Kamalam pulls away and buries her face in her hands. “I said, I don’t know.”
Saradha, who is also looking a little broad and matronly following the birth of her fourth child, attempts to enter into the spirit of the moment. “It’s Sita’s marriage that we need to arrange next, isn’t it? How old are you, Sita?” The younger girl doesn’t answer so Saradha answers herself. “Ten years completed already! It’s time, I say, time for a big party in Pudhukkottai or Pondicherry -somewhere French, where they haven’t passed laws against girls marrying in time!”
The varied volume and quality of laughter around the room demonstrates the variety of opinion around Madras Presidency on the child marriage law, and its attendant problems and solutions. Saradha persists.
“What would be really nice, right now, Sita,” she suggests, “is if you would play a little song on the veena for Visalam’s in-laws. She’s been taking lessons.”
The crowd murmurs approval.
Janaki tries to catch her grandmother’s eye: if they do have further designs on Visalam’s family, Sita’s playing won’t help in this aim. But Sivakami doesn’t notice her. And what is Sita thinking? She is taking her place behind Vani’s veena, sporting a little grin. Even she cannot possibly think she will suddenly become a virtuoso player just because she wants to impress? Janaki slowly brings her hands up to her ears, whether in a gesture of dismay or to block out sound is impossible to tell, but Kamalam unconsciously imitates her, two little monkeys guarding against the same evil. Sivakami catches Janaki’s eye then, and, annoyed, makes a gesture as though to bat their hands down, and the girls lower their hands to their laps.
Sita begins to play. Her song, “Sami Varnam,” sounds like the breath of a wounded animal. At first, the in-laws look as if each has been hit on the forehead with a clay pot. Then, as each notices the look on the others’ faces, they begin, once more, to laugh. They don’t mean to laugh at the music: they are not rude people. They are laughing at each other. Sivakami looks uncertain, almost as if she wants to enjoy their enjoyment. Sita is oblivious, grunting a little as she tries to control the bucking beast of sound beneath her fingers.
A shadow falls on the veena and the girl looks up to find Vani standing over her. Vani makes a flicking motion with one hand, and Sita abandons her song mid-strain. She rises and stumbles back. The bubbles of laughter have nearly all burst, bright, wet, prismatic.
Vani retunes the instrument. Sita looks around, blinking as though she has just awoken, and the laughter starts up again. Vani begins playing “Sami Varnam,” the same song, so naturally it sounds like a rebuke, though Janaki is willing to believe that’s not how she intends it. An elementary item in the south Indian classical repertoire, it’s a song occasionally used as a warm-up, and it is Vani’s regular time to play.
There’s a motion in the southwest corner of the hall, nearest the kitchen. Thangam is cranking the phonograph and laying the needle into its groove. Is this Thangam’s own rebuke, or her way of joining in? Janaki had forgotten the record started with “Sami Varnam,” and now Vani and the absent Madras musician are twinned, like the baby in the main hall, brought out for the naming ceremony, and the one hidden upstairs.
Sita, a tear starting down her cheek, runs straight out the back of the house, bumping into two walls in her haste.
Sivakami quietly tells Janaki to follow her sister.
Janaki doesn’t find Sita under the trees, or anywhere on the way to the canal, so, at the canal, she turns right, toward town. Head down, watching one foot place itself before the other in the mud, she bumps into Bharati, walking in just the same manner toward Sivakami’s house. Bharati’s maidservant Draupadi follows behind.
“Have you seen Sita?” Janaki inquires.
“Yeah, where was she going?”
“Where did it look like she was going?”
“I don’t know. Town?”
“I guess. I’m supposed to find her. Are you coming?”
“Isn’t Vani Amma playing? Hey,” Bharati stands and listens.
“Have you got someone visiting you?”
“No, no. It’s the gramophone.” Janaki doesn’t know whether to be proud or ashamed of the toy. “Come on, come with me.”
They emerge at the main road and look in both directions. It is a market day, and the crowds are thick.
Bharati points east toward the next crossroads. “Is that her?
Janaki squints. She is hearing drums, bells and shouting, a non-Brahmin funeral procession, and now catches sight of Sita, a flash of terracotta paavaadai against the similar red-brown of the road.
“Yes, yes, come, let’s hurry.” She and Bharati weave up the road, dodging bullock carts and baskets, and then are engulfed by a huge herd of goats, going the opposite way. They cannot move until the animals are past, but the goats’ motion makes them feel they are flowing forward, as in water. Janaki loves goats almost as much as calves. She thinks it’s charming that the babies have just the same proportions as the grown-ups, tiny, like dolls. She taps each one on the forehead as it bawls past her.
There: Sita is halted at the fore of the crowd preceding the funeral procession, either stymied by the crush or watching the proceedings.
The dead man must be a Chettiar, Janaki thinks: he reclines on a huge bier of bright flowers. No Brahmin would go in for this kind of show. Ten impassive young fellows beat drums with curved sticks. Two or three men and one woman jump around, very worked up, nearly off their rockers with grief-for-hire. The drums and wailing are mesmerizing and though both Janaki and Bharati have received many warnings against getting too close to funeral processions, they draw closer.
Six little men carry the bier. It dips and rocks as they struggle against their sweaty palms and the surging of the crowd. One of them suddenly catches the fever of the paid mourners’ dance and starts shaking the bier as the others struggle to keep it steady. He is thrashing his body around and moaning, but not letting go, gripping tight even as someone tries to prise the pole from him.
Edging and shoving through the crowd, Janaki has nearly reached her immobile sister. The head of the great big corpse flops to one side and Janaki catches a glimpse of the face. She is startled to recognize him: N. Ranga Chettiar. She hadn’t heard that he died. She had seen Vairum chatting with him outside Minister and Gayatri’s house several weeks ago.
As the bier passes Sita, the bearer who caught the dance leaps, frenzied, away from the bier. The man walking beside him catches it in time, but he is very tall, and as he rises to his full height, the head flops, forcefully, toward the girls. The Chettiar’s eyes are open.
Janaki puts her hand on Sita’s arm.
Sita shudders. Janaki glances toward the corpse and back at her sister.
“Sita?” Janaki shakes her sister’s arm and repeats loudly, “Sita.”
Sita ignores her. There’s nothing Janaki hates more. She shakes her sister’s arm again, roughly, then takes her shoulder and spins Sita around to face her. “Sita!”
Sita speaks. “Palani veeboothi!”
The voice that comes out is not her own and Janaki jumps. Sita says it again: Holy ash from Palani mountain! There is something odd about her face. She is looking not directly at Janaki, but slightly off to the right.
“Palani veeboothi!” Sita shouts again.
“I heard you!” Janaki, on tiptoe, examines her, and makes the tone of her voice gentler when she asks, “Is something wrong?”
“Palani veeboothi!” Sita booms again.
“Would you stop shouting this!”
Even under such strained circumstances, they bicker.
“I am dead!” Sita proclaims. Bharati has caught up with them, and takes Sita’s other arm with a look of concern.
“Stop that, Sita,” Janaki says sternly. “Amma said…”
“I am dead! I am Ranga Chettiar!” Sita exclaims. “She looked, I came! She looked, I came!”