The puja soon ends and Sivakami begins insisting the male guests and children have lunch. No one would refuse, but they let themselves be pressed as a courtesy. Janaki sets banana leaves down in a row along each side of the main hall, and Sita follows her, holding in iddikki tongs the lip of a hot pot of semolina pudding, from which she deposits a blob on each leaf as the diners sit down. Kamalam begs to be allowed to serve also and follows her sisters with a vessel full of vadais.
One lunch guest begins polite conversation, asking, “How long have you leave, Goli?”
“Oh, my schedule is my own.” Goli slurps up the initial daub of sweet. “This is a business trip for me.”
“Revenue department business?” inquires another luncher. Some of these people tried for some years to extract what they are owed for undelivered deer’s heads.
“Ha!” Goli sprays three or four morsels of rice with sambar back toward his leaf. “I’d not make any money at all, if that’s all I did.”
“What kind of a salary does the department offer?” asks an anxious-browed man from several doors away. “My son plans to take the civil service exam next year. I told him to talk to you.”
“You wouldn’t believe. Thirty rupees monthly.”
“Oh, that’s… well, it’s a good salary, of course, but to feed a family of what, eight children…”
“No, no, absolutely unjust. Very difficult to make ends meet.” Goli signals for more rice, and rasam, the next course, and Janaki and Sita run out with serving dishes. He conveys a sense of constant motion above his meal, and despite talking more than anyone, also eats more and faster.
Janaki, serving Vairum, whose indignation is writ large on his face, wishes her appa would just keep his mouth shut. She knows her father has never tossed more than a few odd paisa toward his kids’ upbringing and she turns, blushing, away from her uncle’s rage.
Another neighbour inquires with hesitant interest, “Where are you stationed currently, Goli?”
“One has somewhat just transferred to Malapura. But I am maintaining strong interests in Salem. Salem!” Goli reinforces. The man, who heard the first time, nods. “That’s where everything is happening. Everything modern.”
“Oh, is that so?” another politely remarks while belching.
“Oh, yes,” huffs Goli. “Industries! Banking! Everything is there!”
“Ah…” several men nod.
“Yep.” Goli gobbles both desserts and calls for more, and yogourt rice. “That’s where my son here had better set up. Might even get him to do his college there first.”
“College?” someone chokes lightly-another of Goli’s unpaid creditors. Eyebrows rise in a ripple among the eaters: Goli’s son Krishnan is yet a possibility but Laddu’s poor school performance is no secret.
“Sure,” Goli finishes, and drinks water, a long stream poured down his throat from a tumbler, which Janaki waits to refill, twice, from a brass jug. He belches monstrously. “If he’s going to be an engineer, lawyer, medical doctor, he has to go to college-may as well be there!”
“Oh-ho, Athimbere,” Vairum growls, making the honorific, “elder sister’s husband,” sound sarcastic. Goli turns slowly to face his brother-in-law. “How’s your money situation? Problems?”
Sivakami is in the kitchen and doesn’t hear Vairum’s remark, but hears the main hall grow silent.
“Not at all, Vairum,” Goli smiles tightly. “I don’t know when things have gone as well. So many opportunities opening up. A person just has to know how to take advantage.”
“You certainly know how to take advantage, Athimbere,” Vairum spits. “That is definitely one of your strong suits.”
“I’m sure we all prefer not to know what you are talking about, Vairum, but what I am talking about”-Goli opens his face like a late-season sunflower to the rest of the company-“is investment. I’m sure there are many present who wouldn’t mind knowing how to improve fortunes grown paltry with time.”
“Investing with you, Athimbere, would be the equivalent of burying one’s wealth and forgetting the location.” Vairum flicks his hand twice toward his leaf, folds it toward himself and stands. “But anyone stupid enough to give you his money deserves to lose it.”
“Vairum!” Sivakami says from the kitchen. “That’s bad manners.”
“No, Amma.” Vairum sighs fast and wearily. “It’s a warning. I would hate, I would really hate to see anyone in this room lose money he can ill afford.”
“How disrespectful can a man be? Listen to your mother!” Goli shrills. “You keep your head in the clouds and act superior to try to keep the people of your village beneath you. They are not fooled!”
“So they’ll do what they choose.” Vairum disappears out the back.
“You are not fooled,” Goli commands those around him, and they all wag their heads, “No, no, yes, yes.”
The hall empties of the men, who go to the veranda to chew betel and chew over the latest gossip. Inside, the women sit to eat, including Vani, whose bright chatter is not dulled by the events of the morning. Janaki receives a welcome bonus: Vani’s story changes today. Now the dacoits cut off their own thumbs as part of their initiation ritual. Their weapons are adapted. Vani’s relative cooks and feeds them from his own hand, as he also does his thumbless lover, who had cut off her own digits as a gesture of unity with her first lover, killed young in a raid on a Hyderabad haveli. None of the other children had paid attention enough to realize they are lucky to be present at the change; none is paying attention now.
Saradha has her daughter the next week. The house throbs and surges with children, children having children, children expecting children, steaming milk and screaming mouths and Vani’s music, which beats like the sound of peace dovetailed with conflict.
Around this time, Sivakami is approached with a strange request. The neighbour two houses down, all of whose grandchildren have died at birth, asks Sivakami if she might birth her daughter’s next child. Sivakami is insulted and flattered-decorum means she can’t comply, while sympathy makes it difficult to turn the woman down. Gayatri hits upon a solution: if Sivakami can’t lend her hands, she can lend her handiwork. Sivakami doubtfully offers the family one of the scenes she has worked, an episode in the life of Krishna, the invincible child. She threads beads onto a string and sews the ends to the piece to make a necklace. Her neighbours gracefully accept. Some weeks after the daughter of their house, with the talisman hanging around her neck, gives birth to a healthy child, Sivakami receives another request. Sivakami fulfills it but worries that there is something untoward in this. She hides it from Vairum, who doesn’t pay much attention to the comings and goings of women and children from their house. She is not sure why she is uncomfortable disclosing the new vogue: perhaps because it is superstitious behaviour and she knows how he feels about that. Perhaps because she is helping others to have children.
Sivakami readies Thangam to go to Malapura. It has been thirty days since Krishnan’s birth and so it’s time for Goli to fetch her, but Thangam and Sivakami know how this usually goes: the packing and waiting, the unpacking and being taken off guard. This time, though, things might be different, since Goli hasn’t left Cholapatti in the weeks since his arrival.
He sleeps at the local chattram, not only dropping in on Sivakami more frequently than ever he did when he lived nearby, but occasionally convening his cronies around the veranda, where he tosses out schemes and schematics, logics and logistics, and figures vague or specific but always theoretical. The small group of men around the veranda is composed, Muchami tells Sivakami, of men who have faith in him despite that earlier mishap, including a couple who are hoping that, if they support him a little more, they might make their money back.