“Aren’t you terribly exhausted, Amma? You must stay longer.”
“No. I want to look on that god’s face in the morning.”
“All right, Amma,” she capitulates, sounding concerned. “Sleep now.”
But Sivakami is already asleep.
At dawn the next morning, Sivakami and Saradha go by cycle rickshaw to the foot of the hill temple. Sivakami wanted to walk but finally capitulates only because Saradha said she herself couldn’t walk three miles to the temple and then climb it. In the rickshaw, Saradha asks if they are retracing the route she took. Sivakami thinks they must be but it looks even less familiar now than it did then, when she thought she knew everyone she passed. Now, with Saradha at her side, she can see the streets’ real strangeness. She might have wondered how she made her way, but it had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t. That was the least of her concerns. What will happen when next she sees Vairum? What does he think happened to her after she left-and how can such a son live with himself?
They dismount from the rickshaw at the entrance to a thickly crowded corridor into the temple’s first vestibule, and walk along a cordon of small shops into the oil-lamp-lit, stone-floored room. Voices rebound with the sound of coconuts shattering, thrown hard in a trough, as offerings or thanks, while devotees mill in circles around a wide tree growing out of the floor and into the ceiling. The smells of burning camphor and incense press hard against the smells of sweat, soap and hair oil.
Sivakami bustles straight to the stairs that ascend through the mountain’s centre to its summit, and begins to climb rapidly, one hand on the rough wall to steady her, only one impatient glance back to check that Saradha is following.
Their legs grow painful, then heavy, then numb. Saradha struggles to keep pace. A bat dips into the stairwell from a high cavern in the walls. Sivakami listens to the rhythm of her steps against the stone, the brushing of her hand on the wall, her heart pumping, her breath rasping. She hears it all as though she were a bat, both within herself and high above, both inside the mountain and climbing it. They pass by chambers and niches for worship and rest. She doesn’t stop, not once.
When they come out into the light, they are beside a small cave, with a smooth, level floor, a pillar-framed entrance and walls carved with row upon row of writing. Finally, Sivakami pauses and thinks, as she is meant to here, of kings. Chola kings-did they build this? To guard the city against the marauding Pandians from the south? Was it earlier? The Pallavas? The walls might tell her, but the Tamil is archaic, and though she stands mouthing the syllables, they don’t assemble into meaning.
Still, she moves her eyes along each and every line of the inscription, an exercise not unlike her incessant reading of the Kamba-Ramayanam. She looks at that book because she thinks it important that Brahmins not forget how to read, and for that reason, now, she reads the inscription without understanding any of it and then begins again to climb. She calls out to Saradha, who is leaning against an opposite wall, her eyes still closed but her chest no longer heaving. After one more long flight of stairs, they emerge from the mountain onto smooth, bald rock. Sivakami walks to the edge of the small plateau and beholds the city with the Kaveri River, its reason for being, streaking unconcernedly down its centre.
She sees people below. It is too far down to make out any individual, besides which her eyesight is not what it once was. But Sivakami imagines she sees the kings and armies of olden times, the Pallavas, Pandians, Cholas, Nayaks, battling to gain territory, struggling to keep it. She sees Kannagi and Kovalan, of the Tale of an Anklet, passing through the city on their great and terrible journey south to find their fate in the kingdom of a careless monarch. She sees pilgrims, she sees merchants. Seafaring Chinese and African traders; Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo, laughing with them. And, arriving from the northeast, she sees herself, small and determined, fighting confusion, indignity and peril, and finding her way, in an unrecorded triumph.
Saradha is sitting beside her, now, enjoying the view. Sivakami thumps her encouragingly on the back and Saradha gives her a watery smile. There is yet one more flight of stairs-to the belvedere.
Saradha has always liked this temple. She always brings visitors and enjoys with them a leisurely ascent, with many stops for exploring the cavernous temple chambers hollowed from the mountain’s centre, savouring a strong flavour of self-righteousness on completing the difficult climb and a pleasing glow of fatigue in the thighs. This insane dash has deprived her of all the en route pleasure, and now the tearing sensation in her lungs and the weakness in her legs are preventing her even from enjoying her spiritual point-scoring. Worse, Sivakami exhibits no consciousness of all this, no sense of how it all should be done. She is not even mouthing about how healthy the climb is, how holistic Hindu worship, how superior every Brahmin devotional act.
Rather, Sivakami is bounding, without a word, for the final staircase to the tiny Ganesha shrine at the top. It is enclosed in a cupola with open frames on all sides. Saradha lets her go.
Sivakami joins the other pilgrims circling the god, one of the primary modes of worship. In the course of her first circumnavigation, though, her courage deserts her. Sadly, she confronts Ganesha.
“Are you still there?” she asks, quaking.
“I am.”
“But I didn’t come.” She looks down, her lip trembling. “I didn’t take the chance when the train… I must have been frightened.”
“Mortals refuse most divine offers.” He sounds sad. And amused. “You’ve done nothing new. It reflects well on you that you were tempted. But so few of you accept our gifts, even ones you have prayed for.”
Ganesha is the god of new beginnings, and she missed her chance to end this life and begin another one, fresh. What other divine offers has she denied?
But now Saradha has reached her, and together they make several more turns around the idol. Sivakami thinks Saradha is acting a bit strange, looking at her nervously. She can understand that her dash and insistence might have been alarming. Saradha has had a shock-seeing her grandmother appear, walking on the street with nothing but a brass jug, as if she were some itinerant person-a siddha, for instance-and not the respectable grandmother she has always known.
Sivakami tries to speak reassuringly, says how glad she is to have visited the shrine, and how invigorating the climb was, and asking which way is Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter and can they see it from up here? They make their way slowly down again, stopping to see whatever Sivakami senses Saradha wants to show her.
She gives in and stays two days in Thiruchi; then it’s Saturday and a half-day at school. That evening, Krishnan escorts her to Cholapatti. Muchami fetches a locksmith to open the padlock, and Sivakami, at last, is home.
41. Private Cares 1946-1952
THE FIRST FEW DAYS AFTER HER ARRIVAL are spent cleaning the house and updating the accounts. Muchami waits until the second morning before asking, “And Amma, why did you return?”
She has nearly convinced herself that her banishment was her own fault: if she had gone about things differently, introduced the topic more gently, more indirectly, perhaps if she had talked to Vani first, she might have helped. As it was, she just made Vairum defensive.
Still, she knows that if she tells Muchami what happened, Vairum will come off looking bad.
“What could I do there?” She smiles at him. “They didn’t need me. They needed a doctor.” She tries to make the unfamiliar word sound natural. It’s the first time she has told Muchami a lie; they have always colluded in such matters. “They’re so modern! I just couldn’t keep up.”
“I would have come to fetch you,” he says. “He only needed to send word.”