"Akka," Gayatri sighs, and looks away. "Vani's pregnancy is not advancing because she is not pregnant. Something else may be wrong with her-early menopause? I don't know. But she's not... pregnant."

Is Gayatri suggesting Vani has been lying? Why would she do that?

"I'm not saying she's lying," Gayatri continues in a gentle tone. "I ... I've never heard of something like this from a woman. But it happens, with animals. I remember my brother's dog acted completely-"

"Really, Gayatri," Sivakami shouts at her friend. Comparison to a dog is one of the grand insults. "Sometimes you just go too far."

"Please, Akka, don't take me wrong," Gayatri protests, "I'm sorry."

But Sivakami is furious and they part awkwardly.

Sivakami putters around the kitchen in a rage, prepares meals and goes through the motions of her day, before finally, in the depth of night, acknowledging that, of all the possible explanations, this one makes the most sense. She is surprised that Vairum, with his reverence for reason and science, has not seen it before now. Maybe he has and is not admitting it. The ways of the heart are obscure, though: how can he give up this hope? He can't.

But if they can help Vani, perhaps they can still have a child? That is another question. Sivakami, exhausted by the effort logic demands from her, nods off over her beading.

"But she's in exactly the same condition now that she was a year ago."

Did she say that? She didn't mean to. She didn't mean it.

Yes, she did.

"Go," he says.

Sivakami straightens and dizzies. She doesn't understand.

"Go," Vairum says again.

His meaning is becoming clearer.

"As always with you, it's about appearances. I don't know why I gave in to Vani's begging for you to come," he growls. "A Brahmin widow in the city-you have done everything possible since you arrived to hold yourself apart. I can see the blame in your eyes, always that blame."

"No, it's not true." She doesn't sound sincere, though she is. She has never blamed him-what does he think she would blame him for?

"Go home. You'll never have to look at a non-Brahmin again, except for Muchami and Mari, who will cower for you in the courtyard."

"I will stay."

What about Vani? Can't he see something is wrong?

"No. You will go." He pulls her clean sari down from the drying rod, goes to the shelves of her room, takes out her few belongings and pulls a wad of cash from his pocket. His eyes are white and desperate.

"I ... I want you to have children!" she cries, stumbling toward him in desperation of her own.

"We will." He pushes her effects and the money at her.

"Ten children!" She echoes the prophecy he made when he decided on this marriage.

"Go." He means it.

Vani, in the sitting room, has broken off in the middle of her playing. Sivakami gives her the last square of beadwork she completed-Krishna surrounded by milkmaids-and lays a hand on the crown of Vani's head. She need not remain madi if she is about to travel. Vani grasps her hand, so hard that Sivakami nearly falls, and lays her cheek in Sivakami's palm.

"You will be a mother," Sivakami whispers and then she walks toward the door, with Vairum's eyes on her. She expected him to precede her, to arrange the car, but she looks back, and he points to the exit.

She descends to the street and the peon, though confused, pulls open the gate for her. It is evening. She breaks a small twig from a neem tree growing at the edge of Vairum's compound, and pushes it into her bundle, walks a few steps, and stops. This is the first time in her sixty years that she has gone anywhere alone. She feels naked, invisible, petrified. She can feel Vairum's house behind her, as Rama must have sensed his home at his back when he was banished to the wilds, driven from his kingdom. That story has a happy ending.

She clutches for her Ramayana, inside her satchel, and forces herself to shuffle along to the busy street at the end of the cul-de-sac, where she hails a horse carriage. The driver stops but looks to either side of her and asks, "You must not be travelling alone, Amma. Where is your son, your servant, your nephew? Who is helping you?"

"No." Sivakami clears her throat. "I am going to my village. Please, take me to the station where I can catch a train south." She remembers that she must change trains in Thiruchi. "To Kottai," she adds, using the traditional name to make herself sound practised.

"Yes. Yes. Sit, please." He gestures to the carriage as his horse snorts in her frayed blue harness.

At the station, he escorts her in with a great show of respect, points out where she can get her ticket and overcharges without apology. Sivakami brought the cash Vairum gave her-she didn't want to insult him further-but doesn't want to use it for this journey. She extracts one of the five ten-rupee notes she pressed between the pages of her Ramayana all those months ago and pays her own way.

Though India has been bound together by the iron ribbon, most people on a train will try to keep a respectful distance from a Brahmin widow. As the cabin fills, though, this s.p.a.ce thins to a sheet the thickness of a single molecule. Sivakami appreciates the delicacy of the dark and noisy persons to either side, who avoid eye contact with her despite their thighs pressed length to length, their shoulder blades fitted together like parts of a rice mill. These non-Brahmins clearly have not yet been infected by that intimacy shown by Vairum's a.s.sociates, an intimacy which, she thinks, breeds and festers in cities, especially among the wealthy cla.s.ses.

Madras rolls away. It is already dark. Chingleput, Madurantakam. She feels the sea recede. It is hours before she must change trains for Kulithalai. The sound of Vairum's voice returns to her on the rhythm of the train. "Go... Go... Go..."

One day, when Vairum was small, he came to her urgently, wanting to tell her a story Gayatri had told him, of Lord Ganesha and his brother Murughan. The young G.o.ds' father, Shiva, had set up a compet.i.tion, saying that the brother to most swiftly circle the entire world would inherit all its peoples and riches. Lean, n.o.ble Murughan leapt onto his peac.o.c.k. It spread its wings with a shriek and sped off, to return in moments. Like that! Vairum said, and snapped his fingers.

When Murughan returned, Ganesha was still standing where his brother had left him. Murughan dismounted with a swagger and bowed to receive the winner's garland from his father.

"Very good!" said Shiva as he stepped forward and placed the garland over Ganesha's elephant head.

Vairum let his mouth fall open, dramatizing Murughan's shock. Shiva explained, "While you sped through the heavens, your brother, not even summoning his mouse"-that's Ganesha's vehicle, explained Vairum, as Sivakami pretended not to know-"walked clockwise around his mother. 'Mother is the entire world,' he said, 'I need go no farther.' And he fell at her feet and received her blessing and stood back up just as you arrived."

"I'm surprised fatso could move that fast," Vairum improvised on Murughan's behalf. But he accepted defeat and also fell at his mother's feet, at which point Vairum had leapt at Sivakami, throwing his arms around her, burying his face in her stomach. She could feel the warmth of him, even now, her precious boy, his face making a veronica of her belly Mother is the entire world. This is what we believe, she wants to shout out the window. He will hear her, back in his enchanted, sorrowful house, because this is the truth. Did she not raise him any better than this?

At Vellur, a young couple board. The floor between the benches has just been vacated. They spread their bedding. Sivakami cannot see them but can hear from their speech that they are Brahmins. The girl wakes with the first beams of light and smiles up at Sivakami.

"Where are you going, Granny?" she asks, rubbing her eyes.

"Kulithalai." Sivakami is sitting by the window now, her feet tucked under her.

"Who is ... is he your grandson?" she asks, pointing to a young man next to Sivakami, whose head, bobbing in sleep, Sivakami has been trying for some hours to avoid.

"No, I am travelling alone."

The girl pauses, and Sivakami winces.

"You are so brave!" says the girl, her voice different now.

"One must be brave in this life," Sivakami says, hoping for some distraction to end this. "When life gives no choice."

"I am lucky," comes the response, full of youth's smugness. "Life has allowed me the choice of cowardice."

No distraction has arrived, so Sivakami asks, "Children?"

"In about six months," with a sign to ward off the evil eye.

"Very good."

"This is my first time south. My husband has taken a job in Thiruchi. Water inspector. My mother is in Kanchipurum, and..."

They pull into a station platform with a roof and open sides. Sivakami has anxiously checked the name of every station they have pulled through in the night and now she sees the name she has been looking for: Kottai. Kottai! She is caught off guard. This is where she must change trains!

The young woman looks doubtful, but Sivakami hurries from the train along with a few rumpled families, squeezing past the rest of the pa.s.sengers, still awakening, sitting up, scratching and yawning. She descends the rungs of the metal steps and hops onto the platform from the lowest, which is still high for her. She is some thirty paces from a pump and as she walks toward it she feels some cheer. It will be good to brush her teeth and wash her face. Soon, she will arrive home. She need only think of how to disguise her unescorted arrival. She is glad to have a mission to distract her from her terrible thoughts, her shame.

She takes out her neem stick and sets her bundle down. The water gushes out brightly and she moves the bundle out of its reach. She fills her bra.s.s jug and squats to scrub her face over the drain. She hears a voice calling "Granny, Granny!"-no doubt some young person meeting her grandmother after a long time, and she thinks of the grandchildren she might see soon. She wets her neem stick and puts it in her mouth as the train starts to pull away. She looks up at the train, then down. Where is her bundle?

The young woman who shared her carriage has come to the window and is waving and pointing, "Granny! Granny!" But then she is carried past into another void.

Did she see who took it?

Sivakami runs a little in each direction like a caricature of a woman in distress, then realizes she may as well finish cleaning her teeth, and stands chewing the stick like an imbecile. Her bundle is gone-her money, her ticket, her Kamba-Ramayanam. The only person left on the platform is a peon sleeping against the ticket booth at the far end. She savours the neem's bitterness as she scrubs its frayed end over her teeth and tongue.

The platform sits on a plot of scrubby dirt and there are colonies of some kind in the near distance. This doesn't look like a big station with frequent ongoing trains. She trudges toward the ticket booth, but it's still closed and she doesn't know what she would do if it were open. The dozing peon, in a rumpled uniform of khaki shorts and shirt with fewer b.u.t.tons than advisable, rolls onto his back. From the west, a woman in a khaki sari arrives and starts sweeping the station-likely her husband died in service, and she was given his job because the railways take care of their own. Sivakami doesn't try to talk to anyone. She tries to think.

Saradha lives here somewhere. Somewhere in Thiruchi, on a street by the name of Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter, in house number "6," as she recalls. She probably lives closer to the main station than to this place called Kottai, which is not what she thought it was. So if Sivakami follows the train she just disembarked, she will eventually arrive. She hopes she encounters a Brahmin quarter somewhere before long. She is parched.

Sivakami walks to the end of the platform, climbs off it to reach the track, where she puts her right foot upon a tie, and then her left foot on the next one. That's the first step.

Or was Vairum's last word the first step? Or was the first step when she took Vairum back to Cholapatti to raise him on her own? Or was it Hanumarathnam's, fleeing to read his fate's fulfillment in the sky? Now she tries not to think.

The sun rises, hot and hard. She pa.s.ses through the centre of a labourers' encampment, the unwashed wives tying sun-bleached hair back with other strands of hair, leaning over the day's fire, the day's gruel. The children point at Sivakami and run toward her, bellies out. Their mothers approach, shyly and swiftly, until Sivakami is forced to stop because a cordon has formed around her.

"Amma, Amma, where are you going, Amma?"

"I'm going to find my granddaughter."

How dare they speak to her?

"Amma, Amma, why hasn't she come to fetch you, Amma?"

"She doesn't know I'm here."

Why are they not making way?

"Amma, Amma, please sit, Amma. Please sit."

"Please, please let me go on."

So many people she was never meant to meet.

"Amma, Amma, be careful, Amma."

"I will. I will. Please, let me go on."

They part to permit her egress, grinning at her distress, or so she feels.

G.o.d willing, her Cholapatti neighbours will never know she has gone through this. How many of their lives contain miseries hidden from her? She remembers wondering this when Rukmini, poor dear, and Gayatri were going through their troubles. But her compa.s.sion for them doesn't reduce her own desire for privacy: we are ill equipped to bear even our own sadnesses, she knows, and many burdens are only made heavier by sharing.

She sees a big hill and wonders if it is Malaikottai, the Ganesha temple she has dreamed of visiting. Maybe Saradha will take her there. She wonders how far she is from Saradha's house.

She squints against the rails' glare, the sun a feverish palm on her crown. A burst of laughter causes her to turn her head. She almost missed it: a pilgrims' pavilion, a stone gazebo, in a triangle formed by the rail line and two roads.

Sivakami approaches. She must get out of the sun for a moment. She would rather the place have been empty, but...

The bunch sitting on the cool stone rip into peals of merriment again and their babble, as Sivakami approaches, resolves into speech. She stops. They are Brahmins. They will wonder if she is known to them. She may be, by marriage or some other connection. They call out to her. "Mami, please, Mami, sit. But... are you alone?"

"Yes, yes, alone," she says, wishing she had just gone on.

"Please, sit." They rise to make room for her.

"Sit, sit," she insists, now that they are all standing. "Sit, I say."

She clears her throat and looks away. Her mind is working more quickly even than she can think. She has the first word, she should use it to her advantage. "Where have you all come from?"

"Namakkal, Mami. Do you know it?"

She grew up in its shadow.

"I went there once, as a small child, with my grandparents. I don't remember it. Wonderful, is it?"

"Oh, yes, a very fine place. And you, Mami, where do you come from"

"Cuddalore."

That just popped out.

"Oh, our niece married into Cuddalore."

"Ah, so you have been there?" she asks, terrified they will make reference to some landmark or family she doesn't know.

"No, not us. This is as far as we have ventured. We are making a pilgrim tour, going to Palani, Srirangam, all the important places."

"Very good, very good." Sivakami is so relieved that she can no longer listen.

"And you, Mami?" they ask, their curiosity bursting to the surface. "How do you come to be so far from home, and alone?"

"A ... penance," she responds. Penance? "For... the sake of my son... who was ill."

"Oh, no, Mami." They are all sympathy. Their curiosity, though, is unrelieved.

"Yes, yes. He is well now, recovering, in Cuddalore, with his wife and family." Sivakami listens to the sound of her voice. Has she ever been lied to as easily as she is now lying? "I pledged a pilgrimage," she continues slickly.

"But if he was sick, shouldn't he do the pilgrimage?" One of the wives asks, unable to contain herself.

"I pledged, I pledged to do it. Alone. Myself, alone. Maybe he will also do it someday. He is a good and pious boy, very attached to me. He protested."