Wanderers in Eternity – Chapter 4 (Page 1)
4
JANAKI, SHIVANKARAM AND VASANTHARAJA
1972
The August heat covered everything like a stifling thick cotton cloth. The briny breeze that blew in from the sea also held a roughness. The evening sunlight had a golden hue.
Hugging little baby, Janaki moved from under the temple gateway know as the gopurama and walked away from the crowd towards the shady mango trees by the high wall.
This was the Nalloor season. There was a festive air around the Kandaswami Kovil. Though there were crowds there was no chaos. Janaki felt as if everyone behaved serenely, their hearts filled with piety.
There were several devotees sitting under the shade of the mango trees. As if not to disturb the chanting at the puja in the Kovil, everyone was quiet. If anyone spoke a word to another it was done hush hush. Nearing the shade, Janaki’s eye caught the sight of a Shiva devotee. The yellow color of his robe and his holy thread had some how seeped into his long white beard. He must have bathed in saffron water. He looked away with a haughtiness that said he was a high caste Brahmin. As if not to disturb him, Janaki turned the other way and walked across the burning sand to another shade. If her father were alive would he look like that Shiva devotee, she wondered. Every time she saw a man past his middle age she thought about her father. Thirteen years had elapsed since her father’s sudden death. Janaki let out a sigh. Involuntarily she muttered “Appa”.
She blew her breath for the baby in her bosom to feel its coolness. The child slept on without a stir. “My Vasantharaja,” she thought. “My own son.” From the love towards the baby, her breasts were filling with milk. It was a little while ago that Shivankaram left the kovil grounds with a friend he had met after a long time. They were nowhere to be seen. Janaki who stood under the temple gate came here to the shade hoping to feed the baby as well. She turned away from the crowd covering her head with the sash of her white sari. When she pulled out a tanned breast out of her jacket and neared it to the baby’s lips she remembered her mother. Her own mother must have fed her milk the same way.
She remembered her younger brother who ran away to Velvetithurai without listening to such a good mother. Many times, Janaki heard mother saying that sixteen year old brother Ranganadan became so stubborn because of the loss of their father at such a young age. “If Appa was alive the boy wouldn’t have run amuck like that, ” Mother’s words echoed in Janaki’s mind. Then how come that she did not run amuck? Ranganadan was coddled too much. Little boy without a father, poor little boy without a father, everyone looked at him with such pity. Wasn’t she also a little girl without a father? But she toughened her heart for the sake of poor mother. She knew all the hardships that mother went through. The journey that mother took with the two kids after father died, Janaki could remember only very faintly. It was a long tiring journey.
Afterwards they lived with relatives. Out of these, Uncle Mahes who was a distant relative of mother’s was the closest to them. Mahes Karuppulle, whom Janaki called Karuppu Maman was married at the time. He had a small store in puttur. It was in a small back room of this store that Janaki came of age. It was a cadjan hut. For sixteen days Janaki was imprisoned inside this small space. Then bathed by the washer woman wannan Maami and other female relatives, she walked out to the world. This she remembered very well. Didn’t Uncle Mahes behave just like her own father then? When she was about ten or eleven years old, she went on a pilgrimage with Uncle Mahes and the family which she remembers to this day. This was because of a special reason.
It was three months prior to this pilgrimage that Uncle Mahes’s wife, Auntie Ragawathie died after a long illness. Janaki felt that she and her mother and younger brother came more under the thumb of Uncle Mahes after Auntie’s death. Poor widowed became an unlawful wife of Uncle Mahes. He never got married to mother.
Janaki thought that even in widowhood men and women received two different types of treatment from the world. When Auntie Ragawathie died everyone who consoled Uncle Mahes said how lucky his wife was to die before him. Many said who she died before her husband would be reborn in a good place. But Janaki’s own mother who was widowed by the death of her husband was considered an unlucky woman. Auntie Ragawathie was cremated while wearing the gold necklace which she wore on her wedding day. But mother could not wear her gold necklace after father’s death. After his death, she did not wear any jewelry or fancy clothes. She wore only a white sari. But Janaki understood that mother succumbed to the wishes of Uncle Mahes thinking of the welfare and the future of her two kids.
She herself did everything giving in to Uncle Mahes. On the coming of age ceremony, Janaki ate the pittu mixed in with sesami oil and raw eggs silently without complaints, accepting the fate of herself as a woman. She married Shivankaram Appadurai, who was a relative of Uncle Mahes by accepting more of this same fate.
She often lamented that her fate would have been different only if her father were alive. If he lived she would have done further studies and become a teacher. She could vaguely remember how she went to school holding on to her father’s hand. She still remembered well how one fateful day she waited so long for father to come and pick her up and then when he did not show up how she ran all the way home alone. Wasn’t it that day that her life changed completely? That was the day that all the castles of her dreams fell apart.
She still remembered how she walked on to the road that night while holding on to mother’s hand after gathering a few odds and ends that did not get destroyed by the fire which burned their house down. Younger brother Ranganadan could not remember any of this. Poor fatherless boy…….. poor fatherless boy.
While breast feeding the baby, she prayed no misfortune such as that should ever befall her little one. When Vasantharaja suckled with his baby lips, Janaki felt that warmth on her breast.
Just like her brother left her mother would Vasantharaja leave her one day and go somewhere? Now Janaki knew that Ranganadan went off to Velvetithurai after a big argument with mother because he was in love with a Catholic girl there.
Within mother was still a brewing anger. This was obvious to Janaki from everything she said. Why did a Shiva worshipping Hindu boy from their family fall in love with a Catholic girl? Not only that. Janaki’s family belonged to the Vellala (Farmer) caste. Ranganadan’s girl’s family were fisher folk. Sprats, sear fish, anchovies, sardines. That is what they caught. Mother said in the same way they catch fish in their nets, they caught Ranganadan in their net. “He fell in that pit,” mother said.
“They are black marketers who smuggle illegal stuff from India,” Uncle Mahes commented. “How else can they live so grandly? People in Velvetithurai are like that.”
Ranganadan met his love, Arunakshi for the first time when he went to the Alvar kovil in Vallipuram.
Thangamani, the mother went there specially to worship god Vishnu. The kovil in Vallipuram offered a special place to Vishnub Krishnavathar. It was from mother that Janaki learned puja to the god within the temple and say her prayers. It is not that Janaki did not notice little brother moving away from these services which he attended so piously as a young boy.