“What?” Sita says bad-humouredly from the vestibule. “Where are you?”
“By the well, just for a second, really.” Janaki watches her mother, who doesn’t react.
Sita says an exasperated goodbye to her friend and heads for the back by way of the kitchen. As soon as she enters the pantry, Janaki scurries for the front and slips out the door as the sounds of Sita’s fury start to mount.
She picks her way along the edge of the cart path leading to the main road into Kulithalai. As she steps onto the road her heart begins to pound. She has barely been out after dark and never alone. Figures approach and she steps aside so they pass her without seeing her or inquiring as to her business. She doesn’t want to give anyone stories to carry back to the Brahmin quarter. She is risking being seen and talked about; she is risking not being seen and not being missed, should anything happen. But what choice does she have? She turns onto the main road and keeps to the shadows.
The club is within a walled compound but there is no one guarding the big iron gate. At night, the grizzled old peon patrols the compound occasionally but must also make change and sell goli choda for the card players to mix with spirits they bring themselves.
Janaki looks for a place where she can spend the next few hours unseen, waiting for her father. The clubhouse faces the tennis court. Men approach it from one side. The other side is sheltered but smells of urine; one can imagine it is used often over the course of the evening. Janaki opts for a large neem tree at the back with a branch obligingly bowed into a seat, thick enough for her skinny twelve-year-old bottom.
From there she catches only glimpses of men as they walk past the barred window. Once they are seated they are hidden from view but a large gap between the wall and the roof thatch lets her hear the men’s voices, including her father’s, rising above the slap and shuf fle of a deck of cards. From the few Janaki saw, she didn’t think they looked like an appropriate class of men to be associating with her father.
“So you transacted the necessary business with your brother-in-law today, Goli?” a man says in a Brahmin accent. Janaki is surprised that there are other Brahmins here, though she doesn’t know why she should be.
“He’s going to get his comeuppance one of these days,” Goli says by way of reply.
“I hope I’m around to see it,” the first man says. “He owns half of my family properties now.”
“Yes, well, today, he opened a factory on my ancestral lands,” sputters another Brahmin. “And if that’s not enough, I swear, half my tenants are going to work in it! I could kill that guy. I swear, if he wasn’t the son of the most orthodox lady in the Brahmin quarter, I might think he’s a progressive. Did you hear what he’s paying?”
Janaki, wincing at his inelegant Tamil, listens harder.
“Vairum is canny-and fair-minded,” says a warm, gravelly voice in a non-Brahmin accent that Janaki can’t place. “Happy workers are good workers.”
“Sure, I’m all in favour of non-Brahmin uplift,” says the other Brahmin reservedly. “But for non-Brahmins like you, Mr. Muthu Reddiar, self-starters, of good family. Putting power in the hands of the illiterate masses, though-it’s a recipe for disaster.”
“The man wants to start a revolution, that’s what,” Goli cries. “He wants to be king.”
“Seems to me the Brahmins around here have profited as much as anyone from business with Vairum,” Muthu Reddiar insists, an edge to his voice. “He’s generous, you have to say that for him.”
“I don’t have to say anything good about that man!” It sounds as if Goli has thumped the table.
“All right, all right,” says the first Brahmin. “Let’s take it easy. You can rest assured that most if not all the Brahmin quarter shares your opinion, Goli.”
“What a week,” Goli complains.
“Have you been to see Chellamma?” someone asks, and Janaki starts.
“Last night. She won’t budge,” Goli growls. “Bitch.”
Janaki gapes at the crude language, feeling sick.
“Hasn’t given me the time of day since Balachandran came on the scene, and now she expects me to pay for that pup? Ravana!” Janaki can’t tell if he’s cursing at Bharati’s mother or just lost a hand of cards.
“So don’t pay,” the first Brahmin man advises.
“She’s got me over a barrel,” Goli says darkly. “She’ll go to my boss.”
“What-” the man starts, but Goli breaks in: “Deal. I’m done talking about that.”
The clubhouse goes briefly quiet except for the slap and slide of cards and occasional muttered words. Then the night erupts in hooting and shouts as someone wins. Janaki listens to the chime of the men’s tumblers and wrinkles her nose at a puff of tobacco smoke that has drifted from the clubhouse window.
The cycle repeats, the men’s voices blurring and sharpening with emotion and drink. At one point, Janaki drowses, shakes herself, drops off again-and drops off the branch. It’s a rude shock, but she is not hurt by the fall. She runs behind the tree when the peon looks out the window, and then remounts the branch.
It must be well on for nine o’clock when Goli finally wins a round-the biggest pot of the night, according to the ribbing he receives. He loudly claims that it only earns him back what he has lost, but it sounds as if he’s being modest. Janaki, hearing him announce his departure, perks up.
“Lads, I’m sorry to say I must take my leave of you now.”
“Come on, Goli, let us at least win back our dignity.”
“Sorry, you’ll have to face your wives without it. Not the first time, I would say.”
More hoots.
“Last time Nallathumbi here stripped himself of his dignity his wife ran from the room in fright!”
Nallathumbi makes his rebuttal. “Naked, I inspire men and frighten women. Just as it should be.”
They all laugh, satisfied. Goli takes his leave.
Janaki allows him a few moments before slipping from the tree, praying to herself, “Please go home just go home please go home just go home go home go home.” She tails him to the gate. “Go right go right right right.”
He hesitates, looking both ways, and turns left. Janaki pauses a second, to look down at her toes, bare and vulnerable as they emerge from beneath the paavaadai. My toes look purple in the moonlight, she thinks. How curious. She too emerges from the gate.
In the dark this is not the town she knows. The night forgives a lot; she doesn’t want to imagine what sins it lets slip by. Kerosene flares make sinister shadows that dance and dodge no matter how still the body that throws them. Janaki is frightened and focuses on her father’s back as though it is a magic charm whose powers she doesn’t know and yet has no choice but to trust.
At the end of the commercial thoroughfare, Goli strikes east along the curving road that rings the town. Janaki is not so scared now. The velvet dust between her toes is like the dust behind their house when she relieves herself at midnight, and the shadows cast by moonlight are steady and sedate. She permits herself to imagine Bharati’s house and her mother.
In her mind, Chellamma is slatternly. Lumpy mounds of flesh, conniving eyes ringed in thick kohl, scheming lips reddened by betel, layers of powder over a dark and uneven complexion. Janaki really cannot understand what her father would see in such a woman, when he has the most beautiful wife anyone’s ever seen. Janaki gasps aloud: witchcraft! Bharati’s mother captivates men with spells. That must be it!
She is walking faster and faster, working herself into a fury of indignation, and nearly overtakes her father but catches herself in time and drops back. Finally he steps onto a small path leading to a mud house with thatched roof. It is lit within by kerosene lamps, proof of their prosperity. Janaki, though hardened by anger at Chellamma’s nerve, doesn’t fail to note the tidiness of the swept path, the walls as freshly whitewashed and decorated for Pongal as any Brahmin’s.