Barring serious objections, she expects she will give in to her son. Then all she will have to worry about is the family rejecting the blotches on his skin. Perhaps Minister will find some way to finesse that. On subjects of diplomacy, he seems inexhaustible.
She rises and exits the pantry, where she sleeps, to do her beading by the moonlight in the main hall, conscious of Vairum’s breathing on the mat beside the northernmost pillar. He chose to sleep downstairs this first evening-a gesture of tenderness toward his mother? She wants to think so. The slight sound of his breath fills the room.
By discreet means, Sivakami issues a request for information.
Her mole returns from Pandiyoor: Kantha, a hustle-bustle busy-body whose nine yards of sari, given mid-region spread, suggest a spindle bundled with bright thread. Her tongue pricks like a spindle, too. She enters already wailing, “Oohh, Sivakami, Sivakami, it is all too unfortunate.”
Sivakami bids her sit and offers a tumbler of water on a tray, the minimal mark of hospitality. She asks,“What have you learned?”
Kantha pours the water down her throat, head craned back to receive the stream, completely still but for a pulse in her neck like the gills of a shark. She fixes Sivakami with a beady, knowing eye, then her face softens into a well-practised expression between pity and conspiracy.
“Such a beautiful girl,” Kantha begins in an ominous tone. “So accomplished.”
Sivakami cuts to the chase. “She is married already?”
“Oh, don’t they wish,” Kantha says as though the words are delicious. She wants to draw this out.
“They have unfounded provincial superstitions about skin conditions.”
The phrase “provincial superstitions” sounds stiff and unfamiliar, especially pronounced by one so provincial and superstitious as Sivakami, but Kantha looks interested at the possible bonus of learning more about Vairum’s troubles. She shakes her head slowly.
“I doubt it-they are hopelessly sophisticated. Practically foreign! But surely your son…”
“So what’s the trouble?” Sivakami cuts her off.
“Her horoscope is very bad.” Kantha pauses to measure Sivakami’s reaction while Sivakami works to keep her face neutral. “Very bad. It says… she will not have children, and only a very small minority of configurations could counter this. How is your son’s horoscope?”
“Don’t know,” Sivakami replies, after a significant pause, in a mechanistic murmur noted and filed by the spindle, who knows fully well the rumours about the causes of Sivakami’s widowhood.
“There’s not much chance of a match, sadly,” Kantha continues.
“Sadly for them, too: her parents are getting desperate. Two years now they have been searching.”
Sivakami tries to stay all business. “Is there anything else? They are a modern family-does the girl travel well escorted?”
“Oh, yes,” Kantha yawns. “They are all too interested in their arts-shmarts, but this girl is their precious gem. No chances taken, I’m glad to say.” She’s not glad.
“And how do they feel about horoscopes?” Sivakami asks with deliberate coolness. “Are they looking for a boy whose horoscope will counter hers?”
“But it is so rare, Sivakami Akka!” Kantha is authoritative, encouraging. “They have been searching for years! And these modern people, aristocrats-they probably don’t even follow the horoscopes. They just did it because how else to find a groom?”
When Sivakami closes the door behind Kantha, she paces the length of the main hall, feeling her cracked heels grind against the brick tiles. She is sure she can smell the sandalwood box, tucked within the safe. She can smell it from the farthest end of the hall. She doesn’t want to touch it.
It comes to her: she doesn’t have to. Vairum has made up his mind, and nothing about the horoscope will change it.
A responsible parent, though, would try to dissuade him.
“Little one,” she starts when he returns from the fields. “There is bad news on the marriage front.”
“What?” Vairum is clearly not interested in hearing objections.
“She cannot have children.”
“She is only ten years old, of course she cannot have children.”
“Don’t be obscene.” She purses her lips primly. “Her horoscope? They have been searching for a groom for two years and have found none to accept her.”
“Pah! No one believes in that stuff any more. You know what I think of horoscopes? This!” Vairum mimes setting a fire and watching it blaze. “Superstition! Folk tales and false science!”
Sivakami imagines firelight on his face and suddenly the image shifts so she is remembering him as a baby, standing by his father’s funeral pyre. Vairum had, as instructed, tossed a burning faggot onto the dried cow dung patties and was pulled back by his relatives as the fire licked through the layers of wood and warmed his father’s corpse. Had he know what he was doing? Sivakami wonders. She recalls that he was crying. Does he remember?
His horoscope consigned his father to flames, and now he’d like to set his horoscope similarly ablaze.
She says weakly, “You must have children.”
“We will have children! We will have ten children! You will see.
Horoscopes are nothing. Less than nothing. Ashes of something long dead.“ He blows imaginary ashes from his palm and dusts his hands one against the other. ”It’s a new century, Amma, science and religion have triumphed over astrology and superstition. Come. Let’s ask God.“
The next day, Sivakami and Vairum mount the hill to the Rathnagirishwarar temple. The rains have come, as they generally do around this time of year, and they use banana leaves to cover their plate of offerings-coconuts, bananas, betel, yellow and pink flowers, camphor, turmeric, cash-and two paper packets. One packet contains a small red rose and the other a large white jasmine. They are roughly the same size, indistinguishable one from another, as impartial and innocuous as most instruments of fate-lemons, for instance.
Red is auspicious, the colour of vermilion powder and wedding saris. If Vairum chooses this flower, the wedding will proceed. White is the colour of death and if he selects this flower, plans for a wedding with Vani will quietly die.
The middle-aged priest takes the plate and, without ever looking at them directly, asks brusquely their reason for coming. He gives the coconut to a junior priest who uses an iron blade set in the floor by the sanctum to cut off its fibrous hair and break it open. The older priest lights the camphor and fussily rearranges the things on the plate. He waves the plate around, muttering, professionally bad-tempered, stuffs the yellow and pink blossoms into a few niches around the bottom of the lingam, takes half the coconut, some bananas and the money, and hands back the plate. The younger priest smiles at them.
Sivakami receives the plate and nods to Vairum. His hand hovers. He chooses one packet. He untucks the first fold and unfolds the next.
Red.
The rose petals rise, freed from the paper wrapping, like a ruffled sigh.
They return home in the rain, a triumphant smile across Vairum’s face, and a resigned one on Sivakami’s.
Sivakami makes a few well-placed remarks, speaking within the hearing of others as well as encouraging Gayatri to pass along information. There is nothing wrong with Vairum’s horoscope-she makes that clear-they are simply not interested in horoscopes. Others have said such things, progressives, people like that. Vairum is in college, it is believable that he might feel this way. He cut off his kudumi last year in favour of a Western style; he looks like a modern thinker. Sivakami had been dismayed, but it is not unknown, these days. She emphasizes her son’s impeccable lineage, his stellar future. Not the future determined by the stars, but his likeliness to be a star in the future. He will be a leader of Brahmins. He will earn cash, not paddy. A good boy, from a good family.