And now Vairum, in Sivakami’s opinion, is refusing to become what he already is, what he was meant to be. After all her efforts in bringing him back here, he will not attend school.
Thangam, despite being the elder, spends all her days on the veranda. She has small chores to do, a few minutes of helping her mother with food preparation, a few minutes of embroidery, which she does without resistance or engagement. Always the children await her outside, from first light to dusk. She is not likely to attend school, but Sivakami registers her, hoping this might goad Vairum into it too. When Sivakami reminds him of the ceremony of rebirth he so proudly undertook in Samanthibakkam, saying that his education commenced with that moment, he replies, “So take me back there so I can start school. I told you, that’s what I’m waiting for.”
She jabs her hand in the general direction of her brothers’ house. “If you go back to Samanthibakkam, the school you will go to will make of you nothing more than a Brahmin.”
“I am a Brahmin,” says her son.
“Yes,” she cries, “you are already a Brahmin, and I think you can become something more, if you go to a proper school.”
“Well, I don’t want to and I won’t!” He stomps upstairs, to the attic room he has begun to adopt as his refuge.
Gayatri, who arrived early in this conversation, signals to Sivakami that she will go after him. She mounts the stairs and persuades him to come down for their twice-weekly palanguzhi match, and, as usual, he does multiplication tables under his breath between turns at the cowries. Today, she casually inquires, “Do you have any idea how much more maths you will learn, how much more math there is to learn, by going to school? You can’t imagine.” For her trouble, she receives a scowl.
Muchami also makes his contributions to the campaign. Sivakami overhears him at the close of a game of courtyard tic-tac-toe, saying, “Look, I beat you. Me, your family servant. Go to school, little boy, or that is going to happen more and more.”
It is Minister, Gayatri’s husband, who makes the obvious suggestion. “Bribe the boy!” he proposes in his marvellously English-accented Tamil. Only a would-be politician would think of this, but Gayatri agrees it is a simple and brilliant solution.
She immediately conveys the suggestion to Sivakami in whispers by the well, just in case Vairum should find their conversation interesting. But with what should they bribe him?
They offer:
1. New clothes. Wouldn’t he like a bright shiny shirt and dhoti to wear to school? But Vairum, though he sits out of view of the street, can see the street quite well. He can see that every child wears a bright shiny shirt and dhoti to school. He rejects the deal.
2. Money. Wouldn’t he like a few more coins to jingle against the one at his waist, maybe to buy candy on his way to and from school? But Vairum already knows that money has no value in this place. The only way he will accept cash is if he’s going back to Samanthibakkam, where he has friends on whom to spend it. No deal.
3. Toys. Wouldn’t he like a new palanguzhi set or a top he can show off on the street? But Vairum likes palanguzhi with Gayatri just fine on the set they have-and he’s not showing anything off on the street. Forget it.
Gayatri had witnessed Vairum’s first encounters with the village children as they ran past her own veranda and can imagine that his condition would now make him even more self-conscious. Her father-in-law has gone to considerable trouble to smooth Vairum’s path into the local school, meeting with the headmaster and teachers. He succeeded in overcoming their objections to the child’s presence, though he could not persuade them against prejudices. Gayatri thinks she understands Vairum’s reactions to the bribes but cannot come up with anything better. During their afternoon rest, she asks her husband if he has any other ideas.
“No, no, you must offer him something special, something different… something more… English,” Minister muses. “Shoes. Offer him a shiny pair of brown leather shoes, foreign-made. I will take him to Trichy”-it’s one of Minister’s idiosyncrasies that he thinks the English name for the city of Thiruchinapalli, “Trichinopoly,” more attractive than the Tamil-“and buy them for him. Get him off on the right foot, so to speak.” He chortles at this last expression. It’s rendered in English, so Gayatri doesn’t understand it, but she understood what he had said before and so chortles along and pecks him impulsively on the cheek, which leads, one thing to another, on to something else. It’s early evening by the time she makes the trip to Sivakami’s house.
Wholly convinced this suggestion will work, Gayatri beckons Sivakami in from the kitchen with a call-“Hoi, Sivakamikka!”-and squats before the glum little boy whose education is their collective mission. Vairum regards her with wary curiosity.
“Okay, mister, what about this? My husband has offered to take you into Thiruchi with him tomorrow and, if you are the good little boy he thinks you are, the little boy who is going to start school and be brilliant and become rich, he wants to buy you a pair of English shoes. No one can expect to be successful and work in an office without shoes. And think about it, you will be the only child from Cholapatti who walks to school in glossy, brown, leather…” Her descriptive powers fail her for a second, and Sivakami breaks into the pause indignantly.
“Hooves! They will be like bullock hooves. What Brahmin wears the skins of killed animals? No, I’m sorry. Vairum will not be clip-clopping to and from the school smelling like a tannery worker no casted person would go near.”
Vairum pays a good deal more attention upon hearing his mother’s objections. The idea of shoes does appeal to him. He’s seen them on tax collectors and on Minister. If his mother had been enthusiastic about the idea, he might have had to reject it. Now, seeing her willingness to relinquish his education over caste objections, he stamps his foot and insists, “Yes, yes, I want English shoes to wear to school. I must have English shoes to go to school.”
Sivakami gapes at him in astonishment. “But you told me you only wanted to go to the school that would make you into a Brahmin. Now you will only go to school if you do something Brahmins do not do?”
“Oh, pish,” Gayatri interrupts with one of her husband’s favourite ejaculations. “In cities, offices are full of Brahmins, all of them wearing both sacred thread and leather shoes. Times are different. If you want your son to go to a paadasaalai, he can go barefoot. If he is going to step into the new world, he has to do it shod.”
Vairum is agreeing vigorously, and Sivakami concedes defeat with the flicker of a feeling that she has brought this upon herself-and Vairum. If she had stayed in Samanthibakkam and sent him to a paadasaalai, he wouldn’t be getting shoes, that’s for sure. What kind of Brahmin will he become, walking the path along which she has aimed him? Maybe he needs the shoes.
No more than two days later, Vairum steps proudly up the Brahmin quarter and to his front door. Sivakami hears him coming. It can’t be, not in the soft dust of the road, but she is sure she hears the soft thuds of Minister’s tread, and the smaller clip-clop of her own son’s new feet. Born into caste to begin school and now uncasted for the same reason.
She meets him at the door and sees his expression of cautious pride when confronted with all the veranda-gathered children become defiance when he sees her. She silently indicates where he is to leave his shoes, in the vestibule between the doors. He shucks them with his toes and lines them up carefully in a corner.
The next day, as per the bargain, Muchami drives Vairum, kudumi slicked and shoes buffed, in the bullock cart, to the Tamil medium school at Kulithalai, some twenty minutes away. He is wearing a new dhoti and shirt, each with a bit of vermilion kumkumum rubbed into an unseen corner, to soil it appropriately.