Next comes Vairum. He strides first to the doorway where she is standing, her hair loose around her. Vairum goes past her into the house and looks at his sister lying blue on the cot, her womb an expectant silence.

Goli sits up in the spot where he has been sleeping, his forehead in his hands, cradling his big dreams. He looks up to see his wife's brother. He puts his head back in his hands.

Vairum runs back up the road without a word to them. He pa.s.ses his mother and tells her, "She is there-go up the road, you will see the house. I'm going to fetch help."

He swims back across with the parasal, faster than riding in it. The villagers take a collective step back as he ascends the bank before them like a minor G.o.d and sets off in the direction of the rail station.

Sivakami places her feet carefully in the streaming road. She looks up to see where she must go and staggers, firebursts of fear in her tired eyes: here is Kali, G.o.ddess of destruction, her hair loose and rising about her, mouth open-Kali, running on water, bounding death.

No, it's Janaki. Just a little girl, helpless and scared, her hair streaming. What is she, after all, just fourteen? Fourteen years old. She is crying with sadness because her mother is dying, and with relief, even joy, because now she can say so. The world still exists; they didn't abandon her.

Her loose hair is stuck to her face and as Sivakami clears it from her mouth, Janaki suddenly becomes conscious of it and binds the ends together. Sivakami squeezes Janaki's arms, pats her back. They walk back together, Janaki holding her grandmother's arm. Once, Sivakami slips on the sliding invisible earth and Janaki steadies her.

Sivakami knows none of the people in the house, but she does not resent them. Sickness always draws a crowd. A pathway through the ma.s.s appears for her and at its end, the waxy blue figure of her daughter. Sivakami strokes Thangam's cheeks as though drawing out sadness, kisses her fingers where they touched her daughter and asks, "Enn'idhu, kanna?"

What is it, dear one? What brought you to this pa.s.s?

Janaki moves to a corner and slumps down, cradled by two walls and the floor. She thinks her grandmother and mother, alone in the nattering crowd, look like an island in the Kaveri, a still, holy place in the mad rushing river. Her neck softens and she drops into sleep.

Some three hours later, a beefy white face appears in the door. Everyone stops talking. Many are trying to remember whether they owe taxes.

But he is not a revenue officer, he is the district medical officer whom Vairum has fetched, along with two junior doctors to a.s.sist. Three white doctors, everyone whispers. This is the kind of influence Vairum exerts now. Such doctors come with strings attached: Vairum has evidently pulled some.

The DMO asks that everyone clear out. They laugh at his excellent Tamil and go, except Sivakami, who refuses to leave her daughter alone with these strange men. She resists efforts at persuasion, saying, "I know: they are doctors. They are good men, and they have come a great distance, but anything they have to do, they can do in my presence."

Vairum takes her aside and explains to her that she is an ignorant woman and the doctors need freedom to work. Sivakami says nothing, her lips set as tight as if sealed with wax, and finally, for the first time, his logic and will are bettered by her determination.

The DMO nods, impatient. "It's fine, sir, please. I can do the work with the lady present, as long as she doesn't interfere. I quite understand." He waves Vairum out the door.

Several neighbours try to rouse Janaki to come out with them. She resists unconsciously. Her eyelids twitch and she mumbles but does not awaken. They shake her, speak gently, then fiercely, until Sivakami says, "Leave her. She's not in the way." She looks to the DMO, her ally. He nods resignedly. So Janaki remains, a crumpled pile of hair and clothes, in the corner.

The nurse from up the road arrives, looking very hastily washed and combed, though it is approaching eleven o'clock. Her lethargy is legendary. Vairum had rapped on her door and called for her as he and the doctors waded up the road from the crossing point: the DMO had asked for a nurse and she is the only one, locally.

The DMO asks Sivakami to put some water on to boil. She does, compliant but suspicious, as the nurse, shaking her head, closes the bottoms of the shutters against the many who watch unashamedly from without. The DMO checks Thangam's pulse again and turns apologetically to Sivakami to explain, in his blocky, grammatical Tamil, "I must now check on the baby. I, have, concerns."

Sivakami squints in incomprehension then closes her eyes when she understands. No one in their family has ever been seen by a doctor. She knows there are woman doctors for women patients, but it's too late to get one. She knows she cannot interfere and knows it doesn't matter, that Thangam will not have to account for this loss of modesty.

The DMO checks: there is no sign of dilation. The instruments are boiled. He performs a Caesarean.

A girl. Big. Blue. Dead. Gently and with regret, they hand her to her grandmother. The child's blue lips are sealed stubborn and resistant in a frozen face. Sivakami looks deep into the lost eyes of her daughter's last child. She thinks she sees a gold band around the pupil narrow, fade to blue, and then to black. Sivakami carries the baby out the back of the tiny house.

After sewing Thangam up, the DMO palpates her throat, feels her forehead, opens her eyelids one at a time and looks into her eyes. He feels she is far away, already. He looks up at Sivakami and asks, "How many children does she have?"

"She has nine children, and five grandchildren."

"How can it be?" he murmurs, as if kind and gallant. "She looks so young."

But when he looks back at her, she looks very old. He blinks to clear a film and again she looks terribly young. Tragic, these people. He lifts her lids again and again checks the pulse at her wrist. He is buying time. The other two doctors are waiting for orders.

He says to Sivakami, "I will try," and reaches for a phial and a needle.

But he is lying. Her illness is serious and, as far as he knows, unnamed. He looks at his eager a.s.sistants, who are waiting for some instruction. He believes there is nothing he can do and believes the wee widow watching him knows this, too.

In his professional opinion, he needs to inoculate this dying woman with faith. He is a skeptical Christian but understands these people have their ways. He shakes the phial of saline and tries to think of it as liquid faith. It could work, in this country where so much happens that he cannot explain. He shakes the bottle faster, willing a catalysis within the worthless liquid, imbuing it with that chthonic quant.i.ty this woman needs to live. He shakes and shakes-the junior doctors are looking puzzled-shakes-he doesn't look at Sivakami's careworn face-shakes-he maintains a look of diagnostic concentration-shakes.

Chime! The clock rings out. The cuckoo pops. One o'clock. The phial takes flight, out of the DMO's hand, between the inclined heads of the neatly groomed junior doctors, to shatter against the picture of the G.o.ddess Saraswati on the wall calendar beside the window.

Janaki sits bolt upright from sleep. She hears her mother make a rattling growl.

Then Thangam is dead.

The tall white doctor opens the door and walks outside, and leans his forehead against a palm. Those who saw him claimed he cried a little, but that makes no sense.

The others cry, then, except Sivakami. She hears the wails of her grandchildren rise and fall in waves. She sees Janaki lower her head in the corner and recognizes, with a stab, that while joy can be shared, grief must be borne alone. She hears little Raghavan begin screaming and thinks, He must be frightened. He must be frightened. She hears Murthy, gasping, "Gold. She was our pure gold, and we have lost her." She hears Murthy, gasping, "Gold. She was our pure gold, and we have lost her."

Sivakami goes to the back to bathe, dousing herself with water head to toe, as one must when a relative dies. As the others follow, she helps the nurse to tidy the room. She wipes the liquid from the face of the G.o.ddess of wisdom and music. It looks like tears, or like rosewater sprinkled in worship. Could that elixir have saved Thangam? Doubtful. Sivakami has little faith in medicine. No faith in that stuff she wipes from Saraswati's cheeks and the crumbling wall and the rain-damp floor.

Gold to Ash 1940.

WHEN MUCHAMI SAW SIVAKAMI and the family off at the train, he did so with some certain knowledge that he would not be seeing Thangam again. Sivakami told him, The year has arrived, The year has arrived, in the way she sometimes talked to him: as though it were not too different from talking to herself. in the way she sometimes talked to him: as though it were not too different from talking to herself.

The day after they left, Muchami was supervising the gathering of coconuts in Rukmini's garden. Rukmini and Murthy had recently engaged a new servant and they didn't trust him not to take a share. A small gang of his youngest relatives kept him company-the youngest sons and eldest grandsons of those boys who guarded Vairum in the days of his earliest persecutions. The children, inspired by a bunch of young coconuts hanging low to the ground, started clamouring for coconut water.

The coconut gatherers were taking a break, squatting in the garden. Muchami asked if he could borrow a scythe. Though a cut above his caste-agricultural labourers, generally handy with the implements of harvest-Muchami is not good with knives. He started lopping off coconut tops, concentrating visibly, his palms sweating. The labourers giggled as he handed the first off to the children, a rough hole hacked off the top, and some of the water spilt. He had just started on the second, determined to give his young cousins this treat himself, when from within the house the grandfather clock struck one o'clock.

Muchami startled. The scythe went awry and split the coconut lengthwise from tip to tip along one side. Falling to the ground, it yawed slightly, water slopping out, tears from a nearly closed eye. Muchami had nicked himself, and tried to staunch his thumb. He didn't know why the clock should return him to thoughts of Sivakami's mission, but he had a sudden feeling it was complete.

IN MUNNUR, THE FAMILY PERFORMS Thangam's last rites. Her body is cremated at a ghat downriver. The cremation grounds attendant, a bored and ill-tempered dwarf, pokes the pyre to ensure thorough incineration. His son, a tall boy, handsome enough to be in movies, a.s.sists.

Six priests chant around another fire in the small salon of the last house where Thangam lived. The house is filled with the mournful, waxy smell of things sacrificed to the flames: ghee, holy water, flowers, puffed rice. Thangam's ashes are gathered, and Laddu, looking solemn and unfamiliar, carries the urn to the river. An entourage surrounds and trails him-his siblings with their spouses and children, Vairum, Vani, Goli, Murthy and Rukmini, Minister and Gayatri, some neighbours.

As Laddu wades out into the current, he stumbles and begins to cry. Behind him, Murthy wails, "We have lost our purest gold, our darling!"

Saradha and Rukmini whimper agreement; Gayatri, her head bowed, stands behind her husband, weeping and not watching. The urn exhales several puffs of ash against the cool light of the season before Laddu tips its contents into the river's flow.

Sivakami, watching from the bank, recalls the first time she saw Thangam's strange golden dust silting the narrow gutter that leads from the bath. The dust would shift with the water but was so heavy buckets were needed to move it along into the drain. Now, Thangam's particulate remains, light as anyone's, float out and away in seconds. A thin ashen sheet billows in the air before dropping to follow the rest.

Sivakami's eldest brother died some three years back, but the next two brothers come and observe mourning with the family, repeating, as does Murthy, plat.i.tudes on the n.o.bility of Thangam's death. Sivakami grits her teeth and says nothing. If it were anyone else's daughter, she would be saying the same sorts of things.

Rukmini tends Krishnan, who, at five, may not be entirely certain what has happened. He has lived with Sivakami since his younger brother's birth; Sivakami made the argument that Thangam could not handle two boys, and Thangam did not protest. Also, Sivakami believes that boys should be coddled, to give them confidence and a strong feeling of home. Girls don't need either, she reasons, since they don't need to meet and do business with the outside world. Because Laddu needed discipline, Sivakami had not been able to indulge him to the degree she would have liked, and fears that, as a result, he may have turned out nervous and remote. Krishnan, a brighter and more sensitive boy, gives her some hope of rest.i.tution.

It has been two years since Krishnan last saw Thangam, and as far as Sivakami can tell, he has forgotten her. He spends every day with Rukmini, who is childless and has lived alone with Murthy since her mother-in-law died. The little boy has become the light of her days and their companionship is as intimate as any between mother and child. It pains Sivakami and also makes her glad to see Krishnan so little affected by his mother's pa.s.sing.

Raghavan, however, had not been fully weaned when Thangam died. Though he accepts cups of warm, sweetened cow's milk from his sisters, he sucks on their sleeves and bites their shoulders, crying for comfort they can't give him.

Janaki feels sad at her mother's pa.s.sing, but also guilty. She wonders whether her sisters feel similarly. While they are motherless in a sense, she thinks, their state is not too different from before: they are still reliant on their grandmother, vulnerable to their uncle, suspicious of their father. Janaki and Kamalam still crave physical affection, a craving finally satisfied in the elder sisters now that they have children of their own. Radhai is just now getting too big to sit on Muchami's knee.

Sivakami watches Vairum and Goli circle, keeping their animosity within the limits of decorum. Goli is sullen but remains present for all the ceremonies where he is required.

During the day, Sivakami remains composed, busy cooking for fifteen people and watching the ceremonies. At night, her sense of devastation returns as if to feed on her. I thought if I lightened her burden, she thinks, she might hang on. And, The horoscopes have defied me once again. I thought if I lightened her burden, she thinks, she might hang on. And, The horoscopes have defied me once again.

On one of these nights, Vairum, rising to relieve himself, finds her huddled in a corner, her face hidden in shade, her body illuminated by moonlight. She sleeps directly on the cement floor, its grey turned shades of blue by the night, but now, at three, she is sitting up and weeping.

He pauses before her, hands on hips. "You think she died of a bad horoscope," he says, his voice ringing quietly. All the other family members sigh and snore, asleep in the hall behind him. He shakes his head. "May the day come when you admit it was his loutishness that killed her, not the stars."

Sivakami wipes her tears, then puts her hand to her forehead, not looking at him.

"I will arrange the marriages of my sister's remaining daughters," Vairum swears, standing over her. "I will..." he chokes, this little boy who swore never to take from his sister, only to give, and who, as she lay dying, could not give her what she needed any more than his mother could. "I will arrange their marriages on terms rational and religious," he sputters. "No more horoscopes. Let people take responsibility for their actions."

Thirteen days after Thangam's death, the priests are paid and a feast prepared to bid the soul pa.s.s on.

The next day, the Cholapatti folk make ready to return. Thangam's elder daughters will also go back there for a time with their children. Goli goes out at some point-no one sees him leave. Presumably, he has gone to back to work, his bereavement leave concluded. They are milling around, feeling it rude not to have bid him farewell, but Vairum hustles them to the train mid-afternoon, reminding them that Goli did not pay them the same courtesy.

At the Cholapatti station, they ask the children of the station master to run and alert Muchami to their arrival so that he can bring the bullock cart. When Sivakami sees Muchami's familiar silhouette emerge from the now-solid dark, she feels herself relax and come close to tears again.

Muchami jumps down and, putting his palms together and bowing quickly to them several times, sets about loading the baggage. Sivakami gets into the cart first, without saying anything to him. The family had not communicated with him from Munnur, knowing that he would intuit the reason for so long an absence. He fusses over them, asking, "Are you comfortable?"

Vairum has mounted the front. When Muchami hops up beside him and takes the reins, he asks, "So, Vairum, everything taken care of?" Vairum nods perfunctorily. Muchami glances one last time over his shoulder before starting. He catches Sivakami's eye, and his face crumples.

"Our gold," he whispers, turning to the front. He twitches the rein against the bullocks backs with a "tch-tch" to get them started. "Pure gold. Such a good girl."

"Yes, yes," Vairum sighs. "She deserved much better."

Muchami weeps audibly for the duration of the trip home while the occupants of the cart behind him are silent, having spent much of their grief during the formal mourning period and being tired from travel. Muchami is far less demonstrative than many servants in his position, who would weep for form's sake, as servants are supposed to weep for masters, more even than for their own families. Sivakami knows him to be sincere, knows he feels exactly as she does: that while Thangam's marriage may have killed her-by whatever means-Sivakami had no choice and did the best she could have done.

Not Another Mother 1940.

THE NEXT DAY, hordes of Brahmins from up and down the quarter come to pay condolences. Sivakami wishes she were more like others, like her granddaughter Saradha, for instance, who clearly takes comfort in hearing the same encomiums repeated again and again by people who barely knew Thangam. Instead, as when Hanumarathnam died, Sivakami wishes they would all keep quiet, or, better yet, stay away.

When Muchami's and Mari's families come to the back to pay respects, gnashing and screeching as is appropriate in their community, Sivakami wonders if it is within her rights to tell them to leave. Out of consideration for Muchami and Mari, she doesn't. But Mari does-telling her parents and her mother-in-law that their histrionics are not needed. Mari herself, when she arrived that morning, expressed her condolences to Sivakami with quiet dignity and went about her ch.o.r.es.

In the days after they return from Munnur, little Krishnan takes to sleeping at Rukmini's house. By the time Sivakami is fully aware that it has become a habit, she is not sure how to break it. It seems cruel to deny a motherless child all he is receiving from Rukmini: he accompanies her in every activity; at home, he sits in her lap; they play games, have secret jokes and a code language. Rukmini makes sweets for him daily and bids him bring his sisters to eat them.

Sivakami is in a quandary: she wants Krishnan to enjoy these attentions, but she feels she must remain responsible, in certain ways, for his moral and physical upkeep. She also thinks Rukmini might be too soft, too grateful for Krishnan's presence, to hold to certain old-fashioned child-raising practices.

So Sivakami requires that Krishnan come to take his breakfast at her house: pazhiah sadam, day-old rice, mixed with yogourt-the best thing for a young tummy. One of his sisters feeds him-Sivakami herself cannot touch it because it is kept to ferment overnight. Every Wednesday and Sat.u.r.day, she insists he comes to take his oil bath and, every few months, a dose of castor oil. In other words, she asks only that Krishnan complete the severer and less pleasant of his basic requirements at her house because the sense of discipline and plain living these impart-the gifts of a conservative upbringing-will remain the measure of his origins.

Sivakami is motivated by concern not only for Krishnan's well-being, but also for the family's. "A house that gives a son for adoption has no sons for seven generations." The proverb reverberates in her conscience. Krishnan is with her for safekeeping; he belongs to the house of his father. Rukmini may tend him further, but she cannot be allowed to feel he is her son.

Rukmini understands Sivakami's concerns, though she doesn't think about them too deeply. She is flattered by the violent resistance Krishnan displays whenever his sisters come to fetch him. While she doesn't interfere with their missions, neither does she a.s.sist.

Krishnan is always reluctant to leave Rukmini-she is his favourite person. He doesn't respond to cajoling nor to ordering. He is becoming the boy Sivakami meant him to be: precious and headstrong. Nor can his sisters bribe him-little they offer can compete with his treatment at Rukmini's. Increasingly, they resort to tricks to get him to come home. Fortunately, Janaki proves herself a master of minor deceptions, and enjoys devising them-for a good cause, of course.

Sita stays on to keep company with her family and give them comfort in the wake of Thangam's death. (Or so goes the protocol. Sita's specialty has always been discomfort, and relative marital happiness has not gentled her. Her husband is a stable, timid man, a compiler of agricultural statistics who admires and resents her. She is not interested in his feelings, but his behaviour suits her well and she has seen no need to change hers.) When she is the one sent to fetch Krishnan, she blackmails him, explaining to him in a low, sincere voice that unless he comes with her immediately, she will fix it so that he never sees Rukmini again. Krishnan listens, wide-eyed, without reason to disbelieve her, and obeys.

"Poor Akka," she remarks the Friday after their return to Cholapatti, as she and her sisters sit, after their oil bath, drying their hair.

"Mm-hm," says Janaki, peering critically at her embroidery, a bouquet of flowers, none of which she recognizes. She drew the pattern after a photo in one of Minister's books on English gardens.

"Forced to give up her children one by one like that," Sita continues.

Janaki and Kamalam are silent, Janaki looking at Sita, Kamalam lying on a cot with her hair fanned and falling over the edges, incense burning beneath to perfume it.

"I could never." Sita shakes her head. "I'd rather die."

"Well, she didn't give us up." Janaki finally rises to the bait. "Amma just looked after us for them because Appa's job..."

Sita points at Janaki. "Vairum Mama stole us because he's jealous."

"No-" Janaki starts.

"And because he hates Appa. He would do anything to sabotage Appa. Poor Appa, just trying to make an honest living, and he has this business shark for a brother-in-law."

Janaki tries again lamely. "What-"

"Is your hair on fire, Kamalam?" Sita inquires sprightly.

Kamalam, who had let her eyes drift shut, springs up, trembling.

"Oh," Sita laughs, "I guess it was just the incense smoke. You know I never think you wash the oil out properly. Can't blame me for worrying!"

Janaki stands. "You look like you could use a nap, Sitakka." She gestures to Kamalam with her head and starts for the veranda. "Don't you feel tired?"

"No," Sita replies. "Where are you two going?"

Around this time, Murthy invites some cousins to stay with him and Rukmini. Down on their luck, as so many Brahmins are these days, they had lost their lands and home, and approached Murthy at a wedding a month or two earlier and appealed to him for a.s.sistance.

"We must help our own." Rukmini parrots her husband's words to Sivakami the day before the cousins arrive. "So much a.s.sistance available to those low-caste types, but Brahmins are as poor as they ever were and no one thinks about what services they give! Who will a.s.sist them?"

Sivakami agrees and congratulates her on their generosity. They are not the wealthiest family in the Brahmin quarter-that status has always been reserved for Minister's family, though she suspects Vairum might have exceeded even them, not that it has changed her lifestyle or the children's. Murthy and Rukmini are comfortable, though, and childless, and live modestly in a s.p.a.cious house, built for the large, extended family that has dwindled to these two over the course of three short generations.

These relatives are expected to arrive by bus, and the next day, Murthy, a splash of betel-stained spittle ornamenting his fresh-pressed kurta, borrows Sivakami's bullock cart to meet them. When he returns the cart, he brings them in to meet her. They huddle together as if persecuted and have to be bid to enter several times, Sivakami calling from the pantry.

They have been travelling and need to bathe, they protest in whimpers. The wife is barely four foot nine, and her husband perhaps two inches taller. Their faces are pinched and ingratiating, their clothing poor. Their son, a strapping, touchy-looking youth, carries their little baggage.

"Welcome," says Sivakami with energetic friendliness, inspired by Rukmini and Murthy's caste feeling to ensure they feel warmly received. She sends Janaki and Kamalam out toward them, one with a tray of tumblers of water, the other with plates of snacks. "Eat something small at least. And you must come take a meal here soon. Our home is yours, just as it is Rukmini and Murthy's."

The couple, who had been casting looks of rapid appraisal at the Ramar, the safe and the girls' jewellery, thank her, wagging their heads so vigorously their bodies move. The son smiles meanly and turns to go.

"Ugh," Sita shudders, when they have barely gone. "Unattractive lot!"

"No more out of you, young lady!" Sivakami's sharpness startles both her and her granddaughters. "They are in need and it is an act of good to give charity. Rukmini and Murthy will do well in their next lives."

Sita doesn't retort but later tells Janaki, "I'm all in favour of caste solidarity, but I have a bad feeling about them."