Goli pulls Janaki away and lays a finger on Thangam’s shoulder. Immediately Thangam is still, as though the impulses have withdrawn, the way the touch-me-not plant closes its leaves on contact. She is still, except for a decorous, defiant throb at wrist and neck, and another life, in her belly, which kicks to be free of her.
Goli demands, diagnostically, “Too tired? Too tired how?”
No response. Raghavan sleeps on a blanket, snug and dry between three spots where rain drips through the roof. Goli swivels toward the two neighbours and begins shouting at them.
“What’s going on? How long has she been sick like this?”
One tries to say what she knows, what she has seen, but Goli is pacing and muttering, every now and again returning to Thangam’s prone form to say her name, “Thangam! Thangam. Thangam?” until he begins to wind down, like a gramophone record. Finally, he, too, is still. Above and around them is the chaos of the crashing rain. Janaki watches her father. For the first time that she can recall, he is still and present.
He looks at Thangam, a long time, and then he begins to speak. “Thangam? You look so different, Thangam. When did you change? You were once so beautiful. This small house, it’s a mistake. My small salary, it is all the government bastards would give me. That’s why I was always trying to do more, Thangam, to get more money, so you could have a big house. A comfortable life. This is… this is a mistake.”
He backs away from her, toward a far corner where he unrolls a mat, lies down and soon falls asleep.
One tear draws down from each of Thangam’s closed eyes. The rain begins to leak through the roof in a fourth place.
Janaki turns to one of the neighbours. “Mami, you must tell my grandmother. Please, my grandmother. She must come.”
Ifyou had come in the morning, you would have beheld my dead body.
Oh no.
“I need my grandmother, please.” Janaki gets the cash her grandmother gave her and holds it out. “Can someone go?”
The kind neighbours assure her, yes; one says she will send her grown son.
Janaki sits beside her mother through the night. She presses Thangam’s legs and arms, rubs warmth into them, until the chill breaks and fever burns through her brightly. Janaki soaks a cloth with rainwater and lays it across Thangam’s forehead, but the chill soon returns and Janaki resumes the rubbing. All the while, she speaks encouraging words. “Akka, you must hang on. Amma is coming. Amma is coming and everything will be fine, but you must hang on and see her.”
A leak springs above the dough village but Janaki makes no attempt to move her creatures, and from top to bottom they melt, sometimes in a slow bending, sometimes in a sudden collapse, until, as morning nears, the seven shelves are coated in a cold lava strung with puddlings of colour that were once red lips and emerald earrings, dark hair and cheery skirts.
An hour before dawn, the young man returns. He had gone to the next village and had a telegram sent-as quick as going himself, and less costly. Janaki knows her grandmother forbids telegrams for any but the worst news. She had forgotten to tell the young man. Anyway, this may not be the worst news, but it is close. He gives her the change.
In the morning, when her father rises, Janaki prepares coffee. She is a terrible cook, and her father makes a face as he swallows. Oh, well. She takes the second steaming tumbler, holds it beside her mother and blows the vapours toward her, hoping that miraculous scent of richness, vigour and future unexceptional mornings will rouse her. It doesn’t. Maybe the coffee is too weak; maybe Thangam is. Janaki keeps whispering in her mother’s ear, as she has all night, “Amma is coming, Akka. Amma is coming, just hold on.” She takes heart from the fact that Thangam has hung on, so far. Goli, saying nothing, goes to work.
On Tuesdays and Fridays, girls have oil baths. Today Janaki must administer her own, for the first time ever. She sniffs a little with self-pity as she works the oil through her hair as best she can, and goes to rub it out with soap-nut powder in the bath, leaving Raghavan and her mother under a neighbour’s watch.
She comes back into the main hall, holding both ends of the thin cotton towel and snapping it against her hair, from neck to waist, then binding the hair into the towel so that it makes a knot the size of three hearts at the nape of her neck. She and her sisters certainly have been blessed with hair, she most of all.
Thangam is lying waxen and small on her cot, burning again with the fever.
Raghavan awakens and wants his mother. Janaki consoles him, giving him sweet milk, bathing him and singing “Jaggadodharana,” with its lyrics about Lord Krishna: His motherplays with him, as though he is no more than her precious child. It is raining too hard to go outside. They play with pots and pans and two of the dolls their father bought. Janaki makes as much noise as he does. She wants their mother to hear them playing.
The servant comes to sweep and mop, quiet and fearful. When she leaves, Janaki breathes, relief: morning is past and Thangam is still alive. If she can just hold on until evening-they’re only five hours from Cholapatti, so Sivakami should be here by what, five or six?
She removes the towel and mechanically binds just the ends of her hair, which is now so little damp it feels not so much wet as heavy. The small knot hits the back of her thighs, the hair loose enough to finish drying, but not unbound, since a woman’s hair should never be unbound except when she performs her parents’ funeral rites. “The sight of a woman with unbound hair strikes sadness into all hearts,” Sivakami, very strict in this regard, would say.
Janaki scrapes the doughy mass that was the golu into some newspapers and tosses it out behind the house. The neighbour comes, brings food and plays with Raghavan. Janaki again makes sure they do it close to Thangam. They unshroud the gramophone and play each record three times. The laughing one sounds stranger each time: at first it sounds eerie, the second time as if it’s mocking them. By the third playing, it doesn’t even sound like laughter any more.
The neighbour leaves to prepare her family’s tiffin. Janaki isn’t hungry but feeds Raghavan. She sits by her mother and sings the first two songs from last night’s concert, which feels so long ago. She tries to hum “Chinnan Cheeru Killiyai Kannama” but can’t remember how it goes. The baby inside Thangam seems to wake, kicking and swimming.
Five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock… the cuckoo, which Janaki is coming to hate, pops out each hour to announce to her that her grandmother still has not come.
Thangam is breathing but not moving. She looks bluer and bluer, or is that the fallen night? Janaki lights a lamp for warmth.
There is a knock. She leaps and unbolts the door, but it’s her father. He thrusts a paper packet into her hand. “Here.”
Veeboothi-he must have passed a temple on his rounds. Janaki carries it to Thangam, smears it on her forehead, throat and belly, and puts a pinch between her lips. Previously, it would have shown grey against gold; now it merely dulls the waxy blue surface of Thangam’s skin. Janaki rubs it in but the ash resolves into nubbins and disperses into flakes, refusing to absorb.
Janaki serves her father the food the neighbour has brought. For a second unending, undying night, Janaki sits beside her mother. She prays without ceasing, saying Shakti Mata, Durga Mata, Saraswati whose names are Uma, Vani, Saradha and nine hundred and ninety-eight more. Bring me my grandmother, oh don’t let my mother die. She looks at the Saraswati calendar she hung on the wall, the face of the goddess sweet and impartial.
She presses her mother’s legs, holds her hand and strokes her forehead while her father sleeps. Her little brother sleeps, his golden eyes shut tight. She doesn’t know why Amma has not come. She fears she has been abandoned. She fears the rain rain rain has washed the world away, washed the universe clean, shining, empty. All the people she loves, all those she doesn’t love, all washed away. Are they all alone, too, waiting for one another? Are they all together, waiting for her? Is she late and are they wondering what is keeping her? Has the rain washed her away, too, clean and empty, no guilt no ambition no short history of minor transgressions no unwanted wisdom left to pollute her and tear her gently limb from limb?