Vani raises her left hand and beckons in the child’s direction. Janaki looks behind her to her right, into the garden, to her left, into the back of the hall, but she is the only one around. Vani looks directly at Janaki, something she’s never done, her pale face solemn, her eyes canny and expectant. She beckons once more.
Janaki leaves her niche and seats herself, facing Vani and slightly to her right. Vani strokes the drone strings, upward, with her right pinky, leaving the melody for a moment. As she does, she taps the front of her left hand on her lap. Then she taps the back, then the front again, and as she does, strokes the drone. Then again the front of the hand, with a drone stroke, and she counts off, pinky, ring, middle finger. She repeats: front of hand, back, front, back, front, pinky, ring, middle, with the drone struck each time she taps with the front of her hand, and Janaki understands: this is how you count off the rhythm.
As Vani resumes playing, continuing to stroke the drone with her pinky on the taalam’s downbeat, playing the melody with her ring and middle fingers and working the frets with her left hand, Janaki taps out the taalam.
“Adhi Taalam,” Vani names it for her with a smile, and Janaki is elated because she hears it and doesn’t have to pretend any more.
As she listens to the song, though, which has grown sleepy and tense, like the lull before an episode in a long-running quarrel, Janaki’s teacher’s words return to her. She blushes and happens to look to her right, where she sees Vairum standing on the spiral stairs leading down from his and Vani’s quarters. He is watching Janaki with a look she will never forget, though she won’t understand it for years: the remnants of that morning’s humiliation, scattered against years of disappointment.
Janaki circles with her hands the space her aunt and the veena inhabit and cracks her baby knuckles against her own temples-a customary gesture of affection. Vairum charges.
“All you children, all of you think you own this place, don’t you? This is your inheritance from your father-the belief that you have the right to a good life without working for it! How long did you last, a half-hour? The school uniform is a joke to you? This is not your veena! This is not your place! You do not decide, do you hear?”
Vairum advances six steps toward her with his speech and Janaki has to flee. She scoots back an equal distance on her bottom, then stumbles to her feet and backs away, around the veena and her aunt, both of whom continue as before. As her uncle reaches the spot where Janaki herself had been sitting, Janaki reaches the garden door. As Sivakami yells, “Stop! Stop, my son!” Janaki runs out into the green and embraces from behind the young papaya whose succour Vairum had taken earlier.
The earth in the pockets between the tree’s roots tempts her. With one hand still fast round the tree, Janaki flips into her mouth a lump of dirt the size of the thaingai maavu balls the children have for their after-school snack. The soil is crunchy and damply acrid, and contains a couple of jasmine petals. Its dark comfort spreads in her mouth. She sighs and leans her forehead on the tree, both arms clasped round it, its parasol of leaves nodding above. Despite having her forehead pressed to the tree, Janaki can see her grandmother approaching from the main hall and Muchami from the cowshed.
Sivakami says from the door, “Tch-tch, Janaki-baby. Vairum Mama didn’t mean what he said. He knows you are a good girl, a smart girl. But why are you home from school now? You were so excited to go.”
But Muchami reaches her, turns her small shoulders from the tree and puts his arms around her. Janaki knows Vairum meant every word of what he said and now she has learned something else on her first day of school: to be afraid of her uncle.
She starts to cry on Muchami’s shoulder and a dribble of black drool escapes the downpulled corner of her mouth and falls onto his bicep. He wipes it with his shoulder towel and frowns at its colour. “Ah, Janaki-baby,” he sighs. “How many times do you have to be told?”
Mari, who had joined them by now, choruses, “Ayoh! Dirty girl! So much good food you get in this house! Don’t eat dirt! Don’t, don’t eat dirt!”
Janaki’s sobs, which had been pulling at her small form with increasing intensity, cease with a great inward yank, as though a line around her has been pulled taut. She fixes on Mari a look of weariness. Mari, who means well, clamps shut her lips. Janaki whips around and vomits on the roots of the young papaya.
Muchami takes her by the hand and leads her to the courtyard, where he washes her face and tells her to rinse her mouth. Vani finishes playing in the meantime, and Muchami sends Janaki back inside to listen to the day’s story while he has his meal. This week, Vani has been telling the story of a mysterious reliquary that seemed always to appear during times of crisis in the family, and disappear when the crisis had passed. A box in the shape of a parrot, encrusted with a filigree of unidentifiable metals, it contained a rosewood bowl as big as half a hen’s egg, still bearing faint traces of some pearly unguent; two coins, the smaller with a stamp of fruits and the other of two figures entwined in erotic counterpoise; and a wooden statuette that offended everyone who saw it: a dog with vermilion stains that indicated it was an object of worship. No one could hold on to the box, and no one could agree on whether it was bringing or banishing the family’s episodes of ill fortune.
Janaki checks the vestibule and sees that Vairum’s shoes are gone: he’s out on rounds or wherever he goes. She sits across from Vani and sinks into the story as into a down-filled comforter, wondering where it will go today. In the last four tellings, the story has turned on Vani’s uncle noticing the reliquary, in a time when he had been asking many pointed questions and receiving no answers. His suspicions of some misfortune afoot had been confirmed by the parrot box’s appearance. Janaki wonders if the story will change today and hopes not. She’s in the mood for continuity.
Maybe Vani senses this, because the story stays the same, with only the smallest additions or subtractions of detail. When the story is done, Janaki looks over to see if Muchami is ready and waiting. He is, and the two of them set off for his home. En route, Janaki asks the questions she had prepared. Muchami has a couple of his own. They are quieter than usual. At Muchami’s house, Janaki falls promptly asleep and remains so for the entire afternoon. When she awakens, it is to find herself in Muchami’s arms, and half of the homeward journey completed.
Back at home, Laddu and Sita have already arrived. Janaki tenses for a barrage of Sita’s barbs, but Sivakami must have spoken to her because Sita says nothing.
An hour later, she and Muchami sit in their usual spot for the Sanskrit tutorial. Janaki sings out her responses with confidence and without expression, as though already taking for granted what the teacher notes with a congratulatory smile: she has had a breakthrough.
In a pause, while young Kesavan drills the other pupils in a phrase Janaki had gotten right the first time, Muchami leans over. “You are the smartest and the best, Janaki-baby.” She smiles, embarrassed, and butts her forehead into his shoulder.
The next morning, Janaki rises, as usual, well ahead of the other children, and commences her morning routine. When Sita and Laddu sit to do their homework, she sits with them, bent over the slate Sita brought home for her the day before.
Sita is too sleepy and grumpy to be properly cruel and so only asks, “Where’s your uniform, twerp?”
Janaki looks up from her slate as though irritated at the interruption and asks defiantly, “What do I need it for?”
“To go to school?” Sita yawns loudly.