The Toss of a Lemon

15. A Coming of Age 1914

AT FOURTEEN, THANGAM SHEDS FIRST BLOOD. “Ah,” the village sighs, “how sweet that she’s survived to come of age, and how bitter, that she will now leave us!”

In the style of her mother, the celebration will be thorough but not grandiose. Sivakami believes feasts should please the tongues of the gods, not the gossips.

Thangam, dressed in red, sits in the back room, on a mat laid over grains of raw rice. Brahmin-quarter girls, those who used to cluster at the veranda, now cluster at the doors so that she won’t feel alone in her isolation. When the villagers come, they greet Sivakami, “Congratulations on your grandson!”-anticipating the required fruit of of the union to come. The married women sing songs about the games of love to make Thangam blush and the girlfriends giggle. All the women dance kummi, circling and clapping hands before the Ramar statue, and sing a song congratulating curvaceous Sita on her noble, attentive husband. Every marriage starts out as perfect as Rama and Sita’s, the matrons imply. Every marriage, like theirs, faces trials. But today we’ll sing not of battles or hardships but of rose petal beds and curtains of jasmine and milky moonlight veils concealing nothing.

For three days, Thangam languishes in peaceful isolation and the village dances around her. For the fourth-day ceremonies, Rukmini will perform the part Sivakami would have had were it not for her widowhood. On that morning, Thangam’s in-laws appear before dawn, while she is out back, bathing for the first time since her first menses began. They stand in the hall beside an immense kolam while Rukmini, blushing with the pleasure of her office, gives Thangam a dhavni, and maternal instructions for womanly comportment. Under silver vessels at strategic points on the kolam are hidden a small conch dripping milk, some cowries, a little doll and some seeds. These are whisked into Thangam’s dhavni and tied at her waist, and then she is seated at the kolam’s centre.

The matrons try to place the ritual silver pieces on Thangam’s head, shoulders, palms and feet, but the coins slip and fall. Is she trembling? Why would she be? The ladies laugh at this difficulty which in any other girl would seem ill-omened in the extreme. “Why even try? Who piles silver upon gold?” They dance more kummi and sing more songs and feast, and when the gaiety is finished and the celebrants depart, nothing is left but the wait until Thangam, too, must go.

Where will she go? Sivakami wonders. To her in-laws’, at the start, but after that? Goli, now twenty-five, has charmed his way into a revenue inspectorship and will be required to change districts every two years for the rest of his career, lest he become attached to locals and tempted into lenience and corruption. Thangam will leave a trail like a small golden snail criss-crossing the presidency. None of them, not Sivakami, not Muchami, none will be able to follow.

A few months later, when Thangam’s new family is due to come again to take her home, Sivakami takes it upon herself to explain to Thangam whatever she can imagine of what her life might be like.

“Do you know, Thangam, that your husband has secured a job?” she asks as she serves both children their supper.

Vairum breaks in. “He’s a revenue inspector.”

Thangam looks at him.

“Big deal,” he says, bent over his meal. Thangam quickly turns her head back to her own food.

“It’s a very good job,” Sivakami says, feeling obliged to sound positive, for Thangam’s sake, even while she abhors the sound of her brothers’ voices in her own, instructing Vairum on how to feel. Neither child looks up. “It will place very interesting demands on you, Thangam, as his wife. You will move to a new district every two years!” Her voice sounds brittle to her. Thangam is looking at her now, clearly alarmed. “Won’t that be interesting?”

“It will be terrible, Amma!” shouts Vairum, and Sivakami jumps. “Will her in-laws travel with her, at least? Is she going to be all alone, in a new place, every two years?”

“Well, she will be with her husband,” she says defensively.

“You can’t count on him! When he comes here, he’s never here. When Thangam Akka goes to his home, he’s never home!”

“Vairum, we need to help your sister prepare, to feel confident and ready.” She watches as he folds his banana leaf and storms to the back of the house. She looks back at Thangam, who has stopped eating and started to cry. “Oh, no, kuttima. Please, dear, everything will be fine.” It is after dark, so she reaches to stroke Thangam’s hair. She looks up to see Vairum has returned and is standing over them.

“Thangam Akka, you have to write to us and tell us if you need anything. Okay? I will come and see you.” He squats beside her. “I will make sure everything is all right.” She nods a little.

Sivakami looks at Vairum to express her gratitude, but he rises without acknowledging his mother’s presence and goes upstairs to his attic room.

The next day, Sivakami can’t help confessing her fears to Gayatri, who now takes her daily coffee accompanied by her three sons, the baby a little less than six months old.

“Oh, I know,” says Gayatri, nose to nose with her youngest, his black eyes flashing toothless delight. “When I have girls, I’ll just worry about them all the time, like my mother does about me, like your mother did about you. Won’t I worry about your sisters, little baby? Won’t I?”

Sivakami feels irritated at Gayatri’s response-what does she know of it? But later that day, as she readies her daughter’s trousseau, she reconsiders and decides Gayatri is right. What is she feeling that every mother has not undergone? She is accustomed to reading her own emotions in Muchami’s face and his dour farawayness shows her how much she has come to look like her own mother, powerless over her daughter’s fate.

Thangam’s in-laws come to fetch her. This is a strange departure from tradition, but they had written to say they wanted to spare her the bother of asking her relatives to escort the girl-since Thangam has no father, either Murthy or Sivakami’s brothers would have gone. Sivakami understands that Thangam’s in-laws cannot afford the expense of hosting the relatives properly, and she accepts their offer with outward grace and inward resignation.

They have grown thinner in the years since the marriage. Though they have the fair skin and drooping eyelids of the highly bred, their clothes are almost threadbare. This is an occasion calling for grandeur, but Thangam’s mother-in-law wears, apart from her wedding pendant, only two measly strands of gold about her neck. Her bangles, earrings and nose rings are perfunctory. Sivakami knows of their financial struggles. Every time she sees her brothers, they ask after Thangam’s in-laws, shaking their heads but heartily insisting, “Good people,” before going on to gloat-good-naturedly, publicly-over the in-laws’ financial incompetence. She hears from them that this once-wealthy family is auctioning off its real estate, taking prices far below the land’s worth. “Creditors,” the brothers speculate in self-righteous tones as they buy parcels of the in-laws’ land on Sivakami’s behalf, using the money she had set aside for Thangam’s dowry.

The departure blessings, as needed, are done. The cart arrives and is packed.

“Coffee?” Sivakami asks the in-laws, and Thangam catches her eye.

Gayatri laughs and winks at Mari. “Our girl’s become corrupt!” She means it as a joke, light-hearted.

Sivakami can’t rebuke her daughter in front of her in-laws; it would be a rebuke to them as well. But Thangam has never before drunk coffee. Mari whispers to Sivakami that she should not give her daughter any of the polluting drink, but Sivakami ignores her, thinking, I don’t have a daughter. Thangam is now someone else’s child.

Sivakami brings the coffee in flat-bottomed silver bowls and tumblers, with a half-inch lip around the top. Thangam accepts her coffee from her mother and begins pouring it, tumbler to bowl and bowl to tumbler, mixing from ever greater heights so that it curls and foams: caustic liquid gentled with sugar and milk, like a truth made palatable. Thangam relishes each tongueful as Sivakami watches her, imagining her in faraway places Sivakami will never see. Is Thangam drinking the coffee to postpone the moment of departure? Is she experimenting with this foreigners’ drink because she, too, is about to become a voyager?

When she is through, she and her in-laws take their leave. Thangam performs an obeisance for her mother, one her husband should have been there to do with her. Vairum stands to one side, watching woodenly. When Thangam rises, her eyes fill and she steps, almost jumps, suddenly toward her brother, putting her palm on his cheek. Vairum jerks his head as though to clamp her hand there, and then shakes her off. Thangam backs toward the cart, which her in-laws have already mounted. Once more, Sivakami has to shake off some petulance-so uncharitable!-at the sense that her children have an understanding that excludes her.

Muchami hovers until Thangam, too, is seated on a bench in back, then leaps up into the driver’s seat and flicks his switch. Little puffs of gold jolt from the side of the cart with each pothole and fall twirling in the sun to the thick dust of the road.

Sivakami turns to her son. “Our family grows smaller to grow bigger.”

He gazes at her skeptically. “I don’t see how you could have let her go with them.”

“You’re not talking sense,” she says, sounding sharp and liking it. “I didn’t ‘let’ her do anything. Her destiny is written by God and I am nothing but an executor.” She catches her breath against tears.

“If you’re not worried, you’re stupid. If you are worried, you should do something about it!” Vairum storms past her.

“What can I do about it, son? I am a widow.” She is shaking: how dare he speak so rudely to her?

“None of this would have happened if our father hadn’t died.” He stands at the bottom of the stairs and starts hitting his forehead with the heels of his hands. “My fault. It’s all my fault.”

Sivakami gapes. “Where on earth did you hear that?”

He stops and looks at her. “You think it too.” Then he runs up the stairs.

“I do not!” she says after him, and again, “I do not,” weakly. She can’t bring herself to follow. What can she say?

When he comes down, hours later, for his meal, she still has not thought of a way to broach the subject. She has been able to think of nothing but their exchange, but can’t think beyond what he said. She serves him silently. While he is eating, she says gently, “It’s no one’s fault, Kanna. Or, that is, it’s my fault, of course, I’m the wife, and if I…”

She is foundering, but Vairum excuses her. “Don’t talk about it, Amma. Forget it.”

She obeys, with uneasy relief, and they go about the routines of their days until they establish, in Thangam’s wake, new rhythms not unlike the old.