The Toss of a Lemon

3. Only one, as an eye 1902

“Onnay onnu, Kannay kannu.”

“Only one, one, as an eye, an eye.”

When there is only one, how precious is that son.

SIVAKAMI IS AT ONCE PROUD AND COMPLACENT-complacent because she knew she would deliver a boy, and proud that she took every available measure to ensure it. When she emerges from her dive into her new baby’s eyes, she asks about Thangam. Since no good wife can say her husband’s name, everyone understands she’s asking after her husband. She expects to hear his voice responding. Instead, her youngest sister-in-law walks Thangam to the door of the birth room and tells Sivakami, obviously curious to see her reaction, “He’s gone already.”

Sivakami feels an unjustifiable pang.

At Thangam’s birth, Hanumarathnam had called to his wife, “I hear she’s a beauty-won’t tell a soul. I’ll return. Send word if you want anything.”

His presence at his children’s births was highly unconventional, after all. He attended only because he trusted no one else to record their birth times and make the consequent calculations.

Sivakami tells herself if he hadn’t said those few words to her after Thangam’s birth she wouldn’t be feeling this disappointment; she tells herself it is far more proper for him to leave, saying nothing, and return for the eleventh-day ceremonies as though he’d never come before; she tells herself he was too excited the first time and couldn’t restrain himself, but now he’s more mature. She tells herself he’s overwhelmed with emotion because she delivered a boy. She doesn’t tell herself that none of these excuses suffices.

Hanumarathnam is fleeing. He speeds, to the degree that he can in a bullock cart, toward his home and his instruments: his home, where he can think straight, and his instruments, which will tell him, finally, his fate.

He reaches Cholapatti as the sun is setting, at that time of day when what is known appears unknown. A sickened feeling in the pit of his stomach has nothing to do with village roads and the swaying cart. He says nothing about it to himself because that would be fatalism: a person irresponsibly deciding, on some caprice, that a terrible fate awaits him. Such a man will be continually preoccupied with his doom until something, anything, happens so he can say, “Aha! You see! I am doomed, it was not my imagination!”

Hanumarathnam has no patience with such whimsy. Destiny can be read precisely, scientifically, and this is precisely, scientifically, what he intends to do. Only after that, if necessary, will he fall into despair. Or sink into relief: he keeps himself optimistic.

On the Cholapatti rooftop, he works through the night. He notes his son’s birth time and birth location in tables, then creates other tables to repeat the calculations from different angles and starting points, checking them one against another, consulting charts and books. Every equation takes him back in time, so changed is the sky already from the moment whose influences he is enumerating as the night moves past the moon.

Every so often, he peers through his telescope, scavenged by a distant relative from the house of a dying British surveyor and bon vivant, and brought to Hanumarathnam in recognition of his talents. Where his ancestors relied on handed-down documents, he, always interested in other traditions’ teachings, supplements his Vedic calculations with measurements he has learned to make using telescopic observations.

He brings the stars close, through the lenses; he looks in their eyes. To those who merely admire the heavens, as they admire a new building in the city or another man’s wife, alterations in the sky are mere degrees of difference. They are interesting to observe, chart, identify. They are fine to forget. But, as all experiences, however fleeting or superficial, leave residues, so the moment-by-moment turning of heavenly bodies has momentous repercussions.

Hanumarathnam, all too fully aware of the ability of the heavens to sustain life, bring death and cause all the ups and downs in between, cannot simply stare in dumbfounded awe for a couple of seconds at the beauty of the skies and then go down to supper and sleep. What he sees writ is destinies untold.

Dawn breaks upon him. He has been sitting still a long time. Dew trickles down his neck, as if the morning sees he’s not sweating and thinks he should.

He has read that he will die.

Sooner, that is, rather than later. His weak quadrant has an astrological alignment with his son’s birth time, and this has darkened the shadow of death. The discus of the little boy’s stars will cut Hanumarathnam’s lifeline within three years.

At the eleventh-day naming ceremonies, Hanumarathnam goes through the motions. It’s not conspicuous: everyone is just going through the motions, as people do at these things. But Sivakami notices and is concerned: Hanumarathnam has not tried to get close to his son. With his daughter, he is still all fond smiles and lifting and swinging, though Sivakami perceives a sadness there too.

Why not the boy? Why not the boy? Sivakami wonders as she waits out the remainder of the thirty-one days’ seclusion. After a girl baby, seclusion lasts forty-one days, so Sivakami has another reason to be grateful for a boy: she couldn’t have borne this strange worry as long as that. Finally, Hanumarathnam comes to escort her home.

He makes his wife comfortable with the baby, who is a bit of a fusser, in the back of the bullock cart. Maybe that’s it, she thinks, the whimpering and whinging. It doesn’t bother her, but maybe that’s why his father keeps his distance. Or the baby’s looks: they don’t make her feel strange, but maybe they do his father? Sivakami is feeling sensitive: her eldest and youngest sisters-in-law had made a few remarks-the sort that sound kind-hearted but sting. “He’s obviously so alert, must be very intelligent, and what do good looks really matter for anyway?” and, with a little shudder, “Oh! Those eyes just look right through a person, don’t they?”

Hanumarathnam sits up front with his lovely daughter, showing her the sights, until her eyes are heavy. Then she leaves him to come and lie in back with her mother, where she insists on keeping one hand on the baby, as though the cart were a big cradle for both of them. Thangam has said nothing about her new little brother, but it is clear that she doesn’t share the world’s repulsion. Daily, since his birth, she has brought him gifts, sweets Sivakami pretends to feed him, for Thangam’s sake, and pretty leaves he crushes in a fist. She would squat on small haunches watching him almost without blinking, for half an hour at a time, until an aunt startled her by calling her name. If anyone asked her about him, though, she gave no answer but her vague, incurious gaze, and since the questions rarely needed answers-“You must be so proud, a big sister, eh, Thangam?”-the asker just pinched her cheek and turned away.

When Hanumarathnam brings Thangam to the back, he looks at the baby without speaking, and then returns to the front to sit with the servant who has come along as driver. Sivakami’s mind keeps running on in speculation: maybe he thinks the boy doesn’t look like him? But who can tell with a mashed-up barely one-month-old? She is feeling ill now, much as Hanumarathnam did on this journey just after his son’s birth. It is a variety of motion sickness, caused not by the rock-bump-sway of the animals and cart, but by the ringing and ricocheting of her thoughts as they tumble along and drag her behind.

They reach home by nightfall. That night, he sleeps, she doesn’t.

In the morning, they go through more motions. Sivakami watches Hanumarathnam: his movements look stiff, his face unnatural. She can feel the pressure of whatever he is thinking on her temples, on her chest, but she cannot guess at it and finally cannot bear it any longer. When he comes into the main hall for his mid-morning meal, the baby is napping and Thangam has gone next door to play with the still-childless Rukmini. Sivakami crumples to the floor and cracks out a plea through clenched teeth and tears, “Oh, my lord, my lord. What is happening? What is wrong?”

He immediately drops to his own knees, lifting Sivakami’s face to his and thinking how he loves her.

“Little one… I…” Where should he begin? With which small fact or hope? “I’m sorry, I…”

Sivakami is watching his face, her lips parted, trying to read what he is not telling her. He turns away so as to be able to tell her himself.

“I told your father when I proposed that…” He glances back and away again. “Let me explain. You know that if something is written in the weakest quadrant of one’s horoscope, it is extremely unlikely, yes?”

“Okay…” She has never heard this before, but the interpretation of horoscopes was never of particular interest to her.

“Your father and uncles knew that, and for the sake of honesty, I told them that my death in the ninth year of my marriage was written in that very weakest quadrant.”

Sivakami sits back on her haunches, no longer weeping, looking resolute and skeptical. “But…”

He will not be hurried. “Often, the birth of a son changes the relation of the stars, can even erase the shadow of death from the father’s horoscope.”

“Our son cannot have done that,” she says, sad and matter-of-fact.

“My calculations following our son’s birth show that Yama’s water buffalo has advanced from the weakest quadrant to the strongest,” he quietly agrees. “The god of death will surely come to take my soul in the third year of the boy’s life.”

“Ayoh!” Sivakami cries now. “Ayoh, Rama!”

“It is not the child’s fault…” Hanumaratham says as though it could be. “But he has killed me.”

She is now leaning on a pillar, he kneeling in front of the Ramar triptych, the glare of the street just out of sight through the front doors, reflecting into the hall along with the distant sound of daily life, but they don’t stay like that for long.

Sivakami soon pulls herself to her feet, and her feet carry her mechanically to the well. She washes her face, the face she has had and known for more than sixteen years-a long time, by some standards. She feels hard new lines drawn there by her husband and son. What will be written on those lines? Maybe they can read what she can‘t, these men who know so much. She returns to the hall and asks, “And so. What now?”

Her husband sees what she has felt on her face. He thinks, Look, two children, and no trace, now, of the girl. She has become a woman. How wonderful, how miraculous, that we go through these stages, walking the path of our lives one foot in front of the other, one in front of the other, this is how we live, this is how to live. He comforts himself with circular, cloudy thinking, the sort that makes respectable conversation in the face of grief. As if he’s rehearsing to attend his own funeral.

For now, though, he is still living, and so is Sivakami, and so are their two children, whose needs must be met, so the requirements of life put their feet one in front of the other. They eat and sleep and conduct business even though their life has been poured into a rice-sorting basket and tossed two foot, four foot, six foot in the air.

HANUMARATHNAM TELLS SIVAKAMI that he is going to teach her about household finances, administration of agricultural income, market relations and management of personnel, and that he has hired a new servant, a young boy, who will learn to assist her. If he works out well, and Hanumarathnam has good reason to believe he will, then he will be retained. If not, they will dismiss him and try quickly to find someone else. They cannot be dilly-dallying with this servant as they normally would. It is not enough that he is related to one of their old servants, not enough that he needs a favour, not even enough if he is entertaining or pitiable. He must be efficient, confident and worthy of trust. Hanumarathnam doesn’t need to say the reason: that Sivakami and the servant will be managing the lands on their own in a little more than two years and both must prove themselves capable.

A few days later, the new servant starts. Sivakami is giving the children their baths when she hears the boy call out from behind the door at the rear of their property. How can she help but hear his as one of the voices of death? Yet she herself opens the door. She forces herself, because the few times she has acted maudlin, it only made Hanumarathnam impatient.

The servant, a thirteen-year-old by the name of Muchami, accepts a cup of sugared milk and then leaves to accompany Hanumarathnam on his daily round of some portion of the properties. He walks behind Hanumarathnam out to the fields, then along the narrow hump separating paddy fields one from another and from the plots of other crops. Social imperative dictates that they cannot walk abreast on the street, agricultural imperative that they walk single file between the fields: the dividers between plots are less than a foot wide in places.

Muchami notes his new employer’s sure-footedness. It separates those who walk among the fields from those who don’t. Most landowners sit in their big fine houses and wonder lazily when to expect the rent, not giving it any more thought than that until some crisis passes the point of resolution. Hanumarathnam is obviously a landlord who likes to know what’s transpiring out among the folk, to sort out tangles while they are still small, even to anticipate them. Muchami is of the same mind. He marches proudly in step with his new employer. He decides he likes Hanumarathnam’s looks and tries to match his step to the seigneur’s.

They pause to clear fallen leaves from irrigation canals. They come slowly up beside the white herons that stand in the six inches of paddy water every morning. Only a few move away. Muchami listens patiently as Hanumarathnam tells him things he already knows, such as who the tenant is on each piece of land, his rent, his character and temperament. Muchami has always made it his business to know things. He finds knowledge more interesting than ignorance. So he doesn’t listen too closely but dreamily soaks in the sound of Hanumarathnam’s voice, which he might have likened to chocolate had he ever known chocolate. (He never comes closer to chocolate than the sound of that voice.)

When they return, he waits while his employer completes bath, prayers and meal. Hanumarathnam takes his rice meal at ten; Muchami receives the same. He ate already that morning but eats again because he is an accommodating sort of boy and, at thirteen, especially accommodating toward extra meals. Hanumarathnam sits in the main hall, Muchami in the courtyard.

As they eat, Hanumarathnam quizzes Muchami through the open doors of the pantry and kitchen.

“Shanmugham’s sesame field-what’s the northern border?” he calls.

Without missing a mouthful, Muchami calls back, “The teak stand that’s the southern border of Kantha’s turmeric field, Ayya.”

“Shanmugam’s paddy yield last year?”

“What he really got, Ayya, or what he told you?”

“Either one.”

“He paid you seventeen per cent of twenty-two bushels.”

“Other particulars?”

“Particulars you told me or other particulars?”

“Hm…” Hanumarathnam purses his lips. “The latter.”

“His brother’s wife has a cousin who went to work on a rubber plantation in Malaysia and never returned. News came on the wind that he married a beautiful village girl, but she is only a girl during the blue nights. By day, she becomes a monkey, called ‘orange-utange,’ or something.”

Hanumarathnam already has a strong feeling that he and Muchami share a point of view on relations with tenants and have a mutual appreciation of the importance of obscure if irrelevant information to everyday business. For instance, Hanumarathnam is certain that, in the past, tenants were tempted to cheat him. He thinks that he has succeeded in dissuading them by strategically mentioning “other particulars” about the party in question-giving the impression that he knew much more than he said. He’s sure Muchami also knows how to deploy such details to effect.

Next, Sivakami gives Thangam to Muchami to entertain while she begins her portion of the training.

Sivakami must also walk the fields, though she cannot actually walk the fields: were she truly to walk in public view, she would be risking their social position in an attempt to maintain their economic grip. Any respectable Brahmin matron keeps largely out of sight if her family can afford that modesty; a widow must be kept entirely hidden, so as not to expose her shame at her condition.

So Hanumarathnam has laboured to create a middle ground: a detailed map of the holdings for Sivakami to walk through with her eyes and mind. Hanumarathnam has accurately portrayed those properties: real and perceived distances, sizes, and productive capacity of each plot. It is not simply a matter of drawing a map to scale; one must choose what sort of scale: physical? psychological? This map has to show how a property relates to its owners, to itself, to tenants, to the community. This is business-not geography, not math.

Each holding is labelled with the tenant, fee and probable current and projected output. Each of these wants discussing: the age and character of the tenant, the age and character of a particular plot of soil, the problems and promise and possibilities of each. Some tenants have special agreements. They grow plantains for themselves among the coconut trees, for instance, until the coconut trees grow large and require that space. Hanumarathnam gets a slightly larger share of paddy for this, since he and Sivakami have plantains in plenty from their own garden. And what of the paddy to be sold? Selling at the market is an art and the middlemen are crafty. Sivakami and Muchami must be equipped to play this game; they must operate as a team.

Muchami is out back playing horsie, letting wee Thangam ride around on his back while Sivakami peers at the map, rotating it, biting her lip. Muchami is slight but must have considerable strength to give a horsie-ride to the world’s heaviest child, Hanumarathnam notes with satisfaction, just as the boy collapses in a pile of giggles. He had wanted a young man, someone who would be Sivakami’s legs and back, eyes and hands, throughout her life. But there are dangers, for a… a… (he does not let himself think widow). He had to find someone he could trust with his wife, who would be no more than eighteen and left alone in the world.

In the weeks between his son’s birth and his wife’s return, Hanumarathnam had found reasons to casually observe the young people of the servant class at play The rough and tumble of pubescent boys, their teasing and taunting of the girls, the girls’ half-hearted escape attempts… and he noticed a young man who didn’t participate in the taunting of the girls. He observed this young man more keenly and saw the youth was not gentle or shy. In Hanumarathnam’s opinion, this boy didn’t refrain from teasing out of an inordinate respect for females. He refrained because girls did not interest him. Hanumarathnam saw Muchami’s eyes gleam when the boys alone ran off to play kabbadi in the dust. He saw him tackling the tallest and best-looking boys and sitting on them a little longer than necessary; when he saw this, he guessed that this boy would not outgrow his boredom with girls.

Discreet inquiries revealed the boy to be called Muchami, to be the only son in a family of three children and to have a widowed mother. By way of one of the couples who work for him, Hanumarathnam summoned the widow to his house and explained his interest in employing her son. He met with the boy, who impressed him as sharp. The pact was secured, conditional on performance, the widow was eternally grateful and Muchami was instructed to show up a week or so after Hanumarathnam brought his wife from Samanthibakkam.

After the morning meal, the whole household naps, Hanumarathnam a little apart from Sivakami and the children in the main hall, Muchami on the narrow, sheltered platform that extends from the back of the house into the courtyard.

Around tiffin time, an agent comes to the house to purchase paddy. Muchami asks permission to handle the transaction on his own. Hanumarathnam complies, then watches with increasing admiration as Muchami bullies and shames and achieves a much better price for the paddy than Hanumarathnam ever has.

After the muttering and defeated middleman leaves, Muchami asks Hanumarathnam, “Ayya, why do you deal with that particular agent with your paddy?”

“I… because I have always dealt with him.”

“He’s been cheating you.”

“I know…”

“But less than the others would have.”

“I know.” Hanumarathnam wonders why he sounds defensive, given that he feels amused. “That’s why I always go to him.”

“Well, you can see he will cheat far less now. Today I did not permit any cheating at all, though I will, with your permission, Ayya, allow him to cheat now and again, just to keep him interested.” Hanumarathnam nods as Muchami continues, “The balance will still be more profitable for you than it has been.”

After this it’s market hour. Muchami will assume this not from Hanumarathnam, but from one of the other servants, a diligent man, but one for whom age is becoming an obstacle. Hanumarathnam takes Muchami to the market himself, to spare the old man the journey and to evaluate Muchami’s bargaining ability.

With the sellers of dry goods, vegetables, fruits and kerosene, Muchami uses much the same bullying and shaming techniques that were so effective with the rice agent. Hanumarathnam observes at a distance, thinking it would have made good business sense to hire such a savvy assistant much earlier. Muchami will pay for himself in no time.

Hanumarathnam has only occasionally gone to market-when he was young, and a servant was sick or perhaps away at a wedding. Every time, he wanted to bully exactly the way Muchami is doing now, especially when dealing with those merchants known to be particularly bad cheats. His caste consciousness would not permit him: such behaviour seems ungracious from Brahmins. It provokes jokes about mercenary priests, and Hanumarathnam is particularly sensitive owing to his role as village healer. If he were perceived as grasping, the villagers would still come to him for medicine, but his relationship to them would be altered by a lessening of confidence in the purity of his goodwill.

So he never tried, though sometimes he intervened on someone else’s behalf, because merchants cheat poor people even more than they cheat the rich and Brahmins. Hanumarathnam reflects momentarily that a poor person working for a middle-class household has the greatest bargaining advantages-the power to purchase in quantity and the knowledge and status of the street.

When they return from the market, Hanumarathnam comes in by the back courtyard, washes his feet, then proceeds to the veranda to sit on a jute-strung daybed and contemplate the Hindu newspaper.

Muchami enters the courtyard behind him and empties the bag of vegetables on the platform behind the kitchen. Sivakami squats to do the sorting. This was a ritual, enacted by her mother and various servants, that she had observed daily as a girl and looked forward to assuming: the mistress criticizes the servant’s choices, goes into shock at the expense, has all the fun of market banter without leaving the house.

But when, in her first week as mistress of her own house, Sivakami launched some imaginative criticisms of the produce, the old servant barely glanced at her. He just put the change down on a corner of the platform and wandered away, leaving her mumbling to fade into silence. The day following she asked him to stay while she inspected the goods, and he complied but shrugged at bruises and rot, claimed not to remember prices and was altogether no fun.

Now, unexpectedly, Muchami addresses her. “Beans are better than most. It’s not been a good season for beans. Don’t know how he gets such good beans, considering he’s such a coward.”

Sivakami is too surprised to respond. She has been silent with him till now, resenting him, hating what he represents. Now, she’s uncomfortably aware of her reluctance to risk a remark that might cause him to stop talking. He doesn’t seem to mind her silence and continues, “His wife and son are always ganging up with her sister and the sister’s husband. They ridicule him until he cries and runs away to sleep. They all live with him-he’s too scared to stop them. Must spend all his time finding these great beans.”

Sivakami, though still trying to be unfriendly, can’t help asking, “Why is he so scared?”

“Because he’s a coward, like I said. Look at these eggplants. I know they’re not gorgeous, but they were a free gift owing to my acquaintance with the seller. He used to beat up on me because I was a friend of his younger brother. Now he won’t try it because I’m working for you, Amma. Just cut off the bad parts, there’ll still be lots. Where do you want the lentils?”

He bounces the sack of lentils off one knee and then the other while waiting for her answer. She hurries to fetch the canister, and he puts away the other dry goods and the kerosene.

That night, Hanumarathnam talks to her about their newest employee. He is satisfied that he has chosen well this caretaker for his wife and children but is also aware that he may be giving this boy some power. He likes the idea that he has the power to give it and thinks Muchami will still know his place.

In those early weeks, Hanumarathnam continues the work of checking on crop yields and collecting the rent while Muchami tags along. The servant has adopted Hanumarathnam’s posture and stance, the slight stoop, the outward turn of the knees. He has found himself a walking stick, which he uses to dredge plantain leaves from irrigation tracts. He leans on it as he watches Hanumarathnam leaning on his own stick and talking to the peasant cultivators. Muchami’s dhotis become whiter, his hair smoother, and he adopts Brahmin turns of phrase and pronunciations, adding curlicues to a manner of speech that had already sounded a bit forced among his social equivalents.

Many of the tenants, along with Muchami’s uncles and mother, find his affectations silly, but the few who are impressed give him more than enough reason to continue. He begins monitoring and collecting on his own. Though he is tougher than Hanumarathnam, he never bullies the tenants. In the market, people expect to be bullied, but bullying peasant farmers in front of their homes is gauche. His family and close friends call him the landlord’s goonda, but they are only teasing. Muchami knows this and doesn’t get defensive; instead he swaggers around and pretends to be a real goonda. He knows he is successful.

Sivakami, too, senses that Muchami hopes to be something more than most among his class, and wonders if they might be of help along that path. She also finds herself, daily, looking more and more forward to his reports from his rounds, less and less inclined to hide her amusement. She has a few friends, Brahmin matrons like herself, who drop by from time to time, but they seem to tell the same few stories, about saris, deaths and slights ad nauseam. These things do interest her, in the candyfloss way of pulp novels. It is wholesome gossip, because everyone does it, and because it comes with judgments: proper versus improper, decent versus indecent. In contrast, Muchami’s tales are meaty and illicit. He tells her everything about people she knows and those she will never meet. He is more respectful when speaking about Brahmins but makes no attempt to censor himself-in fact, he is encouraged by Sivakami’s attention into increasingly outrageous mimicry.

One day a few weeks after he starts work for them, Muchami is sorting through the produce in the back courtyard by the well, entertaining Sivakami, who sits on the platform behind the kitchen with the baby in her lap, by commenting on the vegetables in the voice of their preferred kerosene merchant. The kerosene seller has a strange condition: his voice, every few phrases, shoots up briefly and involuntarily into a falsetto. Muchami maintains a deadpan monologue on the vegetables, not breaking rhythm at all for the falsetto interludes. “Okra aren’t bad, though he kept slipping these little-little rotten ones in among the good. I called him on it, picked them out and said, ‘Who’re you trying to fool?’”

Sivakami, after a brief attempt to restrain her giggles, breaks down. Muchami starts adding effeminate prancing to the high-pitched bits, still with no break in work or words, until Sivakami is nearly collapsing with laughter.

Glancing up, she sees Hanumarathnam has come to the pantry entrance, attracted by her laughter. He looks amused and curious, but Muchami stops when he notices his employer and stands with his head bowed. Sivakami, too, stops laughing, and Hanumarathnam says, “What? Why so solemn as soon as I show up?” They smile at him shyly and he withdraws with affectionate exasperation, but Sivakami feels sick with anger now, at herself, and even more, at Hanumarathnam. Muchami tries to resume clowning a little but quickly sees that she is no longer in the mood.

How dare my husband trick me into accepting this? Sivakami stomps inside and puts the baby in the cloth hammock where he sleeps, rocking it silently and a little too hard, until the baby’s wails jolt her into slowing down and beginning a lullaby. She takes a deep breath. Here I am, acting normal, after my husband has said he is going to die.

WEEKS ACCELERATE INTO MONTHS. Sivakami and Hanumarathnam’s son has come to be called Vairum, “diamond,” in contrast to Thangam’s gold. One of Hanumarathnam’s sisters created the nickname, when, holding the baby, she said with a little shiver, “Ooh-look at how his eyes glitter-so cold!” She stopped, suddenly aware of how Sivakami might take this. An elder sister-in-law didn’t really need to be concerned with Sivakami’s feelings, but she didn’t want to offend her little brother. “Your little diamond!” she added in a shrill disclaimer, and Sivakami accepted the suggestion, choosing to pretend the entire comment had been in goodwill and good taste. (The sister-in-law had not yet discovered ice, or Vairum might have been named for that chill substance.)

Vairum is a very different child from his elder sister. Unlike Thangam, he craves attention. He complains loudly until he is picked up and comforted. Fortunately, also unlike Thangam, he is the normal weight of a skinny Indian baby, and so not a great burden to his tiny mother. While Vairum’s stare contains unmistakable longing, no one but Sivakami and Thangam is tempted to carry and cuddle the boy with the pinched features and cold, dark eyes. Tempted least of all is his father. Hanumarathnam keeps very occupied with healing and agriculture, his studies, his training of Sivakami and Muchami. He always has a small joke and a cuddle for his daughter, but nothing for his son. Sivakami holds Vairum tight whenever she can, covering him with kisses and words of adoration. Where Thangam, at six months, nursed six times daily with perfect regularity, Vairum demands the breast capriciously like the little king he is and should be. Sivakami nearly always complies, stopping what she is doing to take him into the room under the stairs, holding him in her lap as he idly sucks and fiddles with her thirumangalyam, the wedding pendants that otherwise are dropped out of sight in her blouse.

On one afternoon, after Vairum finishes nursing, Sivakami is playing with him, lifting him horizontally to blow against his tummy, luxuriating in his baby skin and the rich sound of his giggles. She looks up to see Hanumarathnam, watching through the doorway as though it’s a portal between this life and the next. She holds the baby out to him, exasperated: no matter what is coming, nothing in life is denied to him now. But he takes a step back and she clasps Vairum again to her breast.

She wishes she could talk to Hanumarathnam about the despair and estrangement she sees on his face, but when she tries, she finds she pities him too much. She is grateful she doesn’t have to live with such feelings toward her children; she doesn’t know how she could talk Hanumarathnam into feeling any different. She persuades him a couple of times to hold the child, thinking he can’t help but fall in love if he does so, but Hanumarathnam looks so stiff and helpless that she takes Vairum back. And the little boy’s eyes, so often trained on his father, are full of unreciprocated desire.

Perhaps through some ineffectual cosmic attempt to remedy this injustice, Thangam is as infatuated with her little brother as the rest of the world is with her. She insists on helping her mother bathe the baby; she rocks him, pats him, sings to him, seems oblivious to any child’s existence save his, even while children on the veranda call for her daily.

When Vairum is nearly eleven months old, they shave his hair-it takes three of them, Sivakami, Murthy and Rukmini, to hold him still-and make a pilgrimage to Palani Mountain, where they offer it to the deity. On his first birthday, he is held on Sivakami’s eldest brother’s knee and his ears are pierced. He screams and thrashes so violently that Sivakami wonders if one of the demons who should be placated by these rituals has got the wrong message. Thangam stands close by-she who whimpered as her head was shaved and burbled with silent tears at her own piercing-trying to soothe the baby.

Hanumarathnam, on these days, says nothing. He always turns so as not to have to see the little boy, who watches his father as Thangam watches the baby, and Sivakami watches them all, knowing nothing can compensate for Vairum’s deprivation. None but a father can give a father’s love.

MONTHS SPEED PAST. Hanumarathnam and Sivakami have been married now for almost eight years.

She has been enjoying her new responsibilities. She has known many women who do their families’ accounting and make their financial and strategic decisions. Many wives do these jobs because their husbands are less than competent. The wives’ work is accepted but never acknowledged. She is the first she has known whose husband has trained her at these tasks, shown faith in and approval of her abilities. And with Muchami’s presence already so strong in the fields, her husband’s absence will hardly be noticed out there.

She realizes that she has begun to accept the way he has tricked her into being practical, into living with his death. She hardly recalls the resentment she first had toward Muchami.

And in the night, every night, Hanumarathnam turns to her. They might go through the movements for procreation or pleasure, but on these nights, the fire is fed on fear of death. Sometimes, as Sivakami marches tenderly through the requirements of his siddhic practices, she wonders with each movement, is this the one that will give him long life? She is a Brahmin, she cannot make him into a siddha. She supposes he could become one, if he chose. But then, that would mean renouncing caste, and if he were not a Brahmin, she could not be married to him, so what purpose would that serve?

She often rises after Hanumarathnam’s rough breathing has deepened into post-coital rest. Her sleep now is rare and slight, between her worries and Vairum’s nocturnal wakings. She lights a kerosene lamp and does beadwork by the bad light. Night after sleepless night, contrary to all her mother’s severe warnings, Sivakami finds her sight improves from the exercises. The tiny glass beads dance with the flame, sometimes they seem to her almost to sing, as she sits before the Ramar, working and praying and wondering about the future.

She wonders, if they have more children, another son, maybe things, astrological things, would shift again. But she somehow knows there will be no more children.

She recalls Savitri, that most devoted wife and daughter, whose story is told in the Mahabharata. Savitri had insisted on marrying Satyavan, in spite of all her elders’ objections that he was cursed to die within a year of their marriage. She would not be put off, and when Yama, god of death, came riding his water buffalo to claim Satyavan’s soul, Savitri went after him and, with clever arguments and bulldoggish perseverance, got her husband back.

Sivakami wonders what choice she herself would have made, given these conditions. She admits to herself in the small, bleak hours before morning that, given the choice, despite all she feels for her husband, she would not have chosen to be a widow.

But she was not given the choice. And when the time comes, will she follow Yama’s water buffalo into the netherworld, over rocks and by harsh seas, to reclaim her husband’s soul for his body? She sensibly concludes that all she can do is prepare. Her husband, bless his cursed soul, is doing everything in his power to help her do that. She falls asleep praying for strength.