One day a few weeks after he starts work for them, Muchami is sorting through the produce in the back courtyard by the well, entertaining Sivakami, who sits on the platform behind the kitchen with the baby in her lap, by commenting on the vegetables in the voice of their preferred kerosene merchant. The kerosene seller has a strange condition: his voice, every few phrases, shoots up briefly and involuntarily into a falsetto. Muchami maintains a deadpan monologue on the vegetables, not breaking rhythm at all for the falsetto interludes. “Okra aren’t bad, though he kept slipping these little-little rotten ones in among the good. I called him on it, picked them out and said, ‘Who’re you trying to fool?’”
Sivakami, after a brief attempt to restrain her giggles, breaks down. Muchami starts adding effeminate prancing to the high-pitched bits, still with no break in work or words, until Sivakami is nearly collapsing with laughter.
Glancing up, she sees Hanumarathnam has come to the pantry entrance, attracted by her laughter. He looks amused and curious, but Muchami stops when he notices his employer and stands with his head bowed. Sivakami, too, stops laughing, and Hanumarathnam says, “What? Why so solemn as soon as I show up?” They smile at him shyly and he withdraws with affectionate exasperation, but Sivakami feels sick with anger now, at herself, and even more, at Hanumarathnam. Muchami tries to resume clowning a little but quickly sees that she is no longer in the mood.
How dare my husband trick me into accepting this? Sivakami stomps inside and puts the baby in the cloth hammock where he sleeps, rocking it silently and a little too hard, until the baby’s wails jolt her into slowing down and beginning a lullaby. She takes a deep breath. Here I am, acting normal, after my husband has said he is going to die.
WEEKS ACCELERATE INTO MONTHS. Sivakami and Hanumarathnam’s son has come to be called Vairum, “diamond,” in contrast to Thangam’s gold. One of Hanumarathnam’s sisters created the nickname, when, holding the baby, she said with a little shiver, “Ooh-look at how his eyes glitter-so cold!” She stopped, suddenly aware of how Sivakami might take this. An elder sister-in-law didn’t really need to be concerned with Sivakami’s feelings, but she didn’t want to offend her little brother. “Your little diamond!” she added in a shrill disclaimer, and Sivakami accepted the suggestion, choosing to pretend the entire comment had been in goodwill and good taste. (The sister-in-law had not yet discovered ice, or Vairum might have been named for that chill substance.)
Vairum is a very different child from his elder sister. Unlike Thangam, he craves attention. He complains loudly until he is picked up and comforted. Fortunately, also unlike Thangam, he is the normal weight of a skinny Indian baby, and so not a great burden to his tiny mother. While Vairum’s stare contains unmistakable longing, no one but Sivakami and Thangam is tempted to carry and cuddle the boy with the pinched features and cold, dark eyes. Tempted least of all is his father. Hanumarathnam keeps very occupied with healing and agriculture, his studies, his training of Sivakami and Muchami. He always has a small joke and a cuddle for his daughter, but nothing for his son. Sivakami holds Vairum tight whenever she can, covering him with kisses and words of adoration. Where Thangam, at six months, nursed six times daily with perfect regularity, Vairum demands the breast capriciously like the little king he is and should be. Sivakami nearly always complies, stopping what she is doing to take him into the room under the stairs, holding him in her lap as he idly sucks and fiddles with her thirumangalyam, the wedding pendants that otherwise are dropped out of sight in her blouse.
On one afternoon, after Vairum finishes nursing, Sivakami is playing with him, lifting him horizontally to blow against his tummy, luxuriating in his baby skin and the rich sound of his giggles. She looks up to see Hanumarathnam, watching through the doorway as though it’s a portal between this life and the next. She holds the baby out to him, exasperated: no matter what is coming, nothing in life is denied to him now. But he takes a step back and she clasps Vairum again to her breast.
She wishes she could talk to Hanumarathnam about the despair and estrangement she sees on his face, but when she tries, she finds she pities him too much. She is grateful she doesn’t have to live with such feelings toward her children; she doesn’t know how she could talk Hanumarathnam into feeling any different. She persuades him a couple of times to hold the child, thinking he can’t help but fall in love if he does so, but Hanumarathnam looks so stiff and helpless that she takes Vairum back. And the little boy’s eyes, so often trained on his father, are full of unreciprocated desire.
Perhaps through some ineffectual cosmic attempt to remedy this injustice, Thangam is as infatuated with her little brother as the rest of the world is with her. She insists on helping her mother bathe the baby; she rocks him, pats him, sings to him, seems oblivious to any child’s existence save his, even while children on the veranda call for her daily.
When Vairum is nearly eleven months old, they shave his hair-it takes three of them, Sivakami, Murthy and Rukmini, to hold him still-and make a pilgrimage to Palani Mountain, where they offer it to the deity. On his first birthday, he is held on Sivakami’s eldest brother’s knee and his ears are pierced. He screams and thrashes so violently that Sivakami wonders if one of the demons who should be placated by these rituals has got the wrong message. Thangam stands close by-she who whimpered as her head was shaved and burbled with silent tears at her own piercing-trying to soothe the baby.
Hanumarathnam, on these days, says nothing. He always turns so as not to have to see the little boy, who watches his father as Thangam watches the baby, and Sivakami watches them all, knowing nothing can compensate for Vairum’s deprivation. None but a father can give a father’s love.
MONTHS SPEED PAST. Hanumarathnam and Sivakami have been married now for almost eight years.
She has been enjoying her new responsibilities. She has known many women who do their families’ accounting and make their financial and strategic decisions. Many wives do these jobs because their husbands are less than competent. The wives’ work is accepted but never acknowledged. She is the first she has known whose husband has trained her at these tasks, shown faith in and approval of her abilities. And with Muchami’s presence already so strong in the fields, her husband’s absence will hardly be noticed out there.
She realizes that she has begun to accept the way he has tricked her into being practical, into living with his death. She hardly recalls the resentment she first had toward Muchami.
And in the night, every night, Hanumarathnam turns to her. They might go through the movements for procreation or pleasure, but on these nights, the fire is fed on fear of death. Sometimes, as Sivakami marches tenderly through the requirements of his siddhic practices, she wonders with each movement, is this the one that will give him long life? She is a Brahmin, she cannot make him into a siddha. She supposes he could become one, if he chose. But then, that would mean renouncing caste, and if he were not a Brahmin, she could not be married to him, so what purpose would that serve?
She often rises after Hanumarathnam’s rough breathing has deepened into post-coital rest. Her sleep now is rare and slight, between her worries and Vairum’s nocturnal wakings. She lights a kerosene lamp and does beadwork by the bad light. Night after sleepless night, contrary to all her mother’s severe warnings, Sivakami finds her sight improves from the exercises. The tiny glass beads dance with the flame, sometimes they seem to her almost to sing, as she sits before the Ramar, working and praying and wondering about the future.