Now, when she’s in the women’s room, she is making items for her own child’s layette. Senior Mami has a radio; Janaki turns it on and off for her and listens to programs on current affairs and spiritual matters while doing her handiwork. She practises veena at least three or four times weekly, which is what she is doing when the telegram comes.
A paadasaalai boy peeps around the corner of the doorway to the women’s room; they ignore him. He gradually edges over so that more than half of him is visible along the doorway’s edge. Still, he is ignored. He is evidently here with a message-giving the boys small chores, everyone says patronizingly, is a way of making the pupils feel included in the family.
The boy, a jug-headed child of six with attention problems, starts to fidget and rustle, but Janaki doesn’t notice, over the music. Finally, Swarna sits up and takes the envelope out of the tyke’s hand. Senior Mami, noting the end of the standoff, immediately says, “Here.” But the sisters-in-law, lest anyone forget that they are burrs and must be plucked, and because it amuses them, have kept up their habit of disobeying their mother-in-law. Thus Swarna, hearing Senior Mami’s command, tears open the telegram.
Her eyes bulge, her jaw drops, and she gasps, “Janaki! Your sister!”
That evening, Janaki, accompanied by her husband, is on a bus bound for the town of Kumbakonam. She is wondering how much longer laughter can last in the world, now that it has been returned to its source. Like the heroine Sita, in the Ramayana, swallowed by the earth, Visalam has been taken by the giggling, gurgling River Kaveri in flood.
Janaki knows what the neighbours will be saying. There’s always someone who is taken, in every generation-the question is only who it will be and when. They all will have lost family members and will want to talk about them, and Janaki and her siblings will be forced to be polite while Visalam’s husband and children… how will they bear this loss?
Oh, how she hates the rainy season! Janaki slams the bus window’s shutter against the wet. Baskaran, at her side, says nothing. She starts weeping again and eventually falls asleep on his shoulder. In the dark, he lifts his hand to stroke her cheek and when she shifts, he brings her head to rest on his shoulder once more.
At Visalam’s family’s house, three matrons Janaki has never met rush at her, awash in tears. She feels her bile rising and dashes to bend over some bushes. Baskaran explains about the pregnancy and the ladies cluck. Janaki’s sisters and Visalam’s in-laws jockey past the strangers to take her arms, ushering her in toward a bath and sleep.
The stunned house is quiet. That’s not always the way when tragedy strikes a gregarious people. Visalam’s in-laws had loved Visalam as though she’d been born to them.
Her widower performs the necessary rites. He is in his early thirties but looks ten years older than he did the last time Janaki saw him, six months ago, his laugh lines like cuts in his gaunt face.
Saradha has come from Thiruchi; Sita from Tiruvannamalai; Laddu has brought Kamalam and Radhai from Cholapatti. He will return to Cholapatti for a week and bring Krishnan and Raghavan back for the thirteenth-day ceremony so they needn’t miss school. Vairum and Vani also arrive from Madras, in time to see Visalam’s ashes committed to the river that took her life.
The night they all gather, Sita wonders aloud if their father knows. “Does any of you have the least idea where he is?” She looks around at them, facing blank, weepy looks.
“I…” Laddu clears his throat inefficiently. “I had sent Vairum Mama a telegram asking him to inform our father. He is the only one of us who might know where he is!” he says defensively in response to several incredulous looks. “And Vairum Mama is honourable. He would have done it.”
Saradha looks at Sita with concern and says, “But maybe he didn’t.”
Kamalam bites her lip. “Or couldn’t find him.”
But the next night, when Laddu discreetly asks Vairum, Vairum assures him, “Oh, yes, I certainly did. Sent him a telegram.” Vairum smiles, softly sardonic, not without pity. “I didn’t offer to pay for his bus fare, though. He might have thought that an insult.”
“Where is he now?” Laddu asks, a bit too eagerly.
“He is very near, as it happens.” Vairum wears an even, appraising expression. “Thiruchi. Barely fifty miles.”
Laddu looks small and stammering. “And do you know he got it?”
“The telegram was sent to his home.” Vairum rises and stretches. “Presumably, he got it.” He looks around at Goli’s children, who look back at him, with Sivakami’s features, and Goli’s, and Thangam’s, and Vairum’s own, and the looks of ancestors none of them will ever know.
“Good night,” he bids them, and leaves for the chattram where he is lodged.
They are silent a while in this room they have been given, off the main hall. Everyone else is asleep. Then Sita explodes.
“Our father is a good-for-nothing! A good-for-nothing! Look at how he left us, vulnerable to Vairum Mama’s insults and jibes all these years!”
Her siblings shush her, telling her in whispers to sit, as she marches around the room, incensed.
“Vairum Mama was right! All of his slights against our father were absolutely right and I’m going to tell him so. Visalam was…” Here she gulps a little against a sob. “Visalam was a harmless soul and Appa couldn’t even come to bid her farewell. I know what you all think of me.” Saradha clucks in protest, but Sita doesn’t appear to hear, and none of her other siblings say anything. “But even I can see what an innocent soul she was. I wish he weren’t my father.”
Her siblings are surprised. None of them has felt compelled to make a declaration of the sort Sita makes the next day, to Vairum.
“Vairum Mama, I was critical of you all these years, trying to be loyal to my father. I regret that now,” she says, her voice trembling but clear. “You have done more than he ever has or will for our welfare. Thank you,” she declares, breaking down a little.
Vairum looks bemused and unabashedly triumphant. “It was, ahem…” he smiles. “It was my duty to my sister, as I saw it, and duty is an honour to uphold.”
“Yes.” Sita wags her head with martial vigour, even through tears. “It is.”
Janaki herself cannot help but contrast Baskaran’s ministrations with her father’s absence and her uncle’s passions. Baskaran stays at a guest house some ten minutes away for three days, coming to ceremonies, helping with logistics and children, offering graceful words of consolation. At the end of three days, he returns to Pandiyoor, where he is needed, but Janaki knows that he will return for the thirteenth-day ceremony.
She thinks, not for the first time, that if only he had a job and didn’t take snuff, he might be the perfect husband. When she speaks of him to Kamalam, though, as they lie side by side on their mats, taking this precious opportunity to exchange sisterly confidences, she emphasizes his faults, suspicious of the evil eye. Having seen two more households on the Pandiyoor Brahmin quarter reduced to penury through bad management of their family fortunes, she has started to wish, as her grandmother has from the start, that Baskaran were earning a regular income.
“But if he had a job,” Kamalam says, “like Saradha Akka’s and Sita Akka’s husbands, he wouldn’t be so flexible. It’s very good of him to come here and help. The old ways had their benefits.”
Janaki concedes. Baskaran is traditional in all the ways she likes: loyal to home and parents, upholding caste strictures out of deference to them, and in the interests of continuity She really shouldn’t complain.
Janaki journeys to Cholapatti shortly after the passing-on ceremony to spend some time with her grandmother. Sivakami protests that she will be fine, that Janaki shouldn’t be travelling more than necessary in her condition, but Janaki insists. Baskaran escorts her and stays three days on Gayatri’s hospitality, since protocol forbids a husband from staying in his wife’s home.