The most recent event of suffering in Ramaiyi’s life was the sudden death of her second husband in May 2006. She remembered him fondly and not vaguely; at least once a week during the time that I carried out fieldwork, she would tell me how good a person her husband was to people on the estate, her family, and children. On the third anniversary of his death in May 2009, she was particularly upset and told me in great detail about the night that he had suffered his fatal heart attack on Kirkwall:
“That day, I had cut the chicken, gave him and everyone rice, chicken curry, and some vegetable curry. I put it in the center of our house, which is where we usually eat. I cleaned the house, took a head bath, and went to bed around nine thirty in the evening. A short while after lying down to sleep, he began making a noise in his sleep like a cough [she makes a cackling noise]. When I came by his side, he was in a pool of sweat. I did not know what to do so I carried him on by back to the front door and some others helped carry him to the steps to the main road, but he had already died.
Enna c'yratu? (“Now what will we do?”) [She begins to cry] He was a good man.
He never hit, never yelled, or treated anyone badly. He never called children or anyone by their name. He always said, “V#rat#? P%rat#?”47 (“Are you coming?
Are you going? He had affection for everyone (ell#rukkum p#cum). Usually a second husband would treat the children of your first husband badly. But he was not like that. He treated my children like they were his own, and because of that, I will never forget him.”
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The description of her second husband is a central piece of Ramaiyi’s account given that she was his second wife and that he is not her children’s biological father, signaling that bonds of kinship extend beyond blood and that there are informal bonds of love and obligation between Malaiyaha Tamil men and women that go beyond previous anthropological conceptions of marriage and widowhood on the plantations. Anthropologist Oddvar Hollup specifically mentions the higher frequencies of levirate and sororate marriages after widowhood among Paraiyar caste Malaiyaha Tamil estate widows of younger ages (1994: 265-6). But such instances would most likely result in children produced from the second marriage. In Ramaiyi’s case, she did not have children with her second husband given his marital status and children from his first wife. Such shifting dynamics in widowhood should be noted in transforming preconceptions of caste-based and kinship-driven marital behaviors and how they correlate to a widow’s sense of allegiance to her deceased husband.
Interestingly, Ramaiyi did not speak often or passionately about her first husband, who disappeared in the 1983 Colombo anti-Tamil riots and who was presumed dead. Another elderly retired woman and wife of Ramaiyi’s second husband’s brother said that he actually did not die but ran away with another woman in Colombo, which was why she never received information about his corpse or an official notice of his death. Furthermore, it was a rumor that I only heard from her, and I was never able to confirm its veracity during my research period. Regardless, Ramaiyi’s outspokenness about her second husband and the gestures of allegiance that she put forth during our conversations indicate that gendered conceptions of widowhood on the plantations can be reformulated
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in direct response to the way in which a widowed woman loses her spouse and partner. The presumed death (and more so, absence) of her first husband was undocumented, unseen, and most importantly, unconfirmed. His body literally did not show itself, and unstable social and economic circumstances forced Ramaiyi to move on in the best interests of her children. It was also noticeable that he was the only “deceased” ancestor that did not have a photograph framed and hanging in the main room of Ramaiyi’s house. His photograph was kept in a box in the cupboard, and Ramaiyi only showed it to me in passing as she searched for another document.
Her second husband, on the other hand, was very present in our conversations. He had died her arms, and she had very vivid recollections of his last breaths, his perspiration, which foods he consumed before his death, and how heavy he was to lift in his lifeless state. Her memories and grief reflect that she, as a wife, had witnessed firsthand and confirmed the loss of his life in their home. Unlike her first husband, he had left in conditions of shock that were mutually shared. Although her second husband, like her first, was not here to tell his story—a fact that she reminded me of at least once a week—she would constantly reference how he would have spoken with me: “He would have been able to tell you the history of this estate nicely, when it was built, who built the temple, who were the ka+akkuppi""ais back then. I do not know that information. He knew it well.” Her desire to defend his knowledge—his a,ivu or skill for knowing—in death reveals the love and respect that she continues to have for him. Her acknowledgement of his permanent physical absence and mention of his dignified role as
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husband, father and former kank#ni also validates her own status as a retired widow on the estate today.
Ramaiyi’s transition into widowhood also brought on behavioral changes that are specifically connected to her working through the grief and loss. Since his death, she has struggled to fall asleep at night on the floor in the front room of her line house, where she now sleeps with her daughter and two granddaughters. She told me that to distract herself from not being able to fall asleep, she had to watch television before falling asleep, a habit that I witnessed during the several nights that I stayed in her house sleeping in the twelve by seven foot front room with her, Sadha, and her two older grandchildren. Every night that I spent there I would drift in and out of sleep as she watched television on silent for nearly two hours before turning it off and immediately falling into a deep sleep. When I asked her about this habit, she said that she had picked it up when she was a domestic in Colombo; her dorai and n%n#48 had put a television in the back room that she had slept in while there. She stopped watching when she came home but picked up the habit again once her husband died because she moved from sleeping beside her husband in the back room and to the front room with her daughter and the two girls. The television, she told me, served as a distraction because she did not like sitting still and needed to see the moving images in order to calm her mind for sleep.
For Ramaiyi, grief and the process of mourning introduced new habits into her everyday life and perspectives about what new roles she could inhabit as a retired plucker turned widow. For instance, when he was alive, her husband played an integral role in the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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upbringing of Seelan’s first two daughters. He would walk them to school, discipline them to study after school and obey their mother’s instructions. He did this, she told me, because he was well educated and had been a kank#ni so had held a certain degree of authority over residents in the lines. Furthermore, the goodness of her husband had brought out a moral certitude in her about her beliefs about the goodness of the estate and its residents. When he died, she feels that such assurances about goodness have weakened; her family has experienced social and economic uncertainty in the recent years following his death,49 while she has seen other families around her prosper.