Seelan, Balendran noticed, was standing by the window, heating a teaspoon over a burner. He deftly picked up a syringe with his other hand and drew up the liquid on the teaspoon. Balendran noticed a white coat and a stethoscope hanging over the chair by the desk. “You’re a doctor!” he said in astonishment.
Seelan blushed with pleasure.
Balendran turned to his brother in wonder. Arul and Pakkiam smiled, delighted with his surprise.
“You’re looking at a University Scholarship student, thambi. London-trained,” Arul said. “Just came back last month.”
The University Scholarship was a rare honour, only given to the very brightest students in the colonies. Balendran looked at his nephew with doubled admiration.
Seelan came forward with the syringe, a shy but gratified smile on his face.
Arul extended his arm. Seelan took it and, with a quick movement, inserted the needle. Arul hissed and then sighed. Seelan withdrew the needle.
Both Pakkiam and Arul turned to Balendran, seeking his endorsement for the marvellous manoeuvre their son had performed. He shook his head to show his admiration, glad that they had taken his surprise as a compliment, that they had not understood it came from his very scant expectations of his brother’s existence in Bombay.
Balendran watched his nephew walk back to the table by the window, followed by his parents’ proud gaze. Nothing was as he had anticipated. His brother and his wife were at peace with each other. The enormous gap that existed between them had not destroyed their affections.
Balendran remembered the purpose of his visit and his father’s threat to cancel Arul’s allowance. Seelan had finished his work at the table and he came back and sat on the edge of his father’s bed. It occurred to Balendran, as he looked at his nephew, that with him being a doctor and now practising, Pakkiam would not be dependent on his father’s allowance any more. Seelan could easily provide for her on a doctor’s salary. Balendran realized that his father’s threat had become empty, all its power diffused.
On his first morning in Bombay, Balendran went for a walk to look at the neighbourhood. He found it as dismal as his brother’s residence, but then saw, amidst the squalor, a well-kept little park. He sat there for a while watching the traffic. Even the busiest streets in Ceylon were slow and uncluttered in comparison, and he found something exciting about the rush of traffic, the hooting of horns, the pedestrians who crossed willy-nilly, the cows that simply stood in the middle of the road.
When Balendran returned to his brother’s flat, he heard the sound of raised voices inside and he knew that something had happened.
Upon entering, the conversation in Arul’s room ceased. Pakkiam pushed open the curtain and looked out. She signalled to him. She was distraught and he dreaded that Arul’s illness had taken a turn for the worse. When he went in, he was surprised to find his brother sitting up in bed, stronger than he had been yesterday. There was an enraged expression on Arul’s face as he glared at his brother. A crumpled letter was lying on the bed.
“How dare you, Bala, how dare you come here with such a request,” Arul cried at him. “You bastard, you bloody vulture, picking at my dead bones.”
Balendran drew in his breath in dismay. His brother had found out about his father’s decree.
Arul’s shouting had brought on a coughing fit.
Pakkiam put her arm around him. “Don’t get excited, Appa.”
She nodded for Balendran to sit down in the chair by the bed. He did so. Arul had called him a “bloody vulture.” His brother believed that he had remained silent with the devious intention of fighting for his body after he had died. Balendran cursed himself for not telling his brother last night.
Arul’s coughing caused the letter to slip from his lap and fall to the ground. Balendran picked it up. It was in Tamil. He quickly turned it over and saw the name at the bottom. Pillai. He stared at his brother in astonishment. Even though Arul was coughing, he was watching for his brother’s reaction and he managed through his coughing to nod his head as if to say, “Yes, you are surprised, aren’t you? It serves you right.”
Pakkiam, seeing that the coughing was not going to cease, went to get Arul some medicine from the side table.
Balendran gazed at the letter again and remembered how his mother had known of Arul’s impending death through Pillai.
Pakkiam gave Arul some medicine and his coughing stopped. He lay there exhausted, breathing raspingly. After a moment, he muttered something. Pakkiam bent close to him, but he waved her away and stretched his hand out towards Balendran, who came around the side of the bed and knelt close to him. Arul muttered something in Tamil and Balendran recognized it as a verse from the Tirukkural. “ ‘Knowledge is a weapon of defense, an inner fortress no foe can raze.’ ” Arul, seeing the puzzled look on Balendran’s face, gestured to the letter. Then Balendran understood what he meant. He was talking about the knowledge of servants, their awareness of what went on in a house. Pillai was a servant par excellence, never supervised, his household accounts never checked, so implicit was his father’s trust in him. Yet that very same Pillai had acted on his own conscience and had, all these years, maintained contact with Arul. He had flagrantly defied his master’s dictates, ignored the vow he took in front of the family Gods.
Arul was looking at him, his eyes bright with the understanding that his brother knew what he meant. He beckoned Balendran close to him. “You are a fool, Bala, a damn fool.” Then he quoted the Tirukkural again. “ ‘Only the learned have eyes – others two sores on their face.’ ”
Balendran nodded, thinking his brother was talking about his ignorance of Pillai’s insubordination.
Arul shook his head to say that Balendran had not understood. He gripped his arm tightly and drew him forward again. “You have been blind to the reality of life, Bala. You have spent your whole life living by codes everyone lays down but nobody follows.” It was the longest sentence Arul had uttered since his coughing began and he lay back on his pillow, drained.
Pakkiam took over now. She gestured to Balendran that it was best to leave Arul to rest. Balendran nodded and got up. Arul started to protest, but Pakkiam put her hand on his shoulder and said firmly, “Enough, Appa. Your thambi and you can talk later.”
Arul pushed her hand away in annoyance, but he acquiesced.
Balendran went to his bedroom, his brother’s words echoing in his head. He ran the sentence over and over again in his mind, pondering what these codes were his brother was talking about. The word “everyone” lingered for a moment and he wondered if his brother was not really speaking of “everyone” but of their father. Yet what codes could he be following that his father was not?
Balendran’s contemplations were disturbed by Pakkiam calling “Thambi” from the other side of the curtain in his doorway. He told her to enter. She was dressed to go out. “I need to visit the pharmacy, thambi, to get more morphine. I’ll be a few minutes.”
He nodded to say that he would take care of Arul in her absence. She looked at him for a moment, as if she wished to say something. Then she changed her mind and left. He heard the front door closing behind her.
The moment she was gone, he got up and went out of his room. He paused outside Arul’s doorway, uncertain if he should go in or not, then he drew back the curtain and entered. Arul was propped up in bed, staring at him. He had seen him beyond the curtain. Balendran came up to the bed. He could tell his brother was not comfortable, as his head kept lolling to one side from time to time, as if keeping it straight was too great an effort. Balendran sat down on the bed. “I need to ask you something.”
Arul nodded.
Balendran paused. “This … this code you talk about. What does it mean?”
Arul cleared his throat. “A set of rules. We are told we must follow them. Some of us obey in spite of our natures. Others only make a pretence.”
Balendran looked at his brother carefully. “I always live by what I believe.”
“Do you, B
ala?”
“I don’t understand.”
Arul studied him for a moment. “Your stay in England.”
Balendran was astonished. He found it difficult to believe that Arul knew anything about Richard, yet his heart was beating rapidly.
“What about England?”
Arul rolled his eyes upwards trying to think of how to express himself.
Balendran clenched his hands, waiting.
“A friend of yours there.”
Balendran felt the blood rush to his face. He got up and went to the table by the window and poured a glass of water, no longer able to look at his brother.
Arul clapped his hands to get Balendran’s attention. Balendran turned to him. His brother beckoned him to come and sit on the bed again. When he had done so, Arul took his hand and held it tightly in his. He cleared his throat slowly and painfully and then said, very softly, “I do not judge you.”
“But how? How did you find out?”
“Pillai,” Arul said. “An anonymous note. Sent to Appa.”
“So Pillai reads English,” Balendran said. He was silent for a moment. “Then you know.”
Arul patted his hand. “Pillai wrote to me, concerned about the consequences of Appa’s anger.”
Balendran was silent again. His brother did not judge him. Something which might have been catastrophic had actually passed with great ease. And Pillai. He had known about all of it, but never changed his demeanour towards him.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry things turned out the way they did,” Arul said. “I blame Appa. Most of all for his own hypocrisy.”
Arul was silent then, gazing ahead of him. After a moment, he made the effort to clear his throat and Balendran leant close to him. “Pakkiam’s mother,” Arul finally whispered.
Balendran drew back and looked at him, not understanding.
Arul sighed. “Appa only made a pretence of living by those rules he laid down so firmly. He and Pakkiam’s mother …”
Balendran stared at his brother in disbelief. His father and Pakkiam’s mother. “But … but it’s impossible. Where would they have met?”
“In Jaffna,” Arul said. “When he would go to make his inspections.”
At that moment, Pakkiam entered the flat. Balendran got up from the bed hastily.
She drew the curtain aside and came into the bedroom. When she saw them both staring at her, she stopped in the doorway and looked from one to the other. Then she went to the side table and began to put out the vials of morphine she had bought.
Balendran left the room.
He felt that he had to get away from the flat in order to think clearly, so he made his way to the little park he had discovered that morning. It was deserted. He found a bench under a banyan tree and sat down, staring ahead of him. In the short course of this morning, much had changed. He was content for the moment to put aside the fact that Arul and Pillai knew of his inversion. He concentrated his mind, instead, on what he had learnt about his father. Numerous questions swarmed into his mind like buzzing flies.
With his scant knowledge, it was impossible for his father’s indiscretion to become an actuality to him. He needed to know more, he needed to feel the facts, like rounded stones in his palm, rub them over and over until they became real to him. Balendran got up. It was useless for him to sit here.
When Balendran returned to the flat, he found Pakkiam sitting at the head of the dining table. She gestured for him to keep his voice low, that Arul was sleeping. He removed his hat and stood running his hand through his hair, wanting to speak with her but understanding that he had to consider her feelings, had to consider what she might wish or not wish to discuss. Pakkiam had seen his hesitancy and she beckoned for him to come and sit down at the chair on her left.
Once he was seated, they were both silent, not looking at each other.
“Ask what you will, thambi,” Pakkiam finally said. She opened her palms as a gesture of her willingness, but he saw that she was tired and indifferent to his quest. Her husband, the love of her life, was slipping away from her and, in the light of that enormity, his quest, or even her past, seemed trifling and irrelevant.
Balendran was silent for a while, ashamed to be imposing his needs on her at a time like this. “The relationship between your mother and my father …”
“For my mother, it wasn’t love. I’m not sure what it was for him. Once my father had died, she was a widow, a desperately poor widow with a daughter to raise.”
“And did you know from the beginning?”
“No. A man would come to say that my mother was wanted at the big house. I thought she had work there. I only understood, once my mother had died and I was brought to Brighton from Jaffna.”
“How did you find out?”
“I was told by that very man who came to fetch my mother.”
“Pillai?”
She nodded.
“But what a difficult thing for you to have been told about your own mother.”
She was silent. “I was told for my own safety,” she finally said, then looked away from him.
Balendran stared at her in shock.
She shook her head slowly to say that nothing had happened between his father and her.
In the silence, they could hear the hissing of the fire as water boiled out of a pot onto the stove. Pakkiam got up to attend to it. Before she left, however, she said, “Our son does not know any of this.”
Now that the facts were in his hand like hard, rounded stones, Balendran, as he sat on his bed, began to feel his emotions push to the surface. He thought again of the fifteen-year-old Pakkiam and he felt a deep abhorrence for his father. His father had brought her from Jaffna to Brighton like the sacrificial Dipavali goat, fed her, clothed her, all with the intention of seducing her once she had reached a more mature age. He thought of Pakkiam’s mother and wondered what had gone through her mind when she had been called to their house in Jaffna, the revulsion she must have had to control in order to keep her daughter fed. What had his father thought as he forced himself on Pakkiam’s mother, as he prepared Pakkiam to take her place? A quote from the Tirukkural that his father often declaimed rose in his mind. “Integrity and shame are natural, only to the well born.” His father must have told himself that they, being of a low caste, could not possibly have the same sentiments as those of his own wife or niece, could not possibly feel shame or the loss of self. Balendran felt an anger begin to stir within him. What terrible, offensive hypocrisy. His father felt no more revulsion for a person because of their caste than he did. Yet Arul had committed the crime. He had fallen in love with Pakkiam, he had wanted to make her his wife. He had loved where he should have simply lusted.
Balendran’s anger, however, was impotent. The damage had long been done. His anger, lacking a release, turned inward. Balendran berated himself that he had justified what his father had done to Arul, that he had been understanding of his father’s views.
“I, too, am a hypocrite,” Balendran said, disgusted with himself. He got up and began to pace around the room. Arul was right. He had been blind, blind to the realities of life.
But Arul had said something else. About those who lived by the rules despite their nature.
Balendran looked around him at the shabby furniture of Seelan’s bedroom, the bare walls, the faded, threadbare coverlet, the almirah propped up by bricks where the legs had fallen off. Arul had foregone his wealth, his status. He had worked in a lowly job. Yet he had a happiness that eluded Balendran with his fine house and high position. He thought of his own study, its expensive furniture, shelves of books, the ebony stand with the bowl of flowers on it, the sea breeze that gently moved the lace curtains back and forth. He recalled the day, six months earlier, when he had heard about Richard’s imminent arrival in Ceylon, how he had stood in his study, Edward Carpenter’s book in his hands, and said that he truly believed what his father had done had been for the best, saving him from an unhappy fate.
Balendran saw that
what had changed now was that the thing which had comforted him in his exile from himself had been taken away. His love and admiration for his father, his understanding that his father had, ultimately, done what was right for him, were gone. The prop of his existence had been dislodged. He could no longer count on it for succour. All that was left was the heaviness of regret for a time, for a moment, that was irredeemably past.
In the days that followed, Balendran mourned the loss of his father, the one he had imagined was his, though he was not conscious that he was mourning. In fact, he would have been hard-pressed to give a name to the variety of emotions that passed through him in a day.
Mirroring Balendran’s volatile emotional state, Arul’s disease ebbed and flowed, changing direction sometimes from hour to hour. None of them was quite certain what to expect, save that the end would come soon. There were mornings when Arul was not conscious of the world around him and they were sure he would be gone by the evening. Then by mid-afternoon he would stir to life, able to talk without coughing much. Balendran and Arul spent most of their time in companionable silence, because of his brother’s increasing breathlessness. When they did talk, they chose not to discuss their father. Instead, they talked about their holidays, their escapades as boys, the old neighbours, the Kandiah girls at Lotus Cottage. A bond grew between the brothers that had not existed before. Or perhaps it had. For as they talked of their childhood, even of their quarrels, they found in those shared memories a life lived together.
Balendran began to call Pakkiam “akka” to show his respect for the person she had become despite her past, to show his desire to be accepted as family by her. Pakkiam tried to return his affection and respect, though understandably her attention was absorbed by the impending catastrophe of her husband’s death.
With Seelan, Balendran saw, one evening, the person beneath his nephew’s formal manner. Pakkiam had retired early to bed from exhaustion, leaving them alone to watch over Arul. They sat in silence, Seelan reading and Balendran lost in his thoughts. After a while, Balendran glanced up to find his nephew staring at him. Seelan quickly looked away. Yet, after a moment, he returned his gaze to his uncle. Balendran could tell that his nephew was struggling with something and he waited.
Cinnamon Gardens Page 24