Murthy is slightly shorter than his wife and has a high-pitched voice. He chiefly endears himself to Sivakami with his pride in Hanumarathnam’s abilities. Since a mother’s sister is considered a second mother, and a father’s brother another father, Murthy considers Hanumarathnam to be his own brother and takes personal credit for his accomplishments. He himself barely made it through eighth standard before stopping. He nominally assists in looking after the family lands, which have been split now that Hanumarathnam has received his share, but mostly spends his days snoozing on the veranda and occasionally holding forth on some article he has read, say on recent advances in science and technology. Hanumarathnam commented once to Sivakami that Murthy always mangles the details of these reports, and she has never since been able to respect Murthy, though she is fond of him nonetheless.
They live in the house to the left. Sivakami never meets the people to the right. She hears their story from Hanumarathnam’s aunt, though when she repeats it, wide-eyed, to her husband, he tells her not to take all the details so literally. No one ever sees the wife of that household, because she is ashamed, knowing everyone on the Brahmin quarter fears her. Her mother-in-law was a witch, and bribed the young woman to become one too. She accepted a necklace of gold coins, along with her mother-in-law’s hellish, itchy craving to periodically cast a spell. When, every so often, some old, weak or retarded person snaps and becomes crazy, the village understands the young witch has satisfied her demonic urge upon this victim. The craving tormented the elder woman; she died soon after passing it on and now rests, supposedly in peace, not knowing the real tragedy of her family: one of the young witch’s early spells was misdirected at her husband’s sister, a beautiful, bitter woman, who now crouches and gibbers, incontinent, in a corner of their house. Sivakami hears the sister-in-law sometimes-howling for food, chuckling eerily or delivering obscene diatribes-and shudders.
Cholapatti’s Brahmin quarter is a single street of some fourteen houses, ending in a Krishna temple. At the other end, closest to where Sivakami lives, the road curves out past a small Shiva temple and joins the main road into the nearest town, Kulithalai, the Taluk seat, where there is a sizable market, a courthouse, a club, even a small train station. Although Samanthibakkam, the village where she grew up, is larger than Cholapatti, it is much farther from any town of size, and she enjoys the sense of proximity to bustle and importance, even if she rarely sees it herself. Cholapatti’s Brahmin quarter is surrounded by fields, but there are small settlements of other castes, agricultural workers mostly, tenant farmers on the properties owned either by Cholapatti Brahmins or by the better-off residents of Kulithalai.
Once in the early months of her marriage, she goes to a wedding in Kulithalai: the Brahmin quarter there consists of two streets whose mix of prosperity and humility is similar to that on the street where she now lives. It is bordered on one side by a large quarter of Chettiars, whose opulent homes rise above their shops: jewellery, fabric, pawn and moneylending. When Sivakami goes shopping with Murthy and Rukmini, she sees there is variation in the Chettiars’ prosperity, but this doesn’t alter her perception of that caste as uniformly money-grubbing and flashy. Streets of other castes: Reddiars-she’s not sure what they do, business of some kind; a few families of Marwaris, with their fair, sharp features and gold hoop earrings, competing with the Chettiars for moneylending business; others she cannot name, including members of the agricultural classes wealthy enough, by wile or inheritance, to live in town; these streets bow out to enclose the circular stone bench at the market square, petering out beyond the train station, or at the river, which runs alongside the main road from Cholapatti. The untouchables’ neighbourhoods are in the hinterlands, though she has never seen them, nor even thought of them: the barbers, the funeral workers and so on, who all have their own traditions and hierarchies.
Once Sivakami saw a white man alighting from a horse cart in front of the train station. She asked Murthy if white people lived in Kulithalai, and he laughed, “No, no!” Hanumarathnam told her that might have been a circuit-court magistrate, paying a bi-monthly call, or a revenue supervisor visiting from Thiruchinapalli, the city, some hours away by train. He has promised her they will visit someday.
As to the rest of the Cholapatti Brahmins, Sivakami made their acquaintance when she and Hanumarathnam paid their post-wedding calls. There are three grand households. Hanumarathnam is great friends with the husband of one, at the far end. The other is a duplex, five doors down, brothers who built across from their father’s more modest house. And there are three very poor households, including that of the woman Hanumarathnam hired to clean his house. Her husband is a cook-for-hire, the lowest profession available to Brahmins. At their house, Hanumarathnam and Sivakami did not take a meal but, with cordial remove, accepted tumblers of churned yogourt and stale snacks that Sivakami supposed the husband brought home from weddings where he worked.
In other words, for all that this life is so new to her, she has a profound sense of order: everyone in their places, easily found when needed, otherwise comfortably unseen.
Then this.
It is strange. Even if all of Cholapatti insists it is normal, she will refuse to believe it. But what if it is normal? Will she live with this for the rest of her life?
She sits on her haunches and rocks back and forth while she adds up, in two separate mental columns, the factors that make her marriage normal and the factors that make it strange. Before now, reflections on her marriage were either smug or self-righteous, depending on how she felt toward her husband in the moment. At present, alone-she has never been alone before, she’s barely got used to being alone in a room once in a while, and now the whole house balloons empty around her-she is terrified.
The long list of normal factors gives her some satisfaction, and thus a little calm. She wants to demonstrate to herself that, on balance, her marriage is not materially different from any other Brahmin union. Next, she tackles the strange.
1. She is the second wife of a widower. Widowers with children marry their deceased wives’ sisters, if they can, because such women have maternal feelings toward their nieces and nephews. Widowers without children marry girls no one else will have. Neither condition applied to Sivakami, a fair-skinned, able-bodied, obviously intelligent girl of good family. But her parents offered her no explanation and she had come to see it as of little significance: he never even met his first wife, after the wedding. That long-ago girl must seem as unreal to him as she does to Sivakami. Sivakami edges this factor, in her mind, toward the normal column-Hanumarathnam, so young, barely qualified as a widower.
2. It is a little unusual that he is a healer, but there are others who divine people’s ills and offer remedies of holy ashes, each-each unique but looking each-each the same. Also, he doesn’t consult any priest for astrological advice but goes straight to the stars and makes the calculations himself. Though unusual, these are at least activities appropriate to Brahmins with a paadasaalai education-natural extensions of his training.
Sivakami takes a breath.
3. Her husband has just wandered off into the forest with a small band of itinerant ascetics, siddhas, naked but for their hair and some holy ash, or maybe dirt, smeared in patterns on their blue-black or mud-brown skin, stretched taut on bony bodies…
She shudders. Her husband, a young, healthy, even slightly flabby Brahmin man, has walked off in a jolly manner with three siddhas, men who know no caste boundaries, whose origins are obscured by their membership in this mystic cult, who have no right, as far as she is concerned, to come in contact with respectable caste householders.