It is after eight o’clock when they reach Madras. The city welters up around them, almost before Sivakami realizes it has. The houses on Vairum’s street look, to Sivakami, grand enough to be government offices. In the car port, the driver opens her door, and she follows Vairum’s striding form up the stairs, yearning to be invisible as she feels his employees’ discreetly curious eyes. Upstairs, she creeps along the narrow balcony, keeping her gaze on the floor. In the outdoor reception area, Vani falls at her feet and ushers her through the majestic carved wooden doors into the sitting room. The black and white tiles are cool, like taut silk. Sivakami’s callused feet make slapping sounds that ring in the airy room’s besieged hush-the quiet of a house sheltered from traffic noise by tall trees and a serious class differential. The sound of her feet against the brick of the Cholapatti floor was immediately dulled by the roughness of the floor, and the sounds of the village, always entering without leave.
She is so happy to see Vani, especially with the glow of expectancy lighting her rounded features. She appears cheerful and girlish as she shows Sivakami around, a terrific contrast with her appearance in recent years. She is about six months along and is significantly heavier, an effect enhanced by her nine-yard sari. But one would not guess Vani was pregnant from her figure, Sivakami thinks with some satisfaction: all the better to protect her from the evil eye.
Vani leads her to her room. She is not sure she likes this: a room of her own. It has one set of narrow double doors leading onto the rear courtyard, and another leading onto the sitting room. It seems inappropriate to her, excessive, for a lonely widow to take up an entire room, but she puts her Ramayana and extra sari in a wall-niche cupboard, along with her beading, and follows Vani out into the courtyard, in the centre of which is a well and a depression for washing dishes. This feels relatively familiar. The toilet and bath stalls are in the far corner. No more four-in-the-morning-blue-air dips in the Kaveri, she realizes. Will she really feel clean without sand encrusting her feet? From the courtyard, Vani shows her into the kitchen, where Vairum has deposited the satchel of snacks. It has a second set of doors onto a dining room, and a third, onto a rear puja room.
Sivakami takes water-the first she has drunk all day-pouring it from the brass jug down her throat without touching the jar to her lips, and then bathes and performs oblations for the gods in Vairum’s puja room. Taking up a fistful of salt, she beckons Vani, making sure Vairum doesn’t see, and circles her three times each way with the fist, saying the familiar curses under her breath. “May your eyes burst open if anything happens to this child.” She looks around, unsure of where to throw evil-eye-soaked salt in a house without a canal out back. Vani points to the bathroom.
She turns next to familiarizing herself with the kitchen so she can cook herself a meal. So this is what it feels like to be so near the sea she has never seen, she thinks: the air itself clings like damp cloth. She finds herself waving her hand in front of her face as though she has walked through a cobweb; she finds the cupboard contents limp and sticky. She greets the servant couple from Cholapatti. The man has been given other chores, since Sivakami will do most of the cooking while she is here, but the woman remains to help with washing, peeling and chopping, and Sivakami shyly asks her how to use the stove.
Vairum has never told Sivakami anything about his work. Sometimes she has asked Muchami questions, and he has explained what he understood, based on gossip and on his observations as he accompanied Vairum in the field. She understands Vairum has a reputation for fairness and has earned a great deal of respect from both their tenants and his factory workers in the Kulithalai Taluk. She knows he had dealings with non-Brahmins but doesn’t believe he will bring them into his house. Janaki and Kamalam had sworn to her, on returning from their Madras visit, that they ate no cooked food in non-Brahmin houses. It didn’t occur to Sivakami to ask whether non-Brahmins ate food in Vairum’s house. What is the purpose of soiling himself thus? He eats in restaurants-can’t he just meet them there?
The first time it happens, she is convulsed with disgust: she has cooked this food and Vairum and Vani are sitting together with three of those people, in plain view of those people, polluted by their gaze. She never shows herself in front of guests, Brahmin or non-Brahmin; the cook serves. But she glimpsed them as they entered-dark-skinned, evidently wealthy-and could hear them, using inflections and terms foreign to Brahmins, and imagined them eating the food she had prepared. She crouches in the door between the kitchen and puja room, feeling ill. The crowning insult is when they cut through the kitchen to the courtyard to wash their hands-they enter the kitchen! On their way back to the sitting room, they stop to compliment her lavishly on the food, mortifying her with their lack of manners.
That night, she performs purification ceremonies, waving camphor and muttering prayers, to make the kitchen usable again. The next day, unable to help herself, she tries to talk to Vairum about the breach.
“Kanna, I have heard that non-Brahmins are very fond of our food,” she opens, timidly. “But shouldn’t you consider Vani’s feelings?”
Vairum snorts, looking amused. “What are you saying, Amma?”
“Vani is a good wife-she can’t tell you this herself, and would never disobey you,” she presses gently. “But you shouldn’t make her eat with those… with non-Brahmins, kanna.”
“Vani no more believes in such artificial distinctions than I do, Amma,” he says sharply. “We keep Brahmin cooks only because they prepare food in the style we are accustomed to and like-not because we subscribe to your outmoded provincial prejudices. Got that?”
Sivakami is defenceless. Hanumarathnam never spoke rudely like this to anyone. Vairum is more polite to his peons than to his mother. How has she lost her son to a world turned upside-down? Was it for this that she educated him? Perhaps she should have kept him in the paadasaalai, she resorts to thinking, briefly indignant. At least he would have valued his Brahminhood then, even if his caste status were the only thing he had to be proud of.
In December, Sita arrives for her delivery, bringing her elder daughter and twin sons. Kamalam and Janaki also come, Kamalam to help Sita, and Janaki for company. Everyone but the expectant mother is accommodated in the guest quarters below. Sivakami’s room becomes a birthing chamber and Sivakami relocates to the kitchen floor, where she feels significantly more at ease than she did taking up a room all on her own. Vani’s nieces hold a bangle ceremony for her, and now the merry tinkle of glass mingles with her music when she plays, along with the sisters’ chatter and the clamour of their children.
“It’s like being back in the village!” Sivakami overhears Vairum telling Sita’s husband, at the eleventh-day ceremony. “In the best sense, of course. Nothing like the sound of children’s voices to gladden the heart, no?”
Sivakami sees Janaki’s expression: all of the Cholapatti clan present for the ceremony are painfully aware that he has not always felt like this about the sound of children.
Visalam’s in-laws come for the ceremony also, with a proposal for Vairum: the year of mourning for Visalam has ended and Kamalam is now eligible for marriage. She is already part of the household, they say; there’s no sense in breaking the family bond. The children need a mother and she has proven already that she can be that to them.
Kamalam acts surprised and embarrassed, but it is clear to all of them how comfortable she has felt at her future in-laws’ house. Vairum happily accepts.