Today Vani's story changes: now the uncle is the one on the brink of misfortune and trying to keep it secret from the rest of the family, and the family guesses, from the reliquary's appearance, that someone is hiding something, though not what or who.

And now Muchami is ready to depart and Janaki to depart with him.

On the road, she starts in with the day's questions.

"Muchami, how come rice and lentils get soft when they're cooked, but idlis and dosai get hard?" she asks in a let'-forget-the-past tone.

Muchami smiles at her sadly. "I don't know, Janaki-baby. Maybe you should ask your teacher that one."

Janaki slides him a wary look. "What teacher, Muchami?"

"Your teacher at school." He looks at her and back at the road.

"I'm finished school, Muchami," she explains. "It was spreading me too thin."

"But you have so many questions, Janaki, that you and I can't answer alone. We need your teacher."

Janaki is silent, wondering how Muchami could be so wrong in his judgment.

"Janaki-baby." Muchami clears his throat. "Did you learn Sanskrit in school?"

"No," replies Janaki, and it's the truth. She didn't learn it, she discovered she already knew it. "You can't learn Sanskrit at school, Muchami, that's why Laddu Anna needs to learn it at home."

"Laddu is being taught at home because he's not learning in school, but he's not learning at home, either," Muchami points out, and a little of Janaki's faith in him is restored. "But you could learn so much, Janaki-baby. Trust me: so much that you can't learn at home, that I can't learn unless you go and do it for me. Then you can teach me. Please go back to school, Janaki-baby. Do it for me."

Janaki is starting to see his point of view in spite of herself. Her practical mind begins rearranging her days. She could look after the cows before and after school. She and Muchami, too, can convene at other times to do what they must do. And she only need attend school a half day on Sat.u.r.day, and Sunday not at all.

But what about Vani? Vani cannot be rearranged. Well-if Janaki is to be Muchami's eyes and ears at school, he can be hers at home. Janaki will spend as much time as ever she is able listening to Vani's music; he cannot help her with that. But he can listen to and relate the day's stories. If he promises this, she will go back to school.

He can offer this. "Done."

Done.

Janaki returns to school the next day, opening some doors, closing others. Muchami and she save their questions for the end of the day and weekends, but there are more and more questions never asked and never answered, and eventually, more and more she doesn't think to seek answers for.

The Son of a Son 1932.

THERE IS A BOY ON SIVAKAMI'S STEP holding out a piece of paper. She doesn't understand.

He explains that it is a telegram.

The telegram. Sivakami receives it with trembling hands. Vairum always has to be modern. He and Vani had travelled to her parents' house for Vani's delivery. If the telegram is arriving in Cholapatti today, that means he sent it... when? How long do they take?

These thoughts chase one another like minnows through the reeds of her mind. She has never been so nervous. She takes a short breath through her nose and opens the seal.

BOY BORN STOP VANI TIRED BUT HEALTHY STOP I COME HOME TOMORROW STOP.

A son of her son, a son of her son. She falls on her knees in front of the Ramar. Thank you, thank you. Her elation is so great it feels not unlike despair: how can this be? She wished for this so long and so hard that she had nearly given it up. Her happiness now is too near wonder-how can this finally have come to pa.s.s?-to be recognizable as joy.

Gradually, however, rocking back and forth on her knees before her G.o.ds, the telegram stretched between her hands like a cradle, she comes to accept and a grin starts to pull at her upper lip.

VAIRUM IS ON THE TRAIN HOME, wearing the same grin-that seen on a stranger walking the opposite way, that inward smile that makes one think, oh, someone has found love, has found a job, has been paid a high or casual compliment; someone has been made happy.

In the train car, people make conversation with him, and though he's always the silent one in the compartment, this time he shyly confesses : he's a father. He has a son.

I have a son, son, I have a I have a son. Cradled in the train in the drowsing of the day, Vairum's thoughts drift to his own father, and those moments when he would have first learned he was father to a son. His musing is interrupted by a strong, sudden headache. The left half of his brain seems to throb, and the temple around it, one of the body's irrational moments, the kind of pain that happens every so often for no reason. His left eyelid twitches. He shakes his head and holds his eye shut with his fingers until it is still. The train pauses at an uncovered village platform and he goes out to take a drink of water at the pump. When he sits down again, he can't remember what he was thinking of and can't be bothered remembering. He blissfully goes on conjuring his son and this mantle of fatherhood, drifting through such lulling, abstract thoughts as only Vani has ever before invoked in him. son. Cradled in the train in the drowsing of the day, Vairum's thoughts drift to his own father, and those moments when he would have first learned he was father to a son. His musing is interrupted by a strong, sudden headache. The left half of his brain seems to throb, and the temple around it, one of the body's irrational moments, the kind of pain that happens every so often for no reason. His left eyelid twitches. He shakes his head and holds his eye shut with his fingers until it is still. The train pauses at an uncovered village platform and he goes out to take a drink of water at the pump. When he sits down again, he can't remember what he was thinking of and can't be bothered remembering. He blissfully goes on conjuring his son and this mantle of fatherhood, drifting through such lulling, abstract thoughts as only Vani has ever before invoked in him.

He enters the main hall, falls at the feet of his G.o.ds, and then does the same for his mother, who holds her hands over him in blessing. He stands and looks into her eyes, the only person, with Vani, whose joy equals his.

He does not go out in the fields that day, which should have been his greatest priority after three days away. No, Vairum takes a few magazines and sits on the veranda. It is the strangest sight. Why is it so strange when it is precisely how most other men on the Brahmin quarter spend their days? Well, precisely for that reason. Several neighbours offer shy congratulations as they pa.s.s. Vairum modestly accepts. Murthy joins Vairum on the veranda and acts the proud senior uncle.

Sivakami lies awake that night, a night twelve long years in coming. Her optimism had ebbed a little with each succeeding-or should that be failing?-year, though she wouldn't admit it, even to herself. It wears a person down, hope. So many pledges and pujas, from the most public and dramatic to the last one at home-the one that worked.

Had the miraculous not occurred, the events of that day might not have stayed in Sivakami's mind at all, but as it is, she recalls the disagreement between Vani and Vairum over the puja. She had never seen them disagree and hasn't since. Sivakami recalls that her own first child was conceived on a night when she and her husband were together again after a rupture, one of his unforgivable sojourns, and though it is awful to think that the best unions may be born of discord, she thinks more than one couple may share this experience. Certainly, Gayatri has gone so far as to confess she occasionally provokes fights with her husband because he works so ardently to regain her favour.

But Sivakami doesn't think Vani was simply upset at having her playing interrupted, or at Vairum's not trusting her to finish in time. South Indian cla.s.sical music tends to be devotional. Vani was making a supplication that day, Sivakami believes, the same request they would then make in the puja, the same they had been making all those years. Vani had to stop Vairum from interrupting it.

For the last nine months, Vairum has been buoyant and benevolent as never before: kind to Thangam's children, solicitous of his wife and mother. Sivakami and he have been united in their desire to care for Vani. Previously, Vani's energies had mirrored the moon's: she would be sluggish and sleepy while the moon was in shadow and shake with overabundant energy when it waxed bright. Pregnant, she was consistently inward-directed and content. Her playing became softer and more conventional-most often, she played paeans to Lord Krishna, favourite to children, songs she occasionally sang. She obediently drank the garlic rasam Sivakami prepared, even when she occasionally brought it back up. She had attacks of nausea through her first trimester that left her skin waxy and eyes dull. But she was obviously happy. She put on weight; her plummy figure and moon-like face grew rounder. She had always glowed, but in pregnancy, she looked less exceptional than she had before. Sivakami thinks this must be some portion of her happiness, as of Vairum's: finally, they were like any couple. No longer the darkly repulsive business genius; no longer the eerily glowing musical genius. Just a young married couple expecting their first child.

Sivakami turns over to her other side. A son of her son, a son of her son ... she falls into a long sleep, deep and dark as a stone well.

Though perhaps her sleep should rather be compared to the bed of the Vaigai River, which runs behind Vani's hometown: peaceful and solid in appearance, but with a current ever springing just beneath the surface, so that one need only rake the sand with one's fingers to find one's handprint immediately drowned.

While Vairum is striding about the fields the next day, shielded within the touching invincibility of parenthood, another telegram arrives.

While Vairum is out seeing that the earth will provide for his son, while he is gracefully accepting congratulations on this most natural and, for the father, effortless of achievements, while he stands gazing at the fertile fields and thinking how he never felt the goodness of sunshine before, Vairum's gold medal, his rose-tinted spectacles, his soft beating heart, loses grip on this world and slips away.

CHILD DID NOT SURVIVE STOP.

Sivakami collapses. There is no other response. She crumples in a little bald and white heap on the brick floor and her granddaughters run to her, shrieking, not sure whether to touch her. They run around her screaming until she opens her eyes and finds some neighbours entering the front door and kneeling beside her. They look at the telegram and bring her a tumbler of water.

Like a pattern of sound waves radiating from a signal source, silence spreads over the Brahmin quarter, the village, the river and fields, until Vairum, some three miles away, notices a hush, shivers and starts running for home. He runs without stopping, the panicked Muchami struggling to keep up with him, and when he enters his house from the back and sees his mother on the floor of the hall and his nieces around her with tear-streaked faces and the neighbours all fearful and resigned, because babies are fragile and do tend to die, Vairum raises his face to his fate and feels it press him down to his knees. As he falls, though, he curses. He cannot change his fate, but he can object, and this he does, in tortured tones. Those who hear him talk of it for years: his scream, like no sound they had ever heard from any living being.

Thangam Visits 1934.

THANGAM HAS BEEN EXPECTED in Cholapatti for nearly a week now, and Janaki, for one, is tired of waiting.

"Is she coming today?" she asks Sivakami, as she has every morning since they were told to prepare for the visit and the arrival of a new baby. Their elder sister, Saradha, arrived a week ago, for the same reason-she is due in a couple of months-but she is bossy and Janaki, who has never lived with her, finds her a little hard to take. She longs to see her mother again.

Sivakami tells her wearily, as every morning, that she can't say for sure.

"Why can't you say for sure, Amma?" Janaki whines, while her siblings scramble to organize their school work. She always has hers ready the night before. She's eight now and can barely remember living with her parents but still aches for her mother at times.

"Because your father is a ne'er-do-well and a cad," Vairum remarks casually as he pa.s.ses her and breaks a couple of bananas off the stalk leaning in the pantry.

Janaki shrinks back against the main hall wall to let him pa.s.s back out. She watches him leave through the front door.

"What does that mean, Amma?" she asks Sivakami, her lower lip trembling.

"Nothing, kanna, nothing," Sivakami clucks. Janaki keeps her head down, her hands folded in front of her. "Your father's work keeps him very busy. He can't easily get away when he wants."

Muchami overhears this exchange from the courtyard but is not close enough to partic.i.p.ate. He watches Janaki turn away, oh, oh, my girl, too old now for him to take in his arms. As badly as she clearly needs to be held, there is no one now for that. my girl, too old now for him to take in his arms. As badly as she clearly needs to be held, there is no one now for that.

It's lunchtime at school, and Janaki and her friend and benchmate Bharati go to pick up their tiffin boxes. "So has your amma come yet?"

Janaki momentarily can't think of what her friend means. "Amma?" Then she realizes: Bharati is referring to Thangam. She's not Brahmin and so has never been inside their home. She can't know they call their grandmother Amma and refer to their mother as Akka. When Janaki was telling her friends that her mother was expected, she used the term "amma," but as identification, not appellation. "Um, no. Probably today."

"I thought she was coming a couple of days ago."

"My appa's work means he can't always bring her whenever he wants," Janaki parrots, glad that Bharati's gone on ahead of her out of the cla.s.sroom and doesn't appear to have heard.

They look to see where their little gang of friends are sitting in the schoolyard and head for a slightly different place to force the other girls to come and join them.

"I couldn't live without my mother," says Bharati.

Is she being sly? Tough to say: her eyes are downcast, toward her lunch, which Janaki notices contains chicken. Although Janaki still only vaguely understands caste distinctions, she has been inculcated with Brahmin disapproval of non-vegetarianism. Even if one's caste permits such practices, she believes better individuals behave as much like Brahmins as possible. Muchami and Mari would never touch meat.

"I don't really notice it," Janaki lies.

Bharati lives with her mother, but, like Janaki, in her mother's mother's house. This is unusual, and they have talked a little about this strange fact of their lives they have in common against the world. She has heard it whispered, however, that Bharati might not know who her father is. Janaki doesn't know how this works but figures the subject must be sensitive. Janaki doesn't live with her father either, but at least she's confident of his ident.i.ty.

"Ayoh!" yells Bharati all at once. Only the newest girl of their set jumps, the others being more accustomed to her melodrama.

"What?" asks one of them finally.

"We have our music lessons with that horrible Nandu Vadyar today," Bharati groans. Janaki can't help noticing that even Bharati's complaints sound musical and appealing. "Everything I learn about music I learn only from Vani Amma. Nandu Vadyar may as well be teaching us to wash dishes. Janaki, when Vani Amma was playing 'Nannu palimpa' last night, oh I thought I would cry." Bharati leaps up and falls to her knees. Arms arching skyward, eyes softened, she holds the pose as though she is being painted. She's so pretty, with fair skin and straight jet hair, that all the girls easily imagine her as an ill.u.s.tration in a storybook about the G.o.ds. "It was as though I could really see her, pleading with Lord Rama ..." She clasps her hands at her breast and bows her head, while somehow still ensuring that her face is visible.

"Do you think when Nandu Vadyar hears music he's hearing the same thing we are?" Janaki asks metaphysically.

"I don't care what he hears." Bharati resumes her lunch. "Anyway, that's why I must have courage to listen to Vani Amma even after the sun goes down and the ghosts come out!"

Their four little friends jump and shiver as if on command. Janaki, because she is lieutenant and foil, and because she's smarting from having had her question dismissed, remains icily still.

"I saw a ghost, Janaki, two days ago," Bharati gasps, her eyes dancing, "when I came to hear Vani Amma play and Draupadi was late coming to get me. Can you guess where?"

"Tamarind tree, again?" Janaki a.s.sumes a diagnostic expression. "By the gate?"

"Have you seen the ghost that lives there?"

"Oh, there's more than one," Janaki world-wearily informs her. "Describe it."

"Huge, skin of fire, dripping fangs, broken horns," Bharati lists as though cataloguing the merits of a recent clothing purchase. All four of their friends are squirming, stricken.

"No, I haven't seen that one," Janaki admits with a tone of detached interest. "I think it almost got my brother once."

"I shielded my eyes and ran." Bharati mimes the tableau. "I could hear it chasing me until its power sucked it back into the tree."

"But how can you bear to go back, Bharati?" One of their companions asks, reason and curiosity overtaking her fright.

"Because that's the only place I can hear Vani Amma play," Bharati harrumphs, adding dreamily, "I would overcome any fear, I would scale mountains and swim up waterfalls to live in her music."

The whole rest of their cla.s.s, munching lunches, looks frumpy and discontent in contrast with Bharati. Even Janaki, despite their close a.s.sociation, can never come close to matching her friend in style or mystery. Bharati seems to have been born sophisticated; there is something tragic that twinkles about her, something real or tinsel, one cannot tell, but it is intriguing either way.

On the bullock cart ride home, Janaki thinks on what may await her. She hopes her mother has arrived. She hopes her little sisters look like her, especially the one, Kamalam, who is coming to stay.

Vani normally commences playing shortly after the children get home. Today, though, as the bullock cart rounds off the town road onto the Brahmin-quarter approach, Janaki can already hear the music-vibrant, furious. Vani must be well into her session to have the raga at such a pitch.

The front hall, as always, is dim and cool, but the floor is shimmering with trails and patches of golden dust, as though a character from fairy stories has wandered through their home and enchanted it. The hair on Janaki's neck stands up: her mother, loveliness itself, is seated against a pillar, smiling faintly. The contours of Thangam's shoulders are accentuated by shadows of fairy dust, the pleats of her sari spread against her swollen belly. Kamalam, a little girl who does look like Janaki, leans against Thangam shyly. Another, littler girl, Radhai, is galloping to and fro in the garden with Muchami, banging trees with a stick.

Laddu, Sita and Janaki all grin and shuffle their feet in front of their mother.

"His."

"His."

"Hi," they say.

"Kiss your mother," Sivakami says loudly from the kitchen doorway, and the children go to Thangam, bending awkwardly to peck her on the cheek. She touches them lightly with her hand as they incline toward her. She smiles as if to put them off, and Sivakami, watching, feels pained. Has Thangam been made unable to show affection, too embarra.s.sed by her father's favouritism, and now by her fecundity? But why make the children suffer for suffer for that? thinks Sivakami. Vairum is not even home. that? thinks Sivakami. Vairum is not even home.

The children look at Sivakami as if to ask what to do next, and she beckons them to the pantry to receive their after-school snacks. Laddu and Sita sit against the wall in the main hall, Janaki in one of the doorways to the garden. Janaki expects to be asked questions, but she's not. Sita and Laddu look proud and anxious to be noticed. Sita creeps gradually closer until she can take Thangam's hand. Thangam lets her, without clasping the hand in return.

Saradha comes into the hall from the kitchen, bustling and bouncing, straightening things that don't really need straightening. Janaki watches her and understands that, annoying as her methods are, this is her peculiar way of giving herself a feeling of stability. She listens, disturbed, to Vani's music. It sounds mad this afternoon, twirling and popping like Deepavali fireworks off the roof above them. She thinks she recognizes "Jaggadodharana," a song of praise for Lord Krishna, but each note is scissored frighteningly into sixteenths, blurring its sound. She hums along-yes, it is that song-and starts singing the lyrics, about the G.o.d born to a mortal, and his mother playing with him, as though he is merely her plump, silken baby, hers to hold, out of the world's eye. Janaki first heard the song at a wedding a year earlier, and made a relative there teach her the words. Lord Krishna is humanity's essence and its saviour, says the song, and his mother plays with him as though he is no more than her precious baby.

Then Vairum blurs through the pantry door and pulls up sharp at the sight of his sister and her ma.s.s of offspring, and Janaki suddenly remembers when Vani went away to have her baby and it died. Janaki has often thought about this cousin who vanished before she ever had the chance to meet him. It took her a while to understand that, unlike her and her sisters and brother, who have all been taken away and all eventually returned, this baby will never arrive here. She has always wondered what he looked like-crystal crossed with a moonbeam? A bubble on a cloud, attached to the world by dew-covered spider lines. They tore and he floated away. Had he come to live with them, he would have been Janaki's special companion, her complement, she thinks. He would have seen light where she saw dark, he would have been Vani's melody to Janaki's taalam. She used to crave dirt; he might have licked whitewash from clean corners and she alone would know.

Vani hits and pulls furious strings. The melody hammers on the drone as Janaki's imaginings plink gla.s.sily onto the brick floor and she drowses, half in sun, half in shade, her hand half-consciously tapping the song's rhythm on her knee. She's awakened by Sita knocking on her head.

"I'm going to go have a veena lesson like I always do at this time," she remarks pointedly. "I'll wake you up when it's time for supper."

"I'm coming, I'm coming." Janaki starts toward the back of the house. "Let me change, wait for me," she calls over her shoulder as she runs.

At four o'clock, as every Monday and Wednesday, she and Sita have a veena lesson at Gayatri's house, with a terrible teacher of good family engaged by Gayatri's mother-in-law. Gayatri had invited Sita and Janaki to partic.i.p.ate since her daughter Akila was quite young and it would help to have older girls along, since she knew Janaki would like nothing better, and since she couldn't invite Janaki without inviting Sita. Janaki ekes all she can from their teacher's limited store of knowledge, while Sita, though she loves the idea of having lessons, is terrible and never practises. Still, Gayatri and Sivakami privately agreed that any constructive activity could help curb Sita's destructive impulses, and Gayatri was glad to help Sivakami, much as she disliked having Sita in the house. Even if Sivakami had intended to give her granddaughters veena lessons, which she hadn't, it would be impossible for the girls to receive a teacher at home, given that teachers generally teach in exactly the hours when Vani conducts her own afternoon session.

Sita will, of course, have left by the time Janaki gets out of her school uniform and into a regular paavaadai, and Janaki knows this, but changes quickly just in case. Sita has gone, so Janaki trots to the back door off the courtyard and leans out peering to her left, so she can see Bharati, who sits beneath a mango tree as she always does at this time.

"His."

"His."

Bharati points up in Vani's direction with a mystified expression; Janaki purses her brows and shrugs in agreement. Bharati closes her eyes. Janaki goes to her veena lesson.

After he finishes with them, their teacher goes west, out of the Brahmin quarter, to the very edge of Cholapatti, to Bharati's house, where he gives his last lesson of the day.

It's midday break, at school the next day. Janaki and Bharati choose their position, and their friends close in uncertainly.