“I thought I would be able to make the song out better,” Bharati explains.
“Can you?” Janaki moves to the tree and looks up.
“No. Come up anyway. Is that your sister?”
“Yes, Kamalam.” Janaki points at the littler girl, who hangs back, nearer the house. “How do I get up there?”
“Jump and grab that branch there and swing your foot up. Come.” Bharati holds out a hand as though to help.
Janaki jumps for the branch and swings. She kicks her legs, which makes her swing harder, pedals her feet against the trunk, falls.
“Try again,” Bharati suggests.
“Come down if you can’t hear the song any better anyway.” Janaki sits, leaning against the trunk, and beckons her sister impatiently to join her.
A minute’s rustling later, Bharati drops from the tree in a pretty heap, thumping against the ground with a sound akin to mangoes falling on windy days, the promise of sweetness, even sweeter if bruised.
“I have a sister around your age,” Bharati says to Kamalam, who sits, knees to chest, on Janaki’s other side. “Maybe she’ll be in your class at school.”
“Isn’t Vani Mami’s playing so strange today?” Janaki shifts a little so Bharati’s view of Kamalam is obstructed.
Bharati shrugs. “No one plays like her, but other people have kids.”
Janaki doesn’t know what Bharati means but is not going to admit that in front of Kamalam.
That night Thangam goes into labour.
The next afternoon, Janaki is listening to Vani play, again “Jaggadhodarana,” with the strange improvisation, which has grown even wilder and more alien. And when the rips and hies of a newborn’s cry rise from the room below the stairs to join the notes bounding across the rooftop, Janaki hears: Vani’s version sobs. The song somehow remains intact-perhaps because the improvisation cycles back to the original raga-but a keening invades it, as if the song were a baby blanket impaled on a sword.
Abruptly, Vani ceases playing, takes up her instrument and carries it down the stairs to the chamber she and Vairum inhabit on the second story. Janaki and Kamalam edge along the balustrade. Janaki happens to glance east over the rail, into the witch’s yard next door, where the slapping of laundry against laundry stone had been providing percussive accompaniment to Vani’s music. Dharnakarna, the witch next door, is washing the clothes herself. It often happens that her servants quit. In the silence which seems extra silent now, the witch’s sister-in-law’s incessant obscene monologue crescendoes and recedes again within the witch’s kitchen. Dharnakarna doesn’t pause.
Janaki, her hand on Kamalam’s shoulder, arrives at the bottom of the stairs as Vairum blows in from his business, a cold front in a warm climate. The door to the birthing room is closed. He goes to the pantry entrance and sees that the kitchen is empty.
“Amma?” He calls out. “Amma!”
Sivakami answers from within the birthing room. “A boy! Finally, another boy.”
Vairum nods, walks toward the stairway, and pauses outside the birthing room.
“Congratulations, Thangam Akka!” Vairum calls out. “A second son, at last. Now you truly need worry about nothing. I could even kill your first son and you would still have another. Nice work. Your mind must now be so at ease.”
Laddu, who had just emerged from the pantry with two bananas in each hand and his mouth stretched to encompass a generously proportioned sphere of thaingai maavu, retreats again. Janaki and Kamalam look at him, terrified, but Vairum looks back a little too late to see his nephew, then turns to mount the stairs. Kamalam holds on to the back of Janaki’s shirt as they shuffle through the doorway and along the garden wall. Kamalam is crying, and Janaki looks at her sternly.
“Kamalam, Vairum Mama’s not going to do anything,” Janaki tells her little sister as they arrive at the cowshed, where Muchami is milking. “Muchami, Vairum Mama isn’t going to hurt Laddu Anna, is he?”
“No, no, no.” Muchami puts a hand on Kamalam’s head. “Vairum was just… he was just talking. Aren’t you glad to have a little brother?”
Kamalam nods, though she is still crying. Janaki doesn’t reply, ashamed of her anger at the uncle who shelters them. Muchami seats Kamalam where she can watch the milking, but Janaki goes out back through the courtyard door. Bharati drops out of the tree beside her.
“Did I hear a baby cry?” she inquires.
“Yeah. A boy.” Janaki scrapes up a handful of dirt, dry and pebbly.
“A boy, huh?” Bharati crosses her wrists elegantly over one knee. “Your amma must be happy.”
Janaki shrugs-she has never thought of her mother as happy.
“My mother is never happy when she has a boy baby,” Bharati says, tearing a long blade of grass into shreds. “And they don’t live, except for my one brother.” She drifts into silence, then sighs a quick breath and looks up. “It’s okay though because my mother really only wants girls.”
“My Vairum Mama and Vani Mami’s boy baby passed on, too.”
“But they wanted him. Trust me.” Bharati looks like she knows more than she should. “What did your cousin die of?”
They hear Sita in the courtyard. “Janaki? Janaki? Okay, I’ve looked for her. I’m leaving.”
Janaki gets up. “Veena lesson. See you tomorrow.”
What did her cousin die of? Maybe Muchami can tell her. She has the feeling talking about it might upset her grandmother.
The next day, Janaki finds Muchami as he milks the cows. Even if she is too big now to go with him to his village, she still likes to spend time with him when he does chores, helping a little when she can.
“Muchami?”
He looks at her briefly and back at his work. “What do you want, Janaki-baby?”
She strokes the cow’s flank-it’s the oldest and the most calm of the three.
“I was wondering, do you know… how my cousin died?”
Muchami looks at her again, pursing his brow. “Vairum’s son, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know,” he says gently. “I don’t think there was a specific reason. It happens, unfortunately.”
Janaki nods.
“What makes you ask?” He finishes the milking and stands, holding his back.
“I was just thinking about it because someone I know, from school, told me all of her brothers died when they were babies, except one.”
“That must be very hard.”
“I suppose, except”-he question bursts forth, held against Janaki’s curiosity for so long-“my friend said that in her caste they only want girls! Have you ever heard of that?”
Muchami wags his head slowly.
“Why?” Janaki asks.
Muchami rubs his forehead. “There could be a few reasons. I’m not entirely sure.”
Janaki waits.
“Is that the girl I see out back sometimes?” he asks.
“Yes,” Janaki says. “She loves music. She comes to hear Vani Mami play.”
“I see.”
“She’s my best friend,” she confides, not that he would know what a privilege this is.
He doesn’t respond, and she feels a bit disgruntled: he might appreciate it just because she so clearly does. In silence, she helps him carry the milk in.
Ten days after Thangam’s delivery, Janaki and Sita are kept home from school to clean house and prepare for the baby’s eleventh-day naming ceremony. They spend the day bickering and being separated. Janaki manages to arrange her tasks so that she can listen to Vani’s morning session: she spends the time spinning wicks from cotton bolls and knotting jasmine blossoms, marigolds and roses into garlands with cotton twine.
Kamalam fills her day by doing whatever Janaki does, but less so: she spins more slowly, her wicks are thick and uneven, her garland knots loose. Today, she can do almost nothing, owing to tension: their father is expected. Kamalam has confessed to Janaki that she is afraid of Goli and wishes he weren’t coming. Janaki, who hasn’t seen him for a couple of years, recalls some feeling of fear, though she is also curious.