The Toss of a Lemon (5 page)

HANUMARATHNAM IS HAPPY about the pregnancy, though worried because his wife is so small. Sivakami’s confidence and self-assurance grow with the itty-bitty body within her own, and she reassures him. They have created a child, they are carrying on an important work, one he cannot undertake without her, and one for which she is fully equipped. The unmarried Sivakami was passionate but reserved; the newly married Sivakami was determined yet unsure; the pregnant Sivakami sits on a solid sense of her worth in the material and spiritual universe.

By the third month, though she is not getting large at all, she is getting a little uncomfortable. Her belly is becoming heavy. Not swollen, not churning—this is not a fictional sensation nor is it gas. She is bearing a significant wombal weight. She continues to be active and cheerful, but as the fourth and fifth months pass, the slight roundness grows and distends downward, slung in her pliant skin. By the end of the sixth month, though no one would even know to look at her that she is pregnant, she can barely stand. When she does, she must lift her middle against her interlaced fingers. She finds ways to manage.

Her nervous husband makes sure she is never without household help, instructing the two old woman-servants never to go home. They have five betel-stained teeth between them and have suffered a significant loss of memory with age, especially memory for all difficult tasks. But they enjoy the status conferred by age, and most days, Sivakami finds one of their nieces or granddaughters washing the pots and clothes, pounding the paddy and sorting for stones. The wise old women wisely confine themselves to the sedentary tasks of stripping leaves for thatch and cracking jokes, chewing betel in the courtyard or on the step out back. Newsmongers stop by to ply them with frequent gossip.

Hanumarathnam also arranges for a penurious Brahmin lady to come in to cook. She slips quietly in and slips out, so as not to have to acknowledge the humiliation of labour. Sivakami, who is a snob but not cruel, tactfully ignores her. It’s easy because most of her concentration is taken up with sitting, walking or lying down. She cannot turn over once she lies down but has to grasp her middle, sit up and steadily descend onto the other side.

As the nine-month mark nears, Hanumarathnam and one of the old women-servants escort her to her mother’s home, as is customary and expected. They leave her there to be doted on for a few weeks before the birth. She is fed sweets; her nieces sing to her; her sisters-in-law loop strings of fragrant jasmine into her hair. Though she never complains, her brothers’ wives watch her heaving her wee belly around and dryly wonder what she will do when she has a pregnancy of substance.

One day, with the unexpected prescience of some fathers-to-be, Hanumarathnam departs in a rush for his wife’s village. He arrives to find Sivakami in the concluding hard stages of labour. A barber’s scrubbed wife has been working with Sivakami for some eight hours. Sivakami’s mother can’t stand the sight of blood and is dithering around the well in the back. Hanumarathnam’s father-in-law is pacing the street and veranda, a wreck, trying to think nice things to block out his daughter’s groans and cries. He attempts to smile at the arrival of his son-in-law, but there is an undercurrent of blame. He blames Hanumarathnam, who is directly responsible for Sivakami’s present trials, but he also blames himself, because he would have ensured that Sivakami be put in this position eventually, if not with Hanumarathnam, then with someone else. (He wants but cannot quite bring himself to blame society, which insists it must always be so: women marrying men, bearing their children. If they are at all able, it must always be so.)

Hanumarathnam can see how he feels. He feels rather the same. He touches his father-in-law’s feet. This makes the older man feel worse, even as he twinges with pride, a vestige of the wedding. Hanumarathnam proceeds into the house and finds himself ushered straight out the other end. He walks into the garden and along the side of the house, until he finds a window in the vicinity of the birthing room. He calls out, “Ayah! Ho, ayah!”

The exasperated barber’s wife finally appears at the window and asks, “What do you want?”

“How is she?”

“You have ears.”

“Here.” He holds out a lemon.

She stares at it and grunts distractedly, “Huh.”

“You must throw it out the window the second the child’s head appears.”

“Okay.”

“The exact moment, you ...”

She has caught the lemon and vanished back into the birthing room. He imagines her tucking it into one of the hundreds of secret pockets created by the random wrapping of the saris their class wears and finding it three days later. He gives himself over to fate. He sits and paces and prays for his little wife and baby.

But she is good, the barber’s wife, a very cool head, and the second the golden orb makes an appearance, she extracts the lemon with a flick of her hand in the region of her waist and tosses it to a niece who is seated on the threshold of the birthing room, a little girl whose curiosity far outweighs the smack and reiterated forbiddance whenever someone notices that she is still there. There is one in every household. “Run, run. Throw this out the window to that ayya. I have seen his baby’s head.”

The ecstatic child (who loves work as only children can) runs and hurls the lemon as hard as she can out the window, which is far above her height. So intent is Hanumarathnam on watching his hourglass and repeating a mantra that he doesn’t see the fruit’s flight, and only looks up when he hears a slap. He sees the lemon rolling toward him from the roots of the coconut tree it hit. Fortunately, he noted the time, the moment he heard the sound. He has a figure he can use to make his calculations.

Sivakami is up on her elbows, panting and sweating. The barber’s wife, though intent on her task, wordlessly conveys her boredom at this act that never was and never will be new.

Finally, it’s a push and a rush, a new mother nearly lifting off the cot with relief, and a baby girl sliding into the midwife’s hands, nearly pulling her to the floor because this is one heavy baby. Small to average size, but heavier than an iron skillet. As they gently wipe her with a warm, damp cloth, like a cow’s tongue on its calf, they notice this child is exceptionally beautiful.

“Jaundice,” says the barber’s wife at the child’s colour. But Sivakami, who doesn’t have the age or experience to question the ayah aloud, knows she is wrong. Though the baby will formally be given her paternal grandmother’s name, she will be called Thangam—gold.

Six weeks later, the small family returns home. Sivakami is relieved to see how her husband dotes on the little girl. Everyone prefers a boy, but this is just the first child. You can still hope.

Sivakami cannot lift the baby. Her middle is still a little weak and the baby heavy as a sack of bricks. Hanumarathnam lifts Thangam to the breast or lays her in her little cloth hammock so Sivakami can rock her. He even regularly puts his daughter in the crossed legs of his own lap to dandle her, something Sivakami has rarely seen fathers do. But Thangam is unusually good and calm. Everyone says so. Everyone loves to hold her. They need to hold her, even if their arms fall asleep and they stagger and sway and give themselves backaches. The baby doesn’t cry or even coo. Sometimes she smiles a faraway smile, and all around her are transported, stroking her golden skin, looking into her golden eyes.

THANGAM GROWS INTO A SOLEMN, obedient child. Even if she were not so heavy, one would have to say gravity is her chief characteristic. Sivakami recalls the feisty, fightingish child she was herself, battling three elder brothers and winning. It was hard for her as a girl: she was required to grow out of this and even now she is not sure she succeeded in leaving this part of herself behind. She is glad to see her daughter is not like her.

Sivakami is pregnant, again, four months along. But this new life is not heavy, neither is it soft. When Sivakami, curious, palpates her tummy, she feels a hard centre, like a coin, or a marble, or a gem.

One morning finds her in the kitchen, as usual, grinding rice and lentils into
idli
batter. Her left hand rotates the huge black obelisk of the pestle into the pit of the black stone mortar, polishing the pestle with her palm. As each rotation swings away, her right hand guides escaping batter back into the black stone pit. Thangam watches. Sivakami herself finds the motion mesmerizing and enjoys even more seeing her child engrossed.

Suddenly Thangam looks to the front of the house, where her father is holding his healer’s court on the veranda. She pushes herself to her feet and toddles forward with intent. Her weight grounds her. It enabled her to balance early, so walking soon followed. Sivakami calls her name, but Thangam doesn’t stop. Sivakami quickly wipes her hands and follows, but she is fearful of running, and so doesn’t catch Thangam before the little girl exits the front hall to the vestibule. She is confident, though, that her watchful father will keep her from leaving the veranda. When Sivakami arrives at the doorway, she sees Thangam framed in sunlight and, beyond her, three siddhas. The men return Thangam’s gaze, neither stare the more innocent or knowing, each curious and mildly calculating.

The trio is led by a tall man whose grey hair, yellowing at the temples, winds into smoothly matted locks that hit the backs of his knees. He has sharp, sculpted features and an imperious bearing. The others are younger and shorter. One appears to be in his forties, his wide face filled with sunny-looking, upturned features. The third, in his early twenties, has a surly, rebellious manner. He projects active defiance, while the others give off an air of amused inevitability about their Brahmin-quarter invasion.

Sivakami tries to lift Thangam into her arms, but of course the little girl is too heavy. She does succeed in turning her damply glowing child around and hustling her into the house, where she kneels and clutches her to her breast. She is furious: Hanumarathnam is telling the crowd of supplicants to come back another time, which means that, once more, with no notice, no thought for her feelings or preferences, he is off. He looks around the door at her and—without even a note of apology in his voice!—says he will not be away long.

The next day, they are to attend a wedding in Kulithalai, twenty minutes from Cholapatti by bullock cart. All Cholapatti Brahmins of stature are invited; the groom is one of their own. When Hanumarathnam’s aunt, Annam, calls from the road that they are ready to depart, Sivakami bustles out sullenly and pretends she will be able to lift Thangam onto the bullock cart alone, until Murthy is signalled by his mother to help. Rukmini, innocent and unobservant, asks after Hanumarathnam. Sivakami responds with a shrug, then feels shame at her own rudeness, which in turn prods her to cheer up and pretend to enjoy the day

At the bride’s house, a sea of primped matrons seethe round and among the festivities, cords of jasmine and roses tucked in their hair. Their husbands hover or sit, contented or nervous; their children race around. Girls twirl and squat, so their stiff silk
paavaadais
pouf out in bells that they pop like inflated cheeks; the boys twist and tweak the girls’ plaits and upper arms. In one corner is a sacred fire and around it are gathered the parties required to be relatively attentive—bride and groom, parents, bride’s brother, groom’s sister, priest. To satisfy a need for spectacle, puffed rice and ghee are sacrificed to the fire; any kind of animal sacrifice would admittedly command more attention, but at some point, for some reason, this came to be shunned in favour of things that don’t squeal or bleed. Once in a while, the priest intones the Sanskritic phrase that signals those gathered in witness to hurl rice or flowers to bless the union, which they do while hardly pausing for breath from their chattling-prattling.

The groom is from the last house on Sivakami’s street in Cholapatti, one of the grandest families on the Brahmin quarter. His father, Chinnarathnam, comes almost daily to exchange the news of the world with Hanumarathnam. The son, at thirteen, has already earned an English nickname, “Minister,” owing to his anglophilia and oft-declared political ambitions. Sivakami has met the boy often, since Minister accompanies his father whenever possible, interrupting pompously with opinions his father affectionately challenges him to refine. Sivakami has the impression that Chinnarathnam is more intelligent than his son, but skeptical in his essence and so unmotivated to join public life. Hanumarathnam also prefers the father but doesn’t hesitate to say it is Minister who will be remembered.

The bride is seven. Sivakami’s first glimpse of her is in the bride-and-groom games, keepaway coconut, which she wins, and the one in which the couple are put on a swing and sung songs with teasing, sometimes even lewd, lyrics. The little girl shouts to her mother from the swing, a question about a word she doesn’t understand. She elbows her groom until he looks cowed, half hanging off the end of the swing. Sivakami recalls her own marriage, so long ago already. She defensively feigned uninterest in Hanumarathnam—at least, she thinks she was pretending. She had enjoyed the games and new clothes, but when, on the second day, she told her mother she had had enough and tried to ignore the priest’s instructions, she was reprimanded sharply by a half a dozen people she didn’t know.

Chinnarathnam greets Sivakami, one eye straying to look for Hanumarathnam. Unlike the many other people who have asked after him, Chinnarathnam is tactful enough not to confirm what he knows. Sivakami cannot guess whether he is offended by Hanumarathnam’s absence, though she feels it must be a serious gaffe.

This, the second day of the celebration, is the most important. The couple will be made to walk seven steps together in imitation of their future life, with the fire as witness. They will swear eternal fidelity on the unwavering pole star. They will exchange garlands like exiled royalty in myths, those who have no family but the forest to help bind their fates. The bride will be collared with the saffron-threaded
thirumangalyam
, the emblem of her new state: two graven gold pendants that tell the world, in symbols neither she nor anyone else can decipher, whose family she has married. Vermilion is rubbed into the parting of her hair and the gold medals hung at her throat, so she becomes warm colour and wealth—everything good to look on.