Her real home. After all these years of feeling she was living on credit-not just because she is a girl, but because she was being raised in her mother’s natal home-Janaki is departing for the place where she truly belongs. She has been in safekeeping all these years, for this family she will now join.
Vairum and Vani were to have taken her to Pandiyoor by car but, at the last minute, a business crisis prevents Vairum from coming. There are not many male relatives appropriate to take his place: Murthy has grown increasingly dishevelled since Rukmini died, Janaki’s brothers are unmarried; Sivakami’s brothers are dead, and Vairum never liked to ask them for favours in any case. Instead, in a radical departure from tradition, he arranges for Baskaran to come and fetch his bride himself. Sivakami finds the plan disturbingly casual, and insists they will have at least a ceremonial handing-over, even if it takes place three steps from the veranda. She recalls that Thangam’s in-laws came for her, but circumstances were such then that she didn’t want to draw attention to the matter.
Janaki doesn’t feel undervalued by the change in plans; on the contrary, it flatters her that Baskaran is willing to come himself. But the unconventionality worries her in the way that every departure from tradition does. On her last night within these borrowed walls, Janaki frets: will she measure up? Their trip to Madras made her feel more sheltered than ever. She lies awake, holding Kamalam’s hand. Kamalam squeezes back, her face against Janaki’s shoulder, crying silently.
The next morning, upon seeing Baskaran, with a brother and one of Vani’s lawyer uncles, ready to escort her, she relaxes. His smile for her is reassuring.
She takes leave of her grandmother, prostrating for her as Baskaran bows, palms together, at her side. She does the same for the Ramar. She hugs Kamalam, wiping tears from both their cheeks, saying she’ll be back soon for a visit, not to worry. “Or you can come to visit me there! Please don’t cry.” Radhai, Krishnan and Raghavan come along to the station.
At the Kulithalai station, she is packed into a train compartment by Muchami and Baskaran, as carefully as she packed her trunks. Radhai and her brothers kiss her, and Muchami smiles at her long and affectionately, a smile she returns rather more quickly, with a little puzzlement at his apparent sentimentality. He holds the children back from the platform and they wave until the train is out of sight.
ON THE TRAIN, Baskaran’s brother and cousin bury themselves in newspapers and lift their heads only to engage in heated debate with their compartment-mates on the subject of India ’s entry into the war on the British side: was independence worth such a sacrifice of lives and integrity?
Janaki is next to the window with Baskaran beside her so that no other man will sit next to her. Baskaran grubs in the left-hand pocket of his kurta and holds its contents out to her until she accepts. He boldly brushes her hand as she pulls it away.
It is a package, no bigger than her palm: slightly heavy, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. She tugs at the coarse bow. It comes loose, and the soft thick paper opens to reveal a box of worked silver in the shape of a parrot.
Seeing it stirs some dim memory in her that she can’t quite bring into focus. It’s so touching that he planned a gift; what a shame it’s so ugly. The bird looks vulgar and ill-intentioned. Perhaps parrots are not suited to being rendered in silver, she thinks.
“Do you like it?” he asks.
“It’s beautiful,” she responds.
He gestures. “Open it.”
She lifts off the lid, which fits onto the bottom half by means of a latticework border. Inside is a small sack and, inside the sack, glossy peppermints in pink and white stripes.
“Take one,” he urges, but she thinks they look too lovely to eat, and she feels so shy. She imagines playing palanguzhi, Kamalam’s favourite game, with him, using pink and white peppermints for tokens.
She hands back the bird-shaped box, indicating Baskaran should offer the mints around the compartment. He tries and is ignored by the others, who are shouting now, evenly divided on a number of related political topics. Finally, he takes a mint, presses it into her mouth and chucks her lightly under the chin. Taking another candy for himself, he sits back to enjoy her discomfort.
MUCHAMI FINISHES PUTTING AWAY THE BULLOCK and cart and comes through the courtyard toward the kitchen door, carrying Raghavan, who is nearly asleep. Sivakami is in the pantry, reading her Ramayana, only her forehead and hands visible above the book. The older children have scattered. Muchami calls out softly, “Amma?” then goes back around to pass through the back room, then the room under the stairs, into the main hall.
Sivakami lays a mat down in the main hall. Muchami deposits the little boy on it, and Raghavan rolls luxuriantly onto his side, already asleep.
Sivakami and Muchami take their separate paths, she through the kitchen, he through the other passage, out to the courtyard, where Muchami draws some water. He washes his feet, face, neck and hands, and takes a long drink.
“Everything went all right?” Sivakami asks from the small veranda at the back of the house.
“Oh, yes,” he says. “Janaki’s a good girl, very smart girl.”
“Yes,” Sivakami says. “They’re all good.”
“I will miss her more than the elder ones,” he says, a little apologetically, “and probably more than the younger ones, too.”
“Sure, who will practise Sanskrit with you?”
Muchami laughs. “She surpassed me so long ago, she has no use for this old man’s stuttering!” He looks serious again. “Amma… seeing her in-laws, I couldn’t help thinking again about how Vairum, what he said about how we warned off Goli. Ah, I felt so bad, all over again.”
Sivakami is silent: she had tried to talk to Vairum about that after the wedding was over, but he wouldn’t allow it. “What’s done is done, Muchami. Don’t torture yourself. I wouldn’t even have told you what Vairum said if you hadn’t asked.”
“I should have known.” Muchami hits his head with his fist. “Vairum is also so intelligent. I should have known he would anticipate whatever we could. I was just so concerned for Janaki.”
“Yes, yes.” Sivakami doesn’t see the point of talking about it. They can’t take it back and they’ll never do it again. “The point is, she’ll be fine there.”
“I think she will.” His face shines as he thinks of her, all dressed up, with her rich husband. “I think she’ll really do well.”
At the Pandiyoor station, the family’s bullock cart, magnificently decorated and drawn by a majestic and fatty black bull, awaits them. Gopalan, the family’s head servant, is driving. Before he mounts the cart, Baskaran pulls a small tin from the pocket of his kurta, inhales a few pinches of snuff from it, and sneezes. Janaki looks away, wishing she hadn’t seen. He mounts the cart and Gopalan twitches the reins against the bullock’s back.
Leaving the station, they cross a small commercial street and travel past the bus depot and a post office before turning into one of two streets that, intersecting at a T, make up the Brahmin quarter. Single Street, the top of the T, is composed of a row of houses facing the sides of two long houses on Double Street, including Baskaran’s family home. Double Street, the T’s stem, looks more like the Cholapatti Brahmin quarter, with two rows of houses facing each other. On both streets, the houses share walls with their neighbours, the red and white stripes of the verandas, as in Cholapatti, practically continuous. Double Street culminates in a Krishna temple, behind which stretches the Vaigai River.
Almost everyone on the street between the station and the Brahmin quarter recognizes the cart and puts palms together respectfully. Baskaran’s brother gives the expected reaction: sometimes he nods in acknowledgement; mostly he doesn’t react at all. Baskaran, though, puts his own palms together, offering namaskarams to labourers, merchants, a tailor, hardly conventional Brahmin behaviour. Suspicion inkles in Janaki’s breast: she hasn’t married a radical, has she?