42. Touring Talkies 1952
JANAKI UNFOLDS THE NEWSPAPER and comes face to face with a face she last saw in front of the Madurai chattram, seven years earlier, before the palanquin curtains fell and ended the scene.
She feels the need to smooth her kitchen-puffed hair and re-pleat her sari pallu, which is crumpled and tucked like a crying infant over her shoulder and into her waist. She feels as skinny and provincial as she did as a child, when Bharati used to look past her much as she is now looking past Janaki from Janaki’s lap.
The photo accompanies an article, and half of the page opposite is taken up with a movie advertisement. It has a border composed of a drawing of Bharati in a three-quarter view expressing pleasure and dismay as though in response to a declaration of illicit love, blending into the valiant leading man, and then into the conniving, mustachioed villain. These images twist like a vine from a tableau along the bottom: Bharati, flowing hair escaping her widow’s whites as she wrenches her wrist from one of the men.
The article in Dinamani is a packet of the standard glowing rot: “Miss Bharati, the product of a modest, middle-class home in Kulithalai, always had a great love of music and was encouraged by her mother and father to pursue it seriously. Of course, her parents expected her to perform at home only, but Miss Bharati has taken a vow to marry her art only. She has been most inspired by the example of Sri Rukmini Devi, alias Mrs. Arundale, whose thrilling debut onto the Madras stage helped Miss Bharati to convince her doting parents that the Indian classical arts can and must be practised by respectable girls. ‘It is a necessary step in the building of an independent, modern nation,’ said Miss Bharati, an ardent nationalist, who is twenty years complete.” Janaki wonders if the paper colluded or was duped into knocking eight years off Bharati’s age.
She folds the paper and lies back on the low, narrow cot she has had built for the women’s room. She has done the kolam, bathed, dressed and fed her children, sent Thangajothi off to school, consulted with the kitchen staff and overseen the start of the day’s preparations. The servants should be leaving any minute with her twin sons, taking them back to their village just as she went back to Muchami’s. This gives her a precious half-hour to look through the newspaper before taking a bath, doing her puja and giving the Sanskrit tutorial at the paadasaalai. She’s excited these days because there is one new pupil who is quite talented. His gifts took her by surprise because his skin is so dark: she didn’t think he looked so bright when he arrived. Now, she finds herself planning special challenges for him, just as young Kesavan did for her and Bharati.
Her sons, Sundar and Amarnath, active two-year-olds, gallop in, damp and toasty from playing in the garden. Every day, they come in at this time and act as though it were a delightful surprise to find her, nearly prone, vulnerable to their attack. Today, they cheer: “Hip hip hooray!” She wonders if they learned the English syllables from their cousin Shyama, a bright boy bound for a bad end. Hers are good boys, she can tell already, and they will remain so if she can keep them from bad influences: Amarnath, a reflective boy who she hopes will outgrow his propensity to cry easily, and Sundar, a resilient bouncy sort who will certainly try his teachers and be beaten but never broken. They are inseparable, which as far as she is concerned is only good.
They throw themselves on her, Sundar with a roar, Amarnath with a squeak, and she submits, pressing their heads to her to quiet them, because grandchildren are not among Senior Mami’s interests. Thankfully, she hears the servants call that the prams are ready to go. She kisses the boys and pulls from under the cot a box of wooden blocks they can take with them. The blocks are painted with English letters; Baskaran bought them in Madurai last year.
She returns to wondering how long it will be before Clouds in the Eyes, Bharati’s debut vehicle, comes through Pandiyoor with one of the touring talkies.
Janaki used to say she had never been to the cinema; now she says she has not been yet. She waited until the most conservative families on the Brahmin quarter started permitting their children before she would consider it for hers, though she still has not gone, nor has Thangajothi. Movie-going doesn’t cause the gossip it might have once, but it’s one of Janaki’s points of pride to do everything possible to uphold conservative values in their household.
Folding the newspaper with a noisy yawn, she curls onto her side for a catnap. Clouds in the Eyes, she decides, will be her debut experience, too.
At half past three, Thangajothi arrives home from school, cranky because she is ravenous, and unwilling, as always, to eat. She’s a bright girl, but complicated. With her is her cousin, Shyama, who is singing.
“Caw! Caw! Caw!” he bellows, the refrain of one of the season’s most popular songs.
Sundar leaps and hinges himself to Shyama’s side, Amarnath falls in behind. They’ve already joined in the chorus, a terrible, joyful caw-caw-phony. Janaki ignores them in the way of young mothers, wearing her authority with little grace. She fetches balls of thaingai maavu and instructs them to break bananas off the stalk in the pantry, pulls Thangajothi onto her lap and force-feeds her while Shyama entertains them.
He went to the touring talkies last night with his elder brothers, neither of whom made it to college, but who make it to the movies several times a month. Shyama is the youngest child of one of Baskaran’s sisters. She married into Tamapakkam, Pandiyoor’s other half, across the Vaigai. The groom turned out to be a Communist, which unfortunately resulted in an aversion to work, a love of sloganeering, and a pressing desire to give away his inheritance the moment it dropped into his hands. As a result, he has a lifetime honorary membership in the Communist Party and several unions for trades he has never practised while his family lives on what Baskaran can eke out for his sister by investing the dowry her husband naturally refused. She had capitulated to her husband in naming their first three children-Stalin and Lenin, and a daughter, Russia -but insisted the last have the name of her favourite composer, Shyama Sastri.
Shyama spends more waking time in Janaki’s house than in his own, because the food and the audiences are so much better. As he snacks, he renders for them, line by line, note by scene, the film he saw last night, one of the year’s causes célèbres. It tells the story of the youngest of three brothers, doing business in Burma during the war, who travels home to Madurai for his sister’s wedding. En route, however, he is duped and robbed, left penniless in the city. His sister marries, but loses her husband and her father in accidents on the very day she gives birth to a child. Their house is sold and she, too, embarks on a life of difficulty: she is forced to borrow money; she tries to make a living selling idlis; she works in the house of a corrupt, high-caste man who tries to seduce her. What she doesn’t know is that her brother, Gunasekharan, has been, in the guise of a madman, keeping an eye on her.
Shyama acts out all the scenes with verve and conviction but reserves a special energy for the songs, whose lyrics are full of attempts at political subversion. One, a siddha song, goes, “If a rich man tells a lie, it will be taken as a truth… Money makes leaders of fools… Even when crying over a dead body, watch your pockets!” The song Shyama had been singing when he entered the house asks why all men cannot simply share with their brethren, the way crows do.
“Caw! Caw! Caw! Beggars fight for food in the trash, while the mighty fight for money! Crows always call one another to share food, but people, never… Caw! Caw! Caw!”