Vidya was crying and Sarada was whimpering. Babuji’s roaring and thundering had disturbed their afternoon naps. Chinnakka tried to soothe them back to sleep but had to give up. There was too much chaos and nervous energy about.
“Is a storm coming? A cyclone?” Sarada, who had missed the drama, wanted to know.
“Worse,” Amma muttered.
“A guest,” Chinnakka whispered in Sarada’s ear.
“A guest and a storm rolled into one,” Rajakka remarked snarkily, adding to Sarada’s confusion.
Visvam and Bala, who did not remember much of their uncle’s previous visits, could not understand what the fuss was about.
Chandra did, but was preoccupied. “What luck! Would you go to a school where you didn’t have a single friend? Where they sniggered behind your back? Called you lady’s finger? Treated you like a freak of nature? Accused you of polishing teachers with ghee and butter?”
In between giving instructions to Panchu maama and Kesavan maama, Amma too muttered, “What luck! As if I didn’t have enough to deal with. A houseful of children home for the holidays, staff threatening to quit, orders and thunder from above, and now this! The world’s greatest critic himself on a grand, extended visit.” Amma took a d-e-e-p breath.
“Even Lokam suspects he married her for the extra allowance of Rs 150 that the Finance Department gives married officers. His own wife thinks that of him, imagine! Why doesn’t he compare his brother with himself instead of pitting me against Lokam? So what if I can’t play the veena like his wife does, or speak Hindi and Bengali? Neither can Lokam translate Henrik Ibsen’s plays from English to Tamil. Imagine how he would have treated me if my father did not hold the title of Diwan Bahadur but was some petty clerk. As it is, he turns his nose up as though I’m not fit to belong to his esteemed family. Nothing I do meets with his approval. Criticising my family, my looks, my achievements…
“Is it my fault that I have given birth to seven children? Why does it bother him? It is not as though he has to look after them. God forbid that day ever comes.” Amma sent up a silent prayer and then resumed muttering.
“I had to listen to his taunts even when we lived in Calcutta for two years. Now that he has travelled to England, he will be insufferable. I have made up my mind. I will not try to please His Highness. He can complain to his heart’s content about the sambar and rasam. About my appearance. It will not affect me in the least. I am just going to shut myself in the cradle room and carry on with my translation.” Amma had the same determined look she’d passed on to her eldest son. “Thankfully, Lokam’s child is still a newborn. Otherwise, he would have compared the children.”
As she vented, she made a list of things for Kesavan maama and Panchu maama to do – cooking, cleaning, washing, buying.
The kids were shooed out again. Chandra cycled round and round in the back verandah at full speed. There was a flurry of activity; people rushed in and out of the house.
In the kitchen, Kesavan maama roasted and ground coffee beans. He soaked rice and lentils to be fermented into the batter for dosais and idlis. He readied the spice-and-lentil powder to be mixed with sesame oil and smeared on hot, fluffy, melt-in-the-mouth idlis. He powdered jaggery and cardamom to add to sweets. Outside, Thyagu maama scrubbed floors and wiped windows. Panchu maama folded piles of clothes.
The aroma of freshly ground coffee wafted out of the house and through the back garden.
“Who is visiting?” Sarada looked up from the design she was tracing in the mud.
“Raman Chithappa,” Rajakka replied.
“He is Babuji’s younger brother,” Chinnakka elaborated. “And Ramudu’s elder brother.’
“Who is he? What will he do?” Sarada wanted to know.
“Raman Chithappa wears the sort of clothes that Babuji does – veshti-shirt at home, shirt-tie-trousers outside the house with a turban over his head and kudumi,” Visvam offered. “But he doesn’t look anything like Babuji. And he keeps the turban on even inside the house; I’ve never seen the tuft of hair on his head.” When Visvam did not know the answers to questions in the exam paper, too, he wrote whatever little he knew. It was a practice that had spilt over into the rest of his life.
Ramudu was nineteen years younger than his brother and didn’t know much about him either, barring what he had heard from Skandan and Sundaram, his brothers who were no more. “He plays games with children – blows soap bubbles, shows magic tricks with disappearing coins and sticks.” That was the extent of his information.
Chandra kept cycling and was not forthcoming.
“He tells stories about scientists and science,” Rajakka said.
“What is science?” Sarada asked.
Rajakka shrugged. “Ask him when he comes. He’s the scientist.”
Gnaanam Paati stepped out of the house to dry a big bundle of red chillies in the sun. Chinnakka accosted her. “Sarada wants to know about Raman Chithappa. We have only met him occasionally, on his brief visits last year and the year before.”
“I have known him since he was a child,” Gnaanam Paati waved her hand to indicate how little he had been.
They crowded around Gnaanam Paati, eager to hear stories. Chandra was still whizzing around on the cycle.
Gnaanam Paati squatted with a grunt and untied the bundle. “When your father and Raman Chithappa were a bit older than Ayya and Bala are now, your grandfather decided it was time for their thread ceremony, the poonal function. He invited even distant members of the family. Along with the poonal, he arranged a paal kaavadi ceremony near the Swamimalai temple, close to Kumbakonam. People came all the way from Visakhapatnam. But I had to stay at home, because I am a widow.”
“What is a paal kaavadi ceremony?” Chinnakka asked.
“How should I know?” Gnaanam Paati grumbled. “I wasn’t allowed.” She spread out the red chillies on an old cotton veshti, their deep red almost entirely covering the white underneath.
Kesavan maama came out to inspect the vathals, vadaams and appalaams he had laid out in the sun. “If they aren’t turned around and dried properly, the rice cakes will not fry well,” he informed them, before going on to answer Chinnakka’s question in detail. “A kaavadi is shaped like a weighing scale. You have to carry a sturdy wooden pole on your shoulder from which hang two pots fastened to ropes tied on either side. These pots are filled with offerings of fruit or rice or milk for the Lord Subrahmanya. Brass bells attached to the stick announce the devotee’s arrival; he is not allowed to speak.” Kesavan maama’s voice dripped with devotion.
Gnaanam Paati went on grumbling. “I was not allowed because I was considered inauspicious. But a few years later, your grandfather, after whom you’re named,” she looked at Chandrasekhar, “needed my help. When the boys came home to Visakhapatnam for their college holidays one summer, Raman reminded us of a scarecrow, his shirt hanging loose on his frame. Both boys were pale and sickly from living in Madras and eating the tasteless hostel food. Your grandfather ranted and raved, and finally decided to rent a house for them in Madras. He sent me, along with our parents, to set up and run the household. It was House No. 8 on Iswaradoss Lala Street in Triplicane. With the food I cooked there and the care I provided, the boys grew healthy quickly.”
Gnaanam Paati spotted some fruit on the woodapple tree that looked ready to be plucked. She grunted again as she got to her feet, and headed towards it, continuing, “A couple of years later, a year later, to another house in Tank Square in Triplicane, south of the temple mandapam. I was there keeping house for the boys until my father, your great-grandfather, took ill. He died that year – it was a few weeks before Navarathri in 1906, I remember. How can I forget, it brought about yet another twist in my life,” Gnaanam Paati sighed, reaching out to pluck the first ripe wood apple.
The children exchanged furtive looks. Visvam grimaced. Bala shuddered. They were all thinking of the foul-smelling paste that Gnaanam Paati made with wood-apple and jaggery, and forced down their throats saying it was good for digestion and whatnot. Had she told them some exciting stories from their uncle’s childhood, they might have considered ingesting the ghastly concoction. It definitely wasn’t worth it if all they got in exchange were these boring sob stories.
Gnaanam Paati wasn’t done yet. “But now, they are full-grown men – independent. And I, an old woman and a burden on them. Neither bothers with the prescribed rituals or performs any ceremonies, but both still consider me inauspicious.” Gnaanam Paati pulled down another branch with ripe fruit. “This is what is in store for you girls, too, if you are widowed. Even if you’re not, as soon as you are married, which could be any day now, all your studies and silly games will have to be tied up in a bundle and put away – like those chillies were, before I brought them here.”
By the time Gnaanam Paati turned, wood apples in hand – ripe and perfect to be made into a paste – the children had disappeared!
Excerpted with permission from Raman and Chandrasekhar: Lighting Up the Stars, Arundhati Venkatesh, illustrations by Priya Kuriyan, Duckbill.
