Janaki has another reason to be glad for moving to Pandiyoor: Vani visits her parents every few months, and Janaki is sure her sporadic lessons will resume. She is particularly hopeful that she will finally learn the Bharatiyar number she first heard on All-India Radio when Vani played her Navaratri concert. Vani’s version of “Chinnan Cheeru Killiyai Kannama,” is becoming famous. She set it to a ragamalikai, a garland of ragas, the scale changing with each stanza. There’s talk, Janaki heard at her wedding, of having Vani make a gramophone recording of it.
Janaki concludes her second piece and her eye lights on the harmonium, which looks dusty. It should be covered with a cloth, she thinks, if it’s not going to be cared for. Maybe she can sew a cover for it.
“Whose is that?” she asks politely.
“Mine,” Swarna says.
“Oh, how lovely,” Janaki soldiers on. “Perhaps you could sing something for us?”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Swarna smiles sourly. “Perhaps you could.”
Janaki is confused and looks down at her instrument, pretending to examine a string.
“Miss Perfect,” Swarna whispers.
Janaki freezes, not entirely sure she has heard correctly, then hears Baskaran calling her from the main hall. She rises, grateful, with apologetic glances to her sisters-in-law, who ignore her, and takes her leave of Senior Mami.
It’s time for them to pay the first few of the numerous required visits they must make, as a newly married couple, up and down the Brahmin quarter. Out of respect, they will visit Vani’s parents first, their seniormost relatives on the quarter. They walk, slightly apart and not speaking, along Double Street in the direction of the Krishna temple, greeting neighbours on verandas. Vani’s parents’ house is, gratifyingly, not as grand as Janaki’s in-laws’, though it would have cowed her before she was married. The talk is strange and lively. Vani’s father describes recent progress in his attempts to start a school based on his system of calisthenics and Janaki pecks at a silver plate loaded with murrukku and halwa as she eyes a china cabinet stocked with Vani’s mother’s collection of vintage weapons. At one point, the woman runs to it to extract a nineteenth-century French switchblade, whose mechanism she demonstrates with a cackle.
Janaki, dismayed, checks her watch surreptitiously. She inquires politely about Vani and receives an earful, including the welcome news that Vani will visit next month.
At eight-thirty, the evening repast is served in Dhoraisamy’s household, a simple meal. Janaki, after having visited three homes in which she was rigorously required to snack, wants nothing but a little yogourt rice. She and Baskaran are seated together and served by the sisters-in-law, one of the few nods to tradition in this otherwise unconventional first day. After today, Baskaran will eat with the men and Janaki with the women.
When the meal is done, the cooks of the house proper pour sweet hot milk with boiled almonds into silver tumblers, inverting a bowl on top, then turning them both so the bowl can be carried by its lip. Vasantha carries one to their father-in-law while Swarna carries another to Senior Mami. The brothers are chatting in the main hall. The children are asleep in various places. There is an ayah and a servant to keep track of them whenever a mother is not available. Each of the wives then takes a tumbler of milk and ascends to her bedchamber. The husbands shortly follow.
Janaki sits on the bed, scared once again. Unlike city girls, she knows how babies are made. And she is sharp, so when she overhears things, she puts the two and two together. But knowing the facts of life doesn’t prepare a person for living.
Baskaran looks down as he enters, glances up, then down, and smiles a little. He closes the door, fumbles the bolt closed and closes the shutters on that side, which give onto the corridor. He clears his throat and hesitates, then crosses the room and reaches through browning garlands to close the shutters on the street-facing windows as well. The house across the street-Baskaran’s uncle’s-also has a second storey.
Janaki had stood as he entered, and now holds the milk out to him. He takes it gravely and urges, “Sit.” He again hesitates-there is a chair in one corner of the room-and opts to sit on the other end of the bed. “Sit,” he repeats in a low voice. “Sit, ma.” She collapses a tiny bit at this endearment, and slowly perches again on the high mattress-topped bedstead. He pours the milk into the bowl, stopping before the almonds at the bottom slip out. He pours it back and forth, twice, to mix and cool it, then pours himself several sips, and drinks, watching her, before he pours a little more that he holds out to her. She accepts wordlessly and drinks. He pours her another and then shares the sweet, milk-cooked almonds out between them.
He takes the tumbler from her and puts it and the bowl by the door, then turns down the flame on the kerosene lamp so the room is dim and seems to brighten again as their eyes adjust.
“I was listening to you play this afternoon,” he says. He sits on the bed again, a little closer. “So beautiful, it was…” He speaks with real passion, or so it seems to her. “Everyone was touched, I could feel it. I imagine you don’t even notice others, though, when you play, do you?”
“I… I haven’t played very much for anyone outside the family. Visitors occasionally. But I like it.” She feels a shy smile tugging her lip upward, covers her mouth with her hand, lowers it with a breath.
He moves closer to her, awkwardly, and as though forcing his arm through a thin barrier, touches her face. Gaining confidence, he begins stroking her brows, temples and cheek. What a strange way of looking at her, she thinks, and how good it feels to be touched. She likes how he looks, his chubby cheeks and receding hairline. He looks like someone who means what he says. And he looks gentle.
Her face and neck feel ticklish and warmed, as if the skin is puffing slightly as he touches it. Now he strokes her shoulder, her arm and the hand on the bed, now her back, the skin above and below the lines of her blouse. She stiffens a bit as he leans toward her and brushes the base of her neck with his lips. He leans back to look at her, and she relaxes as he takes her face in one hand and kisses her neck again, stroking her forehead with his thumb as though to draw from it the tension of this strange day.
He is succeeding-this is the strangest part of it. He stands and removes his kurta. A twirled gold chain and his sacred thread lie on his mostly smooth chest. He has a single patch of hair, just above where his belly starts to curve out. He sits on the bed again and draws the pallu of her sari from around her waist and shoulder as he lies her down. He reaches to lift her legs onto the bed and kisses her belly, all hollows below her blouse.
Looking up at her, he puts both his hands under her thin shoulder blades and lifts her toward him to kiss her eyes and cheeks and each of her lips, and puts his cheek to hers and to her lips and she kisses him back just a little, as if to see what will happen. He emits a sigh as though he had no right to expect it.
She kisses his shoulders and neck. She has no idea if this is what she is supposed to do, but he is not objecting. It’s funny to be kissing a grown man she hardly knows, but he did it first. He sighs several times and then brings a palm to her breast and strokes it through the cloth of her blouse. Janaki gasps-such a sensation! He watches her face anxiously, then smiles tentatively and tries it again.
“Does it feel nice?” he asks.
“Yes!” she gasps. “Er-I think so.”
“Shall I continue?” He smiles, bringing his other hand from her back.
The only direct instruction Janaki received on these matters was from Gayatri, who said, “Whatever your husband asks for, whenever he asks for it, say yes.”