“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. God will not deny us.”
37. 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 institutions 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 fashionable Brahmin youth these days, Baskaran is in favour of Indian independence, and though he has moments of genuinely lathered passion 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 shifts 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 blushing. “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 reassure 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 lust. 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 relationship 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 classmate’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 harassment. 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 advertisement!”
“Oh,” says Swarna, certain of what she thinks but not of what she should say. “Terrible, terrible.”