Visitors continue to arrive, even from neighbouring villages and towns, people whom Hanumarathnam has healed. Not one child in his village is now sick with the fever. Each family will carry out its pledge, to carry fire or milk to Mariamman’s temple during her annual festival, yet each grieves the imminent passing of the man who came as close to science as any they have known. Sivakami hears their remarks, floating in from the main hall to the kitchen with the tch-tch of clucking tongues.
“Such a shame…”
“Such a young man…”
“Oh, what will we do!”
“You know, his first concern was always for us…”
She stays in the kitchen, churning out delicacies to keep their mouths busy so they’ll talk less, to keep her hands busy so her heart will forget to break.
Vairum charges in from the garden, looking for his mother, wanting her to come and see how cozy the stone family is, stowed in their cave against the elements. He gallops through the main hall toward the kitchen, but his father’s eldest sister grabs his arm. It’s nearly yanked out of its socket, so intent is he on the kitchen and so abrupt is the detention.
The aunt pulls Vairum toward her large face and booms, “Hallo, my boy, taking care of your father?” and then speaks to the others over Vairum’s head. “This is the ugly one. His sister’s out on the veranda.”
Vairum wrenches away from her and barrels once more for the kitchen. Now he is intercepted by a neighbour, who wants him to eat a snack from a large tray she carries. He doesn’t want any, but her grip on his arm is tight. When he tugs the captive limb free, it flings upward, slamming into the tray and sending its contents airward. Consistent with his generous nature, Vairum has distributed the snacks equally among all persons in the room.
Silence falls with a thud and awakens Hanumarathnam, who sits bolt upright from a mumbling sleep. With calm resolve, he seeks out Sivakami’s eyes where she stands in the kitchen doorway. Across the multitude that separates them, he summons her with a slight movement of his head.
Now: no middle-class Brahmin wife with any kind of breeding walks through the main hall and talks to her husband in front of guests, and today these guests include her sisters-in-law, who would subject her to no end of criticism, both to her face and behind her back, alone and in mixed company. Though Sivakami is spirited, brave and has had reason to feel encouraged in her life, she cannot obey her husband this time.
Instead, she silently iterates the names of the gods, her children’s need for a father, Hanumarathnam’s relative youth. She cannot completely banish, though, the feeling that if his time has come, she is powerless. How can she stop the progress of Yama’s water buffalo?
Hanumarathnam looks at her a long moment, and her eyes are held in his. His sisters will later liken her to a frightened young goat, unable to move though a tiger walks toward it. A little part of them wants to hear her bawl like a captured kid, but this doesn’t happen. They never see Sivakami cry. She doesn’t permit it.
When Vairum ran into the house, Muchami had left on rounds of some landholdings. He has tried not to let the worries at the house keep him from his tasks. He goes along the canal that runs behind the houses, since he will not walk on the Brahmin street except in the company of a Brahmin, and at the end pauses a moment to spit a red stream of betel juice into the long, green grasses. As he straightens, his eyes grow wide. The largest water buffalo he has ever seen, its coat a lustrous pewter, its massive horns curving out at their tips, is strolling along the Brahmin quarter, unaccompanied by cart or driver. Muchami moves to behind the temple and, mesmerized by the water buffalo’s swaying hump, watches it until it is in front of Hanumarathnam’s house. Then the servant pivots and darts back along the narrow path behind the Brahmin-quarter houses.
Inside the house, Hanumarathnam’s head falls back, exhaling a word that sounds, to at least half the people in the room, like “podhail.”
His sisters, standing closest to him, hear the word and their eyes meet. Podhail: buried treasure. The possibilities of that word occupy the sisters’ thoughts as their younger, only, brother dies.
In that moment, Vairum, having run out to the garden in a tantrum, has kicked all the carefully cleared earth back into the hole under their house. He wets the earth with tears and stamps it and pounds it, his mouth pulled down in an ugly shape, until the place is packed flat. The child of the black-diamond eyes, his golden, oblivious sister, his tiny mother, his slim, dead father, their Muchami-buried forever. Podhail.
They will find Vairum here later, asleep with his head on the ground. They will awaken him, wipe his earth-streaked face and explain that now he is the man of the house. He will learn he has work to do.
6. Siddha Song 1904-1905
IT IS INCREDIBLE TO SIVAKAMI that Hanumarathnam spent years preparing her for his passing. She is shocked by the heat of bereavement: a pyretic pain behind her eyelids and in the unseen caverns of her body. She doesn’t cry and is aware that observers, such as her husband’s sisters, remark this. She feels she contains floods of tears, but they are boiled dry before they can spill.
And the house, too, is alight with funereal activity, the throngs of well-wishers turned chorus, ushering Hanumarathnam’s spirit forward. Sivakami is bidden to wear her best clothes, her finest jewels, during the ten days it will take for that to happen.
His body is dressed in new, unsoiled clothes such as are worn only by the dead and taken to the cremation ground. Little Vairum will light his father’s pyre. This is one reason everyone needs a son.
At the cremation ground, Sivakami does not tell her children that their father is within the blaze. This seems unnecessary. When Vairum runs ahead and picks something off the ground, Muchami slaps it from his hand. It is a bone, but no one explains this. As he throws a burning faggot on his father’s pyre, Vairum is crying because Muchami wouldn’t let him have that white stone.
A little shrine is built beside the Ramar, to house Hanumarathnam’s soul. Thangam, her hair loose, like Sivakami’s, to show their grief, learns to make rice balls, which are offered daily at the tiny shrine. This is one reason everyone needs a daughter.
Sivakami tells her children that their father has gone away, and that the little shrine is like a playhouse where his soul lives, and the rice balls are like pretend food for him. Thangam seems to like this idea. Over the thirteen days of mourning, brushing her long, unbound hair out of her face, she brings extra decorations for the shrine, some tiny play dishes and her own picture of baby Krishna. Vairum takes little interest.
Now that her husband is truly gone, Sivakami feels an odd eagerness for the ceremonies that will brand her a widow. A woman whose husband dies before her is, in some cosmic, karmic way, responsible for his death, and must be contained. The best way to do this is to make her unattractive: no vermilion dot to draw attention to the eyes, no turmeric to rub on the skin for brightness, no incense to suffuse the hair, no jasmine bunches to ornament it. No hair to suffuse, but that comes later.
Still wearing the bright colours she now loathes, she is paraded down the main street to the Kaveri, escorted by her father, her eldest brother and Vairum. On the riverbank, in a ceremony as old as men and women, her brother tears Sivakami’s blouse at the back, and she is made to remove it. She unties the saffron thread of the thirumangalyam and drops it into the pot of milk her son holds for her. She feels her bile rise and viscerally understands why her wedding pendants’ hot anger might need to be cooled.