“We must look after one another, care for our own. Like crows, yes. Otherwise, we will no longer know ourselves.”

She has no idea, from Shyama’s expression, what he has taken from her speech, but she can see that her daughter is listening.

Two MORE LETTERS COME FROM MADRAS and this time Janaki is the one to receive them. The first, from Saradha, says that Sita has said, in notes on a slate, that she doesn’t imagine their grandmother knows anything of her illness. She herself did not tell Amma, but wanted to wait until she recovered to go and tell her in person and seek her blessing. The sisters feel they must permit her this, but the next letter, which arrives two months later, from Kamalam, says that Sita will not recover. Evidently, the cancer has spread: Sita is now dying.

Gathered in Madras, the siblings confer.

“I told Amma I was coming here on business,” Laddu confesses, “like I did last time. How can I tell her? She will want to come, and you know Vairum Mama doesn’t want that. It would be a debacle.”

Raghavan alone among them is in favour of bringing Sivakami to Madras. “Think: it could make them reconcile, when Vairum Mama sees her. Some good could come of this.”

His reasoning is not without validity, though all of the others are deeply skeptical. If Vairum felt pity for his mother, wouldn’t he have brought her there himself?

It is Krishnan who suggests, “Why don’t we ask Sitakka what she wants? ”

Sita is now lucid only for brief periods, when the morphine wears off or when it is first taking hold. Just after she receives a dose, but before she drifts off, they put the question to her. She takes up a piece of chalk and scratches dim letters on a slate: “No. It would hurt her too…”

Three days later, she dies. Among her effects, they find a sealed letter to Sivakami, and one to her brothers and sisters, whose contents are roughly the same. When the funeral is concluded, the granddaughters all go with Laddu to Cholapatti, to deliver the first to their grandmother.

Sivakami is instantly alarmed on seeing them. Saradha asks her to sit, and when she has, Laddu gives her the letter.

Dear Amma…

Sivakami starts to cry, in fear, it seems. Five months have passed since she last saw her grandchildren, all together for the holidays. She puts the letter down, dries her eyes and her palms on her sari and picks it up again.

You used to tell me I had a malignant tongue, and that it would be my ruin. Tell, God is finally punishing me: I won’t see my children grow up. I didn’t know my sins were so great, but what do we know? My illness has taught me how small and insignificant I really am.

I don’t have much longer now, I can feel that. My sisters will tell you details if you want them: I had cancer of the tongue, but even after the doctors removed my tongue, the cancer was not gone.

The one blessing that I have received is that, just as you and Vairum Mama cared for us when we were growing up, he and Vani Mami will raise my sons. They have wanted and deserved children for so long. It is some consolation to me that my sons will have a mother. My husband and I have given them leave to adopt.

Please don’t blame my brothers and sisters for not having brought you to Madras to see me. It is better you remember me as I was.

Your ever-loving granddaughter,

Sita

Sivakami shudders. She considers chastising her grandchildren but feels a cool cloud of reason settling over her: Sita evidently told them not to bring her, and why? She didn’t want to jeopardize the adoption by going against Vairum’s wishes. Sivakami doesn’t think it would have, but now Sita is gone, and Vairum is a father.

She realizes she has been silent a long time and looks at Saradha, Kamalam, Radhai and Janaki, who are holding hands and weeping. Their sorrow must be combined with guilt, for shocking their grandmother, especially after the fact, for not having liked Sita more, perhaps even for questioning Sita’s motives in the adoption: her sons, born to a lower-middle-class household, will be raised in riches. Their house may not have sons for seven generations, Sivakami thinks ruefully, but who knows whether those old rules even hold sway any more.

She goes to take the ritual bath that must follow immediately on news of a relative’s death. She is feeling, also with guilt, another emotion she can’t stop. A son of her son, a son of her son. As if borne on a train, a rush of images fill her mind’s eye: Vairum with two children, coming to show them to her, his snapping black-diamond eyes softened by affection, delight, pride, all the emotions denied to him all these years. Now that her wishes for him have all come true, he will bring the boys and they will all be hers again, the house lit with their laughter.

Some weeks later, Janaki’s daughter Thangajothi, is coming home from school, her cousin Shyama absorbed in a book beside her. Their bullock cart passes a row of huts they pass every day and a woman emerges to scrape a pile of rice out of a pot into the shallow roadside ditch. As the children’s bullock cart continues up the road, Thangajothi sees a crow circle and land, find the rice and start to eat.

He eats alone for a full five minutes before he calls his fellows. “Caw! Caw! Caw!”

43. Bharati Moves In 1957

A HULLABALOO STARTS UP in the back of the concert hall, and Vairum and Vani’s five-year-old sons, Kartik and Kashyap, jump onto their folding chairs to have a look. As Janaki reaches for them with an angry warning, Sundar and Amarnath clamber up to copy their cousins. When she turns to yell at them, Kartik’s chair folds and he falls through. Janaki pulls the crying child up and sits him on her knee to dust him off, and glances apologetically at Vani, who is onstage tuning her veena, and apparently as oblivious to the commotion in the front row as to that in the back. The other boys have been distracted by the accident, but now Thangajothi is wandering toward the aisle to have a look at who is arriving-some politician or musician they wouldn’t even know, probably-and Janaki orders her back unceremoniously. Celebrities are everywhere through the Madras concert season.

On stage, a man in his twenties, tipped toward a polio-stunted leg, his wavy hair slicked into a kudumi that now looks like a proclamation of adherence to old fashions, squawks through acknowledgements and sycophancies on behalf of the group that sponsors this venue, one of the best attended in the Madras concert season. Eventually, two assistants weighed down by fat floral garlands emerge from stage left. The MC sways and swivels toward Vani and her accompanists to pay them the honours, which they accept and refuse at once-removing the decorations even as these hit their shoulders-in the spirit of this democratic age: “ThankyoupleasenothankyouIamnotworthy.”

Janaki and the children, as special guests of the featured artist, are in the front row. She gets the children settled as the rest of the audience clap, but they get restless again within minutes of Vani beginning the kirthanai, and Janaki rearranges them, so that Kartik is on the other side of Thangajothi, and Kashyap between her and Janaki. Sundar is to Janaki’s right and Amarnath on the other side of him-if Janaki can separate her children from their younger cousins, she can trust them to behave, but Vairum and Vani’s boys are difficult under any circumstances and she is already grimly anticipating that she will miss most of the concert. She would have preferred to leave them at home with the help, but she wanted her own children to come and it was difficult to bring them without pointing up the younger boys’ unmanageability.

She’s made her peace with not paying full attention to Vani’s playing; she has had the equivalent of a private concert each of the last few days as Vani has practised at home, and she will stay with Vani and Vairum ten days longer. It’s Janaki’s first time attending the Madras concert season. She intends to relish it. She taps Kartik’s and Kashyap’s knees sternly. Thangajothi stares dreamily at the stage. It’s already breaking Janaki’s heart that her daughter is not musical. Amarnath is the only one of her children with real promise in this department. Baskaran got him a first-class mridangam two years ago, and an excellent tutor. Sundar is made to participate in the lessons and makes no pretense of gaining anything from them, but is not jealous of his brother’s talent. Thangajothi attends veena and vocal lessons with two of her school chums at a neighbour’s. Janaki insists on the lessons but never makes Thangajothi practise at home because she can’t bear to listen.