Vani hits and pulls furious strings. The melody hammers on the drone as Janaki’s imaginings plink glassily onto the brick floor and she drowses, half in sun, half in shade, her hand half-consciously tapping the song’s rhythm on her knee. She’s awakened by Sita knocking on her head.
“I’m going to go have a veena lesson like I always do at this time,” she remarks pointedly. “I’ll wake you up when it’s time for supper.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Janaki starts toward the back of the house. “Let me change, wait for me,” she calls over her shoulder as she runs.
At four o‘clock, as every Monday and Wednesday, she and Sita have a veena lesson at Gayatri’s house, with a terrible teacher of good family engaged by Gayatri’s mother-in-law. Gayatri had invited Sita and Janaki to participate since her daughter Akila was quite young and it would help to have older girls along, since she knew Janaki would like nothing better, and since she couldn’t invite Janaki without inviting Sita. Janaki ekes all she can from their teacher’s limited store of knowledge, while Sita, though she loves the idea of having lessons, is terrible and never practises. Still, Gayatri and Sivakami privately agreed that any constructive activity could help curb Sita’s destructive impulses, and Gayatri was glad to help Sivakami, much as she disliked having Sita in the house. Even if Sivakami had intended to give her granddaughters veena lessons, which she hadn’t, it would be impossible for the girls to receive a teacher at home, given that teachers generally teach in exactly the hours when Vani conducts her own afternoon session.
Sita will, of course, have left by the time Janaki gets out of her school uniform and into a regular paavaadai, and Janaki knows this, but changes quickly just in case. Sita has gone, so Janaki trots to the back door off the courtyard and leans out peering to her left, so she can see Bharati, who sits beneath a mango tree as she always does at this time.
“His.”
“His.”
Bharati points up in Vani’s direction with a mystified expression; Janaki purses her brows and shrugs in agreement. Bharati closes her eyes. Janaki goes to her veena lesson.
After he finishes with them, their teacher goes west, out of the Brahmin quarter, to the very edge of Cholapatti, to Bharati’s house, where he gives his last lesson of the day.
It’s midday break, at school the next day. Janaki and Bharati choose their position, and their friends close in uncertainly.
“I knew your amma had finally arrived,” Bharati opens, “because Nandu Vadyar showed up for my lesson with a gold stripe across his forehead.”
While Janaki and Sita had been at their lesson, Thangam had taken up her old position on the veranda, and Brahmin-quarter residents paid calls into the early evening. They would greet Thangam and, despite receiving little if any acknowledgement, would pinch stripes of gold dust off the veranda to apply to their foreheads and those of their loved ones.
“Yes.” Janaki smiles, wondering why she feels shy. “She was there when I got home, with my little sisters.”
“And she wants a boy, doesn’t she?” Bharati is poking at the contents of her lunch, which, Janaki notices with a little inward shudder, includes eggs. “Brahmins always want boys.”
Janaki doesn’t really know how to answer. Who doesn’t want boys?
Another of their friends, not Brahmin but close, blithely advises them, “My father wanted a girl by the time I was born. They had seven sons already.”
Bharati’s sneer startles them, though Janaki had noticed her gritting her teeth.
“My grandmother says all of your castes talktalktalk about how the good of the family is on the woman’s shoulders, how she is the strength and wealth and culture, but no one really believes that, they just want dowries, so they want son after stupid son. Pooh! My mother wanted girls and she has girls.”
They are too young to ask how it is that Bharati’s mother got girls just because she wanted them. Some people are lucky that way, after alclass="underline" they get what they want. Bharati gives the impression that she too will be such a person.
“Oh, Janaki!” Bharati claps her hands.
“What?” Janaki asks with irritation. Why does Bharati so often make her feel as though she is losing? Aren’t they on the same team?
“It’s Sanskrit lesson, right after lunch,” Bharati says as though repeating herself. “We get to hear what happens next in Shakuntalam.”
Their friends try to look interested but not too interested: as regards Sanskrit, Bharati and Janaki are in a class by themselves. By themselves in a class of girls two years older, that is: they are sufficiently advanced that they take Sanskrit with the sixth-standard girls instead of with the fourth. In the advanced levels, the girls’ Sanskrit master is the same as the boys’, young Kesavan (not really so young any more, but he will be called “young Kesavan” until his death at the age of eighty-four). It is partly for this reason that Bharati and Janaki participate in the advanced class: each of them already receives home tutoring from Kesavan. Bharati has taken Sanskrit tutoring since she was four; her mother considers it part of a girl’s mandatory education. Janaki vaguely guesses this is some kind of a tradition in their caste but somehow feels shy to ask questions about it.
The fourth-standard girls are still at work on nouns, chanting them in singular, dual, plural, until, finally, the words become sounds without meaning. With the sixth-standards, Kesavan has taken it upon himself to introduce them to some classics of Hindu theatre, starting with Kalidasa’s Shakuntalam. The well-loved story of a hermit’s daughter, married in a secret ceremony to a king who later fails to recognize her owing to a curse, it is a challenge to the children, the vocabulary being sophisticated for the ten ten-year-olds, and the romantic intrigues even more so for the two eight-year-olds. Bharati alone seems alarmingly equal to both.
Rattling home in the bullock cart bound for the Brahmin quarter, Janaki reviews the Shakuntalam story episodes of that day, knowing they will form the better part of that afternoon’s tutorial. She had read the part of the jester, a Brahmin. She would have loved to play the star role, Shakuntala, but that had gone to Bharati, and Janaki had to admit she deserved it.
Janaki tries to remember her longest speech, in which the jester complains about his forest sojourn in the king’s company: “… drinking water from tepid streams fouled with dead leaves, eating badly cooked meat at odd hours…” Their teacher had shocked the class by saying this line showed that Brahmins likely once ate meat. One girl, taunted with this after school, had burst into tears and said it was a lie. Janaki thought she might be right. She has heard Sivakami and Muchami describe Kesavan pejoratively as a “progressive,” and so is skeptical of anything he says about caste.
In front of her-that is, behind the cart-a creature with strong legs and puny waving arms gallops out of the banana groves to the left. Janaki flushes as the creature giddily hurtles into the groves to the right. She sighs hard, once, through her nose.
A moment later, Muchami and Kamalam, in piggyback combo, bounce out of the groves again and gallop and weave up the road. Kamalam waves in a manner Janaki thinks is ridiculous, as she plans to inform her sister as soon as they arrive home. For now she is limited to a dignified, reproving glare. Muchami and Kamalam both seem too exhilarated to notice Janaki’s expression, though the jolt and shudder of the cart would make focusing on Janaki difficult even for the soberest of persons. Janaki clenches her teeth, trying at minimum to keep her cheeks from infantile jiggling, but the cart hits an anthill and all its contents are flung about. By the time Janaki collects herself, Muchami and Kamalam have turned up the path behind the Brahmin-quarter houses.