The Toss of a Lemon (21 page)

She immediately conveys the suggestion to Sivakami in whispers by the well, just in case Vairum should find their conversation interesting. But with what should they bribe him?

They offer:

Gayatri had witnessed Vairum’s first encounters with the village children as they ran past her own veranda and can imagine that his condition would now make him even more self-conscious. Her father-in-law has gone to considerable trouble to smooth Vairum’s path into the local school, meeting with the headmaster and teachers. He succeeded in overcoming their objections to the child’s presence, though he could not persuade them against prejudices. Gayatri thinks she understands Vairum’s reactions to the bribes but cannot come up with anything better. During their afternoon rest, she asks her husband if he has any other ideas.

“No, no, you must offer him something special, something different ... something more... English,” Minister muses. “Shoes. Offer him a shiny pair of brown leather shoes, foreign-made. I will take him to Trichy”—it’s one of Minister’s idiosyncrasies that he thinks the English name for the city of Thiruchinapalli, “Trichinopoly,” more attractive than the Tamil—“and buy them for him. Get him off on the right foot, so to speak.” He chortles at this last expression. It’s rendered in English, so Gayatri doesn’t understand it, but she understood what he had said before and so chortles along and pecks him impulsively on the cheek, which leads, one thing to another, on to something else. It’s early evening by the time she makes the trip to Sivakami’s house.

Wholly convinced this suggestion will work, Gayatri beckons Sivakami in from the kitchen with a call—“Hoi, Sivakamikka!”—and squats before the glum little boy whose education is their collective mission. Vairum regards her with wary curiosity.

“Okay, mister, what about this? My husband has offered to take you into Thiruchi with him tomorrow and, if you are the good little boy he thinks you are, the little boy who is going to start school and be brilliant and become rich, he wants to buy you a pair of English shoes. No one can expect to be successful and work in an office without shoes. And think about it, you will be the only child from Cholapatti who walks to school in glossy, brown, leather...” Her descriptive powers fail her for a second, and Sivakami breaks into the pause indignantly.

“Hooves! They will be like bullock hooves. What Brahmin wears the skins of killed animals? No, I’m sorry. Vairum will not be clip-clopping to and from the school smelling like a tannery worker no casted person would go near.”

Vairum pays a good deal more attention upon hearing his mother’s objections. The idea of shoes does appeal to him. He’s seen them on tax collectors and on Minister. If his mother had been enthusiastic about the idea, he might have had to reject it. Now, seeing her willingness to relinquish his education over caste objections, he stamps his foot and insists, “Yes, yes, I want English shoes to wear to school. I must have English shoes to go to school.”

Sivakami gapes at him in astonishment. “But you told me you only wanted to go to the school that would make you into a Brahmin. Now you will only go to school if you do something Brahmins do not do?”

“Oh, pish,” Gayatri interrupts with one of her husband’s favourite ejaculations. “In cities, offices are full of Brahmins, all of them wearing both sacred thread and leather shoes. Times are different. If you want your son to go to a paadasaalai, he can go barefoot. If he is going to step into the new world, he has to do it shod.”

Vairum is agreeing vigorously, and Sivakami concedes defeat with the flicker of a feeling that she has brought this upon herself—and Vairum. If she had stayed in Samanthibakkam and sent him to a paadasaalai, he wouldn’t be getting shoes, that’s for sure. What kind of Brahmin will he become, walking the path along which she has aimed him? Maybe he needs the shoes.

No more than two days later, Vairum steps proudly up the Brahmin quarter and to his front door. Sivakami hears him coming. It can’t be, not in the soft dust of the road, but she is sure she hears the soft thuds of Minister’s tread, and the smaller clip-clop of her own son’s new feet. Born into caste to begin school and now uncasted for the same reason.

She meets him at the door and sees his expression of cautious pride when confronted with all the veranda-gathered children become defiance when he sees her. She silently indicates where he is to leave his shoes, in the vestibule between the doors. He shucks them with his toes and lines them up carefully in a corner.

The next day, as per the bargain, Muchami drives Vairum, kudumi slicked and shoes buffed, in the bullock cart, to the Tamil medium school at Kulithalai, some twenty minutes away. He is wearing a new dhoti and shirt, each with a bit of vermilion kumkumum rubbed into an unseen corner, to soil it appropriately.

She watches them from the door, listens to the rustle, snap and clip-clop of her little boy’s outfitting, watches him clinging tightly, more tightly than he would ever admit, to Muchami’s hand as he mounts the bullock cart. He rides in front with Muchami since the two of them are alone. She turns away only after they turn the corner. Vairum never glances back.

In the schoolyard, though, holding Muchami’s hand again, he walks more and more slowly as they pass the other children, some recognizable from the Brahmin quarter, some from the merchants’ colony, some from Muchami’s own quarter. There are more high-caste than low-caste kids, and more Brahmins than anyone else, and none wearing shoes. Muchami feels a little uncomfortable about the freakish child hanging from his hand: there is something slightly awkward about his gait; his clothes look boxy, his eyes too intense. The effect is heightened by the spreading patch of white on his face, as well as another sprinkling on his knee beneath his dhoti and on the hand clasping Muchami’s. The servant would have felt this way even before Vairum’s condition arose, and only convinced himself to touch the child in the course of convincing his own mother that he could not catch Vairum’s malady. He gives a menacing glance toward the first giggle, and all the children along that flank fall silent. Vairum’s hand is slippery against the servant’s and the child squeezes harder to hold on.

MID-MORNING, Sivakami steps out to the front to call Thangam in. She sees one of their neighbours withdrawing a hand he seems to have placed on the child’s head in an attitude of blessing. He continues along the Brahmin quarter, not having seen Sivakami, and the blanket of children around Thangam reseals in the wake of his departure. Looking down the quarter after him, Sivakami sees Gayatri leave her own house and come toward Sivakami’s, along with another neighbour on her way back from the temple. Not in a mood to speak, she withdraws slightly. This woman, also, stops to place a hand briefly on Thangam’s bowed head. She, too, continues home. The children register no surprise. Gayatri arrives, and Sivakami speaks: “Thangam, it’s time for your food.” Sivakami backs away a little more to avoid their touch as they pass, and asks Gayatri, “Have you eaten?”

She knows that Gayatri has—it’s a formality to ask—and so gets her a cup of coffee, seats Thangam and serves her first helpings before asking Gayatri, “Is everyone on the Brahmin quarter coming daily to bless my daughter?”

Gayatri tilts her head back and raises her eyebrows. “Everyone is receiving her blessing...”

“You too?” Sivakami asks.

“Of course. Every time. She’s done wonders for the children, as you can see. There are no children yet in our house,” she says smugly, five months pregnant and finally showing, “but all the parents are saying their children have become quiet and manageable, and everyone...”

Here Gayatri pauses.

“What?”

“Well, I don’t know about your husband, except what people have said. Is it true, he had friends among the siddhas? My husband said they used to come and your husband would go off with them, that he had great healing powers, and that they, the siddhas, haven’t come since he died.”

“Yes, my husband could heal.”

“Your daughter can too.” Gayatri blurts and then shuts her lips quickly as though unsure of whether she should have said this.

Sivakami is more surprised than skeptical.

“People think,” Gayatri tentatively explains, “she inherited his abilities.”

“But they haven’t been around, have they?” Sivakami asks warily.

“The siddhas—since we left?”

“Not since I got here,” Gayatri shrugs.

“I don’t want them to come.” Sivakami shakes her head, but she is recalling the words of the siddha that day when he saw her baby daughter : Brahmin flesh becoming siddhic gold. It’s impossible, preposterous anyway, that he would have given something to the child. But Hanumarathnam had gifts, to transform sickness into health, translate mystery into reality. It’s not strange that his efforts and gifts are manifest in his daughter; it would be stranger if they were not. It remains to be seen whether the father’s disciplines or lack of discipline will dominate in his son, whether Vairum will be the product more of experiments in transformation or of the blood and conditioning of caste.

Muchami escorts Vairum to and from school every day for a week or two and gradually identifies which children of his own caste community attend regularly. He visits the homes of these boys and instructs them to keep an eye out for Vairum. Any child who tries to harass him should be reminded that Muchami will hear about it. Muchami inspires awe across caste.

When Vairum realizes that these boys have begun to follow him, he makes some cautious attempts at friendship. He does some math equations, and they are very impressed, though they don’t seem inspired to familiarity. He gives them every interesting item in his tif fin case and they accept, but they still pass the lunch recess at a slight distance. He invites them to the sweet stand to buy them some treats, but Muchami stops them before they get there.

The boys confess to Muchami that they are a little afraid of Vairum’s speckles, as well as of the other Brahmin kids, who seem to want to pick on him, but he tells them they are doing a good job and keep it up.

As the weeks roll forward, Vairum trudges resignedly to and from the schoolhouse and ceases to talk of Samanthibakkam. Sivakami thinks he has forgotten the wandering-pondering fun of his gang and his pre-school years. She doesn’t see the silver coin always in his pocket, polishing itself against his school clothes, and if she did, she would not know he set it aside to trade with those left-behind cousins. She would only think,
What a good and thrifty boy not to have spent that coin
.

SIVAKAMI RETURNS FROM HER BATH at the river and is horrified to learn that Thangam has, alone and unsupervised, drawn water at the well and taken her bath. At least she took her bath water cold; she’s not yet been taught to light the bathroom stove. It is early September, the eve of Navaratri, nine nights of feasting to celebrate goddesses and girls. The first three nights are dedicated to the goddess Durga the perfector, the next three to Lakshmi, the bringer of wealth, and the last three to Saraswati, who governs education and music. It must be that Thangam is excited.

Sivakami is not sure how to take the little girl’s enthusiasm: she has never seen Thangam show excitement about anything before, apart from her passion for her little brother, the expression of which has been muted since he grew out of infancy.

This is the first of the major festivals they have celebrated at home since Hanumarathnam’s death and their return. Sivakami is re-establishing their family in the Brahmin quarter as modest and conventional beyond reproach. Their
golu
will be simple, no more and no less than three shelves, displaying a good selection of dolls in conservative, indigenous attire. Thangam unpacked all the dolls the night previous, inspected them for breaks and tears and mended as required. Today, she will repaint faces. One or two dolls may get a change of costume, but the sari must still be wrapped in an orthodox manner, and jewellery and hairstyles remain consistent. Thangam takes the single liberty of grouping a few around her little flute-playing Krishna, to admire his musicianship and pectoral muscles.