He stalks ahead, and they follow him home.

The next morning, he feels moody and stays in the house. As the older children leave for school, he puts a mat to one side of the main hall, where he can listen to Vani play. He lies, his elbow on a bolster, letting the music ebb around him as though he is lying in a few inches of warm ocean at the beach.

One little grandchild is creeping around the house still: Sita. She comes in from the garden but stops when she sees him, and backs away again. Unpleasant-looking child, he thinks, and then is overcome by throbbing, choking, desirous sadness. He turns back to watch his wife. Why haven’t we had a child, my love?

I killed my father, he killed his father. He doesn’t remember when he first heard the chorus in his brain, sounding as though it has murmured there since he was born. Vani, without ceasing her music, looks at him suddenly, and he, feeling her glance, looks back. Even to him she speaks little, but she can still, as she did from that first day, drown out the deathly chatter with her music and her eyes.

She completes me, he thinks, breathing shallowly with gratitude, grasping at this as though at a branch overhanging a now-swollen river, but marriage is not marriage without children.

To escape his origins; to embrace them.

I just want a baby to raise. It may be possible that I am worthy of this.

PART FIVE

25. JanakiStartsSchool 1931

MUCHAMI HAS CARED FOR ALL of Thangam’s children with as much tenderness as their personalities and his station permitted, but he has never grown so attached to one as he has to Janaki in the months since she arrived. He tried with all of the children to distract them from their grief at losing their mother, tried to compensate with games and amusement for the affection Sivakami was unable to give them during the day. Only with Janaki, though, has he formed such a bond. She shines with a brighter light than her siblings, he often thinks, as she trots along beside him, helping with his chores and chattering.

Janaki considers the calves to be her special responsibility and helps especially by coaching the calves in comportment, telling them to stop licking the wall, for instance, where their craving for lime has worn a smudgy brick border into the whitewash. Muchami does the tending and milking. It’s a very particular procedure. A calf is unroped and led to his mother. He roughly butts and nudges her udders before he clamps on. After a few moments, he’s pulled off her belly and tied so that she can reach him but he can no longer reach the udders, and then she is milked while she licks her calf’s back and shoulders. The very young calves stay close by their mothers even after they are untied. They’re allowed more milk. But a slightly older calf, once untied, will dash straight to the water trough. The mother cow will look on for a few moments, then turn her face toward her feed. This calf is not really hers to mother, anyhow. He was born on someone else’s account.

When the milk is handed to Sivakami, that is Janaki’s cue to rouse her sleepy-faced siblings. She gleefully taps heads and shakes shoulders, saying officiously, “Hoi! Hoi, lazybones, what do you think this is, a hospital?” She has heard hospitals are places with cots where everyone stays in bed all day. “Get up!”

Each child sips a cup of boiled milk flavoured with sugar and the scents of cow and woodsmoke. Chores and baths follow and last urgent sums of homework. Janaki usually gets a piece of chalk and makes marks on the floor as her siblings do on their slates, her markings as incomprehensible to them as theirs are to her.

More important than any of these activities, though, is listening to Vani play. After Laddu and Sita have departed for school, Janaki creeps close to listen to her aunt. She’s not sure if Vani sees her; sometimes Vani smiles, but it’s a mysterious smile and could as easily be a response to a moment in the music or some fleeting sensation as to Janaki. From all around, from street and kitchen come the sounds of people working, talking, solving problems and creating new ones, but Vani responds to none of it. She is not startled by loud noises, not disturbed by shouting.

As Janaki listens, she pretends to tap out the beat structure, the taalam, of the song on her lap. She has seen knowledgeable listeners do this, tapping the front and back of their hands, and each of their fingers, in arcane and particular orders.

When Vani has finished playing in the morning, she eats her meal. Janaki eats hers at the same time, not least because Vani talks while she eats. She never talks at any other time, and even at this time, no one-except, now, Janaki-really listens. Sivakami comes in and out with food, but not appearing to pay attention to the daily discourse.

Vani’s method is to tell, on average, a different story each week, repeating it daily with small variations. She often draws from her childhood, telling tales of grandeur and aristocracy. Her uncles are lawyers and ministers; her father is rich. Their house in Pandiyoor is full of music, culture, the latest fashions in clothes, slang, comportment. Most of the time, since Vani doesn’t speak, it’s difficult to tell that she is the product of such a home, but when she does, the influences are obvious.

After a week or so, however, Vani will change the story-fundamentally, but not superficially: most of the details will remain the same, but the moral import or the conclusion will be entirely different, all the pleasant people might become rude and the mean ones heroic. Once, for instance, it was a story of how a wedding was almost stopped by a death; in the variant, the death was almost stopped by the wedding. After delivering this reversal, she stops telling that story, and goes on to another one.

Janaki is as often confused by Vani’s stories as by her music, but she never asks questions. She knows that questioning will get her nowhere with her aunt. She must find other ways.

As Janaki is currently the pre-school-age child in Sivakami’s house, she is looked after by Muchami for much of the day. After his morning chores and mid-morning meal, he goes to his own small house and neighbourhood. Janaki goes with him, as the youngest child in Sivakami’s care always has, and runs through dust and groves while he naps, gossips and has a cup of ragi porridge with his mother.

Sivakami’s grandchildren will each have a very different memory of his or her pre-school months in Muchami’s care. Saradha will remember organizing Muchami’s nieces and nephews into games whose rules they continually broke or forgot-deliberately, she felt. Visalam will remember the whole time as a series of unbelievably funny mishaps. Laddu will forget most things about this epoch, though he will retain the rudiments of gambling, acquired while practically losing his shirt to Muchami’s young nephews day after day. (Muchami made them return to him whatever they won.) Laddu will also never forget the most effective ways of tormenting chickens, though he will not remember having learned them. Sita will recall Muchami’s small relatives as snotty-nosed, insipid, illmannered, repulsive, his neighbourhood as offensive.

Janaki will forever regard this epoch as the happiest of her childhood. In the late morning, each day, Muchami finds her squatting in one of the garden doorways, listening to or thinking about Vani’s story. If the story is not finished, he waits; if it is, he whistles from the courtyard and Janaki comes trotting out to meet him. As they walk, they ask each other questions about things they see or have been thinking about.