A horde of hollering boys-with Vairum’s sons nearly, but not yet quite, at the front of the pack-swarm down the stairs, through the hall and out to the street.
Thangajothi comes to sit beside her mother, and without saying anything, slumps into her and opens a book. Janaki sets down her embroidery with a sigh. All the poonal preparations are done; the ceremony is the next morning. She pushes Thangajothi’s book up to see what she is reading: Kalki, Sivakami’s Vow. She smiles.
This is as close as we can come now, she thinks, to what it should be like. Her sentimentality smarts and she enjoys the sting. There are the missing-she feels the loss of Sita’s darkness as much as Visalam’s light-but this is close: Sivakami in the kitchen, Gayatri and Muchami lingering at her sides, Vani playing her veena, Vairum out on business, and the rest of them, Thangam’s children, and her children’s children, looked after, safe and happy.
During the poonal ceremony, Sivakami gets occasional glimpses of Vairum’s sons at the ceremonial fire, as she stands at the kitchen door. Laddu and Vairum, shirtless, in silk dhotis and shoulder cloths, huddle under cloths to pass on to the little boys the prayer for illumination, but as Sivakami’s eyes blur from the smoke, she is seeing another little boy, who had no father, receiving his holy thread, earnestly repeating the syllables an uncle is speaking into his ear-a little boy who was happy then, and proud, inducted into the traditions of his caste, surrounded by his cousins.
She turns away to wipe her eyes and sees Muchami, crouched at the far end of the courtyard, his head in his hands. A mild anger shudders briefly through her, riding a snake of puzzlement: why can’t he feel happy for them? Clearly, Vairum’s participation in this ceremony-of all ceremonies!-shows his desire, his need, to be accepted into the fold of his community, to be together with the family he supported. If not for Vairum’s intelligence, his know-how, where would they be now? Yes, they suffered at times, but for this, to gather like this, prosperous and happy.
How sad for Muchami, she thinks, that he cannot see what I see. No one ever saw what she did: that tender child. (A gem, a coin, all elbows and iron.) A mother should know. All is forgiven.
Janaki lays down banana leaves for the third round of feasting, when the family can finally eat. Visitors from up and down the quarter are leaving for their homes with promises to return to hear Vani play that afternoon.
The family members are seating themselves when a car pulls up outside the front door. Vairum looks unsurprised, and Janaki thinks he is smiling slightly. Perhaps some business associate is coming to meet him here? That would be strange; he always has them meet him at his Kulithalai office.
No, it’s a woman. Janaki can’t make her features out against the light, until the visitor steps into the hall’s cheery gloom. A shout fades in from the street. “Bharati! It’s Bharati!”
So it is.
Vairum is striding up to greet Bharati. She holds her palms together. “Namaskaram, Mama. Namaskaram, Mami. Namaskaram.” She offers graceful greetings to Gayatri, who, though gaping, reflexively puts her own palms together and then brings them apart an inch or two, unsure of what to do.
“How are you?” Bharati greets Sivakami’s grandchildren, who stand and stare. She directs a particular greeting at Janaki: “Are you well?”
Janaki waggles her head with fearful rapidity, and Bharati gives her a hard and subtly victorious smile.
“So good you could come home, Bharati.” Vairum is waving her toward the line of banana leaves. “You must take lunch with us.”
“Oh, not necessary, I…”
“I insist,” he says. “Sit. Sit.”
Kamalam stands stock-still, while Saradha splutters and turns half away from the sight of a devadasi preparing to take food in her grandmother’s home. But it’s not her grandmother’s home, Janaki is reminded as she catches Vairum eye-it’s his. He doesn’t even bother holding her glance. They have no right to challenge him-they are guests in his home. And before this, he gave them everything good. They owe him their lives.
Sivakami sees the visitor arrive-a sophisticated-looking young woman, not one she recalls having met before. She sees Vairum usher her to eat. There is plenty, of course. Saradha comes to fetch another banana leaf but doesn’t appear to hear Sivakami asking who their guest is. Sivakami looks for Muchami, but he has gone. She beckons Gayatri back, signalling, a fist with thumb extended: “Who is she? What’s going on?”
“Bharati, Akka.” Gayatri can barely meet her eye at first, then looks at her with concern. “It’s Bharati, the star of the movie, of Saraswati.”
Sivakami looks into the main hall. Vairum is watching her.
SARADHA, KAMALAM, JANAKI AND RADHAI ferry out the food, carrying vessels from the kitchen out to the main hall and back, stiff and regular as figures moving in and out of a cuckoo clock. They serve payasam, appam, pickles, curries, pacchadis, applam, rice, sambar. Somehow, though, they are all present to witness the first fistful of rice Bharati lifts from the leaf to her mouth.
There-there.
The house is defiled.
She lights them with her famous smile. “Delicious. My compliments.”
The four sisters look back, variously, but all unsmiling. A flash-bulb pops-a reporter from Anantha Viketan who must somehow have caught wind of the visit. As though his intrusion has broken some film-thin membrane between public and private, the life of the home and the life of the street, neighbours pour back in.
“The devadasi’s daughter,” Gayatri finishes gently, and Sivakami sees a low-caste intruder take rice in her home, in front of her mother-in-law’s Ramar, in front of all the neighbours.
Vairum is still watching Sivakami. Now he smiles.
Muchami has gone around to the garden door. Too late, he sees. He looks toward the kitchen. Sivakami doesn’t look at him. She is seeing for herself now. Muchami hangs his head.
Thangajothi has never met her mother’s father. She knows him only from the wedding photo hung on the pantry wall. She has spent hours looking at that photo; she used to ask to have it taken down for her. She thinks her grandparents the handsomest couple she has ever seen. Since last year, though, she has stopped looking at it so much. It’s true that when these photos are taken, the subjects hardly know each other and often look shy and mildly surprised to find themselves in the same frame. In the photo of her grandparents, though, each looks wholly alone. It has begun to make her sad.
From the back of the salon, she watches the hubbub of neighbours part to make way for a man she now recognizes as her grandfather. His high and distracted beauty has not altered, though his face is lined and hair grey. He flutters and booms greetings to the crowd and the family.
Janaki feels faint. Bharati looks at her, alarmed, and makes the same signal as Sivakami did-a fist shaken, thumb out, emphasized with a thrust of the chin-What’s going on?
Janaki signals her back with a hand flipped, fingers spread, bewildered and accusatory: How would I know?
“Ho, ho!” Goli is making his way through the crowd of Cholapatti Brahmins, offering namaskarams. “Yes, quite a while!” he says to one stiff greeting. “Very well!” he answers another coldly formal inquiry. “Very, extraordinarily, well.”
Goli’s clothes are worn, he carries no briefcase, no walking stick. Janaki cannot imagine where he has been all this time, and with whom, and shudders to think what he has been doing. She wonders if he held on to his job with the government.
Vairum has risen. He walks across the room to the garden door, and Muchami steps back as he holds his hand out over the ground and washes it with a tumbler of water, all without taking his eyes off Goli. He wants to see Goli see Bharati, Janaki realizes. He has set this up.