The day before the ceremony, though, some unwelcome but not unexpected information reaches Muchami via his regular channels. He had, a week or ten days earlier, put a word out requesting this information, after having seen something that didn’t quite look right.
He doesn’t go out every night as he did when he was younger but does still make his way through the woods and fields twice or three times a week, in search of other men, like him, who need physical satisfactions they cannot give or receive in their marriages. It happens that he sees things on these journeys. Some things he understands immediately; some he must work to interpret.
As has been said, the only people abroad at night are those (like Muchami, it could be argued) who have no choice. One of those who must be out is the barber who clips the heads of Brahmin widows, a work of shame and sorrow done in the dark hour favoured by demons. Sivakami has her head shaved monthly, usually by the same barber who sheared her curls in the days of her widow-making and left her light-headed under the moonlight. Now, occasionally, it is his second son who comes. The first son used to come, until his family decided he, meaning all of them, would be better off if he used his skill with a blade to get latex out of trees in Malayan plantations.
So it happened, one night, that Muchami was returning home and saw the barber’s second son entering the rear courtyard of a Brahmin-quarter widow who lives three houses over from Minister and Gayatri. He didn’t think it strange until, some ten days later, he saw the same thing again. It was then that he mentioned it to some cohorts who have now confirmed for him that the barber’s second son, Karuppan, has been coming and going from the house of the widow, Shantam, four or five nights each week. No one’s hair grows that fast.
Muchami is outraged. He stalks home as though burning the fields in his wake, like Hanuman setting Lanka alight with his tail. He knows he must decide what best to do with this information and that it might be his obligation to go to Vairum, who, as his employer and the master of a house on the Brahmin quarter, is most entitled to know and take action. He is in Cholapatti this week. But Muchami is not convinced that Vairum will do what must be done: he has never shown caste loyalty; if anything, he acts as though it would please him to see the entire Brahmin quarter in ruin. And if he tells Vairum and Vairum does nothing, it will be much more difficult then to redress this ill.
He decides to call a conference. He invites Minister and Murthy to come to Sivakami’ s house after tiffin. He tells Vairum not to go to play tennis. He tells Sivakami only that the others will be coming, not why. He is trembling at the impropriety of it. This is the sort of thing about which he could gossip to Sivakami were it to have happened several villages away. But so close to home, to the home whose honour it is his dearest duty to uphold?
That morning, the bangle ceremony is held for Janaki. Every woman on the Brahmin quarter pushes a pair of glass bangles onto Janaki’s wrists, until her arms are covered nearly to the elbows. Sivakami watches from behind the kitchen door, smiling at Janaki’s face, at the auspicious tinkling of the bangles, worn until the birth. Some women pull the bangles off in labour, as a way to distract themselves from the pain or count down the time until it is over. She catches sight of her own bare wrist on the door, the skin loose and wrinkled, and tucks her arm under her pallu.
That afternoon, Murthy and Minister arrive for the conference within minutes of each other. Vairum lounges suspiciously in the hall. Muchami has been pacing from courtyard to garden, and now sees them. Sivakami takes a position behind the nearly closed double doors in the pantry between the hall and kitchen. Muchami has told the children they must stay in the courtyard or go out to play, that he will beat them if he catches them listening. It seems to have worked, though he doesn’t see Janaki, out of sight in the room under the stairs: she doesn’t consider herself a child, doesn’t fear a beating from Muchami, and is curious.
Now Muchami, standing in the door to the garden, tells them what he knows.
Murthy begins immediately to splutter and shake. Minister looks circumspect and deeply troubled.
How it came about they wonder but have no idea. Maybe Karuppan forced her, the first time, and has been blackmailing her. Or Shantam, the widow, may have permitted it all along. She is a sullen and feisty type. She and her husband had loud, frequent fights in the years of their marriage, and she has had loud, frequent fights with her in-laws since he died. One of Gayatri’s regular jokes is about the fact that this woman’s name means “peace”-what would she have been like if her name had meant “hot-tempered”?
Vairum looks exasperated.
“What concern is this of mine?” he asks Muchami, and then looks at the others to see if they can answer. “Let her bring shame on her own head and her house.”
“No, son.” Minister cradles his forehead in his forefinger and thumb. It looks as if someone gave him a gun and he can’t decide how to use it. “He is the criminal in this situation. A woman’s virtue is that of her family, and he has destroyed it, whether or not she chooses each night to open her door.”
“I-I-I can’t even-how-understand, how you c-c-can both still be sitting and t-talking!” Murthy has leapt from his chair. “Open her door! I-I-I’ll open his head, that’s what!” He is running for the door now, his hands over his ears. “Ugh! Ogh! My ears are poisoned by what I have heard today!” He stumbles in an attempt to mount the two or three steps to his own veranda, and succumbs to an attack of asthma, whereupon a few passersby stop to ask what is wrong. He tells them.
Janaki wants desperately to go to her grandmother and console her. Sivakami is so restrained in her behaviour and outlook that Janaki imagines news of such an atrocity would shake her to the core. Really, though, she wants reassurance as much as she wants to give it.
That night, Shantam’s nearest neighbours’ servants are posted in the brush beyond her courtyard gate. The unlucky lover arrives. He pushes open the door, enters, closes it behind him. Each of the servants slips from his hiding place. Each goes to the door of the house he serves and tells his employer that the barber is inside. Each goes to the next house and tells the master of that house. Moments pass and from each house emerges its master. Each master carries a big stick.
What is the barber’s second son thinking? He must be about seventeen, she about twice his age, plump and fair, while he is dark as rosewood. Sivakami thinks of them as she does her beading, working fast, very fast. She hears one of the servants knock on their door to inform Vairum that the moment has come for action. Muchami, who is spending the night in the courtyard, tells him Vairum will not come because Vairum said he will have nothing to do with this nonsense, that mobs always chase phantoms, that he has to work in the morning, unlike these professional moralists in search of a night’s entertainment. Minister also will not participate, because of possible political repercussions. There are more than enough hands, anyway-more than fifteen pairs, all holding sticks, heading for the house, the third rough-hewn gate east of Gayatri’s.
Did he force her? Sivakami wonders. But why didn’t she just bar the door and not permit him to come again? Could he really have blackmailed her? She would have been defiled and disgraced, but better that than going through it night after night, no? Unless she really did choose this…
Sivakami can barely bring herself to think it. A barber, one of the worst classes of untouchables. A Brahmin woman choosing to be with a barber. Sivakami casts her mind back to the years of her marriage and remembers, vividly still because barely a night has passed in forty years when she hasn’t thought about the acts of love she and her husband performed with each other. She can’t help it: her mind begins to imagine Shantam and the barber’s son in these poses, and she shudders, disgusted, but her mind keeps picturing it. She tries to keep the bile down and her mind clear by concentrating on the image she is working in beads, Lord Krishna at Bhutana’s poisoned breast. It doesn’t work. She runs outside and vomits.