The Toss of a Lemon (55 page)

Janaki and Kamalam’s instinct is to run into the house, which they do, with Radhai following, scared, on their heels, but Goli soon follows, still shouting, “Come! Come! Come!”

When the girls run into the house, looking like a startled school of fish, Sita guesses the reason and decants the coffee. Flushed with pleasure, she trots it out with two sweets, but Goli takes no notice.

“Come, I say!” he hollers, waving. “Into the cart! Where is your precious mother? Thangam! Thangam!”

Sita looks anxious and eager to obey but unsure of what action to take to do so. Goli blusters past her into the next room, then reappears and clarifies, “Into the cart!”

Moments later, they are all nested in damp straw, trundling up the road clinging to boards that threaten to pull away. Janaki whispers to Kamalam, “There is a cow pulling this cart.”

Goli hears and makes a grunting noise—“Huh?”—but has his nose pointed at the horizon.

Janaki whispers, “Cows are mothers, they give us everything. They must be worshipped, not made to work.”

Sita’s eyes narrow at them in a skilled imitation of her former self. “Hoi,” she instructs. “Stop telling secrets against Appa.”

Kamalam looks as though she’s been struck. Goli whips round in his seat, glaring. Janaki hisses at Sita, “We weren’t.”

The cart rolls on and Goli’s eyes roll reverentially back to his fantasies. Sita twists her mouth at her sisters. Goli leaps from his seat to the ground. He stumbles slightly and readjusts his dhoti. As the bullock cart jolts to a halt, Goli is already some distance away, gesturing to a building by the side of the road and asking, “Unh? Unh?” in a tone suggesting they should say what they think, and what they should think is that it’s great.

They all climb out cautiously, Sita holding the baby while Thangam dismounts. Goli has already run up to the building, evidently a recently defunct cinema. He turns as they trudge toward him, and whispers as if all the world is a stage, “Criminal, really. The price. Got it for a song—a filmi song! Can you sing one, kids?”

The kids can’t or don’t, but he’s not stopping.

“Lots of people going under these days. The stupid ones. Used to be you could get away with not being on the smarts. But not these days. These days it’s be smart or die. Kids, the sinking has started—and you are hitched to a swimmer.”

Thangam’s voice is both unbelieving and utterly without surprise. “You bought it?”

Goli beams at her and calls back as he starts running around the building, peering and banging and measuring things with the span of his hand. “Lock, stock and barrel. Me and several of my associates. Opportunity is knocking down our door. The ground floor suddenly lowered and why, we just got on.”

Thangam is whispering now, “I thought... it was a gamble... ?”

Goli is in front of her in a flash, the pockets under his eyes pulsing. The humidity is giving Janaki a slight headache.

“You are repeating your brother’s words to me? He wanted me to work for him. For him!” Goli has begun chopping his right hand against his left palm.

Thangam speaks again, her eyes shut. “He wanted to be responsible—”

“No!”

The children step back in unison as the hot roar of refusal whips past them. Sita alone stands her ground and looks at her siblings triumphantly.

“He wanted to be my boss. No respect for me, me! His elder brother-in-law! Go and work for him... big shot...”

In the field before the cinema, they all privately recollect the scene between their father and uncle. One would guess from Sita’s smug face that in her version, Goli is the winner. In Janaki and Laddu’s memories, the victor’s identity is less certain. Kamalam recalls words but not meanings. She thinks she wants to go home, but she is not certain where that is, just now.

As uncomfortable as all of this is, they all appreciate Sita’s continuing good humour. The occasional lapse, such as that in the cart, reminds them of how good they have it now. That night, for example, Sita doesn’t give Janaki any lentils from the rasam. Since Janaki hates that bottom-of-the-pot sludge, Sita usually stirs it up and dumps it on double thick. But not tonight. Janaki ascribes this to Sita’s new-found mental peace. Then Sita eats-last, as she has taken it upon herself to do. Janaki sees her take the last of the rasam. It is nearly clear. There are almost no lentils in the broth.

Janaki presumes Sita forgot the lentils, a logical supposition given the quality of food Sita has been serving since their arrival.

The next morning, they eat pazhiah sadam, fermented rice with yogourt. (“Best thing for young tummies,” their grandmother always says.) But the buttermilk is watery and they are all hungry by mid-morning. When they come to Sita mock-whining that they want a snack, they expect her indulgence with milk sweets, since she’s been handing them out freely all week. Instead, Sita barks that if they’ve got nothing better to do than annoy her, why don’t they spend their time finding some fruit in the garden. The children drift out of the house, avoiding the two stunted, barren banana trees that stand at the end of the yard like more children their father forgot. Lunch is rice, lots of rice but with rasam even thinner than it was last night. For supper, the same. Kamalam asks for more and is given a big chunk of plain rice with a pickled baby mango from the jar Sivakami packed with their luggage. Thangam doesn’t eat, saying she’s not hungry. She drinks half a cup of nearly transparent buttermilk and goes to bed. Their father still has not arrived and Sita will not eat until after he does. Nine o’clock, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock pass, and Sita sits in the dark. She says she wants it dark so everyone else can sleep, but she wiped out the bottom of the lamp oil can with cotton wicks the night before. At eleven-thirty there is a loud knocking on the doors and Goli’s voice calls, “Thangam! Eh, Thangam!”

Sita lights a lamp and unbolts the doors. Goli drops his dapper hat and swinging cane in a corner. He drops himself onto a waiting bamboo mat. Sita holds the oversized lamp with the itty-bitty flame, so he can see. She asks, “Supper?”

He is prone and his eyes closed. He turns onto his side and gets comfortable as he says, “No. Ate at the club.”

Sita blinks, then glances at the lamp. She hurries to the kitchen and eats in a race against the dwindling flame.

For breakfast and lunch the day following, they have rice with buttermilk so thin that it looks like kanji, water that old people strain from boiled rice and drink for strength. Each of the children pretends the runny white meal is something else: onion sambar, spinach curry, bitter gourd. Kamalam starts to sniffle a little as she bites into the tangy flesh of another baby mango. Janaki signals her, “What?”

Kamalam answers aloud, “I miss Amma.”

Janaki’s sinuses start to sting, too, at the thought of their grandmother, her generous kitchen and care. Sita ends this nonsense. “Hush. Stop that. You have your ‘amma’ right here. You want to go back to living with Vairum Mama, where we are not wanted?”

That night, Goli’s work forces him to stay over in a neighbouring town. His family eat their poor meal early, all together, and gather in the hall. The moon has narrowed nightly and is almost ready to turn and begin its pregnant climb again. In the bluish darkness of the hall, the children lie or sit on their bedrolls and play word games, making up rhymes and riddles, laughing loud and free in the night that gladly does not contain their father. Sita shines brightest of all in the open darkness of this night. Why? Tomorrow is Thursday, payday.

It is afternoon. Sita is sitting on the veranda when Goli arrives home from work the next evening-empty-handed, but with a spring in his step.

“Coffee?” he asks, walking past Sita, into the house, with his head opposing the direction of his travel by about thirty degrees. Sita had put off making the coffee, hoping—not, though she would never admit it, assuming—he would bring some of the precious dark dust, since she has enough to brew only a thimbleful. She sits a moment longer on the veranda, where all sit to sun their cares or forget them by watching their neighbours, where private pains meet the life of the street, where decisions are made and deals contracted, along streets just like this one all over Madras Presidency. Different people, different language, but the same worries. And despite all this, Sita sits all alone in the rosy dusk, her toes over- and underlapping one another, her chin on her knees. In the rapid sunset, it is only moments before she can no longer see her toenails and is isolated even from herself.

Taking a breath, she picks herself up and walks into the house just like her father did, her head cocked at an unreasonable angle, trying to see what he sees. There is no more milk in the house. She brews the weak coffee and dumps three tablespoons of sugar through the pale steam. Thank God sugar and rice come in huge sacks. Plenty of those commodities remain. Looks like sugar and rice for supper tonight.

She places the tumbler and bowl on a saucer and carries it out to her father. No more English biscuits or store-bought sweets. Goli is pacing to and fro. He grasps the bowl and pours the coffee from the tumbler to blend and cool it. He is anticipating, as every drinker of great South Indian coffee does, the pleasure of foam and steam rising as the creamy liquid, falling from the lip of the stainless steel tumbler, hits the cylindrical bowl. He gets steam, but no foam. He frowns and peers into the bowl, fighting more the fog in his mind than that around the dish, trying to see what is wrong. Sita stands by, her mind a blank with hundreds of squirming questions nibbling its edges. Finally, Goli looks up, his spectacles opaque from the mist, and asks her, “What is this?”

She answers, reflexively obedient. “Appa, coffee, Appa.”

“It doesn’t look like coffee,” he grunts.

“Appa, that’s what coffee looks like without milk, Appa.” She bobs in a sort of curtsy.

“Who drinks coffee with no milk?” Goli addresses the ceiling. “Am I an Englishman?”

Sita swallows the air in her mouth with great difficulty and asks, “Did... did you get paid, today, Appa?”

“Oh, yes, oh, yes.” Goli smiles. “Stopped after work and put the whole thing down on that new cinema of ours. Ready to fire her up any day now.” He makes another long waterfall of the coffee and remembers his displeasure. “Milk!”

“We have no milk, Appa,” Sita explains gently, her face tense.

“Get some, then, are there no cows left in the world?” he jokes. “Listen, girl, you can hear them now...”

The questions in Sita’s mind are taking big bites now, feasting on her eleven-year-old brain. She replies, “I need money, Appa.”

“Money? You need money?” Goli rises. “It is not enough that I am slaving from dawn until dusk, working for the English, buying properties, doing business, you want money now too?”

“No, Appa, for supplies,” Sita minces. “To buy milk, vegetables, lentils, butter...”

Goli throws the coffee onto the street. “Just like your mother, no management sense. Just like that stupid cook! I told her, get out!” He begins pacing, reliving the scene. “I said, My wife will cook, my daughter will cook! What else are you doing? I don’t have infinite resources, you know. You have to learn to plan.”

“But—” Sita attempts.

“Do not talk back to me!” Goli chops his left hand against his right palm terrifyingly. “I told you, you must learn. The budget is all used up—too bad. I’m going to the club.”

That night, they eat plain boiled rice with a choice of side dish: sugar or baby mango. Breakfast: the same. Lunch: ditto.

At five o’clock, Laddu shows up with three onions and a sweet potato. Sita is elated, her salivary glands springing to action. The springs quickly run dry, though, when she thinks to ask, “Laddu. Where did you get these?”

Laddu’s head cocks at thirty degrees, apparently the angle at which an individual can dissociate from any present situation. He replies, “My friend gifted them to me. They had too many.”

Sita heaves half a sigh of relief. It is interrupted by the remembrance that Laddu cannot speak the same language as any of his friends. Now she asks, “Does your friend know he gifted them to you?”

Laddu is fascinated by a spiderweb in the northwest corner of the kitchen. Sita asks no more questions and prepares a decent meal. Her siblings relish it like no meal they’ve ever eaten, their delight pathetic. Sita gags on every mouthful and lies awake that night on an empty stomach.

In the morning, Goli sits groggy on his mat. This he does for long minutes each morning, sometimes rubbing his head or cleaning his fingernails. It is as though his internal mechanisms are winding. Soon something will snap and he will career for the bathroom as though released from a colossal slingshot, the mist evaporating from his eyes like clouds from a lake. Once this happens, he cannot be stopped. Sita has chosen this, his calmest hour (quarter-hour, really, but who’s counting?), for her second approach.

“Appa?”

No sign of response. She creeps closer, and kneels. “Appa? Appa, I know I should have planned better, Appa, I know I splurged, but I... I really need to buy some more supplies, Appa. I can’t... I have nothing left to cook...”

She trails off weakly, distracted by the oddness of his demeanour. He is only a yard away but peering at her as though from a long way off. Suddenly, he zooms in, his pupils dilating with the rush of landing. He springs to his feet.

“That’s it. That’s it, I’ve had it with your requests. If you will not stop bothering me, if you cannot take responsibility for yourself and live by my rules, you can all go back to live with your grandmother. Pack up, you’re all leaving on the 9:30 train.”

Sita works her mouth in horror and confusion. Janaki, Kamalam and Laddu are rising around her; they open their eyes to Goli’s words. Thangam, who had already risen, lies back down. Sita replies, “That’s not... But...”

“Nine-thirty,” Goli thunders. “Be ready. If you won’t be happy any other way, that’s what you will have.”