Goli’s eyes, which always shine unfathomably, flash.
Janaki heedlessly continues, “Akka will be okay. She’s not expecting us until morning…”
“Stop calling her Akka. She’s your mother.” Chop, chop, chop, hand against palm. “Don’t you care for her at all? Why are you telling me what your grandmother wants? Am I not your father?” He flashes his eyes at their motionless hosts and his voice modulates into a soothing tone, somehow more frightening even than his explosion. “I know I told her we would be home in the morning.” He smiles at Janaki as she shrinks from him. “We’ll surprise her.”
The lady of the house holds the silver plate of hospitality out to Janaki. Janaki, fuming, applies a vermilion smudge to her forehead and accepts the betel leaf.
It is better that they return that night, and Janaki knows it but doesn’t know why he had earlier insisted they would not. This move to return the same night is not out of character: the only rule to Goli’s behaviour appears to be that he does not keep his word.
Janaki dozes on the way home, the betel leaf crunched in her fist. Vani’s music steams in her dreams and when she lifts her lids and looks through the metal shutters half-closed against the rain, she glimpses the silver moon, full and bright beyond thick clouds. The rains beat on the bus roof and become the mridangam in her dreams.
Soon enough, they arrive in Munnur and duck and dodge from tree to eave toward the tiny house. Lamps flicker in the windows. Goli says, “See? I told you she’d be waiting up for us. Good thing we…
But Janaki knows Thangam wasn’t expecting them until morning, and quickens her pace against the flutter of anxiety in her chest.
They bang on the door and look through the window. Thangam lies on a cot and one of the neighbours, who is with her, comes to open the locks. She tells us she was called by another neighbour when Thangam started vomiting early in the evening.
The lamps’ golden glow cools and condenses as it reaches Thangam. Her brow is dewy. Father and daughter step across the threshold. Thangam opens her blue marble eyes, and Janaki’s fast-beating heart is in her mouth when her mother’s blue lips part: “If you had come in the morning, you would have beheld my dead body.”
If you had come in the morning, you would have beheld my dead body.
“I can’t hold on any longer. I’m too tired.” She convulses, lips slack, eyelids small knots, nostrils flaring and closing.
Janaki runs to her side, calling out to her. “Akka, come back, Akka, my mother.” Janaki tries to smooth her brow, but life pulsates under Thangam’s skin, weighed down by lumps and bricks and dreams of gold, life held under the cold blue surface.
Goli pulls Janaki away and lays a finger on Thangam’s shoulder. Immediately Thangam is still, as though the impulses have withdrawn, the way the touch-me-not plant closes its leaves on contact. She is still, except for a decorous, defiant throb at wrist and neck, and another life, in her belly, which kicks to be free of her.
Goli demands, diagnostically, “Too tired? Too tired how?”
No response. Raghavan sleeps on a blanket, snug and dry between three spots where rain drips through the roof. Goli swivels toward the two neighbours and begins shouting at them.
“What’s going on? How long has she been sick like this?”
One tries to say what she knows, what she has seen, but Goli is pacing and muttering, every now and again returning to Thangam’s prone form to say her name, “Thangam! Thangam. Thangam?” until he begins to wind down, like a gramophone record. Finally, he, too, is still. Above and around them is the chaos of the crashing rain. Janaki watches her father. For the first time that she can recall, he is still and present.
He looks at Thangam, a long time, and then he begins to speak. “Thangam? You look so different, Thangam. When did you change? You were once so beautiful. This small house, it’s a mistake. My small salary, it is all the government bastards would give me. That’s why I was always trying to do more, Thangam, to get more money, so you could have a big house. A comfortable life. This is… this is a mistake.”
He backs away from her, toward a far corner where he unrolls a mat, lies down and soon falls asleep.
One tear draws down from each of Thangam’s closed eyes. The rain begins to leak through the roof in a fourth place.
Janaki turns to one of the neighbours. “Mami, you must tell my grandmother. Please, my grandmother. She must come.”
Ifyou had come in the morning, you would have beheld my dead body.
Oh no.
“I need my grandmother, please.” Janaki gets the cash her grandmother gave her and holds it out. “Can someone go?”
The kind neighbours assure her, yes; one says she will send her grown son.
Janaki sits beside her mother through the night. She presses Thangam’s legs and arms, rubs warmth into them, until the chill breaks and fever burns through her brightly. Janaki soaks a cloth with rainwater and lays it across Thangam’s forehead, but the chill soon returns and Janaki resumes the rubbing. All the while, she speaks encouraging words. “Akka, you must hang on. Amma is coming. Amma is coming and everything will be fine, but you must hang on and see her.”
A leak springs above the dough village but Janaki makes no attempt to move her creatures, and from top to bottom they melt, sometimes in a slow bending, sometimes in a sudden collapse, until, as morning nears, the seven shelves are coated in a cold lava strung with puddlings of colour that were once red lips and emerald earrings, dark hair and cheery skirts.
An hour before dawn, the young man returns. He had gone to the next village and had a telegram sent-as quick as going himself, and less costly. Janaki knows her grandmother forbids telegrams for any but the worst news. She had forgotten to tell the young man. Anyway, this may not be the worst news, but it is close. He gives her the change.
In the morning, when her father rises, Janaki prepares coffee. She is a terrible cook, and her father makes a face as he swallows. Oh, well. She takes the second steaming tumbler, holds it beside her mother and blows the vapours toward her, hoping that miraculous scent of richness, vigour and future unexceptional mornings will rouse her. It doesn’t. Maybe the coffee is too weak; maybe Thangam is. Janaki keeps whispering in her mother’s ear, as she has all night, “Amma is coming, Akka. Amma is coming, just hold on.” She takes heart from the fact that Thangam has hung on, so far. Goli, saying nothing, goes to work.
On Tuesdays and Fridays, girls have oil baths. Today Janaki must administer her own, for the first time ever. She sniffs a little with self-pity as she works the oil through her hair as best she can, and goes to rub it out with soap-nut powder in the bath, leaving Raghavan and her mother under a neighbour’s watch.
She comes back into the main hall, holding both ends of the thin cotton towel and snapping it against her hair, from neck to waist, then binding the hair into the towel so that it makes a knot the size of three hearts at the nape of her neck. She and her sisters certainly have been blessed with hair, she most of all.
Thangam is lying waxen and small on her cot, burning again with the fever.
Raghavan awakens and wants his mother. Janaki consoles him, giving him sweet milk, bathing him and singing “Jaggadodharana,” with its lyrics about Lord Krishna: His motherplays with him, as though he is no more than her precious child. It is raining too hard to go outside. They play with pots and pans and two of the dolls their father bought. Janaki makes as much noise as he does. She wants their mother to hear them playing.
The servant comes to sweep and mop, quiet and fearful. When she leaves, Janaki breathes, relief: morning is past and Thangam is still alive. If she can just hold on until evening-they’re only five hours from Cholapatti, so Sivakami should be here by what, five or six?