Yesterday, Janaki had not felt the day on her face except in the hour before dawn when she did the kolam that the rain washed away even as the powder descended from her fist. Today she does not do kolam but opens the door only after the light is full. And opens her eyes wide because Laddu is running toward her up the road. He pants the news out hoarsely: “We are here, we are all here, we couldn’t cross the river yesterday evening, too flooded, we had to wait for light…” His hands are on his knees as he stoops to catch his breath. “Parasals-they are bringing the others across.”
Next comes Vairum. He strides first to the doorway where she is standing, her hair loose around her. Vairum goes past her into the house and looks at his sister lying blue on the cot, her womb an expectant silence.
Goli sits up in the spot where he has been sleeping, his forehead in his hands, cradling his big dreams. He looks up to see his wife’s brother. He puts his head back in his hands.
Vairum runs back up the road without a word to them. He passes his mother and tells her, “She is there-go up the road, you will see the house. I’m going to fetch help.”
He swims back across with the parasal, faster than riding in it. The villagers take a collective step back as he ascends the bank before them like a minor god and sets off in the direction of the rail station.
Sivakami places her feet carefully in the streaming road. She looks up to see where she must go and staggers, firebursts of fear in her tired eyes: here is Kali, goddess of destruction, her hair loose and rising about her, mouth open-Kali, running on water, bounding death.
No, it’s Janaki. Just a little girl, helpless and scared, her hair streaming. What is she, after all, just fourteen? Fourteen years old. She is crying with sadness because her mother is dying, and with relief, even joy, because now she can say so. The world still exists; they didn’t abandon her.
Her loose hair is stuck to her face and as Sivakami clears it from her mouth, Janaki suddenly becomes conscious of it and binds the ends together. Sivakami squeezes Janaki’s arms, pats her back. They walk back together, Janaki holding her grandmother’s arm. Once, Sivakami slips on the sliding invisible earth and Janaki steadies her.
Sivakami knows none of the people in the house, but she does not resent them. Sickness always draws a crowd. A pathway through the mass appears for her and at its end, the waxy blue figure of her daughter. Sivakami strokes Thangam’s cheeks as though drawing out sadness, kisses her fingers where they touched her daughter and asks, “Enn’idhu, kanna?”
What is it, dear one? What brought you to this pass?
Janaki moves to a corner and slumps down, cradled by two walls and the floor. She thinks her grandmother and mother, alone in the nattering crowd, look like an island in the Kaveri, a still, holy place in the mad rushing river. Her neck softens and she drops into sleep.
Some three hours later, a beefy white face appears in the door. Everyone stops talking. Many are trying to remember whether they owe taxes.
But he is not a revenue officer, he is the district medical officer whom Vairum has fetched, along with two junior doctors to assist. Three white doctors, everyone whispers. This is the kind of influence Vairum exerts now. Such doctors come with strings attached: Vairum has evidently pulled some.
The DMO asks that everyone clear out. They laugh at his excellent Tamil and go, except Sivakami, who refuses to leave her daughter alone with these strange men. She resists efforts at persuasion, saying, “I know: they are doctors. They are good men, and they have come a great distance, but anything they have to do, they can do in my presence.”
Vairum takes her aside and explains to her that she is an ignorant woman and the doctors need freedom to work. Sivakami says nothing, her lips set as tight as if sealed with wax, and finally, for the first time, his logic and will are bettered by her determination.
The DMO nods, impatient. “It’s fine, sir, please. I can do the work with the lady present, as long as she doesn’t interfere. I quite understand.” He waves Vairum out the door.
Several neighbours try to rouse Janaki to come out with them. She resists unconsciously. Her eyelids twitch and she mumbles but does not awaken. They shake her, speak gently, then fiercely, until Sivakami says, “Leave her. She’s not in the way.” She looks to the DMO, her ally. He nods resignedly. So Janaki remains, a crumpled pile of hair and clothes, in the corner.
The nurse from up the road arrives, looking very hastily washed and combed, though it is approaching eleven o’clock. Her lethargy is legendary. Vairum had rapped on her door and called for her as he and the doctors waded up the road from the crossing point: the DMO had asked for a nurse and she is the only one, locally.
The DMO asks Sivakami to put some water on to boil. She does, compliant but suspicious, as the nurse, shaking her head, closes the bottoms of the shutters against the many who watch unashamedly from without. The DMO checks Thangam’s pulse again and turns apologetically to Sivakami to explain, in his blocky, grammatical Tamil, “I must now check on the baby. I, have, concerns.”
Sivakami squints in incomprehension then closes her eyes when she understands. No one in their family has ever been seen by a doctor. She knows there are woman doctors for women patients, but it’s too late to get one. She knows she cannot interfere and knows it doesn’t matter, that Thangam will not have to account for this loss of modesty.
The DMO checks: there is no sign of dilation. The instruments are boiled. He performs a Caesarean.
A girl. Big. Blue. Dead. Gently and with regret, they hand her to her grandmother. The child’s blue lips are sealed stubborn and resistant in a frozen face. Sivakami looks deep into the lost eyes of her daughter’s last child. She thinks she sees a gold band around the pupil narrow, fade to blue, and then to black. Sivakami carries the baby out the back of the tiny house.
After sewing Thangam up, the DMO palpates her throat, feels her forehead, opens her eyelids one at a time and looks into her eyes. He feels she is far away, already. He looks up at Sivakami and asks, “How many children does she have?”
“She has nine children, and five grandchildren.”
“How can it be?” he murmurs, as if kind and gallant. “She looks so young.”
But when he looks back at her, she looks very old. He blinks to clear a film and again she looks terribly young. Tragic, these people. He lifts her lids again and again checks the pulse at her wrist. He is buying time. The other two doctors are waiting for orders.
He says to Sivakami, “I will try,” and reaches for a phial and a needle.
But he is lying. Her illness is serious and, as far as he knows, unnamed. He looks at his eager assistants, who are waiting for some instruction. He believes there is nothing he can do and believes the wee widow watching him knows this, too.
In his professional opinion, he needs to inoculate this dying woman with faith. He is a skeptical Christian but understands these people have their ways. He shakes the phial of saline and tries to think of it as liquid faith. It could work, in this country where so much happens that he cannot explain. He shakes the bottle faster, willing a catalysis within the worthless liquid, imbuing it with that chthonic quantity this woman needs to live. He shakes and shakes-the junior doctors are looking puzzled-shakes-he doesn’t look at Sivakami’s careworn face-shakes-he maintains a look of diagnostic concentration-shakes.
Chime! The clock rings out. The cuckoo pops. One o’clock. The phial takes flight, out of the DMO’s hand, between the inclined heads of the neatly groomed junior doctors, to shatter against the picture of the goddess Saraswati on the wall calendar beside the window.