The Toss of a Lemon 3

So Hanumarathnam has laboured to create a middle ground: a detailed map of the holdings for Sivakami to walk through with her eyes and mind. Hanumarathnam has accurately portrayed those properties: real and perceived distances, sizes, and productive capacity of each plot. It is not simply a matter of drawing a map to scale; one must choose what sort of scale: physical? psychological? This map has to show how a property relates to its owners, to itself, to tenants, to the community. This is business—not geography, not math.

(Padma Viswanathan, The Toss of a Lemon)

As in my previous post about The Toss of a Lemon, the context is astrological: Hanumarathnam's horoscope has predicted his death, and he is preparing his wife Sivakami for her widowhood.

The "detailed map of the holdings" described here is for someone who will never see the land described by the map: at the time when the novel begins (around 1900) a respectable Brahmin widow remained in total seclusion from the public eye, so Sivakami could not walk the lands to inspect them.

The reader of a novel is not forbidden by custom to inspect the landscape a novel describes, but the novelist is no less involved in an "accurate portrayal" of the "real and perceived" and the relationship between them than Hanumarathnam is. The novelist may not do so for "business" purposes, but here, the novelist is closer to the businessman than to the geographer or the mathematician.

There are echoes here of the starting point of my last post on this novel: "He finds knowledge more interesting than ignorance." But I'll just let them remain echoes for now.

The Toss of a Lemon 2

He finds knowledge more interesting than ignorance.

I posted this as my Facebook status while reading The Toss of a Lemon, by Padma Viswanathan, because I could identify with this, too (as with the moment of identification I already commented on).

The context: the Brahmin Hanumarathnam, a man who is both a healer and an aristocrat with lands to manage, has read in his horoscope (and that of his wife) that he will die soon. He has found a boy in his village, Muchami, to train as an overseer of his lands after his death.

Knowledge is more interesting than ignorance: the immediate point of the statement is that both Hanumarathnam and Muchami enjoy the work of keeping track of the goings on on Hanumarathnam's lands—all the information about their tenants, who they are, how they work, what they are growing, which plots should be fallow, and so on.

But a further nuance of this for Hanumarathnam is that he prefers to know that he is going to die, because then he can prepare things for his wife and children. This nuance is ironized for the contemporary reader, however, by the fact that Hanumarathnam's knowledge of his forthcoming death comes from astrology; that is, his knowledge is based on superstition, which we now consider ignorance.

That irony is further ironized by the fact that he does die at the predicted time! So his knowledge may have been based on ignorance, but because he knew he was going to die, he was able to prepare the administration of his wealth for his family.

The Toss of a Lemon

Today, I finished two novels. This afternoon, I finished was my friend Padma Viswanathan's The Toss of a Lemon, and this evening I finished Christoph Ransmayr's Der fliegende Berg. I had started the Ransmayr first, back in December, because it is one of four books I'm teaching in my verse novels course next semester, but I put it aside over Christmas and New Year's because I had been planning to read Padma's novel "between the years" since she sent it to me in September.

There is a great deal of say about the excellent Toss of a Lemon, but let me begin with one small, very personal response:

Rukmini ... is tall, with broad shoulders, and an exceptionally good cook, which her in-laws appreciate, though they're more likely to tell others this than tell her.

That was the first thing I marked in the book, right near the beginning, a description of one of the novel's minor characters (the neighbor of the main character, Sivakami). The phrase that struck me was the last bit I quoted; it reminded me of my father's tendency to never praise his children directly, but only indirectly, by praising them to others. My mother (my father's second wife) is not like that; she praises openly—but apparently, my dad's first wife is just like him, and over the years I heard at least one story about her praising her children and concluding by explicitly asking that the praise not be passed on to the children in question.