Sivakami brings it, on a plate. “Then?”
“I went over with them, what else could one do? The garden was a mess, of course, with fallen fruit and rotting coconuts. I said it was very nice of them to take care of it. I was thinking that if you weren’t coming back, what was the point? Let it grow over, like it did after their parents died. When little Vairum returns to take his house, then is the time to clear the garden.”
“They wouldn’t have accepted such advice from you.”
“That’s why I didn’t say anything. I helped them to clear the garden.”
“Oh, I thought you had done all that in anticipation of my return,” Sivakami responds, bringing more rice and then yogourt.
“Well, I would have, when you told me you were coming back, but no, in fact, all this happened a month before. It’s when they ordered the manservants to dig that I remembered your husband’s final word. Thokku?”
Sivakami goes to fetch a dollop of the condiment and deposits it on one side of his banana leaf. She trusts Muchami absolutely, so she has no worry about discussing the possibility of buried treasure with him.
“If my husband thought there was treasure here, he would never have waited to tell us from his deathbed.”
“You’re right, I say.” Muchami takes a mouthful of food. “They would have dug up the whole garden, but I pleaded for the trees. They said what’s the point, it would be fifteen years before Vairum returned, but I begged, I’m telling you, and so they just dug around the roots and after each one I would pack the soil back in. I didn’t ask any more questions. Anyway, all the weeds got cleared.”
“Yes, it looks very tidy,” Sivakami says wryly.
“So, at the end of the day, the sisters and husbands are barking at one another, the servants are dirty and sweaty, none of them have eaten since morning, and they’re no richer. We all go back over the wall. They go to Murthy’s house to bathe and eat, and I’m sure they must have told Murthy’s mother the real reason, or she guessed. So then, my sources tell me, they hit on the idea that they should go talk to Jagganathan. About what he saw.”
This was the boy who once followed Hanumarathnam to spy on him with the siddhas, and lost his voice in the adventure.
“Did I tell you that, since your husband died, he’s got his voice back?” Muchami folds the bottom half of his now-empty banana leaf over the top, picks it up, stands and belches and goes to throw the leaf out the back door of the courtyard.
Sivakami squats against the house, under the eave. “Mm-hm, you told me. He didn’t discover it for some months, until he stubbed his toe and yelled.”
“After so many years without use, it was more of a croak. He still doesn’t talk much-he’s out of the habit. But that mother of Murthy’s was inspired to ask him. Now that your husband is gone, maybe, she thought, he wouldn’t be afraid to talk about what he saw.”
“They thought he would say he saw my husband turning lumps of clay into bricks of gold, and so our house and garden have golden bedrock?”
Muchami rinses his mouth with well water and pours a half-bucket over the spot where he just ate, a Brahmin habit he has picked up in this house, cleansing the spot not only of a little spilled rice, but of the largely theoretical contaminations of cooked food, a horror to Brahmins for obscure reasons.
“Jagganathan probably knew what they wanted, but he wasn’t talking. If he couldn’t have such a reward, he who had suffered so much, why should they? I saw them after, glum faces…”
“Don’t be gleeful,” Sivakami tut-tuts. “It’s not classy.”
He smirks. “Then they went home.”
Sivakami rests a cheek on her knee, frowning in thought. “The soil is all turned, it’s a good time to put in some new plants…”
He’s a little puzzled at the switch in topic but goes along with his mistress. “When?”
Three days later, a jack tree, two papaya trees, a banana tree and a rose bush are delivered to Sivakami’s house. Muchami had told the tree vendor that the lady of the house wanted them to come to the front, strange as that may seem. When he arrives, the whole street sees Sivakami telling the shrubbery parade that no, they are mistaken, come around the house to the back, oh, okay, come into the garden through the front hall, then. Muchami does the planting and she supervises.
That evening she calls a scribe to pen a letter to her sisters-in-law:
Safe.
My dearest Akkas,
Hope this finds you and my brothers-in-law and nieces and nephews and your in-laws in the pink of health.
Oh, I am so sorry and embarrassed to have given you the old key! Where was my head? It’s not every day one’s daughter gets married, so I guess that’s my excuse! Now, as you may have heard, I have returned to live in this home, my son’s home, where I belong. I am his humble custodian, and so of course, you must come again, and see to matters which must be seen to, as such.
Thank you so much for making the effort to tidy the garden for me. I so appreciated it! Just today, I planted jack, papaya, banana and roses in the newly turned soil. But guess what? When we made the holes, we dug up more than worms: a little metal box, no lock, just a latch. Inside was a tiny kumkumum box and a note, in my late husband’s hand. The note said, “My only success at transformation, save for my two children.” With the date and his mark. He would have buried it just months before he got the final fever. In the kumkumum box: you could barely see it, a sifting ofgold dust, so fine and scarce we would have missed it inside, but outside in the Cholapatti sun, it shone.
What do you make of that? Pretty unexpected, isn’t it? He never said anything to me.
Although this has reminded me of something I had nearly forgotten. I’m sure you may not remember for grief but the moment he passed on, he said something. I myself thought he said “poonal, ” but I was all the way across the room. Some others heard “padigal” but I couldn’t think of what he might have wanted to tell me about the stairs, inside or out. I heard from others, though-who thought I should dig up the floor of the house-imagine!-that they heard “podhail.” “
I’m still not really convinced: it would have been a lot of work searching for that box, for not much return. Perhaps he wanted me to find the proof that he really did some transformations; perhaps he was too shy to tell me earlier. And I did find it! I’m sure he would have wanted you to know also.
Sivakami finishes the letter with chat, verbose as she’s never been with those two.
The scribe is suitably impressed with the information he has just learned, and Sivakami knows it will be all over the marketplace by sundown. Muchami has already been instructed to confirm and clarify rumours. Sivakami sits up with her beading long into that night, thinking how nice it would have been to find a note from her husband testifying that his son was one of his successes, how nice it would have been to show Vairum something like that.
WHILE SIVAKAMI IS WORKING UP THE NERVE to talk to Chinnarathnam about Vairum’s condition, she has been taking measures of her own. Each night before Vairum goes to sleep, she has rubbed veeboothi on the patch of white, which has become increasingly solid in only a few days. Vairum asks what she is doing, but she refuses to tell him and perhaps he senses how serious she is because this is one of the few instances in which he obeys her and submits, both to the topical application of the ash and to a pinch Sivakami makes him ingest, which she administers with more mutterings.
It is the third morning after she noticed the freckles, and Gayatri comes, as she has made a practice of doing daily, to drink a cup of coffee and play a game of palanguzhi with Vairum. The coffee-drinking is proof of her modernity; Sivakami never touches the stuff. When they sit down, Gayatri says to the little boy, “Go wipe your mouth, squirt. You left some yogourt in the corner from breakfast. I’ll set up.” She starts counting cowries into the small bowls carved into each side of the board. “Is the game of fours all right, or do you want the twelves again?”