Baskaran smiled unhappily. “Yes, my brothers have spoken to me. Their wives want an independent household. Each. Vasantha Mani’s eldest sister’s sister-in-law didn’t get along with her mother-in-law and they just took their share of the family property and set up on their own. Now Vasantha Mani thinks it’s a done thing. And it’s the type of idea Swarna would have come up with on her own, if Vasantha Mani hadn’t planted it.”
“But… that’s a ridiculous…” Janaki felt short of breath, her stomach roiling. “Your father surely won’t… your mother cannot permit this. I know she will not,” she concluded, feeling she had reassured herself slightly.
Perhaps Senior Mami should be told, Janaki thinks. But if Vasantha and Swarna learn that Janaki was in any way responsible for telling her, they would be furious, and Janaki is not sure she wants to risk that. Further, while Janaki knows her mother-in-law would bridle and resist the parting, she also blames Senior Mami for not doing more to cultivate the attachment and affection of her daughters-in-law. Janaki and Baskaran choose to stay out of the matter. In the months following, it becomes clear that Vasantha and Swarna are pressuring their husbands. Neither man, however, is a master of strategy or courage. They try to approach their father, but sideways, like crabs, waving their eyes at their goal but afraid to face it full on. Their father, no fonder of confrontations than they are, scuttles away from them as fast as they can approach.
When they achieve no results, Vasantha and Swarna implement their own plans of action, using the slim means available to them. Perhaps inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s campaigns of passive resistance, they begin campaigns of passive aggression. They begin interfering in the kitchen, ordering the cooks to use quantities of ghee and sugar that would have befitted a wedding pre-war and are now a terrific expense and challenge to procure. None of the staff dares question them; Mr. Kandasamy sweats over the accounts; the paadasaalai boys start pudging up. They further deplete the family coffers by insisting that their husbands replace all their jewellery and buy only imported cloth in a time when the whole country is turning to native goods. But the genius of Vasantha and Swarna’s campaign is its exploitation of Senior Mami’s possibly fatal flaw. When they serve her, they no longer limit what she is offered, but instead press on her enormous quantities of the rich food, so that she becomes grossly flatulent. They also become flagrantly insouciant with her.
Finding the atmosphere in the women’s room intolerable, Janaki looks for chores to occupy her elsewhere in the house, and comes up with the idea of offering Sanskrit tutorials to the paadasaalai boys. She asks Baskaran to approach the instructor in basic Sanskrit on her behalf.
The pupils are a proud and pitiable crew. Among them are two pairs of brothers, but all eighteen boys look similar: their heads are shaved, leaving a brief kudumi, which hairstyle is now found only in the priestly ranks. They wear a standard-issue dhoti and breast cloth of coarse cotton weave. They are here because their parents cannot afford to give them the quality of nutrition and education the charity will give them, and so have left the children here to be raised in orthodoxy. Janaki might identify with these children more than she would ever admit. She relieves the Sanskrit master of the younger students, delivering the drills and exercises whose practice she perfected in her own questing childhood, and finds, in this work, a release from the pressure-sealed jar of the household.
Baskaran suggests to Janaki that his brothers don’t really want households of their own, run by their wives. “Who would,” he shrugs slyly, “with wives like that?”
Janaki thinks it improper for her to answer, and disloyal, even though she feels little loyalty to her sisters-in-law, especially in this low enterprise.
Baskaran frowns at her. “Is this what you want, also? To have your own home?”
“I absolutely do not. Chi!”
“Good, good,” says Baskaran, smoothing the quilt. “I want you to be happy.”
“I am happy,” she says irritably as she turns the lamp key down and gets into bed. “Very happy. I couldn’t be happier.”
Families should not even be permitted to think of splitting up. Authority is responsibility, unity is security, Gandhi wants to split from the British, Jinnah wants Muslims to split from India, the non-Brahmins want to split from polite society… how will it end? Think of Vairum and Vani. Janaki tosses and rails in sleep while Baskaran holds the quilt fast.
She dreams of visiting Vasantha Nadu and Swarna Nadu, two countries in a house so large she never sees more than two walls at once. The floor is covered in what Janaki first thinks are enormous kolams coloured in with bright powders, but when she draws near to admire them, she realizes they are maps drawn in rice powder and the differently coloured areas are territories and states, each with its own governor and laws.
Vasantha and Swarna swarm like ants through an anthill, continually brushing away borders and redrawing them differently, quick as Janaki herself erases and redraws kolam lines in the morning when she sleepily connects the wrong dots. Janaki yearns to return to Janakipattu, her own city, but it has been erased, or amalgamated. She is stateless and homeless. Responsible to no one; no one responsible for her. She knows, in dreaming as in waking life, that there is no worse fate-standing still, condemned forever to pass through the strange lands that appear and vanish beneath her unmoving feet.
Clerk ex machina: the meek and ever-reliable accountant, Mr. Kandasamy, provides a means of resolution.
“In chess,” he explains to Dhoraisamy and Baskaran, having clearly rehearsed every word, “this would be called a defensive move, except that, for Sir, and Sir’s family, there is no risk. At this juncture, all the higher castes have reason to fear. If-no, let us say, when Congress assumes power, they will work hard to prove they have no bias toward the Brahmin. They will treat with us severely. We will be thoroughly oppressed. There will not only be the reserved posts for the lower castes in government and colleges, the administrative and educational biases. I have started to suspect there will also be vengeful taxation. It is not without precedent.” Mr. Kandasamy took a breath, marking the end of his magnificent preamble.
Dhoraisamy had worked himself into a complicit lather. “What to do? Our dear Mr. Kandasamy, you alone can advise us.”
“Well.” Mr. Kandasamy mopped his brow, looking earnest and purposeful. “We know that the charity’s finances are thoroughly separate from those of the family. And we have kept them strictly and, more importantly, provably so. However, I do think it my responsibility to warn Sir of possible vulnerability to others who are adept at and interested in manipulation. This is my suggestion: you must house your personal assets in what is known as a ‘tax shelter.’ Have you heard this term?” Mr. Kandasamy looked suddenly a few inches taller, Baskaran reported to Janaki with a giggle, and as though he had more hair.
“No, no, no, no.” Dhoraisamy looked to his son, who also shrugged.
“Permit me to be direct.” Mr. Kandasamy smiled with greater assurance than usual. “Your greatest assets are your own sons, are they not? One thinks it could be wise to house them… in houses. Of their own.”
Baskaran and his father made faces demonstrating shock and reluctant receptiveness. Mr. Kandasamy plowed on. “Give them their share of their personal inheritances and pretend-if only on the books, more than this you need not do except to revenue inspectors and their relatives-you no longer care for them. It is the one way to ensure Sir operates at a loss.”