"The Toss of a Lemon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Viswanathan Padma)

13. A Hidden Coin 1908

IT’S BEEN TEN DAYS SINCE THEIR RETURN, and Vairum is sitting in the front hall, waiting to go back to the place where he was a happy child.

He had had fun on the first day, helping to gather coins from all over the main hall. They had even let him keep one that he inched out from a crack in the base of the Ramar statue. He tied it in the waist of his dhoti and is fingering it now.

The second day, he had gone out with Thangam. She took her old place on the veranda, while he circled the gathering children from behind. Half the crowd drew near her, half approached him. He could hear them, gently asking his sister questions to which she softly replied. The children around her got quieter and gentler. When they realized they would never coax her from the veranda, they settled around her, one girl holding her hand, another patting her hair, several others calmly sunning themselves in her presence.

The children who encircled Vairum were those who could not get near Thangam, and yet they seemed a different breed entirely.

“Hey, ratface!” one boy taunted in a low voice, poking Vairum in the side experimentally.

Vairum recoiled, shaken, but then thought to distract these potential playmates by asking the question that had started so many enjoyable hours in Samanthibakkam: “What have you got to trade?”

It was a simple question, but these children seemed not to understand. Vairum tried another. “Want me to add or subtract anything?”

They had grown silent but were still peering at him, moving closer and closer, until, of a moment, one’s hand reached out to tug his hair and another cried, “Boo!”

Vairum leaped from the veranda and broke into a run.

The children gave chase, straight down the length of the Brahmin quarter and past the temple onto one of the small paths leading into the farmlands. Vairum streaked ahead of them, wondering why he was running and where he was going and how he would find his way back afterward when his ankle caught on a root and he sailed into the road with such force that he slid a couple of feet.

He rolled onto his back and propped himself by inches until he was sitting, knees bent, bum dirty, wiping dust from his lips and teeth. The children were panting and laughing. One of his knees and the opposite elbow were badly scraped. A little girl with square, tough-looking features cuffed him, hard but not unaffectionately, on the head.

He shouted at them, “Two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five times sixty-nine is one lakh, ninety-five thousand six hundred and fifteen!” and defiantly waited for them to be impressed.

They looked at one another, trying, apparently, to see how they should react. The boy who poked him first made a “cuckoo” sign, twirling his finger against his temple; another, hiking up his dust-stained dhoti, asked Vairum, “Yeah, so?”

But they didn’t stop him from trudging home. He wiped his nose so roughly on his dhoti that his eyes stung. He felt for the silver coin knocking warm and heavy against his hip, took it out and thought about how the children back in Samanthibakkam would appreciate it, what fun it would buy them on his return.

A blur of children were clustered at the front of his house. As he passed them to enter, a few wrinkled their noses and whispered, “Ratface!” A couple laughed. Thangam softly said, “Stop that,” and the children immediately around her froze in apology, but Vairum didn’t hear her and mounted their front steps without looking at his sister. He continued whispering a multiplication table: three thousand six hundred and fifty-four times two, times three, times two thousand nine hundred and eighty-five. He turned the silver coin over in his hand. He went inside and didn’t come out.

MANY NEIGHBOURS CAME TO CALL on Sivakami in those first days, curious and condoling. With some, the most pressing business was to find out why Sivakami had returned. Others came to shed tears, the weight of which they had borne since her departure, wishing her there to cry with them.

Questions and tears were equally intolerable for Sivakami. She tried her best to respond, though everything in her resisted. She could see that her neighbours were leaving unsatisfied, thinking she was aloof. The days left her drained, with very little energy for her son, who seemed content at first, keeping his solitary counsel in the hall, or pantry, or courtyard, doing arithmetic under his breath, sometimes playing marbles or dayakkattam or tic-tac-toe against himself, chalking all the necessary grids onto the courtyard bricks, like arcane, alchemical formulas. Muchami was too preoccupied to attend to the little boy at first, busy as he was settling Sivakami’s accounts and then settling his own accounts with his uncles regarding his marriage, but after a couple of days he began to join Vairum in the occasional game.

By the sixth of these long, confined days, the courtyard bricks were covered in chalk markings, and Vairum was bored and restless. When Sivakami suggested he might go see what the neighbourhood children were up to, his response was to run from her, to the front end of the main hall and back to the courtyard, and back and back, twelve or fifteen times, until his shoulders slumped and his breath rasped. Then he walked slowly past her, dragging his hand across the back of her thighs. She didn’t have the heart to reprimand him. She went to take a second bath, after which Vairum strolled past and slapped her knee. She bathed again. An hour before sunset, he rubbed her head.

He ignored Muchami’s invitation to go on rounds with him; he kept out of sight of the children gathered round his sister on the veranda; he thrashed and screamed when Muchami and Sivakami said it was time they registered him for school. He played less; he whined more. On the tenth day, the whining, too, ceased.

When Sivakami asks him why he is sitting near the front door-still out of sight of passersby-he tells her he is waiting.

“Waiting for what, my dear one?”

“Waiting to go home to my Samanthibakkam,” he answers, impatient and helpless.

She cannot touch him and cannot help him, and so she turns away.

The next morning, as Vairum is mumbling his prayers in front of the Ramar, Sivakami notices a speckling of white from his armpit to his shoulder blade. He is shirtless following his bath, as prescribed, and wearing a fresh dhoti. She comes closer, thinking he must have spilt some holy ash, though it seems a strange place to manage to spill it. There is none on his neck or shoulder. She comes close, squints and reaches out her hand. She doesn’t care if she has to take another bath; she catches her son with her left hand and rubs the spray of white freckles, hard, with the other. They don’t come off.

Vairum, shocked at her touch, shrugs her now-trembling hand away and then tries to see what she is looking at.

“What is it, Amma?” he asks, annoyed.

“Nothing,” she murmurs with a stiff smile, though she is already muttering horrified prayers against leprosy, sotto voce. “It’s nothing. Finish your prayers.”

Some hours later, she hears a female voice, and Vairum’s in response. It couldn’t be Thangam, because Thangam hardly talks, and it couldn’t be a neighbour, because Vairum doesn’t talk to the neighbours. Sivakami moves to the pantry and looks before she is seen. A young girl, probably fifteen years old, is laughing, addressing her son. Though Vairum looks bashful, he doesn’t seem to resent her. The girl tosses her head and then notices Sivakami, who moves out toward her.

“I’m Gayatri. I’m married, up the street, you know. The big house.” She smiles, forthright, friendly, and hands over the fruit she has brought.

Ah, Minister’s bride. She had not yet come to join her husband when Sivakami left Cholapatti. A Kulithalai girl, she didn’t have far to come. “You’re married to Chinnarathnam’s son?” Sivakami eyes Gayatri’s strong shoulders and good height. Her sari is of an excellent silk.

“I used to come for holidays when you lived here-before, I mean-but I was just a kid, so you probably don’t remember me. But now I’m a proper lady of the house and all.”

“I came to your wedding,” Sivakami tells her, feeling drawn to Gayatri’s liveliness. “Do you know how indebted I am to your father-in-law, how much he helped me, when we were away, and our house was vulnerable to thieves?” She is glad for a chance to revisit this debt. “My husband had great respect for him.”

“Oh, so do I. He’s eased my homesickness so much. He’s such fun, a real father to me.” Gayatri casts around for a place to sit.

Vairum is once more gazing gloomily at the door.

“Hey, bright eyes,” Gayatri addresses him as she claims a spot against a post, waving away Sivakami’s offer of a mat. “Why don’t you get us a tumbler of water?”

Sivakami clucks and hurries to do this herself but notices that Vairum, without changing his expression, was rising to obey the newcomer.

Sivakami returns with snacks and water, for Gayatri and Vairum. She takes another plateful out to Thangam and the crowd of children that play quietly around her as though Thangam’s gravity weighs down their wildness. She returns to her guest with a bit of the usual apprehension. This girl didn’t know Hanumarathnam and so won’t try to ferret out and share Sivakami’s grief. Sivakami calculates that she’ll be one of the curious ones, and summons those of her stock responses most successful in forestalling questions.

But Gayatri doesn’t dig for the reasons Sivakami has returned to Cholapatti. She talks about her own family and married life, what she enjoys, what bothers her. Polite and interested, she asks Sivakami questions about herself for an hour or so before announcing regretfully that she must return to home and chores.

“I’ll come again tomorrow. Do you need anything?” she asks. “Anything your servant can’t get you?”

Sivakami can’t think of anything. She hasn’t had a conversation as such since she left Samanthibakkam. Her loneliness is more acute for having been briefly relieved; the sick feeling of worry over that archipelago sparkling on Vairum’s back also reintensifies.

Gayatri asks Vairum, “Do you play palanguzhi, loudmouth? Something about you makes me think you’ll be good at it. You can count, can you? Add, multiply?”

Vairum takes a second, then assents.

“I’ll bring my board tomorrow when I come,” she says. “You better be here, got that? No gallivanting with those roughnecks outside, no school, no going back wherever you were before. We have an appointment, you and me. Okay, sport?

“Bye, Akka,” she says to Sivakami, using “big sister” as an honorific, as opposed to “aunt.” Gayatri apparently has decided Sivakami is more friend than elder. “Send your man if there’s anything you need from me.”

After she leaves, Sivakami and Vairum raise their eyebrows at each other. He continues to dream by the door, and Sivakami feels a bit lighter as she goes about her chores. She determines that she will ask Gayatri’s father-in-law, Chinnarathnam, what to do about Vairum’s condition.

It is in those days that the letter from Hanumarathnam’s sisters arrives. The sisters had sent it first to Sivakami at her father’s house, and Sivakami’s brothers had sent it on.

Safe.

(One always puts this assurance of well-being at the top of a letter, to avoid causing undue alarm.)

Dear Sivakami,

Hope this finds you and the children and your father and brothers and all their family members well

You must have been quite overwhelmed at Thangam Kutti’s wedding to give us the wrong house key! Silly-billy! Did you forget you had had the locks changed? Muchami told us about the nasty robbery attempt! You should have told us! How were we to know?!

As we explained, matters must be seen to! An empty house is a target!

Send to us the right key, and we’ll make sure that everything with the house is grand!

Your loving Akkas…

Sivakami folds the letter and goes out back to the courtyard where Muchami sits on the stones, taking his mid-morning meal. He is still on the first course, rice with okra sambar, and a fried plantain curry.

“More sambar?” she asks. “Curry?” She prefers to serve him, unusual as that is for a Brahmin mistress, though she keeps a decorous distance even while she does.

“Sambar,” he nods.

She fetches and serves it from a small blackened iron jar that she holds with tongs. “So tell me what happened when my sisters-in-law came to see about the house.”

“Ayoh, Rama, that’s right, we were interrupted when I started telling you about it before.” He signals that he has enough by holding his hand above his rice. “Why did you give them the old key?”

“I didn’t know why they wanted to get into the house.” She puts the sambar back in the kitchen and returns with more rice on a plate.

“Podhail.”

Sivakami straightens. “What?”

“Buried treasure. I’m sure of it.” He’s ready for more rice, which she pushes onto the now-cleared space on his banana leaf. “Remember-” He pauses, unwilling to upset her, but continues softly, “Ayya’s last word?”

Hanumarathnam’s head falls back, exhaling a word… Sivakami has thought back on that moment dozens of times in the years since it happened. If it had been night, and they had been alone, she would have been at his side. She doesn’t think he could have said anything important: he spent so long in preparation for his death and was so methodical.

“It might have been anything,” she mumbles, swiping at her left eye, which had started to tear, and going back into the kitchen with a sniff.

“A lot of people thought he said ‘podhail,’” he explains.

“Including my sisters-in-law, you think?” she asks from the kitchen.

He has carved a well in the mound of rice for ghee and rasam, and Sivakami fetches these and pours them in.

He scoops and presses his rice to mix in the lemony broth. “I’m sure of it. They tried first on their own, then sent for me when they discovered they had the wrong key. When they learned I didn’t have any key at all, they had their manservants climb into the garden. With spades. I felt really torn, because this is not their house, and I’m supposed to be keeping it from harm. So I asked, Have you come to do some gardening? ‘Yes,’ they said. ‘Gardening.’”

Sivakami squats on her haunches in the kitchen door as he continues.

“I think they must have been planning to inspect the floor of the house to see if there was any seam, you know, some place that had been dug and then bricked over. But they had only the garden. The servants were lazy buggers, pardon me, so at first they said there was nowhere to dig. But the ladies and gentlemen were so anxious, they called the servants back and had themselves helped over the wall. Can you picture it? Your sisters-in-law, with their great big-” he indicates with his hands the width of the sisters’ widest parts-“in their nine-yard saris, and, ayoh, Rama. Not to be disrespectful. Curry?”

Sivakami brings it, on a plate. “Then?”

“I went over with them, what else could one do? The garden was a mess, of course, with fallen fruit and rotting coconuts. I said it was very nice of them to take care of it. I was thinking that if you weren’t coming back, what was the point? Let it grow over, like it did after their parents died. When little Vairum returns to take his house, then is the time to clear the garden.”

“They wouldn’t have accepted such advice from you.”

“That’s why I didn’t say anything. I helped them to clear the garden.”

“Oh, I thought you had done all that in anticipation of my return,” Sivakami responds, bringing more rice and then yogourt.

“Well, I would have, when you told me you were coming back, but no, in fact, all this happened a month before. It’s when they ordered the manservants to dig that I remembered your husband’s final word. Thokku?”

Sivakami goes to fetch a dollop of the condiment and deposits it on one side of his banana leaf. She trusts Muchami absolutely, so she has no worry about discussing the possibility of buried treasure with him.

“If my husband thought there was treasure here, he would never have waited to tell us from his deathbed.”

“You’re right, I say.” Muchami takes a mouthful of food. “They would have dug up the whole garden, but I pleaded for the trees. They said what’s the point, it would be fifteen years before Vairum returned, but I begged, I’m telling you, and so they just dug around the roots and after each one I would pack the soil back in. I didn’t ask any more questions. Anyway, all the weeds got cleared.”

“Yes, it looks very tidy,” Sivakami says wryly.

“So, at the end of the day, the sisters and husbands are barking at one another, the servants are dirty and sweaty, none of them have eaten since morning, and they’re no richer. We all go back over the wall. They go to Murthy’s house to bathe and eat, and I’m sure they must have told Murthy’s mother the real reason, or she guessed. So then, my sources tell me, they hit on the idea that they should go talk to Jagganathan. About what he saw.”

This was the boy who once followed Hanumarathnam to spy on him with the siddhas, and lost his voice in the adventure.

“Did I tell you that, since your husband died, he’s got his voice back?” Muchami folds the bottom half of his now-empty banana leaf over the top, picks it up, stands and belches and goes to throw the leaf out the back door of the courtyard.

Sivakami squats against the house, under the eave. “Mm-hm, you told me. He didn’t discover it for some months, until he stubbed his toe and yelled.”

“After so many years without use, it was more of a croak. He still doesn’t talk much-he’s out of the habit. But that mother of Murthy’s was inspired to ask him. Now that your husband is gone, maybe, she thought, he wouldn’t be afraid to talk about what he saw.”

“They thought he would say he saw my husband turning lumps of clay into bricks of gold, and so our house and garden have golden bedrock?”

Muchami rinses his mouth with well water and pours a half-bucket over the spot where he just ate, a Brahmin habit he has picked up in this house, cleansing the spot not only of a little spilled rice, but of the largely theoretical contaminations of cooked food, a horror to Brahmins for obscure reasons.

“Jagganathan probably knew what they wanted, but he wasn’t talking. If he couldn’t have such a reward, he who had suffered so much, why should they? I saw them after, glum faces…”

“Don’t be gleeful,” Sivakami tut-tuts. “It’s not classy.”

He smirks. “Then they went home.”

Sivakami rests a cheek on her knee, frowning in thought. “The soil is all turned, it’s a good time to put in some new plants…”

He’s a little puzzled at the switch in topic but goes along with his mistress. “When?”

Three days later, a jack tree, two papaya trees, a banana tree and a rose bush are delivered to Sivakami’s house. Muchami had told the tree vendor that the lady of the house wanted them to come to the front, strange as that may seem. When he arrives, the whole street sees Sivakami telling the shrubbery parade that no, they are mistaken, come around the house to the back, oh, okay, come into the garden through the front hall, then. Muchami does the planting and she supervises.

That evening she calls a scribe to pen a letter to her sisters-in-law:

Safe.

My dearest Akkas,

Hope this finds you and my brothers-in-law and nieces and nephews and your in-laws in the pink of health.

Oh, I am so sorry and embarrassed to have given you the old key! Where was my head? It’s not every day one’s daughter gets married, so I guess that’s my excuse! Now, as you may have heard, I have returned to live in this home, my son’s home, where I belong. I am his humble custodian, and so of course, you must come again, and see to matters which must be seen to, as such.

Thank you so much for making the effort to tidy the garden for me. I so appreciated it! Just today, I planted jack, papaya, banana and roses in the newly turned soil. But guess what? When we made the holes, we dug up more than worms: a little metal box, no lock, just a latch. Inside was a tiny kumkumum box and a note, in my late husband’s hand. The note said, “My only success at transformation, save for my two children.” With the date and his mark. He would have buried it just months before he got the final fever. In the kumkumum box: you could barely see it, a sifting ofgold dust, so fine and scarce we would have missed it inside, but outside in the Cholapatti sun, it shone.

What do you make of that? Pretty unexpected, isn’t it? He never said anything to me.

Although this has reminded me of something I had nearly forgotten. I’m sure you may not remember for grief but the moment he passed on, he said something. I myself thought he said “poonal, ” but I was all the way across the room. Some others heard “padigal” but I couldn’t think of what he might have wanted to tell me about the stairs, inside or out. I heard from others, though-who thought I should dig up the floor of the house-imagine!-that they heard “podhail.” “

I’m still not really convinced: it would have been a lot of work searching for that box, for not much return. Perhaps he wanted me to find the proof that he really did some transformations; perhaps he was too shy to tell me earlier. And I did find it! I’m sure he would have wanted you to know also.

Sivakami finishes the letter with chat, verbose as she’s never been with those two.

The scribe is suitably impressed with the information he has just learned, and Sivakami knows it will be all over the marketplace by sundown. Muchami has already been instructed to confirm and clarify rumours. Sivakami sits up with her beading long into that night, thinking how nice it would have been to find a note from her husband testifying that his son was one of his successes, how nice it would have been to show Vairum something like that.

WHILE SIVAKAMI IS WORKING UP THE NERVE to talk to Chinnarathnam about Vairum’s condition, she has been taking measures of her own. Each night before Vairum goes to sleep, she has rubbed veeboothi on the patch of white, which has become increasingly solid in only a few days. Vairum asks what she is doing, but she refuses to tell him and perhaps he senses how serious she is because this is one of the few instances in which he obeys her and submits, both to the topical application of the ash and to a pinch Sivakami makes him ingest, which she administers with more mutterings.

It is the third morning after she noticed the freckles, and Gayatri comes, as she has made a practice of doing daily, to drink a cup of coffee and play a game of palanguzhi with Vairum. The coffee-drinking is proof of her modernity; Sivakami never touches the stuff. When they sit down, Gayatri says to the little boy, “Go wipe your mouth, squirt. You left some yogourt in the corner from breakfast. I’ll set up.” She starts counting cowries into the small bowls carved into each side of the board. “Is the game of fours all right, or do you want the twelves again?”

“Twelves,” Vairum replies. He likes this game best: twelve cowries in each of the three bowls to either side of the centre bowl, which is empty at the start but accumulates cowries, round after round, like a bank. Either player-if he or she counts right-can claim either bank, even both. Vairum feels intoxicated by the sight of the cowries piling up and even overflowing a central bowl as the game progresses.

He returns and Gayatri says, “You go first.” She looks at him closely. “You missed it again. Don’t you know how to wipe your face?”

“I did it.” He swipes at his mouth with the back of his hand.

Gayatri frowns and, grasping his chin, tilts his face up. “Sivakamikka,” she calls, letting go and rubbing her hand on her sari. “Have a look at this.”

Sivakami comes from the pantry, already knowing what Gayatri is going to tell her.

Gayatri fetches her father-in-law at Sivakami’s request. He comes and has a look at the new white patch, which has appeared like the beginnings of a clown’s mouth around Vairum’s frown, as the little boy huddles defiantly in a corner of the main hall, playing palanguzhi solitaire, barely looking up when he is asked.

“I’m sure it is not what you think it is,” Chinnarathnam calls to Sivakami, who is staying decorously out of sight in the pantry. “My advice is that you have a licensed medical practitioner come and see the child.”

“What is it, Amma?” Vairum says, rising.

“It’s nothing, child,” says Chinnarathnam. “We will have it looked after. I know an LMP,” he says to Sivakami, using the English acronym. “He comes through Kulithalai once weekly. I will call for him.”

Chinnarathnam and his son (Gayatri’s husband-the man who has been called Minister since he was small, though he holds no official post yet) arrive with the LMP a few days later. Chinnarathnam will mediate because Sivakami will not come out in front of the LMP, nor speak to him directly.

The LMP examines the child. Palpating the patches, he asks, “Can you feel this? Is it numb?” Vairum looks at him with a catlike expression of defiant incomprehension until Chinnarathnam gently asks him, “Vairum. Tell him, little one-does it hurt?”

“No,” Vairum grunts, but the LMP sighs sharply and repeats,

“No-numb. Can he feel anything at all?”

“Ah, yes,” Chinnarathnam clucks with mock humility, the sound conveying the superiority landed gentry feel toward the working man. “My apologies. Child, can you feel this man’s fingers on your face?”

“Of course,” Vairum snorts.

Chinnarathnam smiles at the LMP, who is officiously not making eye contact with anyone as he continues pressing Vairum in other places and firing off further questions, interrupting their replies.

“It’s called vitiligo,” he finally grunts, repacking his black bag. “A condition of the skin: not painful, not contagious, as far as we know, and incurable. Do you understand?”

Chinnarathnam smiles. “So it is not”-he drops to a whisper-“leprosy? This is what the child’s mother fears.”

“No, no, no. Damned village superstition.” The LMP leans in to Chinnarathnam, who leans away from his overfamiliarity and smell of sweat. “My mother thinks the same way. We must impress upon these people that it is quite different.”

Chinnarathnam sees the doctor to the door and instructs Minister to walk him to the end of the Brahmin quarter and bid him farewell.

He then comes back to the rear of the main hall and asks, “Sivakami? What do you think?”

Muchami is waiting in the garden to relay her response to Chinnarathnam. Sivakami is aware of the unusual importance of re-enlisting the servant in her son’s care-she has always felt that when Muchami looks after Vairum, he is overcoming some native distaste. Now she has to persuade him that Vairum’s condition won’t affect him-before trying to persuade the entire Brahmin quarter of the same.

“I am quite satisfied,” she says, with forced authority.

Muchami conveys this to Chinnarathnam with a passable imitation of her quavery confidence.

“What do you think?”

“Yes, it confirms what I thought,” Chinnarathnam says, polite but genuinely relieved. “There is no way that a child being raised in such hygienic and sheltered surroundings could have contracted… the l-word.”

Muchami relates this to Sivakami verbatim, again bringing his skills in mimicry to bear.

“But now you must do something for the boy’s condition.”

“Mm, yes,” Sivakami hurries to agree. “I want to pledge a golden armour for the Rathnagirishwarar Lingam. Vairum can carry it up the hill to give.”

“A very good idea for skin maladies. Shall I order that for you? There is one Kulithalai goldsmith I trust to do a very good job.”

Sivakami consents.

“May I also suggest a puja to ward off possible ill effects of the planets?” Chinnarathnam continues. “One relative of mine, he had exactly the same condition, and an astrologer advised the family that it was a time of bad planetary alignments for the man. I can’t remember which… Saturn? Venus? Something not good. I can call an astrologer for you, also. There is one man here your late husband respected.”

Sivakami thinks this a very good idea.

When Chinnarathnam goes, Vairum, who, despite his theatrical displays of uninterest, has been paying close attention to these exchanges, runs straight to Muchami, who shrinks from him.

“What’s wrong with me?” the little boy demands.

“Nothing, sir.” Muchami shakes his head insistently. “Don’t you worry yourself about this. Come on, I have time for a round of dayakkattam. Come chalk the board on the courtyard. Come.”

This is a house without mirrors, and so until Vairum leaves it to go out into the world, he will have to take Muchami at his word.

THE OLD MEN AND WOMEN who had been in Hanumarathnam’s employ have, after years of pretending they were too old to work, finally grown into their pretense. Sivakami asks Muchami if his wife would like a job.

He doesn’t see why she wouldn’t. So Mari begins, only an hour or two daily at first, then staying to serve Muchami his mid-morning meal, and then staying to help with the late-afternoon cleaning. She is appropriately shy and deferential with her husband and his employer, but her strength of personality is evident. Like Gayatri, Mari is a confident young woman who did not know Hanumarathnam and who therefore comes unaccompanied by residual sadness. Unlike Gayatri, however, Mari is very strict in religious observance. One of the reasons she wants to spend time with Sivakami is to learn the practices of the caste she considers closest to God.

Mari appears determined to make herself a Brahmin woman in every way she can-which is to say, every way except birth, marriage and where she makes her home. Since everyone in Cholapatti considers Sivakami a paragon of Brahmin widowhood, Mari replicates all her habits, which are, apart from her shaven head and white sari, simply orthodox practices that any person with deep concern for his or her spiritual well-being might adopt. Most often, Brahmin men and women take on these renunciations late in life, when their children are gone and their material obligations with them. But Mari is impatient to improve her spiritual welfare and starts immediately. She maintains madi from sun-up to sundown. She takes food prepared only by her own hand, or Sivakami’s. She refuses foods such as pazhiah sadam, dosai and idli, which involve fermentation; at home, she will eat only food cooked the same day, and if it’s not available, she eats raw fruit. It’s a sacrifice but she relishes it. Visibly.

Almost all the Brahmins on Sivakami’s street who learn of Mari’s imitations are flattered; she basks in their approval. She knows many in her own community are contemptuous; she takes their contempt as proof of her success. But Gayatri, who comes over daily to keep Sivakami up to the minute on gossip and opinions, new purchases and the news of the day, is openly amused by Mari’s pretensions. She unapologetically drinks her daily cup of coffee at Sivakami’s, teasing Mari about it, pressing her to imbibe. Worse, Gayatri never once says she wishes she could be so strict with herself. It is of Gayatri alone that Mari might be jealous-not because she wants to be like Gayatri, but because Gayatri doesn’t want to be like her.

And now Vairum, in Sivakami’s opinion, is refusing to become what he already is, what he was meant to be. After all her efforts in bringing him back here, he will not attend school.

Thangam, despite being the elder, spends all her days on the veranda. She has small chores to do, a few minutes of helping her mother with food preparation, a few minutes of embroidery, which she does without resistance or engagement. Always the children await her outside, from first light to dusk. She is not likely to attend school, but Sivakami registers her, hoping this might goad Vairum into it too. When Sivakami reminds him of the ceremony of rebirth he so proudly undertook in Samanthibakkam, saying that his education commenced with that moment, he replies, “So take me back there so I can start school. I told you, that’s what I’m waiting for.”

She jabs her hand in the general direction of her brothers’ house. “If you go back to Samanthibakkam, the school you will go to will make of you nothing more than a Brahmin.”

“I am a Brahmin,” says her son.

“Yes,” she cries, “you are already a Brahmin, and I think you can become something more, if you go to a proper school.”

“Well, I don’t want to and I won’t!” He stomps upstairs, to the attic room he has begun to adopt as his refuge.

Gayatri, who arrived early in this conversation, signals to Sivakami that she will go after him. She mounts the stairs and persuades him to come down for their twice-weekly palanguzhi match, and, as usual, he does multiplication tables under his breath between turns at the cowries. Today, she casually inquires, “Do you have any idea how much more maths you will learn, how much more math there is to learn, by going to school? You can’t imagine.” For her trouble, she receives a scowl.

Muchami also makes his contributions to the campaign. Sivakami overhears him at the close of a game of courtyard tic-tac-toe, saying, “Look, I beat you. Me, your family servant. Go to school, little boy, or that is going to happen more and more.”

It is Minister, Gayatri’s husband, who makes the obvious suggestion. “Bribe the boy!” he proposes in his marvellously English-accented Tamil. Only a would-be politician would think of this, but Gayatri agrees it is a simple and brilliant solution.

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:

1. New clothes. Wouldn’t he like a bright shiny shirt and dhoti to wear to school? But Vairum, though he sits out of view of the street, can see the street quite well. He can see that every child wears a bright shiny shirt and dhoti to school. He rejects the deal.

2. Money. Wouldn’t he like a few more coins to jingle against the one at his waist, maybe to buy candy on his way to and from school? But Vairum already knows that money has no value in this place. The only way he will accept cash is if he’s going back to Samanthibakkam, where he has friends on whom to spend it. No deal.

3. Toys. Wouldn’t he like a new palanguzhi set or a top he can show off on the street? But Vairum likes palanguzhi with Gayatri just fine on the set they have-and he’s not showing anything off on the street. Forget it.

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.