“Good night,” he bids them, and leaves for the chattram where he is lodged.
They are silent a while in this room they have been given, off the main hall. Everyone else is asleep. Then Sita explodes.
“Our father is a good-for-nothing! A good-for-nothing! Look at how he left us, vulnerable to Vairum Mama’s insults and jibes all these years!”
Her siblings shush her, telling her in whispers to sit, as she marches around the room, incensed.
“Vairum Mama was right! All of his slights against our father were absolutely right and I’m going to tell him so. Visalam was…” Here she gulps a little against a sob. “Visalam was a harmless soul and Appa couldn’t even come to bid her farewell. I know what you all think of me.” Saradha clucks in protest, but Sita doesn’t appear to hear, and none of her other siblings say anything. “But even I can see what an innocent soul she was. I wish he weren’t my father.”
Her siblings are surprised. None of them has felt compelled to make a declaration of the sort Sita makes the next day, to Vairum.
“Vairum Mama, I was critical of you all these years, trying to be loyal to my father. I regret that now,” she says, her voice trembling but clear. “You have done more than he ever has or will for our welfare. Thank you,” she declares, breaking down a little.
Vairum looks bemused and unabashedly triumphant. “It was, ahem…” he smiles. “It was my duty to my sister, as I saw it, and duty is an honour to uphold.”
“Yes.” Sita wags her head with martial vigour, even through tears. “It is.”
Janaki herself cannot help but contrast Baskaran’s ministrations with her father’s absence and her uncle’s passions. Baskaran stays at a guest house some ten minutes away for three days, coming to ceremonies, helping with logistics and children, offering graceful words of consolation. At the end of three days, he returns to Pandiyoor, where he is needed, but Janaki knows that he will return for the thirteenth-day ceremony.
She thinks, not for the first time, that if only he had a job and didn’t take snuff, he might be the perfect husband. When she speaks of him to Kamalam, though, as they lie side by side on their mats, taking this precious opportunity to exchange sisterly confidences, she emphasizes his faults, suspicious of the evil eye. Having seen two more households on the Pandiyoor Brahmin quarter reduced to penury through bad management of their family fortunes, she has started to wish, as her grandmother has from the start, that Baskaran were earning a regular income.
“But if he had a job,” Kamalam says, “like Saradha Akka’s and Sita Akka’s husbands, he wouldn’t be so flexible. It’s very good of him to come here and help. The old ways had their benefits.”
Janaki concedes. Baskaran is traditional in all the ways she likes: loyal to home and parents, upholding caste strictures out of deference to them, and in the interests of continuity She really shouldn’t complain.
Janaki journeys to Cholapatti shortly after the passing-on ceremony to spend some time with her grandmother. Sivakami protests that she will be fine, that Janaki shouldn’t be travelling more than necessary in her condition, but Janaki insists. Baskaran escorts her and stays three days on Gayatri’s hospitality, since protocol forbids a husband from staying in his wife’s home.
While Janaki feels proud of the simple graces of her grandmother’s home, she is also uncomfortably conscious of some differences between it and the home to which she has become accustomed. It feels a bit small and shabby; the servants are too visible and audible, too familiar and influential.
The shifting of her perceptions has been a gradual process. The first time she came home, she felt intensely nostalgic and wanted to pretend she never left. By her second visit, though, she could feel she was changing. She was shocked at Muchami calling her by her name, and he saw this, so now he doesn’t call her anything. They both realize, though they don’t speak of it, that she might have felt equally strange had he begun calling her Amma.
It was also on that visit that Mari had told her in low tones, after she had dressed, that she had forgotten her dirty clothes in a bucket in the bathroom. She rolled her eyes at her new habit, recalling how Vasantha and Swarna had laughed at her when they realized she had been washing her own clothes every day in Pandiyoor.
It irked and unsettled Janaki that she should struggle to find her place here. Even the act of getting up in the morning had become strange: at her grandmother’s house, when one rises, one clears one’s own mat, and at night, one lays it down again. In Pandiyoor, a servant clears and lays down the bedrolls. Janaki mentioned this difference to Radhai, within earshot of Mari and Muchami, pitching it in a falsely neutral tone, as though this judgment were mere observation.
Mari was rankled. “That is interesting,” she cut in, without breaking the rhythm of her work, patting fuel cakes from a pile of cow dung. She slapped the most recent onto the courtyard wall, where several rows were drying. “And do your in-laws’ servants take a bath afterward?”
Janaki blushed violently. She really had not been sure how she felt about this difference-on the one hand, she believes in upholding Brahmin practices and disapproves of any modern development that breaks down caste barriers. But the Pandiyoor customs don’t break down those practices-servants are non-Brahmins. Perhaps they aren’t polluted by sleep articles; perhaps they take a bath. How is that her business? She didn’t reply.
Through the old routines, though-setting a plate out back for the monkeys at dawn, snacking on a ball of thangai maavu in mid-afternoon, standing on the roof to watch the parrots at sunset-the small satisfactions of her childhood are returned to her, and she enjoys them, knowing she belongs somewhere else.
She is most concerned, on this visit, with making sure her grandmother is all right, following the shock of Visalam’s death. Sivakami looks lined, small and weary, the stiffness of her shoulder blades more pronounced than Janaki remembers. Suddenly awkward at being in the role of adult, Janaki tries to ask her grandmother how she is, and receives dismissive reassurances. She doesn’t know how to press through to the truth.
“Having you here is a great consolation to me,” Sivakami says. It’s after dusk and so Janaki lies with her head in her grandmother’s lap, Sivakami stroking her hair. “You must look after your health. Think peaceful thoughts. I’ll make garlic rasam for you-good for your strength, and the baby’s.”
Janaki wants to say something more, about Visalam and her untimely death, but doesn’t want to upset her grandmother, either by reminding her of their loss, or by crying, and so just quietly rests her cheek on the soft cloth over Sivakami’s bony thigh.
38. The Barber Lover 1945
FOUR MONTHS LATER, Janaki is expected back in Cholapatti for her bangle ceremony. Muchami is excited about her arrival, especially since the occasion of her last visit was such an unhappy one. He misses the child she was, now no more than a ghost or vapour dancing around the woman she has become. Still, she reminds him of that long-ago child, and some of those lost, warm affections return to him in memory when he sees her.
Because Visalam’s death is still so recent, Sivakami has been anxious about the bangle ceremony: they must provide their relatives and neighbours a way to celebrate the new life while still observing grief, make Janaki feel happy and beautiful while not making her feel guilty. Kamalam, who had stayed behind in Kumbakonam to help Visalam’s in-laws with her children, arrives a few days before Janaki. Though Sivakami would never admit any such thing, Kamalam might be her favourite among the grandchildren: perfectly demure, unquestioning and capable. Sivakami feels reassured by the girl’s presence and puts her immediately to work, cooking for the feast day. Soon enough, Janaki arrives, escorted by Baskaran.