He cuts his mother off, rude but not unkind; she should know by now he doesn't pay attention to those things. Sivakami quickly reins in her only greed, the greed for details. She can understand and almost sympathize with his lack of interest: she herself was far less interested in weddings when she was free to attend them.

But Vairum is speaking.

"... I have completed eighteen years, now, Amma. It's time for me to marry."

Sivakami smiles cautiously at what she thinks is a concession. She had said just these words to him on his previous visit, and he had vehemently denied every part of it then, even his age.

He nods and purses his lips, businesslike. "I will marry Vani, daughter of Parthasarathy of Pandiyoor."

"You will... who?"

"She is the only reason for speaking of this idiotic wedding I attended," Vairum answers, already heading for the stairs to his upper refuge, picking his college satchel up on the way.

She watches it banging against his bony hip as he disappears into the upper reaches.

"Who is she?" Sivakami calls after him, a note of exasperation in her question such as she rarely employs with him.

"The one I will marry," he calls from above.

The next time Sivakami sees him-the next meal-she protests in gentle, persistent tones. "Vairum, kanna, a boy's family never makes the first move. You should be thinking about your studies, now. The time will come soon, and I will initiate some proceedings..."

"Enough, Amma," he responds, though she has numerous wheedlings still to deploy. "This is my decision."

"You cannot make such a decision, you are just a boy!"

"Throughout history men have made such decisions," he informs her. "Nowadays boys wait for their parents to present a girl or two and they say yes I will have her or I like this one better. I have already chosen and I will not have anyone else."

"I will speak to your uncles," she responds weakly, because she doesn't really believe they will make any effort to change his mind. Perhaps, perhaps the girl will be suitable.

"Do what you need to do." Vairum speaks as though to a minion. "Just make sure I am married to her. Soon."

When did that awkward little boy gain such confidence, such command? Maybe in his cla.s.ses, where his performance has been exceptional. Perhaps it is life on his own in the city which has toughened him. Or maybe it was that moment when he, standing before the stage, caught the eye of the beautiful musician and saw her miss a note and smile a little and look away shyly, and glance back.

That night, Sivakami lies awake. This girl, Vani. She might be fine.

Venketu, Sivakami's second brother, could object. His daughter is seven or eight, and Vairum should be hers, by rights. But Venketu has been cool to Sivakami ever since she left their house. The youngest, Subbu, has been warmer, as if to compensate, but she thinks none of them realize what a bright future Vairum is going to have.

Barring serious objections, she expects she will give in to her son. Then all she will have to worry about is the family rejecting the blotches on his skin. Perhaps Minister will find some way to finesse that. On subjects of diplomacy, he seems inexhaustible.

She rises and exits the pantry, where she sleeps, to do her beading by the moonlight in the main hall, conscious of Vairum's breathing on the mat beside the northernmost pillar. He chose to sleep downstairs this first evening-a gesture of tenderness toward his mother? She wants to think so. The slight sound of his breath fills the room.

By discreet means, Sivakami issues a request for information.

Her mole returns from Pandiyoor: Kantha, a hustle-bustle busy-body whose nine yards of sari, given mid-region spread, suggest a spindle bundled with bright thread. Her tongue p.r.i.c.ks like a spindle, too. She enters already wailing, "Oohh, Sivakami, Sivakami, it is all too unfortunate."

Sivakami bids her sit and offers a tumbler of water on a tray, the minimal mark of hospitality. She asks,"What have you learned?"

Kantha pours the water down her throat, head craned back to receive the stream, completely still but for a pulse in her neck like the gills of a shark. She fixes Sivakami with a beady, knowing eye, then her face softens into a well-practised expression between pity and conspiracy.

"Such a beautiful girl," Kantha begins in an ominous tone. "So accomplished."

Sivakami cuts to the chase. "She is married already?"

"Oh, don't they wish," Kantha says as though the words are delicious. She wants to draw this out.

"They have unfounded provincial superst.i.tions about skin conditions."

The phrase "provincial superst.i.tions" sounds stiff and unfamiliar, especially p.r.o.nounced by one so provincial and superst.i.tious as Sivakami, but Kantha looks interested at the possible bonus of learning more about Vairum's troubles. She shakes her head slowly.

"I doubt it-they are hopelessly sophisticated. Practically foreign! But surely your son..."

"So what's the trouble?" Sivakami cuts her off.

"Her horoscope is very bad." Kantha pauses to measure Sivakami's reaction while Sivakami works to keep her face neutral. "Very bad. It says... she will not have children, and only a very small minority of configurations could counter this. How is your son's horoscope?"

"Don't know," Sivakami replies, after a significant pause, in a mechanistic murmur noted and filed by the spindle, who knows fully well the rumours about the causes of Sivakami's widowhood.

"There's not much chance of a match, sadly," Kantha continues.

"Sadly for them, too: her parents are getting desperate. Two years now they have been searching."

Sivakami tries to stay all business. "Is there anything else? They are a modern family-does the girl travel well escorted?"

"Oh, yes," Kantha yawns. "They are all too interested in their arts-shmarts, but this girl is their precious gem. No chances taken, I'm glad to say." She's not glad.

"And how do they feel about horoscopes?" Sivakami asks with deliberate coolness. "Are they looking for a boy whose horoscope will counter hers?"

"But it is so rare, Sivakami Akka!" Kantha is authoritative, encouraging. "They have been searching for years! And these modern people, aristocrats-they probably don't even follow the horoscopes. They just did it because how else to find a groom?"

When Sivakami closes the door behind Kantha, she paces the length of the main hall, feeling her cracked heels grind against the brick tiles. She is sure she can smell the sandalwood box, tucked within the safe. She can smell it from the farthest end of the hall. She doesn't want to touch it.

It comes to her: she doesn't have to. Vairum has made up his mind, and nothing about the horoscope will change it.

A responsible parent, though, would try to dissuade him.

"Little one," she starts when he returns from the fields. "There is bad news on the marriage front."

"What?" Vairum is clearly not interested in hearing objections.

"She cannot have children."

"She is only ten years old, of course she cannot have children."

"Don't be obscene." She purses her lips primly. "Her horoscope? They have been searching for a groom for two years and have found none to accept her."

"Pah! No one believes in that stuff any more. You know what I think of horoscopes? This!" Vairum mimes setting a fire and watching it blaze. "Superst.i.tion! Folk tales and false science!"

Sivakami imagines firelight on his face and suddenly the image shifts so she is remembering him as a baby, standing by his father's funeral pyre. Vairum had, as instructed, tossed a burning f.a.ggot onto the dried cow dung patties and was pulled back by his relatives as the fire licked through the layers of wood and warmed his father's corpse. Had he know what he was doing? Had he know what he was doing? Sivakami wonders. She recalls that he was crying. Does he remember? Sivakami wonders. She recalls that he was crying. Does he remember?

His horoscope consigned his father to flames, and now he'd like to set his horoscope similarly ablaze.

She says weakly, "You must have children."

"We will have children! We will have ten children! You will see.

Horoscopes are nothing. Less than nothing. Ashes of something long dead." He blows imaginary ashes from his palm and dusts his hands one against the other. "It's a new century, Amma, science and religion have triumphed over astrology and superst.i.tion. Come. Let's ask G.o.d."

The next day, Sivakami and Vairum mount the hill to the Rathnagirishwarar temple. The rains have come, as they generally do around this time of year, and they use banana leaves to cover their plate of offerings-coconuts, bananas, betel, yellow and pink flowers, camphor, turmeric, cash-and two paper packets. One packet contains a small red rose and the other a large white jasmine. They are roughly the same size, indistinguishable one from another, as impartial and innocuous as most instruments of fate-lemons, for instance.

Red is auspicious, the colour of vermilion powder and wedding saris. If Vairum chooses this flower, the wedding will proceed. White is the colour of death and if he selects this flower, plans for a wedding with Vani will quietly die.

The middle-aged priest takes the plate and, without ever looking at them directly, asks brusquely their reason for coming. He gives the coconut to a junior priest who uses an iron blade set in the floor by the sanctum to cut off its fibrous hair and break it open. The older priest lights the camphor and fussily rearranges the things on the plate. He waves the plate around, muttering, professionally bad-tempered, stuffs the yellow and pink blossoms into a few niches around the bottom of the lingam, takes half the coconut, some bananas and the money, and hands back the plate. The younger priest smiles at them.

Sivakami receives the plate and nods to Vairum. His hand hovers. He chooses one packet. He untucks the first fold and unfolds the next.

Red.

The rose petals rise, freed from the paper wrapping, like a ruffled sigh.

They return home in the rain, a triumphant smile across Vairum's face, and a resigned one on Sivakami's.

Sivakami makes a few well-placed remarks, speaking within the hearing of others as well as encouraging Gayatri to pa.s.s along information. There is nothing wrong with Vairum's horoscope-she makes that clear-they are simply not interested in horoscopes. Others have said such things, progressives, people like that. Vairum is in college, it is believable that he might feel this way. He cut off his kudumi last year in favour of a Western style; he looks like a modern thinker. Sivakami had been dismayed, but it is not unknown, these days. She emphasizes her son's impeccable lineage, his stellar future. Not the future determined by the stars, but his likeliness to be a star in the future. He will be a leader of Brahmins. He will earn cash, not paddy. A good boy, from a good family.

Gossip takes its course. Soon, they receive an invitation, almost identical to the one Sivakami's father sent Hanumarathnam a lifetime ago. Originality is praised in very few areas of life. In the matter of a wedding, it is nearly unthinkable.

Vairum attends the appointment with Sivakami's eldest and youngest brothers. At the girl-seeing, Vani's family plays her to advantage. She is exceptionally beautiful and Vairum is even more captivated. Vani smiles at him-without shyness or apparent distaste at his progressive bleaching-and seals the pact.

And look at this coincidence: when Vairum enters Vani's house for the girl-seeing ceremony, he is greeted by the two young barristers he met on the train to Thiruchi when first he left home for college. They are Vani's own uncles! It must be fate's working, all jollily agree.

The girl's parents are plainly thrilled. Sivakami's brothers enjoy the food Vani serves and the song she plays. They give broad hints that everything is satisfactory, but they really don't much care. Returning to Cholapatti, they put on concerned and condescending airs as they advise Sivakami to go ahead. She perceives that they are being cavalier, but this was expected. Vairum floats in, dreamy, blissful. This is more significant. He has been pleased. His sharp edges are momentarily cloaked in cloud, but just as fog vanishes under heat, so any objections from his mother would unsheathe his will.

Eight months later, Vairum and Vani are married.

SO LOOK AT VAIRUM, a college student, married to the girl who will become the woman of his dreams. At first glance, it would seem he is becoming exactly what his mother intended when she tore him from Samanthibakkam and reinstalled him in Cholapatti, sacrificing his happiness on his behalf. If he had known what he would receive in return for his suffering, would he himself have placed his contentment on the altar? None of us will ever know.

He lives in the carapace of a happy young man. He has routines that build on his interests and skills, that give his life the appearance of balance. At college, he works hard and is rewarded with knowledge, honours and respect. He has friends.

One of those boys is distantly related to two wealthy merchant families in Cholapatti and goes there for weekends from time to time, since his own family lives in Thanjavur, a bit far to travel for such a short break. When his friend visits, Vairum is invited to be a fourth for tennis at the Kulithalai club and finds it a pleasant diversion at the end of a long day spent in studies and land management. He begins to frequent the club whenever he is home for the weekend, becoming a regular in singles and doubles within a rotating set of sons and fathers of the landed cla.s.ses. Often he stops on the way home for a lemon soda with a few of them, though never with the Brahmins.

Why not with the Brahmins? Sivakami wonders. Is he shunning his own caste or are they shunning him or is it something buried, less specific, which neither he nor the group would admit? Vairum doesn't feel he needs to admit anything, he simply has never had friends among the Cholapatti Brahmins, and age and distance are not changing this.

Distance is begetting distance, in fact-Vairum is tethered to the village, as they all are, by his land and history. The difference is that he is shod for a great step out into the world. The barbs are beginning to fly, and from this distance, they look a lot like the stones that hailed upon him as a child in his gla.s.s house. But now his carapace of contentment is formed, and hail what may, he can retreat within it.

Yellow Money 1920-1921.

THANGAM HAS RETURNED HOME heavily pregnant with her third child: It's a boy, a boy! Sivakami is more a.s.sured in this birth than she has been in the last two, and her confidence grows as she hands the baby, red and screaming with good health, to his mother. Surely, thinks Sivakami, surely his chubby hands will wipe away the worry lines that have settled on his mother's face in the years of her marriage. A boy will be active, mischievous. He will clutch and tear Thangam's dulling mask of anxiety.

Thangam and the baby emerge for the single day of his naming ceremony and then withdraw once more. Two more weeks pa.s.s, but Sivakami cannot tell: has the mask rent? On the nineteenth day, Thangam and the baby come out into the sunlight of the courtyard. They bathe, and Thangam's gold dust silts up the narrow courtyard gutters. She looks calmer than she did on arrival, but the sides of her tongue and the lower rim of her eyelids are tinged a bluish grey. Is she or is she not relieved to have delivered a boy?

The little girls must be relieved to have their mother back, though they might have mixed feelings about the new baby. Saradha, the older one, especially-she had immense difficulty in adjusting to Cholapatti. On arrival, her eyes the size of palm fruits, she had clung to Thangam so vehemently that twice the expectant mother had tripped and fallen, prompting Sivakami to wonder if the child wasn't jealous and trying to endanger the coming baby. Thangam told her, though, that it was the change of place: they had moved a year earlier, and Saradha had behaved in just the same manner. Saradha is not so much attached to her mother as attached to her routine, to things familiar. It's true: Saradha violently protested much of what was required of her the first few days, and then insisted, with equal, desperate, vehemence, on doing all the same things every day after that: prayers with her grandmother, whom she conscientiously never touches until after supper, breakfast with Mari, late-morning visit with Rukmini next door, off to Muchami's village with him, where she takes a nap in his hut, back for tiffin and games with the children who still gather around the veranda whenever Thangam is in town, nursery rhymes on Sivakami's lap at night, by which time this is permitted. When Thangam emerges from her childbed seclusion, Saradha schedules intervals when she will sit by her mother's side and coo at her new baby brother. She is not difficult to tend, provided any change, anything new, is introduced only as a modification of her routine.

"Will Saradha be as upset by your return home as she was by her arrival here?" Sivakami asks.

Thangam smiles mildly and shrugs.

Sivakami persists, "When are you going to move house again?"

In eight months.

If Saradha were like her younger sister, Sivakami muses, there would be no need to worry, but the two couldn't be more different. Where Saradha approaches everything with a seriousness beyond her years or understanding, Visalam seems to see everything as a joke. Every creature, every event makes her laugh, really laugh, good-naturedly ; she is not mocking or spiteful, and she is obedient. Sivakami thinks perhaps she should be worried about her unconventional behaviour, but she has so many other more urgent matters to worry about.

Thangam's health, for example. She looks weak, too weak even, apparently, to have any interest in her newest baby. With the first baby, Saradha, Thangam showed at least some curiosity, at the child's tiny fingers and toes. Sivakami saw her once tickling the child's pretty chin, though with an absent air. She didn't see what she expected, the adoration that Thangam had shown her little brother all those years ago, that which holds most new parents in helpless thrall.

The little boy, since he was first given the breast, seems to have fed through every waking hour and Thangam has barely looked at him. Thangam's milk flows from her breast, the roses from her cheeks, the gold from... where? Her skin, her hair? How will she have the energy to relocate three children? And the last is a boy-when they next move, he will, at eight months, need constant attention. The girls also need at least minimal supervision. Goli's salary and status should permit a couple of servants, but Sivakami has deduced that there are none. Does he fire them, do they quit, does he forget to tell them when they move? How will Thangam cope?

Sivakami chews her lip and selects a bead, tilting her head against the moonbeam illuminating her work. She hears the baby suckling, the breathing of the little girls on their mats in the main hall. Saradha should stay here in Cholapatti, that's what. And when the next baby comes, Visalam should stay. And with the next, this little boy, whose burgeoning belly has already earned him the nickname Laddu, "sweet ball." Thangam need only keep her youngest two with her, need only move and tend two children. Sivakami is thirty-four but, having had only two children, feels she has the strength and energy of women half her age.

She proposes the idea to Thangam, who looks reflective and says nothing. Boarding one's children with a relative is common enough, after all. Gayatri's first son, whose father was determined to educate him in an English-medium school, had gone at the age of five to live with Gayatri's second cousin in Madras city. Nor is parental authority sacrosanct: it's Goli's parents who have the last word on the children. She will have to wait for their response.

Six weeks after Thangam finishes her seclusion, Goli comes to Cholapatti.

He comes at tiffin time, greets Thangam briefly and pats the new baby on the head. Sivakami had no warning of his arrival and is concerned that she has been caught with nothing fancy enough to serve a son-in-law. Goli looks a little more inclined than usual to wait, though, and in fifteen minutes she has made a semolina pudding with cashews, one of the quickest sweets in the repertoire, and Thangam serves it to her husband along with idlis, steamed rice cakes, and a coconut chutney while the baby naps in his hammock in the corner of the main hall. When she comes back to fetch the mulaghapodi, a powdered chili and lentil condiment, Sivakami tells her, "You should speak to the son-in-law about my suggestion." Goli will not stay with them-it's not appropriate for a man to take advantage of his wife's family to that degree-so Thangam's only opportunities would be ones like this, and perhaps only this one, since Goli is exceptionally immobile today. He looks tired.

Thangam goes to squat by him while he eats. She says something Sivakami can't hear. He takes a moment to look up, as though he hadn't noticed her. "What?" he asks. Thangam speaks again as he frowns at her. "This is your mother's idea?"

Thangam doesn't look at him.

Goli eats for a moment without speaking. "I suppose it makes sense, doesn't it? Chutney?"

Thangam comes to fetch the chutney. The matter is not technically technically concluded, Sivakami thinks, and wonders if the parents will overrule the son. She looks toward the courtyard. Muchami has finished his tiffin and observed this exchange. He looks at her but says nothing, and she knows they will speak later. concluded, Sivakami thinks, and wonders if the parents will overrule the son. She looks toward the courtyard. Muchami has finished his tiffin and observed this exchange. He looks at her but says nothing, and she knows they will speak later.

Saradha has eaten her tiffin in the back with Muchami as usual. Sivakami had asked if she didn't want to go eat with her appa, but the little girl shook her head, looking frightened, whether of her father or of the change in routine. Visalam is still too little to feed herself, but as Goli drinks his coffee, she takes him the top she has been playing with. He obligingly spins it a couple of times as she laughs mightily, and then he appears to lose interest, though she continues playing with it, without appearing to notice he is no longer involved.

"I'm off, then," he says, and leaves.

Sivakami, though gratified by the length and relative normalcy of his visit, is alarmed by the abrupt departure. As Thangam gets her younger daughter's tiffin, Sivakami asks her, "Did the son-in-law say how many days he would be in town? I have to get your things ready."

Thangam shrugs.

Later, while Thangam rests, Sivakami raises the topic with Muchami. "I've come up with a plan."

"Are the babies staying here?" he asks.

"One can't surprise you with anything, huh?" she asks, smiling a little.

"That's my job." He shrugs, also smiling.