"But the amount of investment you need takes the project largely out of your hands," Vairum proceeds, reasonable and direct. "I will front the rest of the money-because it gives me the controlling interest. You must admit, it's safer, for you and for everyone else involved."

Incredibly, Goli has said nothing through this speech, but now he sounds as though he is...o...b..ting madly, an electron around Vairum's nucleus.

"I spit on your money, you cheap-nosed freak of a not-quite-man ! How dare you insult me with your generosity! Don't you think for a second you are getting any part of this so let that be a lesson to you with your swell-headed individualistic ambitions and att.i.tudes! I ought to-"

Vairum bellows, "You cannot for a second speak of what it is to be a man, you who leave your children to be raised by others."

Sivakami prays the children did not hear that. (They did.) She knows Vairum doesn't mind the children's presence, not at all. It is Goli he resents. Oh, why did she suggest this?

Goli's voice circles as he charges down the spiral staircase. He pitches into the hall from the stairwell, chopping the side of his right hand against his left palm.

"Pack your bags. We are leaving." He flies around the room, shoving each child in the direction of Thangam's baggage, which stands ready in the corner of the hall. "No objections, children! You will not insist any longer on living in this house. Time and again I have tried to make you all come and live with me. You always refuse: my Vairum Mama says this, my Sivakami Patti says that!"

What he is saying is untrue, but this is immaterial.

Sita is hauled to her feet, unprotesting but also largely unconscious. Laddu, Janaki and Kamalam mill into one another, b.u.mping, confused. Radhai, the toddler, howls and shoves her mother's sari into her mouth as Thangam moves toward the door. Visalam has stealthily backed out into the garden with her baby. Chances are Goli won't notice her, but Sivakami closes the garden door just in case.

"No more!" Goli hollers. "This time, I will not take no for an answer. Go, pack!"

The children have no idea what this means as far as they are concerned.

"PACK!"

Sivakami indicates that Muchami should fetch a trunk from upstairs.

They all get on the 92:35 train that night. By morning, they will reach the Karnatak country, where Goli is stationed at present, the farthest they have ever been from home.

In the Karnatak Country 1934.

THEY ARRIVE AT TEN IN THE MORNING, by which time Cholapatti would have been sweltering and still. In Cholapatti, the packed air is so hot and moist that every villager feels a privileged proximity to G.o.ddess Earth-each person feels her sweat.

In the Karnatak country, the air swirls and rustles round, cool as the children have known only water to be, water dippered from the big clay pot in the darkest corner of the pantry. The house is like theirs in Cholapatti; the same brick floors and clay-shingled roof, but smaller. It is a government-issue house and comes with a government-issue houseboy who bobs ingratiatingly as they arrive and then disappears.

The children watch their father take soap and a towel and stride toward the back of the house. He returns ten minutes later, shaved and washed. They are still in the front hall, mostly still standing and very quiet. The one or two who sat scramble to their feet. Goli looks at them with indignant expectation. He shouts, "Not clean yet? Move!"

Laddu and Sita rush to the back, grabbing towels where they saw Goli do so. There must be more than one bathroom, they think, if they were supposed to be bathing while Goli was. But no, there is only one bathroom. One by one, then, they bathe in cold water and then sit in the hall, uncomfortable.

Goli paces and mutters, to and fro, up and down, sometimes right out the front door. Each time one of the children stands to take her turn at the bath, he shouts, "Move!" at the receding back, which then jumps and runs for the bathroom.

Thangam is exhausted from the trip and lies under a thin dhurri with the baby in the other room. As the last child is bathing, Thangam calls out feebly, "There is no food in the house. You have to get them some food."

Goli boomingly echoes his wife, "No food in the house? No food in the house. Okay, we will eat out." He starts out the door, but no one follows him. He returns to the door and shouts, "Come!"

Kamalam is still in the washroom. The other children point that way.

"Hm? What?"

"Kamalam is still taking her bath," Sita says helpfully.

Kamalam comes hurrying along at that moment.

"Hm!" Goli sweeps his hand upward and starts out the door again. The children run to follow him. Their hair is still uncombed, and Kamalam's blouse is b.u.t.toned wrong, but they are reasonably clean. They turn two corners and stop in front of a low building: two parallel walls connected by a thatch roof, steam coming out the open ends. Goli enters, saying over his shoulder, "Don't you tell your grandmother. I don't want to be hearing about this forever."

It is a non-Brahmin establishment. Their grandmother would never let them near such a place. Janaki very much disapproves, but what is morality on an empty stomach?

A harried-looking boy looks up at them from the floor, where he is clearing disposable plates made from st.i.tched-together leaves. He throws the plates, coated with the remains of meals, to two grateful dogs in a roadside ditch. His eyes swing to a man squatting shinily among vats and cauldrons. The place seats only five, and two places are taken. Goli has now taken a third. The man looks at the children, then addresses his pots. "They'll have to eat in shifts, that's all."

The children give one another looks. They didn't understand the man. It is as though his words come from funny places in his mouth. It hadn't struck home before: this is the Karnatak country they have learned of in school, where people speak the Kannada language. But why would they speak a language no one can understand? Tamil is normal, Kannada is strange, like a one-legged bird or two-headed cow-recognizable but not the way things are meant to be.

Their father is yelling, "Sit! Sit!"

The boy has laid out two more places. They all step forward together. Panic surges in the boy's face and he says something to Goli. Goli raises one hand to point at the dish the boy is carrying and says to the children, "Only two of you now. Not enough room."

Sita flounces forward to take her place, dragging Radhai. Kamalam, Laddu and Janaki politely watch the dogs instead of the diners. The dogs, dirt collected in the hollows between their jagged ribs, lap the sauces and grains from the ridges of the leaves, always licking twice where once would do. Finally, they do a quick sniffover. Finding no more pickings, one mounts the other and starts a dance. Janaki knows enough to look away and Laddu knows enough to know why, but Kamalam keeps staring, her mouth slightly ajar, until Janaki spins her by the shoulder to face the street.

The food is as strange as everything else. Goli vanishes upon finishing his meal, citing important business. By the time the children find their way back to the house, which is still cold and dark, homesickness is burling up in them. It will soon harden and form a ring, marking the end of one age, the beginning of another.

Only Sita is perfectly cheerful, bright-eyed and willing as they have never seen her. She arranges their bundles neatly in the hall. Thangam rises while she is doing this.

"Amma," Sita inquires, apparently having decided that now they are together as a family, her mother should be addressed as such, "shall I take the baby for a while? Don't you want to bathe?"

Thangam gives them the mixed blessing of her smile, like the sun shining through clouds. Sita takes baby Krishnan, and Thangam goes to her bath. When she returns, they sit together on the veranda, relieved that these are also a fixture in this strange new country. In the combined strength of Thangam's faint glow and the dilute sunshine, they begin to feel almost warm.

Neighbourhood children grow curious about them, but since they cannot speak to one another, they choose the shared language of sand-lot cricket. Even the girls join in, but not Sita, who takes stock of the staples and purchases vegetables and milk, lamp oil and kolam powder out of the ten rupees Sivakami slipped to her as they left. She even cleans a little. When Goli returns from work, Sita bustles to the door and hands him a hot tumbler of coffee.

Goli appears sullen and takes his coffee wordlessly out onto the veranda. Janaki and Kamalam are out there, playing at catching the other's hand, like bear cubs slapping at river fish. They become quiet at the sight of Goli's face, but their giggles quickly escalate once more, until Goli howls, "Hush!"

They freeze.

"Am I sweating to earn your keep so that you can torture... ?" He jabs his hand at them, and then lapses back into his ruminations.

Supper is a silent matter. Laddu makes one attempt to tell the story of something funny he saw on their journey, but Goli breathes harder, the huff and puff of a coming storm. Janaki signals her less barometrically sensitive brother to abandon the story.

Sita is still suspiciously happy. She serves all of them first and eats afterward with Thangam.

The days pa.s.s, without school, almost without talk. Janaki has never lived with so few words. They continue to play with the neighbour children, games the children know from home; you don't need to talk to play kabbadi.

Sita, though, seems to be completely occupied in housework. Janaki is suspicious because she has always tricked others into doing her ch.o.r.es, faking a cut by making blood out of vermilion powder mixed in water, or trading tasks so relentlessly that Janaki would lose track of who owed whom and end up doing all the work. Here, Sita is industrious to the point of making them all a bit nervous.(Is Sita happy because all is finally as it should be? For the first time she feels part of the natural order? But few admit, even though they know, that the order's nature is that its elements line up only to drift apart again. Sita appears happy, but she smells of desperation.) Thangam works alongside Sita, offering no instructions or suggestions even when Sita turns out rubbery dosais and powdered condiments one would sooner use to dust a baby's bottom than to fire up a meal. It is strange that the house and position don't come with a government-issue cook, Janaki thinks, but perhaps no stranger than anything else.

One evening, Janaki and Kamalam see their dad at the end of the road, talking with two dark and paunchy men. They are all laughing, slapping their thighs. Goli spots his daughters and calls them over. As they arrive he grabs them by the shoulders and tells the men, "Two of mine." He slaps his daughters on their backs. "Finally got them out of the grip of my brother-in-law. None of his own, you know?" He turns his head sideways and gives a wink. "None of his own. Right?"

The men laugh again.

"I've got more than I can count," Goli brags. "That brother-in-law, rich as a Chettiar, but will he share it? Ah, what to do? The poor fellow can't have kids..."

The two men giggle.

"I'll forgive him." Goli shakes his head and squishes the two girls together. They can't remember him ever touching them before. "You know, if it's true that a man's real fortune is his family, and you and I know it is, well then I'm a millionaire." Goli shoves the girls toward home and says, "Run. Tell your sister I'm on my way home, coffee better be ready. Scoot."

Generally, home supplies are purchased on credit, the bill paid quarterly. Cash is used only for the daily purchase of vegetables from the market or pa.s.sing vendors. Here, in the Karnatak country, the merchants have told Sita they will not give credit. She doesn't understand and they will not explain. Is it because their father is not a local, because he'll move on? But he's been here a year and is posted here one year more, long enough, certainly, to have established a reputation.

Sita had pooh-poohed the merchants, rudely and with dignity. She bought supplies with the ten rupees Sivakami had slipped her; she had splurged, believing her father would want nothing but the best. She was right; he does want nothing but the best. But he clearly had forgotten to give her more money-poor man, she thinks, so much on his mind and now his household has doubled in size. She decided to remind him, show how willing and able she is to take over running the household.

While serving him his afternoon coffee, she asks, "Can I give the houseboy a shopping list, Appa? Will you give me money to give him?"

He looks at her as though he doesn't know who she is and how she came to be in his house. "Money?"

"For groceries, Appa, we need some-"

"Management, management!" He raps his knuckles hard and humorously on her noggin. She winces. He winks. "What have I been keeping you at your grandmother's for, if you still do not know how to manage money?"

"I..." She thinks she does know how to manage money, but she is probably wrong. That was Vairum's house, an upside-down world, everything wrong. She needs to learn things again.

"Payday is Thursday." She beams, but he is looking elsewhere. "Thursday I will bring home such food as you have never seen, squashes and cuc.u.mbers and sweets, yes?"

She happily claps her hands and retires to the kitchen.

The following evening, Janaki and Kamalam are sitting on the veranda. They forget the palanguzhi board between them when they see their father appear on the seat of a bullock cart. Radhai, who has been watching covetously, seizes a handful of cowries. Kamalam grabs her wrist but then releases it as Goli shouts, "Come! Come!"

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 bl.u.s.ters 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 a.s.sociates. 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 ident.i.ty 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 b.u.t.termilk 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 b.u.t.termilk 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 pa.s.s, 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 p.r.o.ne 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 b.u.t.termilk 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, a.s.suming-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 c.o.c.ked 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 G.o.d 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 antic.i.p.ating, 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.