Sivakami becomes pregnant the night her husband returns.
Which is to say that things go a little differently from usual. After it happens, her husband explains that this is the required conclusion if they are to create children, but that it has not happened before because the philosophy in which he is receiving instruction teaches that men must learn to conserve their life force, to keep it within them and not jet it from their bodies at the first hint of pleasure. This night, though, for him, it was not possible. Perhaps he was weak from three days without food, perhaps exhilarated by his learning, perhaps just a little too glad at holding her again. Sivakami was at first frightened by seeing his eyes roll, his body tense and spasm. She had thought for a moment that he was having a seizure-could this be one more thing about him she hadn’t been told? Following his explanation, she is relieved, and testifies also to her happiness at his return, though she is a little disappointed by the brevity of their fun.
Now that they are together again, in the pre-dawn, post-coital calm and commonality, she is emboldened to ask about these siddhas, suddenly so central to her marriage. Her husband replies, “They are men. Men concerned with perfection.”
“What perfection?” She tries not to scoff.
“Lower metals can be made into gold,” he says, and his tone makes her wonder for a moment if he means this literally. “Have you heard of that? The siddhas are teaching me how. And, by an analogous process, the body can attain spiritual freedom. Perfection, like gold, but while still in life, not after, you see?”
He is not really asking and so she just allows him to continue.
“But it is a very, very long process. These men, the siddhas, how old do you think they are?”
“I don’t know.” She doesn’t want to show too much interest.
“Guess.” He smiles.
She sits up, her arms wrapped around her knees. “I can’t see them very well, their hair snakes to their knees, they’re all dusty, and I didn’t look, sort of, directly.”
“Hm?”
“They wear no clothes, am I supposed to inspect them?” Hanumarathnam begins laughing and her irritation increases as she continues. “Go up and stare at these naked men up and down to determine the depth of wrinkles beneath their coat of mud and ash?” She stops and waits, sulking, until he answers his own question.
“They are some hundreds of years old.”
“Hah!”
Hanumarathnam looks a little taken aback at her vehemence, and she is both scared and glad.
“Truly I am saying,” he continues a bit cautiously, “they extend their lives. It takes so much time to transform the soul, and since the body is the soul’s vessel, its life, too, must be extended. And their practices increase vigour and so naturally extend the life. They must live long, else how to learn and practise sufficiently? How to find time?”
“Is that what you are doing?”
“I am not a siddha.” He stretches and yawns.
“I thought they hated Brahmins.”
“They do,” he says lightly. “They mock Brahmins.”
“Then how have they come to call on you?”
“Brahmins have knowledge too.”
“They want to learn… what? Astrology? Healing arts?” This, at least, is something in which she can take satisfaction: they are interested in his scholarship.
“We sometimes debate.”
This is less welcome: a debate implies he treats them as his equals. “And you are learning their… to… extend your life? You are going to live for hundreds of years?”
“I said, I am not a siddha.”
“But you are doing their practice, philosophy, whatever you call it.” What, exactly, is his relationship with them?
Hanumarathnam sighs. “I am living here with you in the Brahmin quarter,” he says, his mouth a bit tight as he speaks in the minor-key singsong reserved for unnecessary explanations. “Once or twice in a year I go with them, then I come back to my nice house and I try some experiments. There are forces at work in my life which do not enter into theirs.”
“Is it true that they write obscene poetry?” Surely this, she thinks, should cap her case.
“It has other meanings also…”
“Anti-Brahmin messages and so on.”
“Yes, yes. Anti-Brahmin messages. Is this what the neighbours have been telling you while I was away?” He doesn’t wait for a reply. “The poetry is satirical. It is critical of the idea of caste.”
“I should hope you debate this, at the least.”
“Yes… but the poetry is more. It is also about spiritual life. Transformation. The perfection of base matter…”
“Like base metals into gold.”
“Quite.” He pats her knee. “They have means.”
Sivakami maintains what she thinks is a look of resolute skepticism, though she feels a little reluctant excitement at the idea that her husband may be learning a means of prolonging his life.
HANUMARATHNAM IS HAPPY about the pregnancy, though worried because his wife is so small. Sivakami’s confidence and self-assurance grow with the itty-bitty body within her own, and she reassures him. They have created a child, they are carrying on an important work, one he cannot undertake without her, and one for which she is fully equipped. The unmarried Sivakami was passionate but reserved; the newly married Sivakami was determined yet unsure; the pregnant Sivakami sits on a solid sense of her worth in the material and spiritual universe.
By the third month, though she is not getting large at all, she is getting a little uncomfortable. Her belly is becoming heavy. Not swollen, not churning-this is not a fictional sensation nor is it gas. She is bearing a significant wombal weight. She continues to be active and cheerful, but as the fourth and fifth months pass, the slight roundness grows and distends downward, slung in her pliant skin. By the end of the sixth month, though no one would even know to look at her that she is pregnant, she can barely stand. When she does, she must lift her middle against her interlaced fingers. She finds ways to manage.
Her nervous husband makes sure she is never without household help, instructing the two old woman-servants never to go home. They have five betel-stained teeth between them and have suffered a significant loss of memory with age, especially memory for all difficult tasks. But they enjoy the status conferred by age, and most days, Sivakami finds one of their nieces or granddaughters washing the pots and clothes, pounding the paddy and sorting for stones. The wise old women wisely confine themselves to the sedentary tasks of stripping leaves for thatch and cracking jokes, chewing betel in the courtyard or on the step out back. Newsmongers stop by to ply them with frequent gossip.
Hanumarathnam also arranges for a penurious Brahmin lady to come in to cook. She slips quietly in and slips out, so as not to have to acknowledge the humiliation of labour. Sivakami, who is a snob but not cruel, tactfully ignores her. It’s easy because most of her concentration is taken up with sitting, walking or lying down. She cannot turn over once she lies down but has to grasp her middle, sit up and steadily descend onto the other side.
As the nine-month mark nears, Hanumarathnam and one of the old women-servants escort her to her mother’s home, as is customary and expected. They leave her there to be doted on for a few weeks before the birth. She is fed sweets; her nieces sing to her; her sisters-in-law loop strings of fragrant jasmine into her hair. Though she never complains, her brothers’ wives watch her heaving her wee belly around and dryly wonder what she will do when she has a pregnancy of substance.
One day, with the unexpected prescience of some fathers-to-be, Hanumarathnam departs in a rush for his wife’s village. He arrives to find Sivakami in the concluding hard stages of labour. A barber’s scrubbed wife has been working with Sivakami for some eight hours. Sivakami’s mother can’t stand the sight of blood and is dithering around the well in the back. Hanumarathnam’s father-in-law is pacing the street and veranda, a wreck, trying to think nice things to block out his daughter’s groans and cries. He attempts to smile at the arrival of his son-in-law, but there is an undercurrent of blame. He blames Hanumarathnam, who is directly responsible for Sivakami’s present trials, but he also blames himself, because he would have ensured that Sivakami be put in this position eventually, if not with Hanumarathnam, then with someone else. (He wants but cannot quite bring himself to blame society, which insists it must always be so: women marrying men, bearing their children. If they are at all able, it must always be so.)