The Toss of a Lemon (73 page)

He takes the tumbler from her and puts it and the bowl by the door, then turns down the flame on the kerosene lamp so the room is dim and seems to brighten again as their eyes adjust.

“I was listening to you play this afternoon,” he says. He sits on the bed again, a little closer. “So beautiful, it was ...” He speaks with real passion, or so it seems to her. “Everyone was touched, I could feel it. I imagine you don’t even notice others, though, when you play, do you?”

“I ... I haven’t played very much for anyone outside the family. Visitors occasionally. But I like it.” She feels a shy smile tugging her lip upward, covers her mouth with her hand, lowers it with a breath.

He moves closer to her, awkwardly, and as though forcing his arm through a thin barrier, touches her face. Gaining confidence, he begins stroking her brows, temples and cheek. What a strange way of looking at her, she thinks, and how good it feels to be touched. She likes how he looks, his chubby cheeks and receding hairline. He looks like someone who means what he says. And he looks gentle.

Her face and neck feel ticklish and warmed, as if the skin is puffing slightly as he touches it. Now he strokes her shoulder, her arm and the hand on the bed, now her back, the skin above and below the lines of her blouse. She stiffens a bit as he leans toward her and brushes the base of her neck with his lips. He leans back to look at her, and she relaxes as he takes her face in one hand and kisses her neck again, stroking her forehead with his thumb as though to draw from it the tension of this strange day.

He is succeeding—this is the strangest part of it. He stands and removes his kurta. A twirled gold chain and his sacred thread lie on his mostly smooth chest. He has a single patch of hair, just above where his belly starts to curve out. He sits on the bed again and draws the pallu of her sari from around her waist and shoulder as he lies her down. He reaches to lift her legs onto the bed and kisses her belly, all hollows below her blouse.

Looking up at her, he puts both his hands under her thin shoulder blades and lifts her toward him to kiss her eyes and cheeks and each of her lips, and puts his cheek to hers and to her lips and she kisses him back just a little, as if to see what will happen. He emits a sigh as though he had no right to expect it.

She kisses his shoulders and neck. She has no idea if this is what she is supposed to do, but he is not objecting. It’s funny to be kissing a grown man she hardly knows, but he did it first. He sighs several times and then brings a palm to her breast and strokes it through the cloth of her blouse. Janaki gasps—such a sensation! He watches her face anxiously, then smiles tentatively and tries it again.

“Does it feel nice?” he asks.

“Yes!” she gasps. “Er—I think so.”

“Shall I continue?” He smiles, bringing his other hand from her back.

The only direct instruction Janaki received on these matters was from Gayatri, who said, “Whatever your husband asks for, whenever he asks for it, say yes.”

“Yes,” says Janaki.

He unbuttons her blouse with difficulty and his face shows complicated emotions at the sight of the cotton bodice underneath, with buttons concealed under the arm. There is mutual awkwardness as the blouse and bodice are removed. Much later, they will giggle retrospectively at their own seriousness. Now he strokes his mouth between her breasts and over them, holds her large, young nipples in his lips, then, gently, between his teeth, and then takes her whole breast in his mouth, or as much of it as he can. Janaki, repulsed at the sight and the damp, mystified at her enjoyment, closes her eyes.

When she opens them, it’s because he is now unwinding her carefully wrapped sari from her narrow hips. Terror shudders subtly from her feet to her shoulders as he slips off the last crumpled yards, and she crosses her legs and arms. He has unwrapped his dhoti and now lies on top of her in loincloth and creamy skin. He rolls her awkwardly from side to side.

“Will you—” his voice cracks. “Will you take it off, this?”

He is giving her the knot to his loincloth. She looks at him in disbelief and he at her in fear and they both start to laugh. She undoes the knot, it falls away, and she closes her eyes again.

He is petting her hair, his cheek against hers, murmuring, “You are so beautiful.” Warmth waves through her legs and loins, before she is hit by unjust bumps of hot, insistent pain. He stops when she cries out and holds her face as she whimpers.

“Is it very bad?”

“Yes,” she replies, as instructed.

“It hurts the bride, at first,” he says, starting slowly to move again. He clearly received a different set of instructions. “Shall I stop?”

“Yes,” she says again, tense and glistening now with a sudden sheen of sweat.

He stops, cradling her head as though to console her, stroking one leg as though to relax it. She does start to relax a little, and he kisses her temple and begins moving again. It still hurts, but differently, and she tries not to stiffen again. He lifts himself up on his elbows above her, looking at her hair and face with an investigative air, as though she can’t see him. As he’s inhabited by the act’s presiding spirit, he groans the names of several gods, gasps, and then the spirit passes.

He slides off to one side and immediately begins snoring. She gathers herself and sees spots: red stains on the sheet. Oh no, she thinks, but only because the sight of blood is always distressing. Gayatri had told her there would be blood the first time, but now she remembers what to do about the stains, and that she can do it tomorrow.

She had wondered for a second whether he was going to sneeze and had hoped he wouldn’t because sneezing is a bad omen. The temple fire and the madwoman’s death at her wedding could also have been seen as a bad omen, but no one knew how to interpret that. Janaki might have thought it strange that Baskaran fell asleep as he did, but it was far less strange than what had come before. She doesn’t feel offended or relieved. She rises, puts her bodice and blouse back on, and a cotton sari to sleep in, and twists down the kerosene lamp key to douse the flame completely. Feeling shy even though Baskaran is asleep, she creeps back into the bed.

The next day, Baskaran runs an errand in Madurai. On returning, he presents her with a glass unicorn that rotates on one hoof while the box beneath it, covered in dusty green velvet, tinkles a tinny Brahms lullaby. The day after, she receives a bar of Raja Snow’s Musk Soap with matching hair oil. The day after that, he presses on her a nail buffer and promises he will ask his cousin how it works. On the fourth day, a block-printed Bengali blouse piece. On the fifth, a flat beribboned box of caramels. The sixth, a book of embroidery patterns. On the seventh day after her arrival, he gives her a leather-trimmed kaleidoscope and they take turns being dazzled, lying on the bed and aiming it at the lamp flame, gawping like children at the tumbling stars.

IT IS THE EVE OF VAIRUM and Vani’s trip to Pandiyoor, where Vani will stay a month with her parents. Vairum slips in from work as Vani practises music in their salon. He reclines on a divan and closes his eyes, opening them again as she finishes playing just a few minutes later.

“Oh, my dear, is that all?”

She smiles and nods, flexing her fingers and rolling her shoulders. It was a long piece.

“I must have been later than I thought.” He pats the divan next to him as she rises from the Kashmiri silk rug where the veena rests on two small ringed bolsters. “Come and sit.” She settles herself and he absently strokes a tendril of hair from her forehead. “So tomorrow we go.” He pats his legs. “I’m interested to see how my niece is faring. Your protégée!”

Vani is silent, but she talks only under rare circumstances. When they go in to dinner, she will tell one of her stories, and Vairum will listen as happily as a little boy.

“Poor, motherless, fatherless girl,” he goes on, playing with his wife’s hand. Vani looks at him sharply and his face darkens. “She is fatherless! None of those children has seen my brother-in-law in years. And he never showed them a father’s love,” he says, his mottled face now forming into an expression he recognizes by feel from a time before memory, the look of a child whose father doesn’t see him. Now Vani takes his face in her hands, looking worried, murmuring consolations. “I need a child to raise, my love,” he tells her, in tears.

She wags her head, her forehead to his. She knows this.

“We have so much to give,” he says.

She continues rubbing her forehead against his, an obsessive, desperate gesture, as though trying to graft his dappled skin to hers, cell by burning cell.

“Please, Vani.” He tries to pull away, but she won’t let him. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

He succeeds in moving away a little, but she grips his hands and rocks back and forth, moaning quietly. He has seen her get like this, very occasionally, when she feels her own terrific need meet his. Her grief at their son’s death frightened him: for a week, she made this same low keening, a sound he felt he recognized from her music. Although he felt close to madness himself, he knew that losing her would have done him in and found the strength to coax her back, as he has several times since, as he does now.

“It will happen, my love. I know it will still happen.” He puts his shoulders against hers to absorb her motion. “Look at us. God will not deny us.”

JANAKI GRADUALLY LEARNS about Baskaran’s family from her husband, as they snuggle together nights in the upper room, as well as from observation.

Dhoraisamy looks after the institutions funded by the trust and enjoys and endures the social approbation, privileges and headaches that accompany this responsibility. He has to hire the cooks and other servants for the paadasaalai, for example, but has use of them for his own family. He is fortunate, as he is wont to say more often than necessary, in having an excellent overseer for all the charity’s operational needs.

“Mr. V. Kandasamy.” He presented the accountant to Janaki with a flourish. “A gem of a man, a bit excitable and perhaps over-efficient, perhaps takes things a bit too personally, but it’s all in the interests of the trust!”

Mr. Kandasamy, a small square man with a nervous squint, stood, clutching one of the largest ledgers, which he nearly dropped as he tried to put his palms together in greeting.

Janaki meets a few of Baskaran’s friends, Brahmins for the most part, much like him: well-dressed boys with acute senses of humour. Like most fashionable Brahmin youth these days, Baskaran is in favour of Indian independence, and though he has moments of genuinely lathered passion about this, he can’t take any of it too seriously for too long. Confronted by anyone with very deep convictions, he treads between Gandhian glamour and Nehruvian practicality. He and his friends tend to laugh off fuming, sweaty types who care more about ideas than people. Janaki gathers that Baskaran is a friend whom friends count on, and a son in whom his father confides.

Janaki fully approves of Baskaran in everything but his snuff-taking and his apparent lack of caste feeling. He appears to believe everyone is created equal and is equally deserving of respect, but that is so clearly not the case—she doesn’t know where to start, though, and so doesn’t try. At least, it seems, he has no intention of making her eat in non-Brahmins’ houses or do other improper things that would dishonour her and her upbringing.

Some nights, Baskaran asks her questions about her childhood, so different from his. He asks how it was that they ended up living at her grandmother’s house, and Janaki dutifully gives him the standard answer, that her grandmother thought the children needed some place they could stay, that her mother’s health was always fragile and it was better she not spread her energies so thin. When others have asked her this, her answer has sounded plausible. She’s not sure why, now, it sounds inadequate, almost deceitful. Perhaps Baskaran picks up on this because he continues to ask.

“That’s unusual, though—that you would live with your mother’s mother, instead of with your father’s parents, isn’t it?” he asks gently but with real interest.

“Yes,” Janaki replies hesitantly. “I’m not sure why that was. Maybe my mother’s mother thought she could do a better job. My father’s parents aren’t too well off.”

“Have I heard that they sold a lot of land to your uncle?” Baskaran shifts a little, on his side, his head leaning into his hand, the other hand on Janaki’s stomach.

“Mm-hm,” Janaki says. “But it wasn’t my uncle’s money that paid for us, mostly. For our upbringing, I mean. It was my grandmother’s own inheritance, her manjakkani.”

“Interesting.” Baskaran furrows his brow. “But wasn’t your dad’s salary enough? It sounds like your grandmother wasn’t exactly extravagant.”

Janaki feels herself blushing. “My dad... isn’t very good with money.” She takes a breath, aware of the depth and luxury of this intimacy with Baskaran, of how protected she feels in this room, revealing to him things she has never said to anyone else. “I doubt he ever offered to pay for us. I don’t think—”

She starts to cry and Baskaran sits up, alarmed, and puts his arm around her.

“I don’t think he ever really wanted to keep us. I don’t think he even really noticed we were gone. And my mother never fought to keep us.” She is sobbing against his chest, Baskaran holding her, patting her head, his lips to her forehead.

He wipes her cheeks with his thumb. “But your grandmother loved you, didn’t she?”

Janaki nods.

“She took good care of you. And your uncle,” he continues, “he paid for your wedding. He’s obviously very proud of you. Look at how puffed up he was when they came to visit at Navaratri.”

Janaki sniffs and hiccups, calming. She knows he is trying to reassure and cheer her. But he has no idea of the trauma she has suffered (she’s not sure she had any idea until she surprised herself with these tears), and she doesn’t know whether to be glad of this or angry.