“He’s a dreamer, though,” said the man, in a tone that sounded appreciative. “Goli always has a scheme up his sleeve. One day, one of them has to come to something. I think he’ll do well.” Muchami hoped he was right. He told Sivakami none of what he had learned.
Sivakami narrows her eyes, raises her brows and replies, “That is the truth. He is a little better, though still in some pain. Where is he? He is off on family affairs.”
They fall silent for a moment as Thangam walks through the hall from the front to the back, on her way to the washroom, or to get a drink of water, or some other ordinary task for an eight-year-old who perhaps shouldn’t be worrying about the whereabouts of her vagabond husband. She passes through a shaft of sunlight and puffs of gold dust dance off her shoulders and toes.
Sivakami whispers to Muchami, “That is the truth. The end.”
They look toward the door. From without, there is a sound of celebration, some kind of parade. Goli is entering the Brahmin quarter with a small and cheerful collection of villagers in a hip-hip-hooray mood of celebration. He gives a jaunty salute, less to his mother-in-law than to the neighbourhood, calling out, “Namaskarams! My train leaves in ninety minutes.” There’s no train in the direction of his home village until dusk: apparently, he’s going somewhere else.
“You must not go without eating something,” Sivakami says from the kitchen, disconcerted at his band of friends, half a dozen Brahmin men, some of whom she knows from the Brahmin quarter, some of whom must be from Kulithalai. Clearly others had been able to find him. “You’ve eaten nothing in our house since your arrival. Come in, please, come in.”
Goli puts his arms round his new friends and extends invitations. “Come in! Have a small bite of something, but you’d better get me to the station before the nine-thirty!”
Sivakami runs to the kitchen and assembles small silver plates with a sweet and a savoury snack on each as Goli and company enter the main hall. Vairum pushes past them to the door. He needs to put on his shoes and go to school. Goli smiles hugely at his little brother-in-law, and extends a hand to ruffle his hair. Vairum ducks and scowls, which makes Goli laugh and shrug. As Vairum passes, Goli slaps the back of his head.
Thangam carries out a silver tray with seven tumblers of water while Sivakami makes polite, formal inquiries. “I trust your health has improved? And your business has gone on well?” Goli doesn’t answer, busy as he is, working the room, making sure everyone’s looked after. He receives a plate and pays attention just long enough to lift the sweet toward his mouth. A moment before it goes in, though, he exclaims, “The train! The train!” He drops his plate and dashes for the door.
Muchami has hitched the bullock cart and driven it around to the front of the house. Goli tosses his valise in the back, climbs up after it, reaches over and whacks the bullock’s buttock. It starts to trot. Muchami gives an exasperated look back at Sivakami as Goli bids his cronies farewell.
“So long! Don’t forget what we discussed-I’ll be in touch. This idea is really going to take off. Don’t tell anyone else. Just between us!” he shouts, as the cart rounds the corner to exit the Brahmin quarter.
This episode is the end of the all-important first Deepavali. Thangam spends the rest of the day on the veranda, refusing lunch, rising only at Sivakami’s insistence, around half past four. When she rises, gold falls from her paavaadai as though all its forget-me-nots were shedding their petals.
A few minutes after Thangam vacates the veranda, Vairum arrives home from school, removing his shoes before dragging his satchel over the threshold. It gathers a thin gold line of dust along the broad bricks. Muchami departs for his late-afternoon tour of the fields; Mari sorts rice; Sivakami organizes snacks for her children.
Thus, she does not see a neighbour’s disappointment at just missing a chance for Thangam’s blessing, she doesn’t see him pass close by their veranda on his way home and be arrested in his passage by the thin dusting of gold on the spot Thangam just vacated. She doesn’t see him take a pinch and stroke it across his forehead, the way he did with a pinch of ash given him once or twice a week by Sivakami’s late husband when he held his healing court on the very spot where Thangam sits daily.
Sivakami doesn’t see one or two neighbours note the glisten across this man’s forehead as he proceeds home, she doesn’t hear his wife exclaim over it, she doesn’t even hear the crackling up and down the lines of gossip as the news spreads like fires in the dry season. What she does hear is the sound of squabbling, maybe an hour after the original incident. What she sees, when she goes to investigate, is three of her neighbours trying to scrape their own small mounds of Thangam into small paper cones, while a crowd of ten or twelve others try to get a glimpse of the substance, on the veranda, or the road, or the steps, before it is all gone.
In the days following, whenever Thangam is out on the veranda, adults come one by one to receive her blessing. As before, she does nothing to offer it. Those who need must simply take. They lean across the veranda and pinch a pinch of dust from the sprinkling around her or from the small drift against the wall where she sometimes leans. Small babies have the dust rubbed on their tummies for their perpetual ailments. Some is given, folded in a bit of paper, to a servant whom caste does not permit to walk on the Brahmin quarter. Old people receive a pinch on the tongue, just as they take a daily dose of holy ash brought home from favourite temples to ease their undiagnosable internal malfunctions. The villagers remind one another that once upon a time it was said a morsel of pounded gold taken internally had great medicinal value. It was the vitamin pill of nobility. All in the village swear that they feel its invigorating effects. Their good health gains renown, and people come from elsewhere, too, just as they did for Hanumarathnam, to pay respects and receive some holy ash toward prevention or cure, just as Sivakami’s parents did all those years ago.
At first, Sivakami feels a vague indignation at her neighbours’ greed and opportunism. She can’t bring herself to think of Thangam’s dust as a gift; to her it feels like a symptom of some malady, the root of which she tells herself she cannot yet fathom.
She eschews the auric dust. The village presumes this is because of her widowhood: widows do not wear gold-her forehead should be marked by nothing but ash, the leavings after a flame goes cold. But this does not explain why neither Muchami nor Mari applies Thangam’s dust to their furrowed brows or tired limbs. Gayatri queries them. Muchami doesn’t say that he, too, is widowed, though this is how he has felt since Hanumarathnam’s death. He replies as he and Sivakami determined together in advance. He tells their young neighbour, “All who are frequently in Thangam’s presence are coated with her blessed presence at all times.” He holds out his hands for inspection; the glints beneath his purplish fingernails and in the creases of his velvet-dark knuckles prove his claim.
Vairum has overheard, though, and pipes boldly his own explanation, “I’ll never take gold from my sister. I’ll only give her gold, I will never, never take it.”
Gayatri feels inexplicably shamed by their answers and determines from that moment not to take the dust by pinches, but to feel content with whatever traces drift upon her by accident during her daily visits.
A week after Deepavali, however, it is clear that the quantity of gold Thangam is shedding is somewhat reduced. Within a month production has ceased. Thangam has returned to her previous magnetic, but not magical, self. The village resigns itself to taking her blessing as before, with a hand on her head. Straggling pilgrims who come seeking the girl who makes gold must content themselves with a sight of her. As the locals point out, and the religious travellers must agree, that sight is reasonably miraculous in and of itself. The pilgrims depart protesting their perfect contentment. And when, inevitably, a few visitors come with glints in their eyes more entrepreneurial than spiritual, all rumours are hotly denied, and the would-be capitalists turn away shrugging.