SIX

Once their bicycle entered Vairipalayam, Saroja felt a little relieved. The town, unlike Kumaresan’s, was full of houses set closer to each other. Most of them had thatched roofs. She looked in wonder at those houses that were wide at the bottom and then slowly tapered towards the top, much like a temple tower. There were some brick houses too. They had the charm of novelty about them. The houses in the interior had tiled roofs. Walking through the town and looking up at the houses that resembled temple towers made her happy. There were only one or two people outside—older people. She couldn’t see any women. But it soon occurred to her that the women here, just like Kumaresan’s mother, must be the ones who did much of the work in the fields. Here and there, she spotted older women standing, holding on to a goat or a calf. This was not the kind of town where women stayed at home, cooked and waited.

She had heard from her father that they had once lived in a village when she was a child. But she had absolutely no recollection of that time. When she mentioned it, her father said to her, ‘It is good in a way that you don’t remember any of that. Leave it.’ And if she ever brought it up again, he simply said, ‘Our town is where we live. All right?’ But it looked like her brother had some memories of the village. Whenever she asked him about it, out of curiosity, he told her, ‘Here, in this town, you walk about freely, swinging your arms. You can’t do that there. Why do we need such a place?’ But despite her interest in the village, she had no desire to actually go and see it.

Back in Tholur, in the row of houses they lived in, the neighbours all talked about their hometowns. During festivals they would go away for ten days or even a month. At all those times, they would ask Saroja, ‘Aren’t you going to your village?’ Though it made her sad, she’d just smile and nod. If she had to respond, she would say, ‘This is our town. This is where we are from.’ For some reason, after moving to Tholur, her father did not ever want to go back to the village. So it was the streets and the people of Tholur who animated her world.

One could walk about swinging one’s arms freely on those streets. The town even had a large fort surrounded by a moat, and a large open area full of trees. She had roamed around and played in those places scores of times. When she was a child, her father would take her with him to his place of work. He would leave her to play near the trees within the compound. There were other children her age too. Saroja would join them and lose track of time.

In those days, life was just uninterrupted playtime for her. It was only when her father came to fetch her at lunchtime that she even realized she was hungry. Her brother worked in a different place. His work day ended earlier, so he would come by and collect Saroja, and they would head home together where they cooked dinner before their father arrived. It was her brother who taught Saroja everything. When she came of age, they asked her to stay at home. Although they had lived in different houses in Tholur, all had been in busy, crowded areas. She sighed now, thinking about how she had always lived among throngs of people.