The Toss of a Lemon Read online

  The Toss of a Lemon

  Padma Viswanathan

  "The Toss of a Lemon joins the company of the great novels on India." – Yann Martel

  ***

  In a fiction debut to rival The God of Small Things, Padma Viswanathan gives us a richly detailed and intimate vision of an India we've never seen.

  Inspired by her family history, Padma Viswanathan brings us deep inside the private lives of a Brahmin family as the subcontinent moves through sixty years of intense social and political change. At the novel's heart is Sivakami, a captivating girl-child married at ten to an astrologer and village healer who is drawn to her despite his horoscope, which foretells an early death-depending on how the stars align when their children are born. All is safe with their daughter's birth, but their second child, a son named Vairum, fulfills the prophecy: by eighteen, the child bride Sivakami is a widow with two young children.

  According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she must don the widow's white sari. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children. She dutifully follows custom, except for one act of rebellion: she insists on a secular education for her troubled son. While her choice ensures that Vairum fulfills his promise in a modernizing India, it also sets Sivakami on a collision course with him. Vairum, fatherless in childhood, childless as an adult, rejects the caste identity that is his mother's mainstay, twisting their fates in fascinating and unbearable ways.

  The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic and yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family's doorstep. It is also the debut of a major new voice in world fiction.

  Padma Viswanathan

  The Toss of a Lemon

  © 2008

  for

  Bhuvana and S. P. Viswanathan

  and for

  Dhanam Kochoi

  Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge…

  Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

  *

  PART ONE

  *

  1. Thangam 1896

  THE YEAR OF THE MARRIAGE PROPOSAL, Sivakami is ten. She is neither tall nor short for her age, but she will not grow much more. Her shoulders are narrow but appear solid, as though the blades are fused to protect her heart from the back. She carries herself with an attractive stiffness: her shoulders straight and always aligned. She looks capable of bearing great burdens, not as though born to a yoke but perhaps as though born with a yoke within her.

  She and her family live in Samanthibakkam, some hours away by bullock cart from Cholapatti, which had been her mother’s place before marriage. Every year, they return to Cholapatti for a pilgrimage. They fill a pot at the Kaveri River and trudge it up to the hilltop temple to offer for the abhishekham. These are pleasant, responsible, God-fearing folk who seek the blessings of their gods on any undertaking and any lack thereof. They maintain awe toward those potentially wiser or richer than they-like the young man of Cholapatti, who is blessed with the ability to heal.

  No one in their family is sick, but still they go to the healer. They may be less than totally healthy and simply not know. One can always use a preventative, and it never hurts to receive the blessings of a blessed person. This has always been the stated purpose of the trip, and Sivakami has no reason to think this one is any different.

  Hanumarathnam, the healer, puts his palms together in a friendly namaskaram, asks how they have been and whether they need anything specific. They shyly shake their heads, and he queries, with a penetrating squint, “Nothing?” Sivakami is embarrassed by her parents, who are acting like impoverished peasants. They owe this man their respect, but they are Brahmins too, and literate, like him. They can hold up their heads. She’s smiling to herself at his strange name: a hybrid of “Hanuman,” the monkey god, and rathnam, gem. The suffix she understands; it’s attached to the name of every man in the region. But no one is named for the monkey!

  Her mother and father cast glances at each other; then her father clears his throat. “Ah, our daughter here has just entered gurubalam. We are about to start searching for a groom.”

  “Oh, well,” Hanumarathnam responds with a wink, “I deal in medicine, not charms.”

  Sivakami’s parents giggle immoderately. Their daughter stares at the packed dust of the Brahmin-quarter street. Her three older brothers fidget.

  “But you have my blessings,” Hanumarathnam continues, making a small package of some powder. “And this, dissolved in milk and drunk each day, this will give you strength. Just generally. It will help.”

  Then he looks at Sivakami. She doesn’t look up. When he asks her parents, “Have you done the star chart yet?” his voice sounds different. They haven’t. “Come at dusk. I’ll do it for you.”

  What could be better? The humble folk trip back to their relatives’, four doors down the street, for snacks and happy anticipation of their consultation with the auspicious young man, who also has some fame as an astrologer.

  At that strange hour that gives the impression of light even though each figure is masked by darkness, Sivakami’s father, with two of the male relatives, finds Hanumarathnam on his veranda. He cannot make out the young man’s features, but the slant of his chest and head suggests wisdom and peace. So young and a widower, by a freak accident: his wife drowned in the Kaveri River before she ever came to live with him. His parents were already dead. He lives with relatives while his own house-his parents’ home, the second to last on the Brahmin-quarter-stays locked, dark and still.

  Hanumarathnam stands to greet them; they take their seats; they make brief small talk as his aunt brings tumblers of yogourt churned with lemon water and salt.

  He examines the chart by a kerosene lamp while the men finger their shoulder towels. He makes some calculations. He purses his lips and takes in a sharp breath before speaking. “I, well, I must say it. I have just entered gurubalam myself.”

  Sivakami’s father hesitates. “Oh?”

  “I will make more detailed calculations, but this is my reasoned guess… Your daughter’s horoscope is compatible with mine.”

  The young man licks his lips, no longer the astrological authority but instead the nervous suitor. He speaks too quickly. “I am obliged to mention, of course, or perhaps you have already heard: the weakest quadrant of my horoscope has a small shadow… It… it faintly suggests I will die in my ninth year of marriage. But, as that prediction is contained in the weakest quadrant, it holds no weight, as you know, though ignorant people let it scare them.”

  The men do not know but are not ignorant enough to say so, and anyway, Hanumarathnam has not paused in his speech.

  “And most often, the birth of a son changes the configuration, as you know. I understand it must be difficult for you to consider giving your daughter as a second wife. My first wife, she drowned to death in her tenth year. Only three years after our marriage, you see, and it was not I who died, you see? It was her. Quite contrary to the negative quadrant of the horoscope. An, an unfortunate, accident. So I have no children, and I am still young. I have money and manage well. I am speaking on my own behalf only because I have no father and I know the horoscopes better than anyone.”

  He blinks rapidly, the lamplight making him look younger than his twenty-one years. He takes a breath and looks at Sivakami’s father.

  “I have never looked at, nor ever proposed to any girl before now. Please… consider me.”

  That night, Sivakami’s father relates his impressions to her mother. They are positively disposed toward the young man and feel they trust his astr
ology and his good intentions. They ask their relatives in the morning: have they heard anything against Hanumarathnam or his kin? The relatives assure them that they have heard only good things: fine, upstanding Brahmins all. The young man not only has special talents but has just come into his inheritance, some very good parcels of land. They think it could be a good match, more: a shame to waste the opportunity.

  In the morning, Sivakami’s father bathes and prays. Then he picks up quill and ink and writes a gracious note, pretending they, the girl’s family, are taking the initiative, as is right and conventional, and inviting Hanumarathnam for a girl-seeing as if his already having seen the girl had nothing to do with any of this.

  Most Esteemed Sir, Village Healer and Knowing One,

  The humble man who Writes this Missive to your

  Gracious Self invokes the Blessings of the Gods and

  Stars on his intentions. The writer would be Honoured

  above Reasonable Expectation, ifhe were to have the

  Pleasure of Welcoming Your Good Self to the

  Samanthibakkam home of his family, where his Revered

  Ancestors have Bestowed their Blessings Through the

  Ages. With the Wisdom and Learning You have

  acquired through Great Sacrifice and Effort, please

  Choose an Auspicious Time, and send word that Your

  good Relatives will Accompany you to Grace the

  Threshold of our Poor but Pious Dwelling. We will be

  Eagerly awaiting your Word. And the Opportunity to

  shower our Hospitality on Your Presence.

  I remain, Yours humbly,

  The note is in Tamil, a script without capital letters, but this is the idea-inconsistently the most flowery and archaic Sivakami’s father can muster.

  The note is delivered by Sivakami’s brothers after they also have bathed and prayed. With a great sense of accomplishment puffing his modest chest and head, Sivakami’s father leads his wife and children on the trek back home.

  Word from Hanumarathnam follows. He comes to Samanthibakkam accompanied by a distant uncle and a male cousin. Sivakami’s family offers the stiffest, most formal reception they are able to raise above the brim of their excitement and happiness. Sivakami is ushered in. She keeps her head bowed and her eyes down, since, by unspoken convention, this is behaviour appropriate to prospective brides. She serves sweets she has made herself, the solidity of her upper back giving her movements a linear grace. Asked to sing a couple of devotional songs, she does so with gusto, closing her eyes.

  By the time he leaves, the observant young man is even more smitten than that day, short weeks before, when he had seen the pride flash in Sivakami’s eyes.

  They are married, like everyone else, at an auspicious time on an auspicious day in an auspicious month. After her marriage, she continues to live with her parents, like everyone else who has parents, though she is escorted to her husband’s village several times a year for festivals, at which times she is feted, and brings gifts for her new relatives. In Cholapatti, she stays with her parents, at their relatives’ house up the street from where her husband lives with his relatives. They are present at the same functions, where she participates in the ceremonies, but her husband remains for her a person known only in public and in glimpses.

  After three years, she comes of age, like everyone else lucky enough to survive childhood, and finally the great change is upon them. Her family readies her to join her husband for good.

  When Hanumarathnam, now twenty-four, learns he will receive his thirteen-year-old bride, he unlocks his parents’ house. The aunt and uncle who raised him (double relatives: his mother’s sister married his father’s brother) make a ceremonial fuss at his declaration of departure; their house is just next door, after all, and their son Murthy’s bride may also arrive soon.

  Hanumarathnam’s own house has not been opened for a full generation. Generations are short in this time when girls marry as children and have children as soon as they are able, but still, the house has not been opened for a while. Hanumarathnam has brought the servants with him who will make the house ready to receive a new bride. These are servants his inheritance has supported in rice and lentils, year in, year out. Generations of their families have served generations of his. While his parents were alive, these people had worked around the house. Hanumarathnam’s mother died before his second birthday, his father less than a year later, and since then, whenever the servants have met him on the street, they have wept noisily for his dead parents. Eventually, they also wept for his dead little wife. When they learn that they will once more have domestic employment, they express great joy. One then becomes untraceable for some weeks. He will later be rounded up sternly by Hanumarathnam, with his uncle, who will come along to lend authority. But the others come immediately, and these two are with Hanumarathnam as he gently tries to open the great, rusty padlock.

  The key turns suddenly, and he’s afraid that it has broken along its collar of rust. But the lock is opening and the thick door of grey-weathered wooden boards is swinging to. They are in the vestibule, a narrow passageway with a high ledge on either side-too high to be a seat, too low for storage. The next lock has not been so exposed and opens more easily. A buttery smell of bats wings over them while the creatures themselves flutter farther back into the dark. Hanumarathnam already has the next key ready-for the tall, narrow double doors into the garden that runs the length of the house. There are two such doorways, about five paces apart, in the wall of the main hall.

  The servants with Hanumarathnam are old enough to remember his first steps in that garden. They shuffle, atypically quiet, in the silent dust of the house. Maybe they are letting him alone in case he is mourning those early years, just a few months, really, possibly before memory, when he was not an orphan. Maybe they are mourning their own lost time. Or maybe they are just thinking of all the work to be done, and the happy times to come for Hanumarathnam, as a family man and householder at last.

  Hanumarathnam opens the doors from the main hall to the pantry, from the pantry to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the back courtyard, where an extended family of monkeys screeches and leaps at his appearance. Hanumarathnam screeches and leaps back into the house. The monkeys have been eating from the fruit trees in the garden: the courtyard stinks of rotting fruit, including half-eaten mangoes and overripe bananas evidently used as missiles in monkey food fights. Several bananas are still stuck on the walls where they were smashed. The monkeys must have been attracted to the courtyard by the shade afforded under the partial roof.

  Hanumarathnam, like his servants, who are tucked safely behind him, stands with the tail of his jasmine-white dhoti held over his nose and mouth against the rancid smell and his horror at the colonizers’ aggression. The courtyard is crawling with their clan. Fifteen, perhaps twenty, mothers, babies, adolescents. There are two dominant bull monkeys. One is a patriarch with a silvery thatch of hair, his muscles a bit stringy. His manner, as he bares his teeth and boxes a yearling’s ears to show off, is defensive. The up-and-comer, who has probably defeated every bull but the old one, is sleek and barrel-chested. He squats, shaking his head and puffing his cheeks, inches behind the old fellow.

  Now, all the monkeys are looking their way, except one, about two years old, who has caught a little bird and is absorbed in plucking it. The bird squawks ambivalently. The monkey rubs the bird’s head on the courtyard bricks, then inspects it as though this might reveal the source of the protest. Hanumarathnam, to the relief of his employees, gently shuts the courtyard door and bolts it.

  Seconds later, there is a pounding against the wood, a single fist, then a multitude, then the monkeys start to squabble and scrabble among themselves and forget the interlopers. The door from the courtyard to the garden is still locked; the monkeys have been going over the wall to get the fruit. Hanumarathnam, back in the main hall, shuts the garden doors and sends the servants to their homes. The house cannot be cleaned without water,
and the well is at the centre of the jealously guarded courtyard. The water at least is probably safe: the well has no bucket right now and, unlike the big agricultural wells, no ladder.

  Three hours before dawn, Hanumarathnam returns. He opens a garden door, straining his senses to perceive life or movement. Detecting nothing, he slowly swings a kerosene lamp out in front of him. Still nothing. With increasing boldness, he creeps, then stalks through the garden. There are no monkeys sleeping here.

  He returns to the main hall, closes the door and proceeds to the back of the house, which splits into the pantry and kitchen to the right and a small room, beneath the stairs, adjoining another small back room, on the left. He takes the left passage this time and tries the bolt. It is a little sticky. He rotates it up, down, up, down, pulling steadily on the handle. It opens with a bang. He pulls it shut again just as quickly and sets his ear against the door, his heart pounding. He can almost feel the old monkey’s overdeveloped canines penetrating his soft, scholarly flesh. When Hanumarathnam was a child, one of the Brahmin-quarter children died of a monkey bite. She had been a beautiful girl; the enraged monkey tore off half her face.

  There is no sound from the courtyard: as he suspected, his house is just one stop on the monkeys’ circuit. They don’t sleep here, cramped quarters, but rather in some forest glade, on grooved branches above leaf-padded floors.

  Monkeys, like cows, cobras, peacocks and mice, are sacred-their mythological associations give them immunity from harm. So Hanumarathnam, as a good Brahmin, must find some means of reclaiming his house without violence toward the invaders. At three the next morning, he and three of his servants return. Illuminating the garden section by section with the gaseous glare of kerosene, they strip every tree of its ripe fruit. It is not a large garden, but severely overgrown, and it takes them until six before all the fruit is stacked neatly in the pantry.