Cunjusamy’s voice is a full octave higher than normal. “Home! Asleep!”
“All night?”
“I can’t remember!”
The policeman, who is young and smartly turned out, wheels away. He walks along the bench to the end of the hall. Facing the door, he pulls out his billy stick and whacks the bench on the far end of which Cunjusamy is quivering. It cracks down the entire length of its grain. The policeman sighs, regains his composure, turns around and flips to the next page of his pad. “Can you remember yet?”
Cunjusamy starts to blubber. “I told them, I told them everything, I am not a wealthy man. I know I have a big house, but I have a big family, and so many people are not paying me, and…”
Chinnarathnam leans forward. “You made a hole in each door.”
Cunjusamy answers through boo-hoos, “Yes.”
“You picked the lock. With a pin?” the policeman asks.
“Yes.”
“You went through three doors, then made a hole in the door to the main hall, then you didn’t go in and didn’t steal the money.”
“Yes. No! I mean, no. I mean…”
“What I said was right?” the officer says.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you steal the money?”
“I told them, it was the policemen. Four policemen, posed, like a picture, three standing, one kneeling, like, like…” Cunjusamy casts around. “Like that!” He points to the Ramar.
Muchami has backed up against the eastern wall of the house so that he alone can see both Sivakami and the interrogation. He looks at her; she wags her head: the house will be safe, not because of policemen or neighbours, but because her gods are protecting her.
Muchami clears his throat. “Sir, thank you, sir. Amma is satisfied that he won’t do it again.”
The police officer frowns. “Are you sure? This blackguard…”
Muchami looks to Sivakami again, and she wags her head more definitively.
“Sir, yes, that’s enough, sir.” Muchami, too, is wagging his head vigorously. “Please, sir, keep the notes, yes, everything, but that is enough, sir. The house will be safe.”
Murthy, too, wags his head as though satisfied. Chinnarathnam, too, concedes. It seems a bit abrupt, but he can’t dispute her judgment. He glances quizzically at the Ramar and, on their way back along the Brahmin quarter, asks Muchami what he thinks happened. The servant echoes Sivakami’s thought: the policemen’s appearance is a miracle.
The nephew, who had to suppress a cheer when the billy stick broke the bench, is disappointed that the interview is so brief. He points at Cunjusamy: “And don’t you forget it, fatso.”
Cunjusamy sneers and pulls back his hand as if to strike. The nephew insolently turns and saunters after the policeman. By the time they reach the main road into Kulithalai, he has asked three times to carry the billy stick.
9. High Time 1907
WHEN THANGAM COMPLETES HER FIRST SEVEN YEARS, Sivakami’s family starts making noises on the subject of the girl’s marriage. Sivakami’s father begins and Kamu, her eldest sister-in-law, nods her lip-pursed agreement. Their strong opinion (stronger for being not at all original) is that it is high time. Kamu’s husband, Sambu, a roomy, sedentary man, is less enthusiastic than he should be-arranging a wedding is a lot of work and all that work is the brothers’. Their father, since his wife’s death, has largely withdrawn from family life and obligations. The middle son, Venketu, who is unnaturally energetic, annoys his elder brother with ambitious proclamations about the match they will make their niece.
With respectful comments on their brother-in-law’s renown as an astrologer, they request Thangam’s horoscope. Sivakami goes to her trunk, which now contains only the palm-leaf bundles and the carved sandalwood box. She had aired the clothes out on arrival, set them on their allotted shelf with her Ramayana and not opened the trunk since. Now she lifts out the long, slim box and sets it on the floor in front of her.
She bends to breathe the ancient scent-rich, antiseptic, vaguely obscene-of the sandal tree’s protected parts, the heartwood and roots. She is trembling a little with an old, familiar flush of resentment at her responsibilities: she has never opened the box, inside which are the leaves whose graven words have caused her loneliness. In the scent is every morning, when her husband ground a block of sandal against a dampened black stone to make a paste, to anoint the foreheads of their gods and each other and their children. It is the scent of her husband’s forehead when she bent over hi0.as he slept.
Sivakami exhales and straightens, and as she does so, her shoulder blades, which had spread slightly, lock back into place. The breath of good memory has steadied her to open the box. As she lifts the lid, she feels an icy breeze escape and curl around the back of her neck. Thangam’s horoscope is on top. Sivakami lifts it out and shuts the box without looking farther. She doesn’t think until later that Vairum’s would have logically been in that place, since he was born after Thangam. Hanumarathnam must have put Vairum’s beneath their daughter’s. He would have known that Thangam’s marriage would come before their son’s, and he must have realized that if Sivakami, not he, was opening the box, she would have reason not to want to see Vairum’s horoscope.
The brothers take the palm leaves to the corner astrologer. He quacks over them briefly, threads a silver stylus through the hole in his index fingernail and doodles out his pronouncements on a supplementary leaf. He slips this appendix onto a couple of pegs and stacks the original four leaves on top of it. The holes line up, but he seems to cut his leaves slightly larger than the standard two-by-eight-inches, or Hanumarathnam cut his smaller: the edge of the update leaf protrudes as though the little-known local garnished and trimmed Hanumarathnam’s predictions, readied them to be served.
The brothers return with long faces. Sivakami, scooping rice onto a plate in the kitchen, hears her eldest brother, Sambu, telling his wife, “She’s got a tough one.”
The wives are not ill-intentioned, but the eagerness of their concern is evident as they ask, “What-what does it say?”
Sivakami pauses to listen to Sambu’s reply.
“It says… whoever she marries, he’s going to die young.”
“Ayoh!” The exclamation comes from Kamu, Sambu’s wife.
Meenu, the second, echoes her, muttering, “Ayoh, ayoh.” She shakes her head and whispers, “Young widow.”
Sivakami comes out to serve lunch and they fall quiet. Ecchu raises her hands to her lips, seemingly to hide a nervous grimace. Sivakami goes back into the kitchen to fetch other items and thinks, This is also the fate that awaits my daughter?
While the men have their afternoon rest, the women discuss marriage even more than usual-and this is a much-discussed subject. With the subversiveness that compensates for but never threatens the domestic hierarchy, Sivakami’s sisters-in-law talk to her of the inaccuracy of horoscopes.
Ecchu overcomes her customary remove to tell of a boy in her family who wanted to marry his cousin. “She was a nice girl, beautiful girl, suited to him in every way except that her horoscope said her husband’s brother would die. So the boy’s elder brother’s wife objected, ‘No. If this marriage is conducted, I will be a widow!’ But the boy insisted, ‘If I do not marry this girl, I will not marry. At all.’ What could the family do? They could not leave their son unmarried. The older brother had already had children. So the cousins married, and guess what? No one died, not the brother, nobody. Thirty happy years later, the boy himself, the groom, died. Just last year. The older brother still lives, even today.”
The sisters-in-law nod and pat their babies. Meenu chips in spunkily with another story. “Yes, my sister, she had a horoscope that said her mother-in-law would die. My brothers showed it around, but no one would accept. Then they heard of a widow lady and thought she might consent, but when she saw the horoscope, she chased them out of the house with a big stick!”