He enters the main hall, falls at the feet of his gods, and then does the same for his mother, who holds her hands over him in blessing. He stands and looks into her eyes, the only person, with Vani, whose joy equals his.
He does not go out in the fields that day, which should have been his greatest priority after three days away. No, Vairum takes a few magazines and sits on the veranda. It is the strangest sight. Why is it so strange when it is precisely how most other men on the Brahmin quarter spend their days? Well, precisely for that reason. Several neighbours offer shy congratulations as they pass. Vairum modestly accepts. Murthy joins Vairum on the veranda and acts the proud senior uncle.
Sivakami lies awake that night, a night twelve long years in coming. Her optimism had ebbed a little with each succeeding-or should that be failing?-year, though she wouldn’t admit it, even to herself. It wears a person down, hope. So many pledges and pujas, from the most public and dramatic to the last one at home-the one that worked.
Had the miraculous not occurred, the events of that day might not have stayed in Sivakami’s mind at all, but as it is, she recalls the disagreement between Vani and Vairum over the puja. She had never seen them disagree and hasn’t since. Sivakami recalls that her own first child was conceived on a night when she and her husband were together again after a rupture, one of his unforgivable sojourns, and though it is awful to think that the best unions may be born of discord, she thinks more than one couple may share this experience. Certainly, Gayatri has gone so far as to confess she occasionally provokes fights with her husband because he works so ardently to regain her favour.
But Sivakami doesn’t think Vani was simply upset at having her playing interrupted, or at Vairum’s not trusting her to finish in time. South Indian classical music tends to be devotional. Vani was making a supplication that day, Sivakami believes, the same request they would then make in the puja, the same they had been making all those years. Vani had to stop Vairum from interrupting it.
For the last nine months, Vairum has been buoyant and benevolent as never before: kind to Thangam’s children, solicitous of his wife and mother. Sivakami and he have been united in their desire to care for Vani. Previously, Vani’s energies had mirrored the moon’s: she would be sluggish and sleepy while the moon was in shadow and shake with overabundant energy when it waxed bright. Pregnant, she was consistently inward-directed and content. Her playing became softer and more conventional-most often, she played paeans to Lord Krishna, favourite to children, songs she occasionally sang. She obediently drank the garlic rasam Sivakami prepared, even when she occasionally brought it back up. She had attacks of nausea through her first trimester that left her skin waxy and eyes dull. But she was obviously happy. She put on weight; her plummy figure and moon-like face grew rounder. She had always glowed, but in pregnancy, she looked less exceptional than she had before. Sivakami thinks this must be some portion of her happiness, as of Vairum’s: finally, they were like any couple. No longer the darkly repulsive business genius; no longer the eerily glowing musical genius. Just a young married couple expecting their first child.
Sivakami turns over to her other side. A son of her son, a son of her son… she falls into a long sleep, deep and dark as a stone well.
Though perhaps her sleep should rather be compared to the bed of the Vaigai River, which runs behind Vani’s hometown: peaceful and solid in appearance, but with a current ever springing just beneath the surface, so that one need only rake the sand with one’s fingers to find one’s handprint immediately drowned.
While Vairum is striding about the fields the next day, shielded within the touching invincibility of parenthood, another telegram arrives.
While Vairum is out seeing that the earth will provide for his son, while he is gracefully accepting congratulations on this most natural and, for the father, effortless of achievements, while he stands gazing at the fertile fields and thinking how he never felt the goodness of sunshine before, Vairum’s gold medal, his rose-tinted spectacles, his soft beating heart, loses grip on this world and slips away.
CHILD DID NOT SURVIVE STOP
Sivakami collapses. There is no other response. She crumples in a little bald and white heap on the brick floor and her granddaughters run to her, shrieking, not sure whether to touch her. They run around her screaming until she opens her eyes and finds some neighbours entering the front door and kneeling beside her. They look at the telegram and bring her a tumbler of water.
Like a pattern of sound waves radiating from a signal source, silence spreads over the Brahmin quarter, the village, the river and fields, until Vairum, some three miles away, notices a hush, shivers and starts running for home. He runs without stopping, the panicked Muchami struggling to keep up with him, and when he enters his house from the back and sees his mother on the floor of the hall and his nieces around her with tear-streaked faces and the neighbours all fearful and resigned, because babies are fragile and do tend to die, Vairum raises his face to his fate and feels it press him down to his knees. As he falls, though, he curses. He cannot change his fate, but he can object, and this he does, in tortured tones. Those who hear him talk of it for years: his scream, like no sound they had ever heard from any living being.
27. Thangam Visits 1934
THANGAM HAS BEEN EXPECTED in Cholapatti for nearly a week now, and Janaki, for one, is tired of waiting.
“Is she coming today?” she asks Sivakami, as she has every morning since they were told to prepare for the visit and the arrival of a new baby. Their elder sister, Saradha, arrived a week ago, for the same reason-she is due in a couple of months-but she is bossy and Janaki, who has never lived with her, finds her a little hard to take. She longs to see her mother again.
Sivakami tells her wearily, as every morning, that she can’t say for sure.
“Why can’t you say for sure, Amma?” Janaki whines, while her siblings scramble to organize their school work. She always has hers ready the night before. She’s eight now and can barely remember living with her parents but still aches for her mother at times.
“Because your father is a ne‘er-do-well and a cad,” Vairum remarks casually as he passes her and breaks a couple of bananas off the stalk leaning in the pantry.
Janaki shrinks back against the main hall wall to let him pass back out. She watches him leave through the front door.
“What does that mean, Amma?” she asks Sivakami, her lower lip trembling.
“Nothing, kanna, nothing,” Sivakami clucks. Janaki keeps her head down, her hands folded in front of her. “Your father’s work keeps him very busy. He can’t easily get away when he wants.”
Muchami overhears this exchange from the courtyard but is not close enough to participate. He watches Janaki turn away, oh, my girl, too old now for him to take in his arms. As badly as she clearly needs to be held, there is no one now for that.
It’s lunchtime at school, and Janaki and her friend and benchmate Bharati go to pick up their tiffin boxes. “So has your amma come yet?”
Janaki momentarily can’t think of what her friend means. “Amma?” Then she realizes: Bharati is referring to Thangam. She’s not Brahmin and so has never been inside their home. She can’t know they call their grandmother Amma and refer to their mother as Akka. When Janaki was telling her friends that her mother was expected, she used the term “amma,” but as identification, not appellation. “Um, no. Probably today.”