After sewing Thangam up, the DMO palpates her throat, feels her forehead, opens her eyelids one at a time and looks into her eyes. He feels she is far away, already. He looks up at Sivakami and asks, “How many children does she have?”
“She has nine children, and five grandchildren.”
“How can it be?” he murmurs, as if kind and gallant. “She looks so young.”
But when he looks back at her, she looks very old. He blinks to clear a film and again she looks terribly young. Tragic, these people. He lifts her lids again and again checks the pulse at her wrist. He is buying time. The other two doctors are waiting for orders.
He says to Sivakami, “I will try,” and reaches for a phial and a needle.
But he is lying. Her illness is serious and, as far as he knows, unnamed. He looks at his eager assistants, who are waiting for some instruction. He believes there is nothing he can do and believes the wee widow watching him knows this, too.
In his professional opinion, he needs to inoculate this dying woman with faith. He is a skeptical Christian but understands these people have their ways. He shakes the phial of saline and tries to think of it as liquid faith. It could work, in this country where so much happens that he cannot explain. He shakes the bottle faster, willing a catalysis within the worthless liquid, imbuing it with that chthonic quantity this woman needs to live. He shakes and shakes-the junior doctors are looking puzzled-shakes-he doesn’t look at Sivakami’s careworn face-shakes-he maintains a look of diagnostic concentration-shakes.
Chime! The clock rings out. The cuckoo pops. One o’clock. The phial takes flight, out of the DMO’s hand, between the inclined heads of the neatly groomed junior doctors, to shatter against the picture of the goddess Saraswati on the wall calendar beside the window.
Janaki sits bolt upright from sleep. She hears her mother make a rattling growl.
Then Thangam is dead.
The tall white doctor opens the door and walks outside, and leans his forehead against a palm. Those who saw him claimed he cried a little, but that makes no sense.
The others cry, then, except Sivakami. She hears the wails of her grandchildren rise and fall in waves. She sees Janaki lower her head in the corner and recognizes, with a stab, that while joy can be shared, grief must be borne alone. She hears little Raghavan begin screaming and thinks, He must be frightened. She hears Murthy, gasping, “Gold. She was our pure gold, and we have lost her.”
Sivakami goes to the back to bathe, dousing herself with water head to toe, as one must when a relative dies. As the others follow, she helps the nurse to tidy the room. She wipes the liquid from the face of the goddess of wisdom and music. It looks like tears, or like rosewater sprinkled in worship. Could that elixir have saved Thangam? Doubtful. Sivakami has little faith in medicine. No faith in that stuff she wipes from Saraswati’s cheeks and the crumbling wall and the rain-damp floor.
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.