Apart from the paadasaalai, Vairum had told her in a briefing, the rich and childless uncle had instituted two other major works under the auspices of the Kozhandhaisamy Charitable Trust. One was the odugal, a concept new to Janaki. The Vaigai River, which she has yet to see, appeared dry most of the year, though its waters continued to flow just beneath its glittering sandbed. The odugal is a large T-shaped cut, eight feet or so along the top, about twice as long, and a few feet deep, into which the river’s waters spring. Brahmins use the top of the T for their ablutions; the other castes descend the stem downriver of them. The cut needs daily maintenance lest the river’s sands collapse back and fill it in; the charity pays for a servant to come and re-cut it daily. Were it not for this, each man or family would have to dig a separate hole for bathing and water gathering.
The third branch of the charity is the Kozhandhaisamy Chattram, a rest home for Brahmin travellers, in one of the concentric streets around the famous Meenakshi temple in the nearby city of Madurai.
Janaki finds it deeply reassuring that this family, however wealthy, is bound to a trust whose goals are clearly in the service of Brahmin knowledge and prestige.
On her way to the puja room, she glances into the kitchen, expecting that she will see enormous, hurried activity. Feeding a household of over fifteen people, not including servants, must take military-level organization, and she is curious to see how they do it. She is surprised to see just two cooks, an old woman and a young one, making snacks, even though tiffin is to be served in an hour. They nod and put their palms together ingratiatingly and she smiles shyly back. She supposes the mystery will be solved shortly and goes to her prayers.
Arriving in the puja room, she is seized with comfort and reassurance-finally, familiar faces! Some of the gods are in different settings or configurations from those she is used to, their skins or outfits tinted differently from the pictures in Cholapatti-artists will take licence. But they are still her idols: Ganesha, with his fat tummy and encouraging expression; Krishna, with his knowing smile and valiant chest; Lalitha Parameswari, who always promised to guide her when this time came; Lakshmi and Saraswati, money and erudition, the matters that brought her here. Rama, Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman… Gazing at them with compassion and gratitude, she thinks of all they have endured, the private doubts, mental tests, failures, betrayals. And here they are welcoming her, shining and beautiful and so well put together. She performs a sincere series of obeisances and settles to the task of settling herself in.
Or she starts to and then stops. She thinks she should ask whether she is needed. But whom should she ask? Senior Mami, seemingly completely removed from the operation of the household? Her sisters-in-law-where are they? Baskaran is coming into the great hall now from the veranda-perhaps she should ask him. But what’s the protocol in this house for talking to her husband?
He beckons her impatiently from the puja room doorway, where she stands like a golden deer, torn between stillness and flight. Relieved to have a signal, she goes to him and asks in a stage whisper, “What should I do now?”
“I don’t know,” he whispers back. He’s wearing a fresh kurta and dhoti, and a different scent from the one he wore this morning. “Did my sisters-in-law tell you?”
Janaki shrugs uncertainly. She doesn’t think they did.
“Are you hungry?” Baskaran asks with concern. “ Tiffin is at three o’clock.”
Janaki shakes her head. “What about-should I be helping to cook?”
“I really have no idea.” He smiles helplessly.
“Where,” she asks, “where is the tiffin being prepared?”
“The paadasaalai kitchen.”
They stand there another moment, perplexed but not willing to part, until Janaki takes matters in hand. “I’ll ask your mother what I should do. I can’t go wrong that way.”
“Yes…” He purses his lips. “Unless she’s asleep or not in a mood to tell you. Or doesn’t know herself!”
Janaki frowns at him reprovingly as he smiles at her. Are they flirting? How fun! She goes off to find her mother-in-law.
She finds her sisters-in-law first, strewn in the women’s room with their children like more jumbles of fabric and feminine fancy. Janaki doesn’t want to undermine their authority, but neither does she want to address questions to them, especially in hearing or sight of Senior Mami, that really should be put to the matriarch.
But Janaki has not only been raised to please. She has also absorbed-so thoroughly she doesn’t even realize it-the finest points of strategy and diplomacy. She enters the women’s room, greeting her sisters-in-law. She pauses as though to ask them something and then starts gently and advances to the door of Senior Mami’s chamber. Her mother-in-law is semi-recumbent, listening to a radio discourse on Tamil poetry. Janaki addresses her question to the floor. “What work should I be doing now?” she asks with formal respect.
After more than several tense seconds, Vasantha emits a pip of breath and asks, in such a low voice Janaki can hardly make it out, “What were you thinking of doing?”
It’s a risk, but Janaki decides to be honest. “I was thinking of helping in the kitchen or arranging my things.”
After another pause, Swarna suggests, “They might need help in the kitchen.”
“Go and arrange your things,” Senior Mami orders decisively.
“Yes,” replies Janaki with eager obedience.
Crying intermittently, she spends an hour putting the mattress on the bed-a mattress made from the fabric she got in Madras, stuffed with bolls she herself gathered and cleaned-and the sheets on the mattress. She had embroidered the edges of the sheets, even designed the pattern of English flowers. She puts her formal saris in the cupboard with the moth-repellant sachets she sewed from old blouses-she got the recipe for the herbal fillings from a women’s magazine she found at Gayatri’s.
At ten minutes before three o’clock, she descends. Never a trip wasted: she carries her four other everyday saris, two bright and new, two nearly so. She takes them through to the back and uses a pole to hang them in a free space on the sari rod beyond the bathroom.
The men and children are gathering for the meal, seating themselves in the main hall, along with Vasantha, who assists with the children. Senior Mami eats in her room. Swarna indicates that Janaki should follow her, and they go through a door in the courtyard wall, so that they are back of the paadasaalai, where three cooks are arranging serving dishes just behind the kitchen. The daughters-in-law, along with one of the cooks, carry these back to serve: silky idlis and thayir vadai, lentil nuggets swimming in creamy yogourt, with mint and coconut chutneys smooth as if made from flower petals. Every day is a festival in this house, Janaki thinks, trying to attune her pace and rhythm to that of her sister-in-law. She even succeeds in fulfilling one strange requirement against her training. Convention has it that anyone serving food must insist on further helpings, until the eater covers his banana leaf with his hands, pleading satiation. Senior Mami has a difficulty the daughters-in-law are charged with correcting, for the sake of her health: she is unable to refuse food or to leave it uneaten. Her daughters-in-law therefore have been instructed by their husbands to find artful ways of limiting her quantities: after she is served a judicious second portion and perhaps a minuscule third, the items are not offered again.