“Yes, well, today, he opened a factory on my ancestral lands,” sputters another Brahmin. “And if that’s not enough, I swear, half my tenants are going to work in it! I could kill that guy. I swear, if he wasn’t the son of the most orthodox lady in the Brahmin quarter, I might think he’s a progressive. Did you hear what he’s paying?”
Janaki, wincing at his inelegant Tamil, listens harder.
“Vairum is canny-and fair-minded,” says a warm, gravelly voice in a non-Brahmin accent that Janaki can’t place. “Happy workers are good workers.”
“Sure, I’m all in favour of non-Brahmin uplift,” says the other Brahmin reservedly. “But for non-Brahmins like you, Mr. Muthu Reddiar, self-starters, of good family. Putting power in the hands of the illiterate masses, though-it’s a recipe for disaster.”
“The man wants to start a revolution, that’s what,” Goli cries. “He wants to be king.”
“Seems to me the Brahmins around here have profited as much as anyone from business with Vairum,” Muthu Reddiar insists, an edge to his voice. “He’s generous, you have to say that for him.”
“I don’t have to say anything good about that man!” It sounds as if Goli has thumped the table.
“All right, all right,” says the first Brahmin. “Let’s take it easy. You can rest assured that most if not all the Brahmin quarter shares your opinion, Goli.”
“What a week,” Goli complains.
“Have you been to see Chellamma?” someone asks, and Janaki starts.
“Last night. She won’t budge,” Goli growls. “Bitch.”
Janaki gapes at the crude language, feeling sick.
“Hasn’t given me the time of day since Balachandran came on the scene, and now she expects me to pay for that pup? Ravana!” Janaki can’t tell if he’s cursing at Bharati’s mother or just lost a hand of cards.
“So don’t pay,” the first Brahmin man advises.
“She’s got me over a barrel,” Goli says darkly. “She’ll go to my boss.”
“What-” the man starts, but Goli breaks in: “Deal. I’m done talking about that.”
The clubhouse goes briefly quiet except for the slap and slide of cards and occasional muttered words. Then the night erupts in hooting and shouts as someone wins. Janaki listens to the chime of the men’s tumblers and wrinkles her nose at a puff of tobacco smoke that has drifted from the clubhouse window.
The cycle repeats, the men’s voices blurring and sharpening with emotion and drink. At one point, Janaki drowses, shakes herself, drops off again-and drops off the branch. It’s a rude shock, but she is not hurt by the fall. She runs behind the tree when the peon looks out the window, and then remounts the branch.
It must be well on for nine o’clock when Goli finally wins a round-the biggest pot of the night, according to the ribbing he receives. He loudly claims that it only earns him back what he has lost, but it sounds as if he’s being modest. Janaki, hearing him announce his departure, perks up.
“Lads, I’m sorry to say I must take my leave of you now.”
“Come on, Goli, let us at least win back our dignity.”
“Sorry, you’ll have to face your wives without it. Not the first time, I would say.”
More hoots.
“Last time Nallathumbi here stripped himself of his dignity his wife ran from the room in fright!”
Nallathumbi makes his rebuttal. “Naked, I inspire men and frighten women. Just as it should be.”
They all laugh, satisfied. Goli takes his leave.
Janaki allows him a few moments before slipping from the tree, praying to herself, “Please go home just go home please go home just go home go home go home.” She tails him to the gate. “Go right go right right right.”
He hesitates, looking both ways, and turns left. Janaki pauses a second, to look down at her toes, bare and vulnerable as they emerge from beneath the paavaadai. My toes look purple in the moonlight, she thinks. How curious. She too emerges from the gate.
In the dark this is not the town she knows. The night forgives a lot; she doesn’t want to imagine what sins it lets slip by. Kerosene flares make sinister shadows that dance and dodge no matter how still the body that throws them. Janaki is frightened and focuses on her father’s back as though it is a magic charm whose powers she doesn’t know and yet has no choice but to trust.
At the end of the commercial thoroughfare, Goli strikes east along the curving road that rings the town. Janaki is not so scared now. The velvet dust between her toes is like the dust behind their house when she relieves herself at midnight, and the shadows cast by moonlight are steady and sedate. She permits herself to imagine Bharati’s house and her mother.
In her mind, Chellamma is slatternly. Lumpy mounds of flesh, conniving eyes ringed in thick kohl, scheming lips reddened by betel, layers of powder over a dark and uneven complexion. Janaki really cannot understand what her father would see in such a woman, when he has the most beautiful wife anyone’s ever seen. Janaki gasps aloud: witchcraft! Bharati’s mother captivates men with spells. That must be it!
She is walking faster and faster, working herself into a fury of indignation, and nearly overtakes her father but catches herself in time and drops back. Finally he steps onto a small path leading to a mud house with thatched roof. It is lit within by kerosene lamps, proof of their prosperity. Janaki, though hardened by anger at Chellamma’s nerve, doesn’t fail to note the tidiness of the swept path, the walls as freshly whitewashed and decorated for Pongal as any Brahmin’s.
She sees her father stoop and enter the dwelling. Janaki paces the periphery clockwise until she comes to a window. She approaches it and startles.
Bharati’s knowing smile matches Janaki’s frightened face as though the window were a magic mirror. Bharati makes no noise, but, giving Janaki a sly nod, seats herself to allow Janaki an unobstructed view.
Bharati’s younger brother and three sisters are clustered in a corner around their grandmother. Her mother, Chellamma, matches her house: she is a small, tidy woman with wrinkles around her eyes that seem to Janaki oddly familiar. She is not fat and slovenly; she is just… plain. And tough-looking. Her mouth is set in a hard line as she tells Goli, “Hand it over.”
Goli hands her a packet of rupee notes. Janaki thinks of the day before, when she saw her first of the new five-rupee notes that have just come out, with a portrait of George VI. She wonders how much her father has paid.
“You could have had all the income from that land,” he jeers, “but you had to make me sell it, didn’t you?”
Chellamma turns away from Goli, and Janaki sees the hardness drop away for a moment. In its place is an expression tired and sad, and Janaki recognizes the lines around her eyes: they’re like her own mother’s. As Chellamma crouches and pours a tumbler full of water flavoured with palm sugar and ginger, Bharati’s grandmother speaks from a corner, where she is assembling betel nut and leaves from a rosewood box.
“Oh, and how was she supposed to manage that land from here? If it was any good, you would have been able to keep it and pay us from the income.”
Goli suddenly explodes, his hand chopping against his palm. “You have no proof! Why should I pay at all?”
The grandmother coolly looks down at the spade-shaped leaves in her palm, a winning hand of cards.
“What proof do we need, beyond your bragging of the strength of your seed?” the old woman says as she streaks the leaves with calcium paste and rose-petal gel. “Everyone knows you were the man my daughter was receiving at that time.”
“Pah!” Goli appears at a loss for words.
Chellamma, the hardness returned to her face, turns back and holds out a plate to him, on which sits the cup of flavoured water.
“Look at Bharati’s forehead, her eyebrows, her hair,” Chellamma says. “Do they not look familiar?”
Janaki watches the old woman sprinkle the leaves with areca nut, cardamom and rock sugar, roll them into three-sided packets and pin them shut with cloves.