Sivakami advances a few steps, reaching toward the children as Vani plucks the boys off of her hips. Muchami, standing at the garden door, turns away from what he sees, what Sivakami can’t and doesn’t want to see: Vairum is not smiling and still has not said a word to her.
The boys receive kisses from Sivakami, stiff with terror as though she is a wraith. The aunts and cousins flood forward to engulf them in a warm tide, and Sivakami smiles, brittle and joyous.
Holding her paavaadai up with the hand clutching the book, bracing herself with her other hand against the wall of the stairwell, Thangajothi climbs to the second level. She crosses a room full of recliners and coffee tables whose random placement confirms their long disuse. She has often lingered in this room, searching out Minister’s face in the many framed photos: large groups of sombre men, faces dark between white caps and kurtas, apart from the occasional white man in a suit, or Indian man in a uniform or princely regalia. The photos are annotated with occasions and purposes, sometimes with the names of all the men present, written in English.
This time, though, she goes purposefully to the original library. Shyama’s not in there, so she goes through to the walkway. As she traverses it, she hears through the skylight, which gives onto the main hall, Minister’s voice. “The time, ma! Tell me the time.”
At the end of the corridor, she pushes open the door to another small room. It is, like the library, filled with books-lining the walls, in piles on the floor-mixed in with a jumble of other curiosities: an Eastman Kodak camera like a jack-in-the-box, a non-functioning radio, an empty binoculars case, all home to dust mites, scuttling spiders and an occasional scorpion; a stuffed mongoose with the tail peeling back to show wires and straw; posters of foreign movie stars; a hinge-lidded tin with printing on the side: “500 Scissors Cigarettes,” and another dented tin bearing the puzzling “Peek Freans.” Nothing has moved, from one summer to the next, in the years since Thangajothi first came upon them. Last year, she picked up a flyer for something called the “Self-Respect Ramayana,” because it was exactly like another she had found in the attic room at Sivakami’s house and used as a bookmark, until she lost it. This time, she stuck the flyer under some books on the bookcase, and it was still there when she returned.
Shyama turns from the shelves and indicates the book in her hand with his chin. “What have you got there?” He speaks as though they had just seen each other at breakfast, not as though they had seen each other only twice in the last year. He is taller, his voice suddenly deep, the skin of his temples and neck bubbled with acne. Thangajothi holds him her book out to him, feeling tongue-tied. “Oh,” he says. “Good, no?”
She sneezes from the dust. “Yes, very. What have you got?”
He holds it out to her and turns back to the shelves. Confessions of a Thug, by Meadows Taylor. She had seen it and passed it over for no particular reason, and now is mad at herself: she would have liked to have read it first and recommended it to him. She goes back to the main library, Shyama following, and puts the Wodehouse back on the Wodehouse shelf. She picks up Sivakami’s Vow, a novel by Kalki Krishnamurthy that she had read the year before. Her mother had read it when it was first serialized, bought the book for Thangajothi, and read it again when Thangajothi finished: a 1,000-plus page historical epic about a dancing girl named Sivakami who wants to marry a king. Thangajothi’s uncle Raghavan had teased his grandmother: a courtesan named Sivakami! Raghavan wasn’t much of a reader, though, and only Janaki, among the sisters, has finished it. She has told Thangajothi that Kalki is one of Vairum’s acquaintances in Madras, that she herself met the great writer on her first visit to the city.
They wander back into the old salon to sit, facing slightly away from one another, reclined in the stillness of Minister’s salon. Only the faraway sounds of Gayatri’s kitchen, and the flip and ruffle of their own pages, break the hush.
The next morning, Shyama enrages Janaki by telling her, when she talks about the big poonal celebration, that he has removed his holy thread. “What do I need a caste marker for? I believe in education for everyone.
“So do we!” Janaki splutters inadequately, and Shyama shrugs.
Sivakami is sitting in the kitchen doorway now, watching them eat, and Thangajothi notices that Muchami, too, has come to squat in one of the doors to the garden. After returning from Cholapatti last summer, Thangajothi had bragged to Shyama of how progressive her great-grandmother’s household is in its treatment of the servants and dared him to find another Brahmin household that so elevated the staff, where servants are permitted to be in view during meals, where they refuse to touch the bedding, where they have actually been given Sanskrit education!
“Elevated!” he had scoffed. “Brahminized, you mean! What’s wrong with their own customs? What’s wrong with Tamil? What’s so polluting about bedsheets, for God’s sake? You’re brainwashed, all of you.”
“All of us?” she had shouted, surprising herself out of a tight silence. “What about you? You’re as Brahmin as we are and all you do is parrot your father, anyway.”
As they end their meal now, she watches him observe all the Brahmin conventions-drinking water without touching his mouth to the tumbler, ringing his banana leaf with water against the pollutions of saliva and cooked food-whether out of mere habit or so as not to offend. She wonders if he remembers that conversation.
Having heard that the musical star of Saraswati is visiting, dozens of neighbours drop in daily to Sivakami’s house, cluster in the hall, on and around the veranda, clamouring for the famous theme song. Sometimes Vani obliges, rousing a cheer with the opening bars and then a singalong, especially at the chorus. More often, she plays something else, and all those gathered look trapped. When she finishes, they try without success to talk to her about the movie.
When Thangajothi goes out the back, she often sees as many as eight or ten children sitting in the trees beyond the courtyard wall, and others, adults, squatted on the ground. She has heard her mother proclaiming her satisfaction with this turn of events. “Good for them. None but Brahmins ever take an interest in classical music. I think it’s excellent that the lower classes have finally come to it, even if it had to be because of a film.”
Thangajothi winces at her tone. Most of the time, she doesn’t think much of Vani’s playing and it’s not hard to tell that most of those in the living room and out the back don’t know what to make of it either. Her mother does, though, which fact Thangajothi respects.
Janaki sits in the main hall, working a kingfisher in bright threads. She peers too closely at it and wonders if it is obvious that she is sulking and trying to avoid talking to the visitors. She just can’t decide if these people deserve to listen to Vani. This is the Brahmin-quarter majority and they are no fonder of her music than they were ten and twenty years ago. But they should humble themselves here, thinks Janaki, those same neighbours who disgraced Vairum, and who have, resentfully, sold him their properties at inflated prices. The tide has turned a little, though, with the rise of a new generation that knows only of Vairum’s magnanimity. He never stays to visit the Cholapatti Brahmins in their homes, but it seems the chill of estrangement from the quarter may have abated a little. The simple charm of passing time.
Kamalam sits beside her, teaching palanguzhi to her four-year-old twin sons. One of the boys is prone to gestures of theatrical generosity; the other is conniving; both are disinclined to stick to the rules. (They are in the swell of their personalities, in their purest moment; they are impossible.)
Raghavan had been trying to help Kamalam but got bored and left to see if his older nephews were up for cricket. Janaki had charged her own sons with making sure they were all back for lunch. Krishnan reclines, his head on Radhai’s knee, both sweetly attentive to the music. Laddu’s wife is helping in the kitchen and Laddu will stop in for supper after work.