The Toss Of A Lemon Part 37

"Will you-" his voice cracks. "Will you take it off, this?"

He is giving her the knot to his loincloth. She looks at him in disbelief and he at her in fear and they both start to laugh. She undoes the knot, it falls away, and she closes her eyes again.

He is petting her hair, his cheek against hers, murmuring, "You are so beautiful." Warmth waves through her legs and loins, before she is. .h.i.t by unjust b.u.mps of hot, insistent pain. He stops when she cries out and holds her face as she whimpers.

"Is it very bad?"

"Yes," she replies, as instructed.

"It hurts the bride, at first," he says, starting slowly to move again. He clearly received a different set of instructions. "Shall I stop?"

"Yes," she says again, tense and glistening now with a sudden sheen of sweat.

He stops, cradling her head as though to console her, stroking one leg as though to relax it. She does start to relax a little, and he kisses her temple and begins moving again. It still hurts, but differently, and she tries not to stiffen again. He lifts himself up on his elbows above her, looking at her hair and face with an investigative air, as though she can't see him. As he's inhabited by the act's presiding spirit, he groans the names of several G.o.ds, gasps, and then the spirit pa.s.ses.

He slides off to one side and immediately begins snoring. She gathers herself and sees spots: red stains on the sheet. Oh no, she thinks, but only because the sight of blood is always distressing. Gayatri had told her there would be blood the first time, but now she remembers what to do about the stains, and that she can do it tomorrow.

She had wondered for a second whether he was going to sneeze and had hoped he wouldn't because sneezing is a bad omen. The temple fire and the madwoman's death at her wedding could also have been seen as a bad omen, but no one knew how to interpret that. Janaki might have thought it strange that Baskaran fell asleep as he did, but it was far less strange than what had come before. She doesn't feel offended or relieved. She rises, puts her bodice and blouse back on, and a cotton sari to sleep in, and twists down the kerosene lamp key to douse the flame completely. Feeling shy even though Baskaran is asleep, she creeps back into the bed.

The next day, Baskaran runs an errand in Madurai. On returning, he presents her with a gla.s.s unicorn that rotates on one hoof while the box beneath it, covered in dusty green velvet, tinkles a tinny Brahms lullaby. The day after, she receives a bar of Raja Snow's Musk Soap with matching hair oil. The day after that, he presses on her a nail buffer and promises he will ask his cousin how it works. On the fourth day, a block-printed Bengali blouse piece. On the fifth, a flat beribboned box of caramels. The sixth, a book of embroidery patterns. On the seventh day after her arrival, he gives her a leather-trimmed kaleidoscope and they take turns being dazzled, lying on the bed and aiming it at the lamp flame, gawping like children at the tumbling stars.

At Home in Madras 1942.

IT IS THE EVE OF VAIRUM and Vani's trip to Pandiyoor, where Vani will stay a month with her parents. Vairum slips in from work as Vani practises music in their salon. He reclines on a divan and closes his eyes, opening them again as she finishes playing just a few minutes later.

"Oh, my dear, is that all?"

She smiles and nods, flexing her fingers and rolling her shoulders. It was a long piece.

"I must have been later than I thought." He pats the divan next to him as she rises from the Kashmiri silk rug where the veena rests on two small ringed bolsters. "Come and sit." She settles herself and he absently strokes a tendril of hair from her forehead. "So tomorrow we go." He pats his legs. "I'm interested to see how my niece is faring. Your protegee!"

Vani is silent, but she talks only under rare circ.u.mstances. When they go in to dinner, she will tell one of her stories, and Vairum will listen as happily as a little boy.

"Poor, motherless, fatherless girl," he goes on, playing with his wife's hand. Vani looks at him sharply and his face darkens. "She is fatherless! None of those children has seen my brother-in-law in years. And he never showed them a father's love," he says, his mottled face now forming into an expression he recognizes by feel from a time before memory, the look of a child whose father doesn't see him. Now Vani takes his face in her hands, looking worried, murmuring consolations. "I need a child to raise, my love," he tells her, in tears.

She wags her head, her forehead to his. She knows this.

"We have so much to give," he says.

She continues rubbing her forehead against his, an obsessive, desperate gesture, as though trying to graft his dappled skin to hers, cell by burning cell.

"Please, Vani." He tries to pull away, but she won't let him. "I shouldn't have said anything."

He succeeds in moving away a little, but she grips his hands and rocks back and forth, moaning quietly. He has seen her get like this, very occasionally, when she feels her own terrific need meet his. Her grief at their son's death frightened him: for a week, she made this same low keening, a sound he felt he recognized from her music. Although he felt close to madness himself, he knew that losing her would have done him in and found the strength to coax her back, as he has several times since, as he does now.

"It will happen, my love. I know it will still happen." He puts his shoulders against hers to absorb her motion. "Look at us. G.o.d will not deny us."

Married Life 1943.

JANAKI GRADUALLY LEARNS about Baskaran's family from her husband, as they snuggle together nights in the upper room, as well as from observation.

Dhoraisamy looks after the inst.i.tutions funded by the trust and enjoys and endures the social approbation, privileges and headaches that accompany this responsibility. He has to hire the cooks and other servants for the paadasaalai, for example, but has use of them for his own family. He is fortunate, as he is wont to say more often than necessary, in having an excellent overseer for all the charity's operational needs.

"Mr. V. Kandasamy." He presented the accountant to Janaki with a flourish. "A gem of a man, a bit excitable and perhaps over-efficient, perhaps takes things a bit too personally, but it's all in the interests of the trust!"

Mr. Kandasamy, a small square man with a nervous squint, stood, clutching one of the largest ledgers, which he nearly dropped as he tried to put his palms together in greeting.

Janaki meets a few of Baskaran's friends, Brahmins for the most part, much like him: well-dressed boys with acute senses of humour. Like most fas.h.i.+onable Brahmin youth these days, Baskaran is in favour of Indian independence, and though he has moments of genuinely lathered pa.s.sion about this, he can't take any of it too seriously for too long. Confronted by anyone with very deep convictions, he treads between Gandhian glamour and Nehruvian practicality. He and his friends tend to laugh off fuming, sweaty types who care more about ideas than people. Janaki gathers that Baskaran is a friend whom friends count on, and a son in whom his father confides.

Janaki fully approves of Baskaran in everything but his snuff-taking and his apparent lack of caste feeling. He appears to believe everyone is created equal and is equally deserving of respect, but that is so clearly not the case-she doesn't know where to start, though, and so doesn't try. At least, it seems, he has no intention of making her eat in non-Brahmins' houses or do other improper things that would dishonour her and her upbringing.

Some nights, Baskaran asks her questions about her childhood, so different from his. He asks how it was that they ended up living at her grandmother's house, and Janaki dutifully gives him the standard answer, that her grandmother thought the children needed some place they could stay, that her mother's health was always fragile and it was better she not spread her energies so thin. When others have asked her this, her answer has sounded plausible. She's not sure why, now, it sounds inadequate, almost deceitful. Perhaps Baskaran picks up on this because he continues to ask.

"That's unusual, though-that you would live with your mother's mother, instead of with your father's parents, isn't it?" he asks gently but with real interest.

"Yes," Janaki replies hesitantly. "I'm not sure why that was. Maybe my mother's mother thought she could do a better job. My father's parents aren't too well off."

"Have I heard that they sold a lot of land to your uncle?" Baskaran s.h.i.+fts a little, on his side, his head leaning into his hand, the other hand on Janaki's stomach.

"Mm-hm," Janaki says. "But it wasn't my uncle's money that paid for us, mostly. For our upbringing, I mean. It was my grandmother's own inheritance, her manjakkani."

"Interesting." Baskaran furrows his brow. "But wasn't your dad's salary enough? It sounds like your grandmother wasn't exactly extravagant."

Janaki feels herself blus.h.i.+ng. "My dad... isn't very good with money." She takes a breath, aware of the depth and luxury of this intimacy with Baskaran, of how protected she feels in this room, revealing to him things she has never said to anyone else. "I doubt he ever offered to pay for us. I don't think-"

She starts to cry and Baskaran sits up, alarmed, and puts his arm around her.

"I don't think he ever really wanted to keep us. I don't think he even really noticed we were gone. And my mother never fought to keep us." She is sobbing against his chest, Baskaran holding her, patting her head, his lips to her forehead.

He wipes her cheeks with his thumb. "But your grandmother loved you, didn't she?"

Janaki nods.

"She took good care of you. And your uncle," he continues, "he paid for your wedding. He's obviously very proud of you. Look at how puffed up he was when they came to visit at Navaratri."

Janaki sniffs and hiccups, calming. She knows he is trying to rea.s.sure and cheer her. But he has no idea of the trauma she has suffered (she's not sure she had any idea until she surprised herself with these tears), and she doesn't know whether to be glad of this or angry.

"And I think you are wonderful," he finishes, looking into her eyes. "You are a gem, and I will always look after you."

Now she knows: she is glad, glad, glad he has never suffered the humiliations of neglect.

Later, he falls asleep before she does, though she is drowsy, emptied of tears and of l.u.s.t. In that state, she wonders why she didn't mention Bharati when talking about her father. Because the conversation took another turn? Because it's not directly relevant? She wonders when and if she will have the chance, and in wondering, realizes that, even if the chance arises, she may not tell.

Janaki spends several hours each morning and evening in the women's room at Senior Mami's request. Janaki dislikes the room because it is untidy and airless and filled with Vasantha and Swarna's tension. They dislike it because it's the only room in the house where they absolutely cannot speak their minds (such as they are) because Senior Mami is sure to hear.

Janaki had sensed between Swarna and Vasantha a relations.h.i.+p that seemed more complex than that of sisters-in-law, and Baskaran had confirmed for her that they had been neighbours and friends since childhood. Vasantha's elder brother had gone to law school with Baskaran's brother Madhavan, who met his cla.s.smate's sister and fell in love. When it came time for the second brother, Easwaran, to marry, Vasantha suggested her chum.

"I don't think my mother much cares for either girl"-Baskaran smiles apologetically-"but she didn't stand in the way of my brothers' choosing. Perhaps there was no one else better!"

Janaki, diplomatically, listens without responding. Senior Mami torments the sisters-in-law to a degree that makes Janaki wonder if she admitted them to the family primarily for hara.s.sment. The women are, in Janaki's opinion, vapid and spiteful. In Senior Mami's position, she would ignore them, but they are difficult to ignore.

When Vasantha and Swarna first enter the women's room after a meal has concluded, there is typically a long silence. The sisters-in-law settle themselves, picking up magazines or patting a child. Janaki sits neither with nor apart from them. Finally, one of the two introduces a topic.

"I hear," Vasantha might say, clearing her throat and speaking as quietly as possible, "I hear Mangala Mami's son has declared he will only marry a widow-so they have placed an advertis.e.m.e.nt!"

"Oh," says Swarna, certain of what she thinks but not of what she should say. "Terrible, terrible."

"Why is it terrible?" Senior Mami calls from her room.

Vasantha and Swarna, who know she must agree with them, have no idea why.

"Ahem," Vasantha might cough. Or she might attempt a rejoinder. "Well, it's wrong. A widow!"

"Hush." The disembodied voice of their mother-in-law silences them.

If neither sister-in-law speaks, Senior Mami says, "Say something, bring me some news."

So one of them starts, "My sister sent me a letter. Her husband took their children to see a movie with Rita Hayworth!"

Janaki waits to find out if this is good or bad. The other one also waits. Senior Mami, though they can't see her, is waiting.

Finally, one says, "How awful!" or "How wonderful!" Senior Mami says, "Hush," and silence is reinstated. Often, now, she follows this command with another: "Play, Janaki." Which Janaki does, her sisters-in-law striking daggers at her with glances so she's forced to close her eyes.

Her sisters-in-law, lying on cus.h.i.+ons in the women's room, often read aloud from newspapers and magazines, sensational stories of freedom fighters Janaki listens to with disapproval while she labours at her handiwork. They also pa.s.s on local gossip, including politically themed stories: a Brahmin man who rents half of a ramshackle house on Single Street is known to be on the independence workers' message circuit. He is a cook who has three daughters and no sons, and therefore can't risk imprisonment, but whenever a freedom fighter is on the lam nearby, this man, who can barely afford pride, carries dosais to them. Janaki imagines men crouched in tall gra.s.s, mud caked in their hair, shaming their loved ones for a country that has never existed and probably never will.

Even one of Vani's two gigantic lawyer uncles is gradually and bitterly parting ways with his family by giving free legal defence to, as he puts it, "people who haven't done anything wrong." His family disputes his definition of "wrong," suggesting that breaking the law is criminal and therefore "wrong," but he informs them rudely that the laws themselves might be "wrong."

These are confusing times, thinks Janaki, as an excuse for not trying harder to understand them. She purses her lips and admires a strip of trim she has just finished crocheting for a baby's unders.h.i.+rt-something real and pleasing. She's sure Sivakami would disapprove of her holding political opinions, and she has no intention of forming any. Why do Indians need to run the country, as long as they can live freely and get jobs? Most often, the talk reminds her of Bharati's first father, as she has come to think of him. She wonders if he got out of jail, if he managed to stay out. This leads her to think of her own father. Will she ever see Goli again? And what is Bharati doing now?

Owing to Baskaran's family's wealth, Janaki had expected that festivals here would be celebrated with the kind of flair Gayatri used to display before her family fortunes started to slide. Instead, Deepavali and Pongal in the Pandiyoor household are marked by celebrations proper but not extravagant, a spirit more in keeping with her grandmother's. All the household members are given money, new clothes or both, and guests are received. Janaki has taken over the responsibility for drawing the kolam daily on the threshold and in the puja room. She is given a box of coloured powders she may use to make special designs, as is customary during this festival Vasantha mutters bitterly throughout these festivals about how much better her natal house does them. Swarna readily agrees, in private corners of the house far away from the women's room. Janaki can't say the same, but had hoped for better and a.n.a.lyzes the reasons their celebrations are so relatively paltry. It is not that Baskaran's family can't afford to do better: the gifts given to all the family members are generous. Nor do either of her parents-in-law believe in austerity, the way Sivakami does. Rather, Janaki senses that Senior Mami has no interest in opening their house to pomp and chatter.

This family displays its bourgeois pedigree in other ways. One is in the distribution of charity during the festival for the G.o.ddess Meenaks.h.i.+ of Madurai. Annually, the temple G.o.ddess is married in grand style. There are daily processions, in which a smallish idol is dressed and pulled through the streets by wors.h.i.+ppers in a two-storey wooden temple car, and lengthy pujas at her temple. The city floods with pilgrims and pet.i.tioners as each caste community commemorates the occasion in its own way. The Kozhandaisamy Travellers' Rest Home, run by Baskaran's family's trust, feeds Brahmin pilgrims for free and ladles water and b.u.t.termilk out on the street to anyone who is thirsty, caste-no-bar. Every family member boasts of how the drinks are offered to all without regard to caste, suggesting they think it a virtue to reach out to other castes, even if they wouldn't think of practising this in any other way. Family members themselves stay in the chattram and serve, which Janaki considers evidence of Brahmins' committed magnanimity. She, too, takes her turn in the hot sun with the ladle. They wouldn't serve untouchables, of course, but untouchables don't pa.s.s and don't ask.

And in May, when the hot weather is at its blasting peak, Janaki witnesses Senior Mami preferring the force of her hospitality on the Brahmin quarter of Pandiyoor. She sponsors a moral discourse, to last ten evenings, by a Thanjavur philosopher-orator of some repute. Janaki is told, by Baskaran, who thinks it amusing, and by Vasantha and Swarna, who find it tiresome, that hearing and talking with these bhagavadars is one of Senior Mami's favourite activities. She sponsors these events once or twice annually, erecting a canopy along half the length of Double Street so that the entire Brahmin quarter may attend and be edified. They are even offered coffee, water and snacks as the man declaims from the veranda.

Each afternoon, the young philosopher is invited to take his post-tiffin coffee in Dhoraisamy's study, so that Senior Mami may converse with him, from her room, on the previous night's lecture. He and Dhoraisamy sit in the study, and Senior Mami, whom they can hear through a high air vent between the two rooms, puts questions and comments to the scholar by addressing them, for propriety's sake, to her husband. At night, Baskaran, laughing until he cries, imitates his father, who looks from the air vent to the young philosopher as though watching a tennis match. Dhoraisamy doesn't read much; neither does Baskaran. It would never occur to them to take on wandering scholars, but Baskaran finds it vastly amusing to watch his mother engaged in her favourite sport. Janaki is, nightly, convinced by the young orator. She has never seen anyone extemporize like this, drawing on other commentators, quoting scripture extensively-and yet her mother-in-law, each afternoon, converts Janaki again with arguments demonstrating equal breadth and acuity of reference! Each afternoon, whether because he doesn't want to argue with his hostess, or because he feels himself defeated in the debate, the young scholar capitulates, complimenting Dhoraisamy on his wife's erudition.

When first she heard Senior Mami arguing with the scholar on his own terms, Janaki felt a flooding envy that she was not better educated. She wondered how long it would take her to read through Senior Mami's library and become such a complex and wide-ranging thinker herself. The impulse quickly pa.s.sed, and by the time she hears the scholar's concluding arguments, at the end of the lecture series, when he, as required, delivers moral prescriptions and rules for good living, she has developed quite a different way of thinking. The point of educating women, in her opinion, is to train them to better uphold the virtue and well-being of the family. Otherwise, she thinks, they may as well be courtesans. Janaki's own ambition is to be a good wife and mother, an aim at which she is not convinced her mother-in-law has succeeded.

Even though Senior Mami observes the basic rules of propriety, never showing her face to their guest and never addressing him directly, Janaki, in thoughts so private she can hardly articulate them to herself, much less to Baskaran, thinks her mother-in-law is unladylike. Her children don't seem to have suffered from her seeming coldness, but Janaki thinks this is because her emasculated father-in-law, whom she adores, is so encouraging and affectionate, and compensates. The more she thinks about it, in fact, the more she wonders whether Senior Mami's erudition, which cows Janaki, robbed Baskaran of the motivation to study. What would be the point? he might have thought. His elder brothers are lawyers, his mother an intellectual. What did they leave for him but the position of a.s.sistant to his father, the part of the good son?

Janaki's reflections on her mother-in-law's style of domestic management are, in part, being provoked by Vasantha and Swarna, who have begun to mutter about getting out. Janaki hadn't been sure she understood correctly, when first they began their dark hints. Janaki, hurrying to serve food with Vasantha, mentioned that their father-in-law had suggested she might teach the rudiments of Carnatic music to Vasantha's eldest daughter, who had begun showing interest. Vasantha drew up defensively and told Janaki, "You know, an extended family household isn't the only way. Just for your information." Janaki had no idea what this meant, but when Swarna said something similar in response to an equally innocuous comment, Janaki asked Baskaran what was happening.

Baskaran smiled unhappily. "Yes, my brothers have spoken to me. Their wives want an independent household. Each. Vasantha Mani's eldest sister's sister-in-law didn't get along with her mother-in-law and they just took their share of the family property and set up on their own. Now Vasantha Mani thinks it's a done thing. And it's the type of idea Swarna would have come up with on her own, if Vasantha Mani hadn't planted it."

"But... that's a ridiculous ..." Janaki felt short of breath, her stomach roiling. "Your father surely won't... your mother cannot permit this. I know she will not," she concluded, feeling she had rea.s.sured herself slightly.

Perhaps Senior Mami should be told, Janaki thinks. But if Vasantha and Swarna learn that Janaki was in any way responsible for telling her, they would be furious, and Janaki is not sure she wants to risk that. Further, while Janaki knows her mother-in-law would bridle and resist the parting, she also blames Senior Mami for not doing more to cultivate the attachment and affection of her daughters-in-law. Janaki and Baskaran choose to stay out of the matter. In the months following, it becomes clear that Vasantha and Swarna are pressuring their husbands. Neither man, however, is a master of strategy or courage. They try to approach their father, but sideways, like crabs, waving their eyes at their goal but afraid to face it full on. Their father, no fonder of confrontations than they are, scuttles away from them as fast as they can approach.

When they achieve no results, Vasantha and Swarna implement their own plans of action, using the slim means available to them. Perhaps inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's campaigns of pa.s.sive resistance, they begin campaigns of pa.s.sive aggression. They begin interfering in the kitchen, ordering the cooks to use quant.i.ties of ghee and sugar that would have befitted a wedding pre-war and are now a terrific expense and challenge to procure. None of the staff dares question them; Mr. Kandasamy sweats over the accounts; the paadasaalai boys start pudging up. They further deplete the family coffers by insisting that their husbands replace all their jewellery and buy only imported cloth in a time when the whole country is turning to native goods. But the genius of Vasantha and Swarna's campaign is its exploitation of Senior Mami's possibly fatal flaw. When they serve her, they no longer limit what she is offered, but instead press on her enormous quant.i.ties of the rich food, so that she becomes grossly flatulent. They also become flagrantly insouciant with her.

Finding the atmosphere in the women's room intolerable, Janaki looks for ch.o.r.es to occupy her elsewhere in the house, and comes up with the idea of offering Sanskrit tutorials to the paadasaalai boys. She asks Baskaran to approach the instructor in basic Sanskrit on her behalf.

The pupils are a proud and pitiable crew. Among them are two pairs of brothers, but all eighteen boys look similar: their heads are shaved, leaving a brief kudumi, which hairstyle is now found only in the priestly ranks. They wear a standard-issue dhoti and breast cloth of coa.r.s.e cotton weave. They are here because their parents cannot afford to give them the quality of nutrition and education the charity will give them, and so have left the children here to be raised in orthodoxy. Janaki might identify with these children more than she would ever admit. She relieves the Sanskrit master of the younger students, delivering the drills and exercises whose practice she perfected in her own questing childhood, and finds, in this work, a release from the pressure-sealed jar of the household.

Baskaran suggests to Janaki that his brothers don't really want households of their own, run by their wives. "Who would," he shrugs slyly, "with wives like that?"

Janaki thinks it improper for her to answer, and disloyal, even though she feels little loyalty to her sisters-in-law, especially in this low enterprise.

Baskaran frowns at her. "Is this what you want, also? To have your own home?"

"I absolutely do not. Chi Chi!"

"Good, good," says Baskaran, smoothing the quilt. "I want you to be happy."

"I am happy," she says irritably as she turns the lamp key down and gets into bed. "Very happy. I couldn't be happier."

Families should not even be permitted to think of splitting up. Authority is responsibility, unity is security, Gandhi wants to split from the British, Jinnah wants Muslims to split from India, the non-Brahmins want to split from polite society... how will it end? Think of Vairum and Vani. Janaki tosses and rails in sleep while Baskaran holds the quilt fast.

She dreams of visiting Vasantha Nadu and Swarna Nadu, two countries in a house so large she never sees more than two walls at once. The floor is covered in what Janaki first thinks are enormous kolams coloured in with bright powders, but when she draws near to admire them, she realizes they are maps drawn in rice powder and the differently coloured areas are territories and states, each with its own governor and laws.

Vasantha and Swarna swarm like ants through an anthill, continually brus.h.i.+ng away borders and redrawing them differently, quick as Janaki herself erases and redraws kolam lines in the morning when she sleepily connects the wrong dots. Janaki yearns to return to Janakipattu, her own city, but it has been erased, or amalgamated. She is stateless and homeless. Responsible to no one; no one responsible for her. She knows, in dreaming as in waking life, that there is no worse fate-standing still, condemned forever to pa.s.s through the strange lands that appear and vanish beneath her unmoving feet.

Clerk ex machina: the meek and ever-reliable accountant, Mr. Kandasamy, provides a means of resolution.

"In chess," he explains to Dhoraisamy and Baskaran, having clearly rehea.r.s.ed every word, "this would be called a defensive move, except that, for Sir, and Sir's family, there is no risk. At this juncture, all the higher castes have reason to fear. If-no, let us say, when Congress a.s.sumes power, they will work hard to prove they have no bias toward the Brahmin. They will treat with us severely. We will be thoroughly oppressed. There will not only be the reserved posts for the lower castes in government and colleges, the administrative and educational biases. I have started to suspect there will also be vengeful taxation. It is not without precedent." Mr. Kandasamy took a breath, marking the end of his magnificent preamble.

Dhoraisamy had worked himself into a complicit lather. "What to do? Our dear Mr. Kandasamy, you alone can advise us."

"Well." Mr. Kandasamy mopped his brow, looking earnest and purposeful. "We know that the charity's finances are thoroughly separate from those of the family. And we have kept them strictly and, more importantly, provably so. However, I do think it my responsibility to warn Sir of possible vulnerability to others who are adept at and interested in manipulation. This is my suggestion: you must house your personal a.s.sets in what is known as a 'tax shelter.' Have you heard this term?" Mr. Kandasamy looked suddenly a few inches taller, Baskaran reported to Janaki with a giggle, and as though he had more hair.

"No, no, no, no." Dhoraisamy looked to his son, who also shrugged.

"Permit me to be direct." Mr. Kandasamy smiled with greater a.s.surance than usual. "Your greatest a.s.sets are your own sons, are they not? One thinks it could be wise to house them... in houses. Of their own."

Baskaran and his father made faces demonstrating shock and reluctant receptiveness. Mr. Kandasamy plowed on. "Give them their share of their personal inheritances and pretend-if only on the books, more than this you need not do except to revenue inspectors and their relatives-you no longer care for them. It is the one way to ensure Sir operates at a loss."

Mr. Kandasamy, who, Baskaran later remarks, has a surprising flair for drama, allows a decorous silence, within which the mood alters and settles. "I know it must seem a heartless and scandalous notion," he goes on, "not to keep one's children and grandchildren under one's own roof, but many respectable families are considering this, and naturally I would... ahem, one would never suggest that Sir's sons go further than Single Street." Finally, Mr. Kandasamy draws a breath to conclude his speech. "The charitable inst.i.tution was established to propagate the values and good name of our caste. It is my duty to guard against any threat to the inst.i.tution and its values. I urge Sir to take this suggestion. Avoid any whiff of caste betrayal. Long live the Brahmins!"

Janaki is quite sure Mr. Kandasamy did this because the charity's finances are not nearly so separate from the household's as they should be, and he would be out of a job if the charity's foundation were eaten through. Whether this is a philosophical end gained by practical means, though, or a practical end gained by philosophical means, the results are the same.

The household returns to its former deceptive and uneasy peace. Still, Janaki continues her work, leading Sanskrit tutorials with the paadasaalai students. She has always kept busy, and work is rea.s.suring, especially in times of change.

OTHER CHANGES ARE IMMINENT, too, but these are expected and non-threatening. Janaki, who has always perceived more than she could understand, now embodies changes she cannot control. She has intense cravings for foods that, once she has eaten them, she never wants to see or smell again. She takes long naps and has fits of crying. With joy, relief and fearful apprehension, she watches two months pa.s.s without menstruating. The estimate is that she and Baskaran will become parents in summer of 1945, and she imagines herself going to Cholapatti for a visit and returning to Pandiyoor with a child.