Sivakami would have preferred to give Muchami the dignity of a private conference, but this is not a private matter. Mother and uncles keep their eyes stonily upon the recalcitrant Muchami as Sivakami raises her eyebrows at him. He stands, hands clasped respectfully before him, looking very tired of the whole business. Sivakami instructs, “You must obey your mother and marry your uncle’s daughter.”
Muchami looks at the ground.
Sivakami continues, “Your mother and uncle are going to fix another date and then there will be no more of this nonsense. How can I have a man working for me who is not married? It is my duty, as much as a parent’s, to make sure you live in a correct way. I forbid you to persist in this behaviour. And I give my whole and hearty blessings on your marriage.”
Angamma flings herself into blessings for Sivakami and her children and her children’s children. She and the uncles and a subdued Muchami depart.
After his rounds, Muchami returns to finish going over the accounts. He gives no sign of resenting the admonishment.
Angamma brooks no more delay. Within a week, the marriage is done. Sivakami is not invited to attend the marriage-as a Brahmin, she cannot attend lower-caste weddings (and as a widow, she cannot attend Brahmin weddings)-but she hears that all has proceeded in a satisfactory way.
Now all that remains is for the bride to come of age so the happy couple can be united physically, as they already have been spiritually.
13. A Hidden Coin 1908
IT’S BEEN TEN DAYS SINCE THEIR RETURN, and Vairum is sitting in the front hall, waiting to go back to the place where he was a happy child.
He had had fun on the first day, helping to gather coins from all over the main hall. They had even let him keep one that he inched out from a crack in the base of the Ramar statue. He tied it in the waist of his dhoti and is fingering it now.
The second day, he had gone out with Thangam. She took her old place on the veranda, while he circled the gathering children from behind. Half the crowd drew near her, half approached him. He could hear them, gently asking his sister questions to which she softly replied. The children around her got quieter and gentler. When they realized they would never coax her from the veranda, they settled around her, one girl holding her hand, another patting her hair, several others calmly sunning themselves in her presence.
The children who encircled Vairum were those who could not get near Thangam, and yet they seemed a different breed entirely.
“Hey, ratface!” one boy taunted in a low voice, poking Vairum in the side experimentally.
Vairum recoiled, shaken, but then thought to distract these potential playmates by asking the question that had started so many enjoyable hours in Samanthibakkam: “What have you got to trade?”
It was a simple question, but these children seemed not to understand. Vairum tried another. “Want me to add or subtract anything?”
They had grown silent but were still peering at him, moving closer and closer, until, of a moment, one’s hand reached out to tug his hair and another cried, “Boo!”
Vairum leaped from the veranda and broke into a run.
The children gave chase, straight down the length of the Brahmin quarter and past the temple onto one of the small paths leading into the farmlands. Vairum streaked ahead of them, wondering why he was running and where he was going and how he would find his way back afterward when his ankle caught on a root and he sailed into the road with such force that he slid a couple of feet.
He rolled onto his back and propped himself by inches until he was sitting, knees bent, bum dirty, wiping dust from his lips and teeth. The children were panting and laughing. One of his knees and the opposite elbow were badly scraped. A little girl with square, tough-looking features cuffed him, hard but not unaffectionately, on the head.
He shouted at them, “Two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five times sixty-nine is one lakh, ninety-five thousand six hundred and fifteen!” and defiantly waited for them to be impressed.
They looked at one another, trying, apparently, to see how they should react. The boy who poked him first made a “cuckoo” sign, twirling his finger against his temple; another, hiking up his dust-stained dhoti, asked Vairum, “Yeah, so?”
But they didn’t stop him from trudging home. He wiped his nose so roughly on his dhoti that his eyes stung. He felt for the silver coin knocking warm and heavy against his hip, took it out and thought about how the children back in Samanthibakkam would appreciate it, what fun it would buy them on his return.
A blur of children were clustered at the front of his house. As he passed them to enter, a few wrinkled their noses and whispered, “Ratface!” A couple laughed. Thangam softly said, “Stop that,” and the children immediately around her froze in apology, but Vairum didn’t hear her and mounted their front steps without looking at his sister. He continued whispering a multiplication table: three thousand six hundred and fifty-four times two, times three, times two thousand nine hundred and eighty-five. He turned the silver coin over in his hand. He went inside and didn’t come out.
MANY NEIGHBOURS CAME TO CALL on Sivakami in those first days, curious and condoling. With some, the most pressing business was to find out why Sivakami had returned. Others came to shed tears, the weight of which they had borne since her departure, wishing her there to cry with them.
Questions and tears were equally intolerable for Sivakami. She tried her best to respond, though everything in her resisted. She could see that her neighbours were leaving unsatisfied, thinking she was aloof. The days left her drained, with very little energy for her son, who seemed content at first, keeping his solitary counsel in the hall, or pantry, or courtyard, doing arithmetic under his breath, sometimes playing marbles or dayakkattam or tic-tac-toe against himself, chalking all the necessary grids onto the courtyard bricks, like arcane, alchemical formulas. Muchami was too preoccupied to attend to the little boy at first, busy as he was settling Sivakami’s accounts and then settling his own accounts with his uncles regarding his marriage, but after a couple of days he began to join Vairum in the occasional game.
By the sixth of these long, confined days, the courtyard bricks were covered in chalk markings, and Vairum was bored and restless. When Sivakami suggested he might go see what the neighbourhood children were up to, his response was to run from her, to the front end of the main hall and back to the courtyard, and back and back, twelve or fifteen times, until his shoulders slumped and his breath rasped. Then he walked slowly past her, dragging his hand across the back of her thighs. She didn’t have the heart to reprimand him. She went to take a second bath, after which Vairum strolled past and slapped her knee. She bathed again. An hour before sunset, he rubbed her head.
He ignored Muchami’s invitation to go on rounds with him; he kept out of sight of the children gathered round his sister on the veranda; he thrashed and screamed when Muchami and Sivakami said it was time they registered him for school. He played less; he whined more. On the tenth day, the whining, too, ceased.
When Sivakami asks him why he is sitting near the front door-still out of sight of passersby-he tells her he is waiting.
“Waiting for what, my dear one?”
“Waiting to go home to my Samanthibakkam,” he answers, impatient and helpless.
She cannot touch him and cannot help him, and so she turns away.
The next morning, as Vairum is mumbling his prayers in front of the Ramar, Sivakami notices a speckling of white from his armpit to his shoulder blade. He is shirtless following his bath, as prescribed, and wearing a fresh dhoti. She comes closer, thinking he must have spilt some holy ash, though it seems a strange place to manage to spill it. There is none on his neck or shoulder. She comes close, squints and reaches out her hand. She doesn’t care if she has to take another bath; she catches her son with her left hand and rubs the spray of white freckles, hard, with the other. They don’t come off.