Goli’s voice circles as he charges down the spiral staircase. He pitches into the hall from the stairwell, chopping the side of his right hand against his left palm.
“Pack your bags. We are leaving.” He flies around the room, shoving each child in the direction of Thangam’s baggage, which stands ready in the corner of the hall. “No objections, children! You will not insist any longer on living in this house. Time and again I have tried to make you all come and live with me. You always refuse: my Vairum Mama says this, my Sivakami Patti says that!”
What he is saying is untrue, but this is immaterial.
Sita is hauled to her feet, unprotesting but also largely unconscious. Laddu, Janaki and Kamalam mill into one another, bumping, confused. Radhai, the toddler, howls and shoves her mother’s sari into her mouth as Thangam moves toward the door. Visalam has stealthily backed out into the garden with her baby. Chances are Goli won’t notice her, but Sivakami closes the garden door just in case.
“No more!” Goli hollers. “This time, I will not take no for an answer. Go, pack!”
The children have no idea what this means as far as they are concerned.
“PACK!”
Sivakami indicates that Muchami should fetch a trunk from upstairs.
They all get on the 92:35 train that night. By morning, they will reach the Karnatak country, where Goli is stationed at present, the farthest they have ever been from home.
28. In the Karnatak Country 1934
THEY ARRIVE AT TEN IN THE MORNING, by which time Cholapatti would have been sweltering and still. In Cholapatti, the packed air is so hot and moist that every villager feels a privileged proximity to Goddess Earth-each person feels her sweat.
In the Karnatak country, the air swirls and rustles round, cool as the children have known only water to be, water dippered from the big clay pot in the darkest corner of the pantry. The house is like theirs in Cholapatti; the same brick floors and clay-shingled roof, but smaller. It is a government-issue house and comes with a government-issue houseboy who bobs ingratiatingly as they arrive and then disappears.
The children watch their father take soap and a towel and stride toward the back of the house. He returns ten minutes later, shaved and washed. They are still in the front hall, mostly still standing and very quiet. The one or two who sat scramble to their feet. Goli looks at them with indignant expectation. He shouts, “Not clean yet? Move!”
Laddu and Sita rush to the back, grabbing towels where they saw Goli do so. There must be more than one bathroom, they think, if they were supposed to be bathing while Goli was. But no, there is only one bathroom. One by one, then, they bathe in cold water and then sit in the hall, uncomfortable.
Goli paces and mutters, to and fro, up and down, sometimes right out the front door. Each time one of the children stands to take her turn at the bath, he shouts, “Move!” at the receding back, which then jumps and runs for the bathroom.
Thangam is exhausted from the trip and lies under a thin dhurri with the baby in the other room. As the last child is bathing, Thangam calls out feebly, “There is no food in the house. You have to get them some food.”
Goli boomingly echoes his wife, “No food in the house? No food in the house. Okay, we will eat out.” He starts out the door, but no one follows him. He returns to the door and shouts, “Come!”
Kamalam is still in the washroom. The other children point that way.
“Hm? What?”
“Kamalam is still taking her bath,” Sita says helpfully.
Kamalam comes hurrying along at that moment.
“Hm!” Goli sweeps his hand upward and starts out the door again. The children run to follow him. Their hair is still uncombed, and Kamalam’s blouse is buttoned wrong, but they are reasonably clean. They turn two corners and stop in front of a low building: two parallel walls connected by a thatch roof, steam coming out the open ends. Goli enters, saying over his shoulder, “Don’t you tell your grandmother. I don’t want to be hearing about this forever.”
It is a non-Brahmin establishment. Their grandmother would never let them near such a place. Janaki very much disapproves, but what is morality on an empty stomach?
A harried-looking boy looks up at them from the floor, where he is clearing disposable plates made from stitched-together leaves. He throws the plates, coated with the remains of meals, to two grateful dogs in a roadside ditch. His eyes swing to a man squatting shinily among vats and cauldrons. The place seats only five, and two places are taken. Goli has now taken a third. The man looks at the children, then addresses his pots. “They’ll have to eat in shifts, that’s all.”
The children give one another looks. They didn’t understand the man. It is as though his words come from funny places in his mouth. It hadn’t struck home before: this is the Karnatak country they have learned of in school, where people speak the Kannada language. But why would they speak a language no one can understand? Tamil is normal, Kannada is strange, like a one-legged bird or two-headed cow-recognizable but not the way things are meant to be.
Their father is yelling, “Sit! Sit!”
The boy has laid out two more places. They all step forward together. Panic surges in the boy’s face and he says something to Goli. Goli raises one hand to point at the dish the boy is carrying and says to the children, “Only two of you now. Not enough room.”
Sita flounces forward to take her place, dragging Radhai. Kamalam, Laddu and Janaki politely watch the dogs instead of the diners. The dogs, dirt collected in the hollows between their jagged ribs, lap the sauces and grains from the ridges of the leaves, always licking twice where once would do. Finally, they do a quick sniffover. Finding no more pickings, one mounts the other and starts a dance. Janaki knows enough to look away and Laddu knows enough to know why, but Kamalam keeps staring, her mouth slightly ajar, until Janaki spins her by the shoulder to face the street.
The food is as strange as everything else. Goli vanishes upon finishing his meal, citing important business. By the time the children find their way back to the house, which is still cold and dark, homesickness is burling up in them. It will soon harden and form a ring, marking the end of one age, the beginning of another.
Only Sita is perfectly cheerful, bright-eyed and willing as they have never seen her. She arranges their bundles neatly in the hall. Thangam rises while she is doing this.
“Amma,” Sita inquires, apparently having decided that now they are together as a family, her mother should be addressed as such, “shall I take the baby for a while? Don’t you want to bathe?”
Thangam gives them the mixed blessing of her smile, like the sun shining through clouds. Sita takes baby Krishnan, and Thangam goes to her bath. When she returns, they sit together on the veranda, relieved that these are also a fixture in this strange new country. In the combined strength of Thangam’s faint glow and the dilute sunshine, they begin to feel almost warm.
Neighbourhood children grow curious about them, but since they cannot speak to one another, they choose the shared language of sand-lot cricket. Even the girls join in, but not Sita, who takes stock of the staples and purchases vegetables and milk, lamp oil and kolam powder out of the ten rupees Sivakami slipped to her as they left. She even cleans a little. When Goli returns from work, Sita bustles to the door and hands him a hot tumbler of coffee.
Goli appears sullen and takes his coffee wordlessly out onto the veranda. Janaki and Kamalam are out there, playing at catching the other’s hand, like bear cubs slapping at river fish. They become quiet at the sight of Goli’s face, but their giggles quickly escalate once more, until Goli howls, “Hush!”