The Toss of a Lemon

31. Gold to Ash 1940

WHEN MUCHAMI SAW SIVAKAMI and the family off at the train, he did so with some certain knowledge that he would not be seeing Thangam again. Sivakami told him, The year has arrived, in the way she sometimes talked to him: as though it were not too different from talking to herself.

The day after they left, Muchami was supervising the gathering of coconuts in Rukmini’s garden. Rukmini and Murthy had recently engaged a new servant and they didn’t trust him not to take a share. A small gang of his youngest relatives kept him company-the youngest sons and eldest grandsons of those boys who guarded Vairum in the days of his earliest persecutions. The children, inspired by a bunch of young coconuts hanging low to the ground, started clamouring for coconut water.

The coconut gatherers were taking a break, squatting in the garden. Muchami asked if he could borrow a scythe. Though a cut above his caste-agricultural labourers, generally handy with the implements of harvest-Muchami is not good with knives. He started lopping off coconut tops, concentrating visibly, his palms sweating. The labourers giggled as he handed the first off to the children, a rough hole hacked off the top, and some of the water spilt. He had just started on the second, determined to give his young cousins this treat himself, when from within the house the grandfather clock struck one o’clock.

Muchami startled. The scythe went awry and split the coconut lengthwise from tip to tip along one side. Falling to the ground, it yawed slightly, water slopping out, tears from a nearly closed eye. Muchami had nicked himself, and tried to staunch his thumb. He didn’t know why the clock should return him to thoughts of Sivakami’s mission, but he had a sudden feeling it was complete.

IN MUNNUR, THE FAMILY PERFORMS Thangam’s last rites. Her body is cremated at a ghat downriver. The cremation grounds attendant, a bored and ill-tempered dwarf, pokes the pyre to ensure thorough incineration. His son, a tall boy, handsome enough to be in movies, assists.

Six priests chant around another fire in the small salon of the last house where Thangam lived. The house is filled with the mournful, waxy smell of things sacrificed to the flames: ghee, holy water, flowers, puffed rice. Thangam’s ashes are gathered, and Laddu, looking solemn and unfamiliar, carries the urn to the river. An entourage surrounds and trails him-his siblings with their spouses and children, Vairum, Vani, Goli, Murthy and Rukmini, Minister and Gayatri, some neighbours.

As Laddu wades out into the current, he stumbles and begins to cry. Behind him, Murthy wails, “We have lost our purest gold, our darling!”

Saradha and Rukmini whimper agreement; Gayatri, her head bowed, stands behind her husband, weeping and not watching. The urn exhales several puffs of ash against the cool light of the season before Laddu tips its contents into the river’s flow.

Sivakami, watching from the bank, recalls the first time she saw Thangam’s strange golden dust silting the narrow gutter that leads from the bath. The dust would shift with the water but was so heavy buckets were needed to move it along into the drain. Now, Thangam’s particulate remains, light as anyone’s, float out and away in seconds. A thin ashen sheet billows in the air before dropping to follow the rest.

Sivakami’s eldest brother died some three years back, but the next two brothers come and observe mourning with the family, repeating, as does Murthy, platitudes on the nobility of Thangam’s death. Sivakami grits her teeth and says nothing. If it were anyone else’s daughter, she would be saying the same sorts of things.

Rukmini tends Krishnan, who, at five, may not be entirely certain what has happened. He has lived with Sivakami since his younger brother’s birth; Sivakami made the argument that Thangam could not handle two boys, and Thangam did not protest. Also, Sivakami believes that boys should be coddled, to give them confidence and a strong feeling of home. Girls don’t need either, she reasons, since they don’t need to meet and do business with the outside world. Because Laddu needed discipline, Sivakami had not been able to indulge him to the degree she would have liked, and fears that, as a result, he may have turned out nervous and remote. Krishnan, a brighter and more sensitive boy, gives her some hope of restitution.

It has been two years since Krishnan last saw Thangam, and as far as Sivakami can tell, he has forgotten her. He spends every day with Rukmini, who is childless and has lived alone with Murthy since her mother-in-law died. The little boy has become the light of her days and their companionship is as intimate as any between mother and child. It pains Sivakami and also makes her glad to see Krishnan so little affected by his mother’s passing.

Raghavan, however, had not been fully weaned when Thangam died. Though he accepts cups of warm, sweetened cow’s milk from his sisters, he sucks on their sleeves and bites their shoulders, crying for comfort they can’t give him.

Janaki feels sad at her mother’s passing, but also guilty. She wonders whether her sisters feel similarly. While they are motherless in a sense, she thinks, their state is not too different from before: they are still reliant on their grandmother, vulnerable to their uncle, suspicious of their father. Janaki and Kamalam still crave physical affection, a craving finally satisfied in the elder sisters now that they have children of their own. Radhai is just now getting too big to sit on Muchami’s knee.

Sivakami watches Vairum and Goli circle, keeping their animosity within the limits of decorum. Goli is sullen but remains present for all the ceremonies where he is required.

During the day, Sivakami remains composed, busy cooking for fifteen people and watching the ceremonies. At night, her sense of devastation returns as if to feed on her. I thought if I lightened her burden, she thinks, she might hang on. And, The horoscopes have defied me once again.

On one of these nights, Vairum, rising to relieve himself, finds her huddled in a corner, her face hidden in shade, her body illuminated by moonlight. She sleeps directly on the cement floor, its grey turned shades of blue by the night, but now, at three, she is sitting up and weeping.

He pauses before her, hands on hips. “You think she died of a bad horoscope,” he says, his voice ringing quietly. All the other family members sigh and snore, asleep in the hall behind him. He shakes his head. “May the day come when you admit it was his loutishness that killed her, not the stars.”

Sivakami wipes her tears, then puts her hand to her forehead, not looking at him.

“I will arrange the marriages of my sister’s remaining daughters,” Vairum swears, standing over her. “I will…” he chokes, this little boy who swore never to take from his sister, only to give, and who, as she lay dying, could not give her what she needed any more than his mother could. “I will arrange their marriages on terms rational and religious,” he sputters. “No more horoscopes. Let people take responsibility for their actions.”

Thirteen days after Thangam’s death, the priests are paid and a feast prepared to bid the soul pass on.

The next day, the Cholapatti folk make ready to return. Thangam’s elder daughters will also go back there for a time with their children. Goli goes out at some point-no one sees him leave. Presumably, he has gone to back to work, his bereavement leave concluded. They are milling around, feeling it rude not to have bid him farewell, but Vairum hustles them to the train mid-afternoon, reminding them that Goli did not pay them the same courtesy.

At the Cholapatti station, they ask the children of the station master to run and alert Muchami to their arrival so that he can bring the bullock cart. When Sivakami sees Muchami’s familiar silhouette emerge from the now-solid dark, she feels herself relax and come close to tears again.

Muchami jumps down and, putting his palms together and bowing quickly to them several times, sets about loading the baggage. Sivakami gets into the cart first, without saying anything to him. The family had not communicated with him from Munnur, knowing that he would intuit the reason for so long an absence. He fusses over them, asking, “Are you comfortable?”

Vairum has mounted the front. When Muchami hops up beside him and takes the reins, he asks, “So, Vairum, everything taken care of?” Vairum nods perfunctorily. Muchami glances one last time over his shoulder before starting. He catches Sivakami’s eye, and his face crumples.

“Our gold,” he whispers, turning to the front. He twitches the rein against the bullocks backs with a “tch-tch” to get them started. “Pure gold. Such a good girl.”

“Yes, yes,” Vairum sighs. “She deserved much better.”

Muchami weeps audibly for the duration of the trip home while the occupants of the cart behind him are silent, having spent much of their grief during the formal mourning period and being tired from travel. Muchami is far less demonstrative than many servants in his position, who would weep for form’s sake, as servants are supposed to weep for masters, more even than for their own families. Sivakami knows him to be sincere, knows he feels exactly as she does: that while Thangam’s marriage may have killed her-by whatever means-Sivakami had no choice and did the best she could have done.