Janaki, lying in the main hall with her siblings, hears her grandmother go out back and rises to meet her in the kitchen.
“Do you want a cup of water, Amma?” she asks.
“I’m fine, child.” Sivakami dippers herself a cup and drinks. “Go back to sleep.”
Dimly, they hear the sound of shouting, getting closer.
“I heard, Amma,” Janaki confesses. “I know.”
Sivakami sighs, and shakes her head, then draws Janaki down to sit beside her. “Pray with me. You mustn’t think about such terrible matters, not in your condition. Good girl.” She takes out her beads and begins the mantra she repeats one thousand and one times daily. Janaki joins in chorus.
Karuppan has closed the door but not drawn the heavy bolt. He never does, why should he? Shantam is waiting for him on the wooden bench on the back of the house where she is made to sleep. She hates sleeping there, but each of the bedrooms is now taken up with one of her late husband’s brothers. Each of them is married now, and so they need private rooms. She could sleep in a corner of the main hall with the children, but it’s her mother-in-law’s prerogative and she wants Shantam to sleep outside. Shantam makes up for it in small cruelties toward her nephews and nieces, and even, sometimes, toward her own children.
She is sitting, waiting for him on her bench. He crosses to her on silent feet. Her sari has already slipped from her head and now he unwinds it from her shoulders and buries his face in the soft flesh between her collarbone and breast, stroking his lips and eyelids across the pillow of silky, fragrant skin. She is so unlike the women of his class-not that he has had one yet, but he can tell. They stand and walk past the cowshed into the garden, her sari beginning already to unwrap. They pull it after themselves and spread it on the garden floor. And when the enraged men burst into the courtyard and run from there into the garden, this is what they see: the widow trying to wrap herself back into the white sari that has been serving as her illicit conjugal bed, and the glistening form of the barber’s second son, reaching the top of the garden wall and jumping down off it.
By now, Shantam’s mother-in-law and other family members, who had not been informed about the raid, have flung open numerous internal doors. Some of the men run through the house to the front and start shouting for those doors to be unlocked, while others have already run back out and through the neighbours’ houses onto the Brahmin-quarter street, to see which way the scoundrel is going. Every woman on the street, except Sivakami and Janaki, is witness to the flight of the naked and terrified boy, who streaks straight up the Brahmin quarter, whistled along by the wind of the matrons’ gasps.
The men give chase. They chase him far, through bramble and brooks. He is much faster than they, but two send their servants on bicycles to cut him off. He is caught. These weak, pulpy Brahmins, worked up by the chase, beat Karuppan very badly. Muchami helps in the chase but participates only a little in the beating.
Shantam is also chastised and lightly beaten by her mother-in-law, in front of her children and all her brothers- and sisters-in-law.
These are the events of that night. After the shouting mob passes and the sound fades away, Sivakami tells Janaki to go back to sleep.
Sivakami resumes her beading. She hears the men return and go to their homes. Muchami comes back, too, and tells her what happened. Then he lies down in the courtyard to sleep. She closes the kitchen doors, goes into the pantry and closes those doors, too. She lies where she normally lies. She is calmer but can feel the horrible images trying to re-form in her mind’s eye. She tries to banish them again, and images of her husband-his skin sliding against hers, the smoothness of his back where she gripped it, her fingertips notching his spine-slip in with distressing ease to replace those of the barber’s son, who is just a few years younger than Hanumarathnam was when he died. Sivakami doesn’t permit herself to move-she lies, as every night, on her side, on the cool floor of the pantry, her neck on a wooden rest-but shifts her legs minutely against that delicious discomfort that now can never be eased. She had almost managed to forget that gnaw and tickle, brushed it away with busyness and prayer. The advance of age was a relief: in the last ten years, the craving has begun to diminish. Now her chest feels thick with anger at Shantam for having reminded her.
Shantam has been a widow for less than ten years, less than ten years feeling no touch save that of her children, and even that only after sunset-and Shantam’s not even permitted to sleep with them. Sivakami recalls her first years of widowhood, when she slept curled around Vairum, the warm pressure of his milk-smelling, dream-twitching, little-boy body anchoring her to her own body, which seemed, in daylight, not to exist at all.
Sivakami wraps her arms around herself, biting her lip. She knows what Shantam has endured. But it is their lot to endure. If not, why else does Sivakami live as she does? What appeal is there in a topsy-turvy world and what place does a widow have, if not this one?
Janaki, sleepless among the children, desperately misses Baskaran. She could talk with him about this, as she can with no one else, and he would hold her and help her think of other things. What if she never sees him again? What if he dies before she returns? She would never again be touched. It would be like her childhood all over again.
She had never before thought beyond her grandmother’s sacrifice and righteousness. She believed in everything Sivakami believed but never thought of her grandmother as sharing her feelings. I’m exactly the age Amma was when she was widowed, she realizes. How did she bear it?
Janaki wants to share the village’s anger at Shantam’s breach, but, in the grip now of this strange pity for the girl her grandmother was, she is unable. She, in Sivakami’s position, might well have gone mad.
At first light the next morning, a bullock solemnly pulls a cart down the Brahmin quarter from Shantam’s house toward Kulithalai (most bullocks look solemn, this one especially so). On the cart are two men and a big load of hay from which they are creating a wake, systematically depositing large handfuls behind them on the path and roadway. When this is done, a priest from the Brahmin-quarter temple drops three lumps of burning camphor at the edge of the straw carpet, which begins where Karuppan landed after vaulting Shantam’s wall. Three palms of flame grow fingers, join hands and run up the Brahmin quarter. Where the fire hits a pocket of damp, it pops and hisses much like the good Brahmin folk of the village waiting for the street to be purified so that they can meet and rehash the night’s events. When the veil of smoke lifts, the carpet of straw has magically changed into one of ash, with little straw bits here and there, and the Brahmin quarter, too, has been magically restored to its former untouchability, which the untouchable robbed by his touch.
That morning, at Sivakami’s, Gayatri expresses perfunctory regret about the beatings but is philosophical.
“It’s terrible, it really is, but what could they have expected?”
Minister has contacted a French mission doctor of his acquaintance, who would go and see the boy today.
Gayatri notices Mari scrubbing pots with extraordinary vigour and asks what she thinks.
“Such liaisons must be stopped!” Mari retorts in a tone of voice that implies she is more offended at Gayatri having felt the need to ask than at the subject of the question.
“Clearly, yes, clearly,” Gayatri mutters, taking offence at Mari’s tone.