“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 cushions 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 pass 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 grass, 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 undershirt-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 analyzes 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 goddess Meenakshi of Madurai. Annually, the temple goddess is married in grand style. There are daily processions, in which a smallish idol is dressed and pulled through the streets by worshippers in a two-storey wooden temple car, and lengthy pujas at her temple. The city floods with pilgrims and petitioners 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 buttermilk 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 pass 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 passed, 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 assistant to his father, the part of the good son?