Now, when she's in the women's room, she is making items for her own child's layette. Senior Mami has a radio; Janaki turns it on and off for her and listens to programs on current affairs and spiritual matters while doing her handiwork. She practises veena at least three or four times weekly, which is what she is doing when the telegram comes.

A paadasaalai boy peeps around the corner of the doorway to the women's room; they ignore him. He gradually edges over so that more than half of him is visible along the doorway's edge. Still, he is ignored. He is evidently here with a message-giving the boys small ch.o.r.es, everyone says patronizingly, is a way of making the pupils feel included in the family.

The boy, a jug-headed child of six with attention problems, starts to fidget and rustle, but Janaki doesn't notice, over the music. Finally, Swarna sits up and takes the envelope out of the tyke's hand. Senior Mami, noting the end of the standoff, immediately says, "Here." But the sisters-in-law, lest anyone forget that they are burrs and must be plucked, and because it amuses them, have kept up their habit of disobeying their mother-in-law. Thus Swarna, hearing Senior Mami's command, tears open the telegram.

Her eyes bulge, her jaw drops, and she gasps, "Janaki! Your sister!"

That evening, Janaki, accompanied by her husband, is on a bus bound for the town of k.u.mbakonam. She is wondering how much longer laughter can last in the world, now that it has been returned to its source. Like the heroine Sita, in the Ramayana, swallowed by the earth, Visalam has been taken by the giggling, gurgling River Kaveri in flood.

Janaki knows what the neighbours will be saying. There's always someone who is taken, in every generation-the question is only who it will be and when. They all will have lost family members and will want to talk about them, and Janaki and her siblings will be forced to be polite while Visalam's husband and children... how will they bear this loss?

Oh, how she hates the rainy season! Janaki slams the bus window's shutter against the wet. Baskaran, at her side, says nothing. She starts weeping again and eventually falls asleep on his shoulder. In the dark, he lifts his hand to stroke her cheek and when she shifts, he brings her head to rest on his shoulder once more.

At Visalam's family's house, three matrons Janaki has never met rush at her, awash in tears. She feels her bile rising and dashes to bend over some bushes. Baskaran explains about the pregnancy and the ladies cluck. Janaki's sisters and Visalam's in-laws jockey past the strangers to take her arms, ushering her in toward a bath and sleep.

The stunned house is quiet. That's not always the way when tragedy strikes a gregarious people. Visalam's in-laws had loved Visalam as though she'd been born to them.

Her widower performs the necessary rites. He is in his early thirties but looks ten years older than he did the last time Janaki saw him, six months ago, his laugh lines like cuts in his gaunt face.

Saradha has come from Thiruchi; Sita from Tiruvannamalai; Laddu has brought Kamalam and Radhai from Cholapatti. He will return to Cholapatti for a week and bring Krishnan and Raghavan back for the thirteenth-day ceremony so they needn't miss school. Vairum and Vani also arrive from Madras, in time to see Visalam's ashes committed to the river that took her life.

The night they all gather, Sita wonders aloud if their father knows. "Does any of you have the least idea where he is?" She looks around at them, facing blank, weepy looks.

"I ..." Laddu clears his throat inefficiently. "I had sent Vairum Mama a telegram asking him to inform our father. He is the only one of us who might know where he is!" he says defensively in response to several incredulous looks. "And Vairum Mama is honourable. He would have done it."

Saradha looks at Sita with concern and says, "But maybe he didn't."

Kamalam bites her lip. "Or couldn't find him."

But the next night, when Laddu discreetly asks Vairum, Vairum a.s.sures him, "Oh, yes, I certainly did. Sent him a telegram." Vairum smiles, softly sardonic, not without pity. "I didn't offer to pay for his bus fare, though. He might have thought that an insult."

"Where is he now?" Laddu asks, a bit too eagerly.

"He is very near, as it happens." Vairum wears an even, appraising expression. "Thiruchi. Barely fifty miles."

Laddu looks small and stammering. "And do you know he got it?"

"The telegram was sent to his home." Vairum rises and stretches. "Presumably, he got it." He looks around at Goli's children, who look back at him, with Sivakami's features, and Goli's, and Thangam's, and Vairum's own, and the looks of ancestors none of them will ever know.

"Good night," he bids them, and leaves for the chattram where he is lodged.

They are silent a while in this room they have been given, off the main hall. Everyone else is asleep. Then Sita explodes.

"Our father is a good-for-nothing! A good-for-nothing! Look at how he left us, vulnerable to Vairum Mama's insults and jibes all these years!"

Her siblings shush her, telling her in whispers to sit, as she marches around the room, incensed.

"Vairum Mama was right! All of his slights against our father were absolutely right and I'm going to tell him so. Visalam was..." Here she gulps a little against a sob. "Visalam was a harmless soul and Appa couldn't even come to bid her farewell. I know what you all think of me." Saradha clucks in protest, but Sita doesn't appear to hear, and none of her other siblings say anything. "But even I can see what an innocent soul she was. I wish he weren't my father."

Her siblings are surprised. None of them has felt compelled to make a declaration of the sort Sita makes the next day, to Vairum.

"Vairum Mama, I was critical of you all these years, trying to be loyal to my father. I regret that now," she says, her voice trembling but clear. "You have done more than he ever has or will for our welfare. Thank you," she declares, breaking down a little.

Vairum looks bemused and unabashedly triumphant. "It was, ahem..." he smiles. "It was my duty to my sister, as I saw it, and duty is an honour to uphold."

"Yes." Sita wags her head with martial vigour, even through tears. "It is."

Janaki herself cannot help but contrast Baskaran's ministrations with her father's absence and her uncle's pa.s.sions. Baskaran stays at a guest house some ten minutes away for three days, coming to ceremonies, helping with logistics and children, offering graceful words of consolation. At the end of three days, he returns to Pandiyoor, where he is needed, but Janaki knows that he will return for the thirteenth-day ceremony.

She thinks, not for the first time, that if only he had a job and didn't take snuff, he might be the perfect husband. When she speaks of him to Kamalam, though, as they lie side by side on their mats, taking this precious opportunity to exchange sisterly confidences, she emphasizes his faults, suspicious of the evil eye. Having seen two more households on the Pandiyoor Brahmin quarter reduced to penury through bad management of their family fortunes, she has started to wish, as her grandmother has from the start, that Baskaran were earning a regular income.

"But if he had a job," Kamalam says, "like Saradha Akka's and Sita Akka's husbands, he wouldn't be so flexible. It's very good of him to come here and help. The old ways had their benefits."

Janaki concedes. Baskaran is traditional in all the ways she likes: loyal to home and parents, upholding caste strictures out of deference to them, and in the interests of continuity She really shouldn't complain.

Janaki journeys to Cholapatti shortly after the pa.s.sing-on ceremony to spend some time with her grandmother. Sivakami protests that she will be fine, that Janaki shouldn't be travelling more than necessary in her condition, but Janaki insists. Baskaran escorts her and stays three days on Gayatri's hospitality, since protocol forbids a husband from staying in his wife's home.

While Janaki feels proud of the simple graces of her grandmother's home, she is also uncomfortably conscious of some differences between it and the home to which she has become accustomed. It feels a bit small and shabby; the servants are too visible and audible, too familiar and influential.

The shifting of her perceptions has been a gradual process. The first time she came home, she felt intensely nostalgic and wanted to pretend she never left. By her second visit, though, she could feel she was changing. She was shocked at Muchami calling her by her name, and he saw this, so now he doesn't call her anything. They both realize, though they don't speak of it, that she might have felt equally strange had he begun calling her Amma.

It was also on that visit that Mari had told her in low tones, after she had dressed, that she had forgotten her dirty clothes in a bucket in the bathroom. She rolled her eyes at her new habit, recalling how Vasantha and Swarna had laughed at her when they realized she had been washing her own clothes every day in Pandiyoor.

It irked and unsettled Janaki that she should struggle to find her place here. Even the act of getting up in the morning had become strange: at her grandmother's house, when one rises, one clears one's own mat, and at night, one lays it down again. In Pandiyoor, a servant clears and lays down the bedrolls. Janaki mentioned this difference to Radhai, within earshot of Mari and Muchami, pitching it in a falsely neutral tone, as though this judgment were mere observation.

Mari was rankled. "That is interesting," she cut in, without breaking the rhythm of her work, patting fuel cakes from a pile of cow dung. She slapped the most recent onto the courtyard wall, where several rows were drying. "And do your in-laws' servants take a bath afterward?"

Janaki blushed violently. She really had not been sure how she felt about this difference-on the one hand, she believes in upholding Brahmin practices and disapproves of any modern development that breaks down caste barriers. But the Pandiyoor customs don't break down those practices-servants are non-Brahmins. Perhaps they aren't polluted by sleep articles; perhaps they take a bath. How is that her business? She didn't reply.

Through the old routines, though-setting a plate out back for the monkeys at dawn, snacking on a ball of thangai maavu in mid-afternoon, standing on the roof to watch the parrots at sunset-the small satisfactions of her childhood are returned to her, and she enjoys them, knowing she belongs somewhere else.

She is most concerned, on this visit, with making sure her grandmother is all right, following the shock of Visalam's death. Sivakami looks lined, small and weary, the stiffness of her shoulder blades more p.r.o.nounced than Janaki remembers. Suddenly awkward at being in the role of adult, Janaki tries to ask her grandmother how she is, and receives dismissive rea.s.surances. She doesn't know how to press through to the truth.

"Having you here is a great consolation to me," Sivakami says. It's after dusk and so Janaki lies with her head in her grandmother's lap, Sivakami stroking her hair. "You must look after your health. Think peaceful thoughts. I'll make garlic rasam for you-good for your strength, and the baby's."

Janaki wants to say something more, about Visalam and her untimely death, but doesn't want to upset her grandmother, either by reminding her of their loss, or by crying, and so just quietly rests her cheek on the soft cloth over Sivakami's bony thigh.

The Barber Lover 1945.

FOUR MONTHS LATER, Janaki is expected back in Cholapatti for her bangle ceremony. Muchami is excited about her arrival, especially since the occasion of her last visit was such an unhappy one. He misses the child she was, now no more than a ghost or vapour dancing around the woman she has become. Still, she reminds him of that long-ago child, and some of those lost, warm affections return to him in memory when he sees her.

Because Visalam's death is still so recent, Sivakami has been anxious about the bangle ceremony: they must provide their relatives and neighbours a way to celebrate the new life while still observing grief, make Janaki feel happy and beautiful while not making her feel guilty. Kamalam, who had stayed behind in k.u.mbakonam to help Visalam's in-laws with her children, arrives a few days before Janaki. Though Sivakami would never admit any such thing, Kamalam might be her favourite among the grandchildren: perfectly demure, unquestioning and capable. Sivakami feels rea.s.sured by the girl's presence and puts her immediately to work, cooking for the feast day. Soon enough, Janaki arrives, escorted by Baskaran.

The day before the ceremony, though, some unwelcome but not unexpected information reaches Muchami via his regular channels. He had, a week or ten days earlier, put a word out requesting this information, after having seen something that didn't quite look right.

He doesn't go out every night as he did when he was younger but does still make his way through the woods and fields twice or three times a week, in search of other men, like him, who need physical satisfactions they cannot give or receive in their marriages. It happens that he sees things on these journeys. Some things he understands immediately; some he must work to interpret.

As has been said, the only people abroad at night are those (like Muchami, it could be argued) who have no choice. One of those who must be out is the barber who clips the heads of Brahmin widows, a work of shame and sorrow done in the dark hour favoured by demons. Sivakami has her head shaved monthly, usually by the same barber who sheared her curls in the days of her widow-making and left her light-headed under the moonlight. Now, occasionally, it is his second son who comes. The first son used to come, until his family decided he, meaning all of them, would be better off if he used his skill with a blade to get latex out of trees in Malayan plantations.

So it happened, one night, that Muchami was returning home and saw the barber's second son entering the rear courtyard of a Brahmin-quarter widow who lives three houses over from Minister and Gayatri. He didn't think it strange until, some ten days later, he saw the same thing again. It was then that he mentioned it to some cohorts who have now confirmed for him that the barber's second son, Karuppan, has been coming and going from the house of the widow, Shantam, four or five nights each week. No one's hair grows that fast.

Muchami is outraged. He stalks home as though burning the fields in his wake, like Hanuman setting Lanka alight with his tail. He knows he must decide what best to do with this information and that it might be his obligation to go to Vairum, who, as his employer and the master of a house on the Brahmin quarter, is most ent.i.tled to know and take action. He is in Cholapatti this week. But Muchami is not convinced that Vairum will do what must be done: he has never shown caste loyalty; if anything, he acts as though it would please him to see the entire Brahmin quarter in ruin. And if he tells Vairum and Vairum does nothing, it will be much more difficult then to redress this ill.

He decides to call a conference. He invites Minister and Murthy to come to Sivakami' s house after tiffin. He tells Vairum not to go to play tennis. He tells Sivakami only that the others will be coming, not why. He is trembling at the impropriety of it. This is the sort of thing about which he could gossip to Sivakami were it to have happened several villages away. But so close to home, to the home whose honour it is his dearest duty to uphold?

That morning, the bangle ceremony is held for Janaki. Every woman on the Brahmin quarter pushes a pair of gla.s.s bangles onto Janaki's wrists, until her arms are covered nearly to the elbows. Sivakami watches from behind the kitchen door, smiling at Janaki's face, at the auspicious tinkling of the bangles, worn until the birth. Some women pull the bangles off in labour, as a way to distract themselves from the pain or count down the time until it is over. She catches sight of her own bare wrist on the door, the skin loose and wrinkled, and tucks her arm under her pallu.

That afternoon, Murthy and Minister arrive for the conference within minutes of each other. Vairum lounges suspiciously in the hall. Muchami has been pacing from courtyard to garden, and now sees them. Sivakami takes a position behind the nearly closed double doors in the pantry between the hall and kitchen. Muchami has told the children they must stay in the courtyard or go out to play, that he will beat them if he catches them listening. It seems to have worked, though he doesn't see Janaki, out of sight in the room under the stairs: she doesn't consider herself a child, doesn't fear a beating from Muchami, and is curious.

Now Muchami, standing in the door to the garden, tells them what he knows.

Murthy begins immediately to splutter and shake. Minister looks circ.u.mspect and deeply troubled.

How it came about they wonder but have no idea. Maybe Karuppan forced her, the first time, and has been blackmailing her. Or Shantam, the widow, may have permitted it all along. She is a sullen and feisty type. She and her husband had loud, frequent fights in the years of their marriage, and she has had loud, frequent fights with her in-laws since he died. One of Gayatri's regular jokes is about the fact that this woman's name means "peace"-what would she have been like if her name had meant "hot-tempered"?

Vairum looks exasperated.

"What concern is this of mine?" he asks Muchami, and then looks at the others to see if they can answer. "Let her bring shame on her own head and her house."

"No, son." Minister cradles his forehead in his forefinger and thumb. It looks as if someone gave him a gun and he can't decide how to use it. "He is the criminal in this situation. A woman's virtue is that of her family, and he has destroyed it, whether or not she chooses each night to open her door."

"I-I-I can't even-how-understand, how you c-c-can both still be sitting and t-talking!" Murthy has leapt from his chair. "Open her door! I-I-I'll open his head, that's what!" He is running for the door now, his hands over his ears. "Ugh! Ogh! My ears are poisoned by what I have heard today!" He stumbles in an attempt to mount the two or three steps to his own veranda, and succ.u.mbs to an attack of asthma, whereupon a few pa.s.sersby stop to ask what is wrong. He tells them.

Janaki wants desperately to go to her grandmother and console her. Sivakami is so restrained in her behaviour and outlook that Janaki imagines news of such an atrocity would shake her to the core. Really, though, she wants rea.s.surance as much as she wants to give it.

That night, Shantam's nearest neighbours' servants are posted in the brush beyond her courtyard gate. The unlucky lover arrives. He pushes open the door, enters, closes it behind him. Each of the servants slips from his hiding place. Each goes to the door of the house he serves and tells his employer that the barber is inside. Each goes to the next house and tells the master of that house. Moments pa.s.s and from each house emerges its master. Each master carries a big stick.

What is the barber's second son thinking? He must be about seventeen, she about twice his age, plump and fair, while he is dark as rosewood. Sivakami thinks of them as she does her beading, working fast, very fast. She hears one of the servants knock on their door to inform Vairum that the moment has come for action. Muchami, who is spending the night in the courtyard, tells him Vairum will not come because Vairum said he will have nothing to do with this nonsense, that mobs always chase phantoms, that he has to work in the morning, unlike these professional moralists in search of a night's entertainment. Minister also will not partic.i.p.ate, because of possible political repercussions. There are more than enough hands, anyway-more than fifteen pairs, all holding sticks, heading for the house, the third rough-hewn gate east of Gayatri's.

Did he force her? Sivakami wonders. But why didn't she just bar the door and not permit him to come again? Could he really have blackmailed her? She would have been defiled and disgraced, but better that than going through it night after night, no? Unless she really did choose this...

Sivakami can barely bring herself to think it. A barber, one of the worst cla.s.ses of untouchables. A Brahmin woman choosing to be with a barber. Sivakami casts her mind back to the years of her marriage and remembers, vividly still because barely a night has pa.s.sed in forty years when she hasn't thought about the acts of love she and her husband performed with each other. She can't help it: her mind begins to imagine Shantam and the barber's son in these poses, and she shudders, disgusted, but her mind keeps picturing it. She tries to keep the bile down and her mind clear by concentrating on the image she is working in beads, Lord Krishna at Bhutana's poisoned breast. It doesn't work. She runs outside and vomits.

Janaki, lying in the main hall with her siblings, hears her grandmother go out back and rises to meet her in the kitchen.

"Do you want a cup of water, Amma?" she asks.

"I'm fine, child." Sivakami dippers herself a cup and drinks. "Go back to sleep."

Dimly, they hear the sound of shouting, getting closer.

"I heard, Amma," Janaki confesses. "I know."

Sivakami sighs, and shakes her head, then draws Janaki down to sit beside her. "Pray with me. You mustn't think about such terrible matters, not in your condition. Good girl." She takes out her beads and begins the mantra she repeats one thousand and one times daily. Janaki joins in chorus.

Karuppan has closed the door but not drawn the heavy bolt. He never does, why should he? Shantam is waiting for him on the wooden bench on the back of the house where she is made to sleep. She hates sleeping there, but each of the bedrooms is now taken up with one of her late husband's brothers. Each of them is married now, and so they need private rooms. She could sleep in a corner of the main hall with the children, but it's her mother-in-law's prerogative and she wants Shantam to sleep outside. Shantam makes up for it in small cruelties toward her nephews and nieces, and even, sometimes, toward her own children.

She is sitting, waiting for him on her bench. He crosses to her on silent feet. Her sari has already slipped from her head and now he unwinds it from her shoulders and buries his face in the soft flesh between her collarbone and breast, stroking his lips and eyelids across the pillow of silky, fragrant skin. She is so unlike the women of his cla.s.s-not that he has had one yet, but he can tell. They stand and walk past the cowshed into the garden, her sari beginning already to unwrap. They pull it after themselves and spread it on the garden floor. And when the enraged men burst into the courtyard and run from there into the garden, this is what they see: the widow trying to wrap herself back into the white sari that has been serving as her illicit conjugal bed, and the glistening form of the barber's second son, reaching the top of the garden wall and jumping down off it.

By now, Shantam's mother-in-law and other family members, who had not been informed about the raid, have flung open numerous internal doors. Some of the men run through the house to the front and start shouting for those doors to be unlocked, while others have already run back out and through the neighbours' houses onto the Brahmin-quarter street, to see which way the scoundrel is going. Every woman on the street, except Sivakami and Janaki, is witness to the flight of the naked and terrified boy, who streaks straight up the Brahmin quarter, whistled along by the wind of the matrons' gasps.

The men give chase. They chase him far, through bramble and brooks. He is much faster than they, but two send their servants on bicycles to cut him off. He is caught. These weak, pulpy Brahmins, worked up by the chase, beat Karuppan very badly. Muchami helps in the chase but partic.i.p.ates only a little in the beating.

Shantam is also chastised and lightly beaten by her mother-in-law, in front of her children and all her brothers- and sisters-in-law.

These are the events of that night. After the shouting mob pa.s.ses and the sound fades away, Sivakami tells Janaki to go back to sleep.

Sivakami resumes her beading. She hears the men return and go to their homes. Muchami comes back, too, and tells her what happened. Then he lies down in the courtyard to sleep. She closes the kitchen doors, goes into the pantry and closes those doors, too. She lies where she normally lies. She is calmer but can feel the horrible images trying to re-form in her mind's eye. She tries to banish them again, and images of her husband-his skin sliding against hers, the smoothness of his back where she gripped it, her fingertips notching his spine-slip in with distressing ease to replace those of the barber's son, who is just a few years younger than Hanumarathnam was when he died. Sivakami doesn't permit herself to move-she lies, as every night, on her side, on the cool floor of the pantry, her neck on a wooden rest-but shifts her legs minutely against that delicious discomfort that now can never be eased. She had almost managed to forget that gnaw and tickle, brushed it away with busyness and prayer. The advance of age was a relief: in the last ten years, the craving has begun to diminish. Now her chest feels thick with anger at Shantam for having reminded her.

Shantam has been a widow for less than ten years, less than ten years feeling no touch save that of her children, and even that only after sunset-and Shantam's not even permitted to sleep with them. Sivakami recalls her first years of widowhood, when she slept curled around Vairum, the warm pressure of his milk-smelling, dream-twitching, little-boy body anchoring her to her own body, which seemed, in daylight, not to exist at all.

Sivakami wraps her arms around herself, biting her lip. She knows what Shantam has endured. But it is their lot to endure. If not, why else does Sivakami live as she does? What appeal is there in a topsy-turvy world and what place does a widow have, if not this one?

Janaki, sleepless among the children, desperately misses Baskaran. She could talk with him about this, as she can with no one else, and he would hold her and help her think of other things. What if she never sees him again? What if he dies before she returns? She would never again be touched. It would be like her childhood all over again.

She had never before thought beyond her grandmother's sacrifice and righteousness. She believed in everything Sivakami believed but never thought of her grandmother as sharing her feelings. I'm exactly the age Amma was when she was widowed, she realizes. How did she bear it? I'm exactly the age Amma was when she was widowed, she realizes. How did she bear it?

Janaki wants to share the village's anger at Shantam's breach, but, in the grip now of this strange pity for the girl her grandmother was, she is unable. She, in Sivakami's position, might well have gone mad.

At first light the next morning, a bullock solemnly pulls a cart down the Brahmin quarter from Shantam's house toward Kulithalai (most bullocks look solemn, this one especially so). On the cart are two men and a big load of hay from which they are creating a wake, systematically depositing large handfuls behind them on the path and roadway. When this is done, a priest from the Brahmin-quarter temple drops three lumps of burning camphor at the edge of the straw carpet, which begins where Karuppan landed after vaulting Shantam's wall. Three palms of flame grow fingers, join hands and run up the Brahmin quarter. Where the fire hits a pocket of damp, it pops and hisses much like the good Brahmin folk of the village waiting for the street to be purified so that they can meet and rehash the night's events. When the veil of smoke lifts, the carpet of straw has magically changed into one of ash, with little straw bits here and there, and the Brahmin quarter, too, has been magically restored to its former untouchability, which the untouchable robbed by his touch.

That morning, at Sivakami's, Gayatri expresses perfunctory regret about the beatings but is philosophical.

"It's terrible, it really is, but what could they have expected?"

Minister has contacted a French mission doctor of his acquaintance, who would go and see the boy today.

Gayatri notices Mari scrubbing pots with extraordinary vigour and asks what she thinks.

"Such liaisons must be stopped!" Mari retorts in a tone of voice that implies she is more offended at Gayatri having felt the need to ask than at the subject of the question.

"Clearly, yes, clearly," Gayatri mutters, taking offence at Mari's tone.

Young Kesavan enters shaking his head and clucking his tongue.

"Why, why, why, why, why..." He shakes his head.

People so often think something becomes more profound if repeated. Sometimes it does.

"Why don't Brahmins permit widow remarriage?" he asks.

This is not what Sivakami and Janaki expected to hear.

"I think it is terribly wrong, what they did," he continues, because this is how he feels and because he would hate to lose this job due to some misapprehension of his position on Sivakami's part. "But if widows were permitted to remarry and if we could rid ourselves of this terrible caste prejudice, maybe this would not have been necessary for them."

"This was not necessary for them," Sivakami starts, and Kesavan replies, "Oh, yes."