Shyama spends more waking time in Janaki’s house than in his own, because the food and the audiences are so much better. As he snacks, he renders for them, line by line, note by scene, the film he saw last night, one of the year’s causes célèbres. It tells the story of the youngest of three brothers, doing business in Burma during the war, who travels home to Madurai for his sister’s wedding. En route, however, he is duped and robbed, left penniless in the city. His sister marries, but loses her husband and her father in accidents on the very day she gives birth to a child. Their house is sold and she, too, embarks on a life of difficulty: she is forced to borrow money; she tries to make a living selling idlis; she works in the house of a corrupt, high-caste man who tries to seduce her. What she doesn’t know is that her brother, Gunasekharan, has been, in the guise of a madman, keeping an eye on her.
Shyama acts out all the scenes with verve and conviction but reserves a special energy for the songs, whose lyrics are full of attempts at political subversion. One, a siddha song, goes, “If a rich man tells a lie, it will be taken as a truth… Money makes leaders of fools… Even when crying over a dead body, watch your pockets!” The song Shyama had been singing when he entered the house asks why all men cannot simply share with their brethren, the way crows do.
“Caw! Caw! Caw! Beggars fight for food in the trash, while the mighty fight for money! Crows always call one another to share food, but people, never… Caw! Caw! Caw!”
“But children, look.” Janaki sees an opening. “Crows call other crows to eat. They’re not calling sparrows and ducks and monkeys. We all look after our own families, our own community,” Janaki points out, confident in her logic. “You see? Brahmins look after Brahmins, non-Brahmins after their own sort.”
“Communists are different,” Shyama retorts.
“Don’t talk back,” returns Janaki. A pause follows. “Drink your milk.”
Shyama, unoffended, continues the story. The political content of the film becomes increasingly pointed, including specific references to up-and-coming champions of the DMK, newest party in Tamil nationalism, though it is lost on him.
In the film’s culminating scene, the brother gulls a corrupt Brahmin priest, castigating him in the voice of the goddess Parasakthi. When the hero reveals himself, it is to make a speech in classical Tamil, a language practically foreign to those in the land of its origins. The DMK is revitalizing it, making a gift to the masses of their own tongue.
The film is so popular that most audience members can now recite this curlicued speech, and the syllables thrum from them in the tents of the touring talkies, as they do from Shyama now. Janaki is just about to stop him-the children, who can’t understand, are restless, while she can’t bear any more polemic-when Baskaran comes in holding a letter and looking grave. He holds up a finger and Shyama stops speaking.
“Janaki.” He beckons her to come close and she disentangles herself from her daughter and rises. “We need to go to Madras. Your sister Sita is travelling there for surgery. It!’s”-he clears his throat-“cancer. I’m sorry. She will stay with your uncle Vairum and need help with the children, though of course we would want to go anyway, at least for a few days.”
They decide that they can go to Madras for ten days, so Thangajothi doesn’t miss more than a week at school. The girl is a top performer and Janaki is keenly interested in making sure she maintains her grades. She and Baskaran have not discussed it with anyone else, but Janaki wants to break with tradition in one critical way, and Baskaran supports her: their bright girl will go to college.
Janaki recalls having thought she noticed a black patch on Sita’s tongue last summer, but, with advancing age, patches and discolorations are not unusual. But it was, it turns out, malignant. Sita had gone to Madras for a biopsy some six months earlier, but treatments had failed to halt the spread of the cancer and now her tongue must be cut out in hopes of saving her.
Kamalam arrives in Madras a few days before Sita’s surgery; Janaki arrives the day of the procedure. Kamalam minds Sita’s elder children, girls of twelve and four, and seven-year-old twin boys, along with her own child and stepchildren, while Vani tends Sita’s babies, twin boys as well. When Janaki comes, she offers to help, over the clamouring jealousy of her own twins, with Sita’s babies, but Vani refuses. Janaki and Kamalam look at each other, remembering the Adyar Beach scene they witnessed on their first visit to Madras, all those years ago, and hope that Vani will be able to give the babies up when Sita recovers.
They also wonder whether Sivakami has been told. They’re almost certain Vairum would not have told her. As far as they know, he has not spoken a word to her since he sent her away. All of Thangam’s children have chosen to remain on good terms with him, and he has done nothing to discourage this but has made it clear he wants to hear nothing of his mother. Any time she is mentioned in his presence, he spits some disparaging remark, which wounds them so that they have all learned to avoid saying anything about their grandmother around him.
Janaki must return home but makes Kamalam promise that she will ask Sita, once she is stronger, whether Sivakami knows of the illness.
Janaki had framed that article about Bharati in creases, torn it out and stored it between the pages of a book of embroidery patterns, Stitches and Pictures, that Baskaran had given her in the early days of their marriage. She reread it several times in the weeks that followed.
Now, Clouds in the Eyes is coming to Pandiyoor. In contrast to Parasakthi, it has not been much of a hit and may be here only a few days. Janaki must act. She asks Baskaran to make arrangements for the next day.
Their bullock cart and driver are sent around to collect Shyama, his brothers and Baskaran’s nephews and nieces. Amarnath and Sundar are installed at a neighbour’s house and the paadasaalai cook will feed Baskaran’s parents. They set off for a tent in a field. The driver is a great film aficionado, and already unfortunately politicized-he has seen Parasakthi seven or eight times, Baskaran’s family servant Gopalan has reported, and Baskaran is considering sacking him before something happens. Tonight, though, he will enjoy some harmless entertainment.
As they walk down the centre aisle, people on both sides rise, a caterpillar undulation, men shucking shoes and lowering the flaps of their tucked-up dhotis, the few women hiding behind men and uncreasing a bit of sari to cover their shoulders. Baskaran puts his palms together, bowing to the sides, waving his hand in gentle slashes to tell the people to sit. The family has seats in the chair class, behind the benches and those who would be seated on the ground were they not now standing. Even in the costliest class, a number of people stand, shuffle and consolidate to ensure the Brahmins are seated together.
The movie is unmemorable yet will earn an entry in chronologies of significant works, owing to Bharati’s presence alone. She plays the role of an upper-class girl, kidnapped and forced into servitude by a villainous landowner angered at not having her hand for his son. The hero is her sweetheart, who mourns her disappearance with her parents in their home village. He imagines that she escapes her abductors but becomes lost in a forest. In his vision, she wanders, singing to keep up her spirits, melancholy at her plight but full of faith that God will save her. In a glade, she encounters a harp. As clouds part to light her, she leans her fair cheek against the curve of burnished wood and strokes out rounds of a tune Western audiences would have recognized as “Greensleeves.” The lover, wending his own melancholy way in search of a medicinal herb his aged parents asked for, hears her song and follows the notes to find her, the song from his lips joining hers while he is still out of sight. Her voice catches when she hears him, but when she pauses her song and darts futile glances into the woods from her large, kohl-rimmed eyes, his song stops. She trills a signal phrase that he answers; she sings a line or two that he echoes; the rest is easily imagined. The tented audience erupts.