Sivakami, relieved both of the heat and the pressure of possible acquaintanceship, speaks with increasing conviction.

"But I told him, G.o.d accepted a small price for your health, for a useless old widow to undertake a journey alone. He shouldn't be so attached. I have no husband; my children are grown. I wish for G.o.d to take me. My work on this earth is over."

It's what old people say, but this is the first time she has said it, and now it occurs to her that she might mean it.

"Will you take some of our food, Mami?" asks another of the wives.

"No, no, please, thank you." They understand, and don't press.

"But... water?" asks the first man who spoke.

"Yes." She holds out her jug and they pour water into it from one of their vessels.

"Where will you stay in Thiruchi?"

"With..." Oh, no, what if Saradha's related to them? "My granddaughter." She didn't think quickly enough-she should have said a chattram. But they might be staying in a chattram and might have insisted on taking her.

"Her husband's good name?" asks the first man again.

It's easier to tell the truth now than lie. "Sivasamba lyer."

"Ah." No recognition.

"And your good names?" she asks politely.

"Ranganathan lyengar."

Oh, they are lyengar-a different sub-caste from hers. She ceases listening again, relief pounding in her ears. No relation. She nods with real happiness as Ranganathan Iyengar introduces his brother, their wives, their children. They are slightly, almost imperceptibly, chillier toward her, which is as she prefers.

They have just finished their meal and lie down to rest through the heat of the day. Sivakami lies down too, but when the food in their bellies goes to their heads, she slips down off the cool platform back into the sun. She can't risk their accompanying her, which they surely would do. She is sure to be caught in a lie if she is forced to talk any longer and would rather her face be burnt by the sun than by embarra.s.sment. It's terrible that she prefers her lies to the truth, but, she has learned, that's what some lies are like.

Three furlongs down the tracks from where she left the cheery pilgrims, she finds a crumbling roadside shrine hung with crisply browned jasmine garlands. The G.o.d within is everyone's favourite, chubby Ganesha. Sivakami smiles sadly at his friendly elephant face, grasps her left ear in her right hand and her right ear with the other and squats a few times, the traditional abas.e.m.e.nt for him. As she rises from her last squat, she falls forward onto her knees and grasps the shrine, sobbing.

Her tears turn instantly to dry pits in the dusty ground. She squints up at her old friend, and quietly shrieks, "Take me. Take me!"

The G.o.d responds good-humouredly, "I cannot take you. But I cannot stop you either. Come along if you want."

"Take me, I say! Please, Lord."

"Come, foolish lady," he smiles, but not as though he has time to waste, "if you want to so badly."

Sivakami circles the shrine thrice, in a temper. Has she not been a firm and doubtless devotee? Has she not lived by every prescription she knows?

The G.o.ds do love their jokes: human prayer is always earnest and divine replies so often ironic. Sivakami throws up her hands and returns to walking along the track, stepping from one tie to the next. She doesn't look back nor about. She maintains a dim awareness of her feet, one in front of the other, in front of the other, on the wooden ties which fall one in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other in front-just like the train-in front of the other in front of the other... in fact there's a train on the track. There's a train on the track train on the track train on the track... She can't see it yet, but the vibrations are growing. She hasn't looked around in some time. Now she finds she is deep within a ditch, the track laid in a furrow with embankments on both sides taller than she is.

Here is her reward, the answer to her prayers. She need only accept.

The head of the train appears. Accept.

Its face nears. It screams and the noise hits her, a foretaste of steel. The rails sing all about her, showing her the way: this is how to die. This is how to die. This is how to die- Sivakami flings herself against the steep embankment, reaching for a pole sticking out of it. Her body flat against the slope, she pulls herself up, toes pushing like a gecko's into crumbling dust, fingers grasping, beyond the pole, for the thin gra.s.s and roots. Her hands have reached flat ground when suddenly her toes slide away on something slick: the railway is everyman's toilet and Sivakami loses her toehold in some malnourished tot's leavings even as, with a thud, the beast of her possible deliverance arrives to flatten the s.p.a.ce she left behind, singing, Don't you want to die? Don't you want to die? Sivakami slides back down to meet her fate, flashing beneath her feet, but then she hits the pole. She wraps herself around it, clinging upside down like a baby monkey to its mother.

As the train pa.s.ses, a thousand startled travellers crane out their windows to gawk back at the little Brahmin widow, her dust-stained sari blown from her stubbly head. Their bewilderment almost matches her own. She has always thought of her life as a series of submissions to G.o.d. What if she has been making her own decisions all along?

The train has pa.s.sed. Elation and disappointment pound in her head like the waters of the ocean she never saw. She steps down to collect her bra.s.s jug from where it fell to one side of the track, then she climbs again, slowly, from the moat, by stepping on stones and wildflower patches. She has eluded death-why did she do that?

She collects her breath and, trembling, waits for the sound of waves to subside. It doesn't. She is hearing water.

It's her beloved and reviled Kaveri. She leaves the track and walks over a hillock toward the sound, pa.s.ses through a parting in some brush, and there it is, familiar and unknowable as ever. She fills her bra.s.s jug, and rinses the film from her eyes, the dust from her skin, and the residue of recent adventures from the soles of her feet. Her exhilaration is ebbing. Did she defeat her G.o.d? Is she now truly alone?

Sivakami glances up from her thoughts to see one of her Cholapatti neighbours-Visalakshi, from three doors down-coming toward her, a friendly but puzzled expression on her face. Oh, she has been spotted, now everyone will know. What is Visalakshi doing here?

But it isn't Visalakshi: it's some other young woman with the same figure, same round cheeks and frizzy hair, stopping at a respectful distance to ask, "Mami is all right? Does she need some a.s.sistance?"

"No, no, child," Sivakami replies, and then realizes she does in fact. "I am ... I need to find, Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter."

"Hmm."

The young woman makes a great show of thinking. She calls her family over and they all think. Clearly none of them knows. Finally, the eldest man in the group speaks on their behalf.

"Well, you must go to Thiruchi proper. All right? Cross that bridge, then you will see it."

Sivakami intended on going that way regardless, so she is spared the embarra.s.sment of not taking their advice. She bids them a decorous farewell.

Rested and cooled, but still as deeply shaken by her failure as her success in not dying, she follows the little path back to the road and starts following it toward the next bridge. She recites Kamban's Ramayana to herself-she knows it so well that she hardly needs the book, but it, too, had become a talisman-the only book she has ever read. Each verse falls from her lips like a curtain against the entry of thought.

As she reaches the end, she spots a Brahmin walking in the same direction. She hurries to overtake him and accosts him by asking, "To go to Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter?"

He turns: it's the priest from the Vishnu temple at the end of the Cholapatti Brahmin quarter! A vicious gossip. She recalls his pious, lascivious voice, like a bletted papaya.

But no, it's just some other paunchy, middle-aged Brahmin. He informs her officiously that Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter is close to Malai Kottai, and points, with confidence approaching boredom, back the way she has just come. He clearly a.s.sumes she is a cook or some equivalent. She must be quite black, she thinks, after all these hours in the sun. For her part, she suspects he has just performed a funeral on Saradha's street, at extortionate prices.

He at least knows where she needs to go, however. She returns to the bridge and walks back.

Every hundred paces, it seems, she sees some familiar old acquaintance from Cholapatti. Is that babbling and limping old man not the same one Dharnakarna the witch cast her spell over three years ago? He is lewd and foul-mouthed and she has forbidden her granddaughters' kids to get within twenty paces of him, but now he seems like a fixture of home and she wishes she had food to give him.

It's not him. That hiccuping laugh that turns her head is not Gayatri's. She asks directions again. She follows a bend in the road. That hoot and holler is not Raghavan's. Raghavan, such a robust and cheerful boy. Just the occasional grey shadow in those golden eyes, only to be expected. She has stopped to seek him out in a cricket ground, though she knows by now that the st.u.r.dy boy running at her out of the dust is not him, and the lanky silhouette following is not Krishnan.

But then why are they embracing her?

It is they.

Sivakami doesn't respond to their questions. Each boy takes one of her arms, and they walk across the field to the street. The sun is showing its colours in the west, but Sivakami can make out her eldest granddaughter's compact shape, leaning on a front wall, chatting with her mother-in-law and a neighbour.

Saradha shrieks. "Amma! Amma! What are you doing? Where are you? What... what did you boys do?" She looks ready to hit them as they guide Sivakami inside.

"We found her," Krishnan says defensively. "We were playing, Raghavan looked over, and she was standing by the edge of the field."

"What are you talking about? That's ridiculous!" Saradha is in a panic. "Amma, say something, Amma, why don't you say anything? Raghavan, go get water for Amma."

Saradha's in-laws graciously retire to other parts of the house. Her husband is still at work. Sivakami opens her mouth. She holds it open a second, then shuts it again. Saradha pours water into Sivakami's jug, and Sivakami moistens her mouth and throat, and after some moments, asks, "Where is the washroom? I have not had my bath today."

"Sit for some more time, Amma." But Sivakami asks again for the bathroom. As she locks the door, Saradha asks, "Amma, when did you last eat?"

"Yesterday," she says into the dank and welcome solitude-out of the world's eye at last. "Don't worry, child. Let me have my bath and then I will make my rice."

"Yes, Amma. I will... I will prepare vegetables for you to cook."

"Good girl."

Saradha's sons, Raghavan and Krishnan's coevals, had been out playing cricket with their uncles but not recognized their great-grandmother so readily. They followed them home, quiet and incurious, though it is obvious that something bad has happened. Raghavan and Krishnan also ask no questions but show concern. When Radhai returns from visiting at a friend's house, she is panicked, but her elder sister silences her with a finger.

When Sivakami is nearly finished eating, Saradha finally makes her first sally.

"Amma, when is Vani Mami expecting?" Sivakami doesn't answer. Saradha tries one more remark. "She must be very big."

"She is no bigger than she was a year ago at this time," Sivakami informs her.

"Ah." Saradha bites her lip.

Her kitchen is orderly to the point of excess, Sivakami has noted, with approval and without surprise. Each time she used a spice, Saradha, hovering, returned it to exactly the spot from which it came.

"Amma, why on earth did you leave Madras, Amma?" she asks.

"Because my son told me to go," Sivakami explains evenly.

"He thought you shouldn't be waiting around any more." Saradha nervously adjusts her sari.

Once more, Sivakami doesn't feel like replying.

"He didn't send a servant with you?" Saradha whispers sympathetically.

There is a long pause in their conversation.

"But you should have informed us that you were coming!" Saradha throws up her hands and rolls her eyes, as if Sivakami were just too spontaneous.

"I intended to go straight through to Cholapatti without troubling anyone else." Sivakami finishes her meal. Dribbling water around the spot where her banana leaf lay, so as to ensure no one will step on the polluted spot before she can wipe it, she folds the leaf away from her and carries it back into the courtyard to wash her hands.

"Why did you get down in Thiruchi then instead of going on to Cholapatti?"

"I don't know what happened. I got confused. And my bundle disappeared, someone took my ticket and money while I was washing my face."

"Oh, no, Amma." Saradha lifts her hand to her mouth. "Oh, no."

Sivakami waits for Saradha to stop wailing. She would feel worse if the girl didn't react like this, but it's not making her feel much better.

Saradha finally dries her tears and asks, "How did you find your way?"

"How does it matter? I found my way. How is your husband?"

"Very well, thank you."

"How are your in-laws?"

"Very well, thank you."

"Good."

"Come," Saradha says, after a pause, standing with the busy air of the excellent housewife. "Lie down now."

"Yes."

Saradha unfurls a straw mat for Sivakami in a corner of the hall as the in-laws return and exchange niceties from a distance.

From the floor, Sivakami tells Saradha, "I want to go to Malai Kottai tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"Yes, tomorrow morning, before I get on the train for Cholapatti. I want to go to the top of Malai Kottai."

"Aren't you terribly exhausted, Amma? You must stay longer."

"No. I want to look on that G.o.d's face in the morning."

"All right, Amma," she capitulates, sounding concerned. "Sleep now."

But Sivakami is already asleep.

At dawn the next morning, Sivakami and Saradha go by cycle rickshaw to the foot of the hill temple. Sivakami wanted to walk but finally capitulates only because Saradha said she herself couldn't walk three miles to the temple and then climb it. In the rickshaw, Saradha asks if they are retracing the route she took. Sivakami thinks they must be but it looks even less familiar now than it did then, when she thought she knew everyone she pa.s.sed. Now, with Saradha at her side, she can see the streets' real strangeness. She might have wondered how she made her way, but it had never occurred to her that she wouldn't. That was the least of her concerns. What will happen when next she sees Vairum? What does he think happened to her after she left-and how can such a son live with himself?

They dismount from the rickshaw at the entrance to a thickly crowded corridor into the temple's first vestibule, and walk along a cordon of small shops into the oil-lamp-lit, stone-floored room. Voices rebound with the sound of coconuts shattering, thrown hard in a trough, as offerings or thanks, while devotees mill in circles around a wide tree growing out of the floor and into the ceiling. The smells of burning camphor and incense press hard against the smells of sweat, soap and hair oil.

Sivakami bustles straight to the stairs that ascend through the mountain's centre to its summit, and begins to climb rapidly, one hand on the rough wall to steady her, only one impatient glance back to check that Saradha is following.

Their legs grow painful, then heavy, then numb. Saradha struggles to keep pace. A bat dips into the stairwell from a high cavern in the walls. Sivakami listens to the rhythm of her steps against the stone, the brushing of her hand on the wall, her heart pumping, her breath rasping. She hears it all as though she were a bat, both within herself and high above, both inside the mountain and climbing it. They pa.s.s by chambers and niches for worship and rest. She doesn't stop, not once.

When they come out into the light, they are beside a small cave, with a smooth, level floor, a pillar-framed entrance and walls carved with row upon row of writing. Finally, Sivakami pauses and thinks, as she is meant to here, of kings. Chola kings-did they build this? To guard the city against the marauding Pandians from the south? Was it earlier? The Pallavas? The walls might tell her, but the Tamil is archaic, and though she stands mouthing the syllables, they don't a.s.semble into meaning.

Still, she moves her eyes along each and every line of the inscription, an exercise not unlike her incessant reading of the Kamba-Ramayanam. She looks at that book because she thinks it important that Brahmins not forget how to read, and for that reason, now, she reads the inscription without understanding any of it and then begins again to climb. She calls out to Saradha, who is leaning against an opposite wall, her eyes still closed but her chest no longer heaving. After one more long flight of stairs, they emerge from the mountain onto smooth, bald rock. Sivakami walks to the edge of the small plateau and beholds the city with the Kaveri River, its reason for being, streaking unconcernedly down its centre.

She sees people below. It is too far down to make out any individual, besides which her eyesight is not what it once was. But Sivakami imagines she sees the kings and armies of olden times, the Pallavas, Pandians, Cholas, Nayaks, battling to gain territory, struggling to keep it. She sees Kannagi and Kovalan, of the Tale of an Anklet of an Anklet, pa.s.sing through the city on their great and terrible journey south to find their fate in the kingdom of a careless monarch. She sees pilgrims, she sees merchants. Seafaring Chinese and African traders; Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo, laughing with them. And, arriving from the northeast, she sees herself, small and determined, fighting confusion, indignity and peril, and finding her way, in an unrecorded triumph.

Saradha is sitting beside her, now, enjoying the view. Sivakami thumps her encouragingly on the back and Saradha gives her a watery smile. There is yet one more flight of stairs-to the belvedere.

Saradha has always liked this temple. She always brings visitors and enjoys with them a leisurely ascent, with many stops for exploring the cavernous temple chambers hollowed from the mountain's centre, savouring a strong flavour of self-righteousness on completing the difficult climb and a pleasing glow of fatigue in the thighs. This insane dash has deprived her of all the en route pleasure, and now the tearing sensation in her lungs and the weakness in her legs are preventing her even from enjoying her spiritual point-scoring. Worse, Sivakami exhibits no consciousness of all this, no sense of how it all should be done. She is not even mouthing about how healthy the climb is, how holistic Hindu worship, how superior every Brahmin devotional act.

Rather, Sivakami is bounding, without a word, for the final staircase to the tiny Ganesha shrine at the top. It is enclosed in a cupola with open frames on all sides. Saradha lets her go.

Sivakami joins the other pilgrims circling the G.o.d, one of the primary modes of worship. In the course of her first circ.u.mnavigation, though, her courage deserts her. Sadly, she confronts Ganesha.