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

4. Fever 1904

The years hurtle past them, like rain and parrots, like rice and rose petals.

VAIRUM, NOW TWO AND A HALF, is outside playing under Muchami’s watchful eye. He has grown from a complaining baby into a child who plays alone. He plays energetically and needs many people to populate his games, but since he lacks friends, he uses Muchami for every role. Vairum is fractious, bossy and tiring, but the patient servant generally does whatever the child commands, pretending perfect comprehension of Vairum’s cryptic and sometimes semi-intelligible orders. Muchami is an energetic young man, but Vairum taxes him completely.

Vairum is spoiled. Not just because he’s an only son, though this might have been enough, but because Sivakami pities him. She coddles and cuddles and feeds him extra sweets. He laps it up, going to her many times each day to bury his face in the folds of her sari and thighs.

He has begun to exhaust even Thangam, who continues to love him for reasons of her own. Vairum responds by pinching his sister, pushing her away when she tries to help with his games and then screaming and clinging when she leaves him, once kissing her so violently his tooth breaks her skin. He doesn’t seek her out, though, as if to prove he doesn’t need her the way everyone else does.

In his favour, Vairum is generous to a fault. He never eats treats without first offering others a share, even giving up his own portion if some urchin looks at it with big eyes. He can’t stand for anyone to go without. Even Thangam is never excluded, though she will never take from him. Sometimes, he approaches his father with an offering. Always, his father declines.

It is hard to say whether Vairum is doing this to win friends. If he is, it’s not working: smaller, more timid children are scared of him; larger, bolder children tease him mercilessly; small and large run at him to take whatever delicacy he has on offer, then run away. Vairum cries in a far corner of the house, goes on feeding the opportunistic children and plays with Muchami.

Thangam spends most of her time sitting in the hall or on the veranda. She doesn’t chatter, she doesn’t do handicrafts, she just sits. She is willing and prompt in completing her few chores, and Sivakami is satisfied she will make a good homemaker. If she needs no entertainment, this is an asset.

The little girl has always been quiet, but, since Vairum was born, she has become increasingly so. This could, Sivakami thinks, be owing to Vairum’s demanding nature: Sivakami knows she pays more attention to the boy, but everyone else pays so much attention to Thangam. Neither has Thangam ever shown her parents the passionate affection that Sivakami receives from her son. Once or twice, however, Sivakami thought she saw, mixed in Thangam’s adoring glances at Vairum, some shame, as she herself received from Hanumarathnam the easy fondness he has never been able to bestow on his son.

Most of the neighbourhood considers Thangam’s beauty itself to be a community service. Burnished hair, molten eyes-for Thangam’s sake, many children come to their house. They ask her to come away, to play with them. They touch her golden skin. She smiles a fleeting smile, rebuking, mischievous, skeptical and warm. The children never give up asking and Thangam never goes with them.

The world loves Thangam and does not love Vairum, because Thangam is easy to love and Vairum is not, and people, given the choice, do what is easy.

IT IS THE HOT SEASON. The children of Cholapatti lie moaning, felled by a fever and pox, in rooms all up and down the Brahmin quarter, in huts in the village and fields beyond. Sivakami prays daily to the stone Ramar, guardian of their home, for her children’s safety. She ties extra charms around the children’s necks and wrists. She prays to the goddess Mariamman, who visits houses in the guise of such sickness, by muttering welcomes, because she mustn’t make the goddess angry, and by appeasements, because this goddess is always angry. Despite her precautions, both Thangam and Vairum contract the illness, which has already taken three children in a month.

The children lie in the front room for five days with sweats and chills. Each awakens with nightmares. Thangam will be sleeping and flip suddenly onto her back. Her eyelids will shoot open and she will stare at the ceiling as though facing down her fears, lips troubled but silent. Vairum thrashes and lashes out in his sleep, hits himself and howls. He weeps from bad dreams and must be consoled.

Sivakami wipes their small bodies with warm water. When they are chilly, she covers them. When they sweat, she fans them with sprays of neem branches, kept always near sick babies, because neem gives the goddess Mariamman pleasure and so satisfies her that she feels she may depart. Muchami quietly does what Sivakami does, attending to one child when she tends the other.

Hanumarathnam is behaving very strangely. The village families have come to him for remedies, but he has told them he can do nothing for this sickness. He has never said such a thing before. He even gives his own children a wide berth, though he watches them from a distance. When Sivakami asks him if he is concerned for them, he says no.

One night, as she lies awake listening to their laboured breathing, Sivakami becomes aware that Hanumarathnam, whom she had thought asleep for some time already, is saying something. She quietly asks him to repeat himself, but he continues mumbling. She leans in close, but the phrases are nonsensical to her. She watches him with her dark-sharpened eyes for a while: he is asleep. She rises to take up her beading. She is working six scenes from the child Krishna’s life and is midway through the third.

In the morning, she asks Hanumarathnam if he recalls his dreams of the night before.

“I never dream,” he replies without looking up from his newspaper.

“You were talking in your sleep last night,” she says.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” He is already impatient with the conversation, and she reciprocates, “Why should I?”

He sighs. “Did it frighten you?”

“No.” The subject is dropped, and Sivakami goes about the morning’s chores, mystified and suspicious.

That afternoon, she is attending to the children, praying under her breath continuously. Like all the women in the village whose children are sick, Sivakami has offered a deal to Mariamman, that her children will participate in the village goddess’s annual festival if only she will remove the scourge. It has been five days, without sign of recovery, but Sivakami has faith yet.

Hanumarathnam is napping on the other side of the main hall. Sivakami starts as his lips begin moving and realizes she has been staring at him for a long time. She rises to move closer and in doing so happens to catches a glimpse beyond the open front door.

The siddhas have come.

The eldest nods as she catches his eye. She is, as always, unhappy to see them. She crosses to her husband, who is muttering softly, intense emotion working his brow, his breath fighting in his nostrils. She takes his shoulder and he startles, panting, sweating, looking around wildly.

“What, dear, what is it?” Sivakami asks. She feels she knows; she feels she is about to cry; she feels a little feverish herself, hot and cold at once.

“I dreamt…” Hanumarathnam is calming. “I dreamt… that you and the children will lead long, healthy lives.” He backs away from her to lean against the wall. “And that I will not recover from this fever.”

Sivakami stares at him. “You are not even afflicted with the fever.”

“I will not recover from it.”

“You are not stricken.” She is aware of her damp palms, twisting the folds of her sari at her waist. “It doesn’t affect adults.” In fact, two adults have contracted the pox and have suffered even more than the children did.

Hanumarathnam rises and joins the shadows blocking the light from the door. Sivakami sinks to the floor, still protesting. “You are hale and strong. You never dream. Why should I wake you just because you talk in your sleep?”

He has gone.

In the evening, Muchami comes in through the back. Seeing the main hall empty, he retreats through the rooms to the courtyard. He addresses Sivakami from outside the kitchen door.

“Where is he?”

“Out,” she says without looking up, slicing vegetables with alarming speed. The children are asleep in the pantry, where she can watch them.

“Out?” Muchami asks.

“He’s out.” She sounds as angry as she feels and feels no need to hide this from Muchami. “I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“Oh…” Muchami nods. “Oh. The siddhas?”

“What else?” She leans out the door to toss some peels into the courtyard. Her face is puffy.

Muchami’s eyes narrow. “You aren’t crying over this?”

In some other servant, some other household, Muchami’s manner might be considered audacious, even insolent, but his are the liberties of those lifelong servants who become closer than family, and more trusted.

“Stupid.” Sivakami sniffs wetly, wipes her face on the end of her cotton sari and starts to sob. “I just can’t stop. I’m making onion sambar, that’s why. When we stop eating onions, I’ll stop crying.”

“Onions never make you cry,” Muchami reminds her gently.

“So I’m crying because it’s about time he gave them up!” She rises, slams the blade down into the block and dumps the vegetables into the blackened iron pot on the fire. “After all, he says he’s going to die anytime, he should start getting ready for it…”

“You angry?”

“Of course not, don’t be ridiculous.” She pokes another dung chip into the fire and fans it. “Can’t he do as he likes?”

“Sure, he’s the husband.” Muchami wags his head. “But he shouldn’t be taking off and leaving us alone like this.”

Sivakami cries harder.

When Hanumarathnam returns, two mornings later, he faces identical resentful glares from both of these souls who adore him.

That night, Hanumarathnam drops a pinch of veeboothi on the small gold tongue of his daughter and the small pale tongue of his son. He places his hand on the head of each. His touch on Thangam is lingering. His touch on Vairum is brief, but the little boy glows rapturous under his hand, and Hanumarathnam’s eyes become tender for a second. Then that is over.

Before going to bed, Hanumarathnam gives Sivakami a large packet of veeboothi and instructs her to distribute it among the parents of the village, for all of their children, sick and healthy.

“That should do it,” he says. She accepts the packet silently and he lies down to sleep. Siddha medicine, she thinks, and shudders, but still, she hopes it works.

That night, when he begins mumbling, she puts her hand on his arm to wake him. The arm is very warm, and she feels his forehead and stomach. A fever has taken hold of him, and there are pustules forming on his neck and arms.