He rolled onto his back and propped himself by inches until he was sitting, knees bent, b.u.m dirty, wiping dust from his lips and teeth. The children were panting and laughing. One of his knees and the opposite elbow were badly sc.r.a.ped. A little girl with square, tough-looking features cuffed him, hard but not unaffectionately, on the head.

He shouted at them, "Two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five times sixty-nine is one lakh, ninety-five thousand six hundred and fifteen!" and defiantly waited for them to be impressed.

They looked at one another, trying, apparently, to see how they should react. The boy who poked him first made a "cuckoo" sign, twirling his finger against his temple; another, hiking up his dust-stained dhoti, asked Vairum, "Yeah, so?"

But they didn't stop him from trudging home. He wiped his nose so roughly on his dhoti that his eyes stung. He felt for the silver coin knocking warm and heavy against his hip, took it out and thought about how the children back in Samanthibakkam would appreciate it, what fun it would buy them on his return.

A blur of children were cl.u.s.tered at the front of his house. As he pa.s.sed them to enter, a few wrinkled their noses and whispered, "Ratface!" A couple laughed. Thangam softly said, "Stop that," and the children immediately around her froze in apology, but Vairum didn't hear her and mounted their front steps without looking at his sister. He continued whispering a multiplication table: three thousand six hundred and fifty-four times two, times three, times two thousand nine hundred and eighty-five. He turned the silver coin over in his hand. He went inside and didn't come out.

MANY NEIGHBOURS CAME TO CALL on Sivakami in those first days, curious and condoling. With some, the most pressing business was to find out why Sivakami had returned. Others came to shed tears, the weight of which they had borne since her departure, wishing her there to cry with them.

Questions and tears were equally intolerable for Sivakami. She tried her best to respond, though everything in her resisted. She could see that her neighbours were leaving unsatisfied, thinking she was aloof. The days left her drained, with very little energy for her son, who seemed content at first, keeping his solitary counsel in the hall, or pantry, or courtyard, doing arithmetic under his breath, sometimes playing marbles or dayakkattam or tic-tac-toe against himself, chalking all the necessary grids onto the courtyard bricks, like arcane, alchemical formulas. Muchami was too preoccupied to attend to the little boy at first, busy as he was settling Sivakami's accounts and then settling his own accounts with his uncles regarding his marriage, but after a couple of days he began to join Vairum in the occasional game.

By the sixth of these long, confined days, the courtyard bricks were covered in chalk markings, and Vairum was bored and restless. When Sivakami suggested he might go see what the neighbourhood children were up to, his response was to run from her, to the front end of the main hall and back to the courtyard, and back and back, twelve or fifteen times, until his shoulders slumped and his breath rasped. Then he walked slowly past her, dragging his hand across the back of her thighs. She didn't have the heart to reprimand him. She went to take a second bath, after which Vairum strolled past and slapped her knee. She bathed again. An hour before sunset, he rubbed her head.

He ignored Muchami's invitation to go on rounds with him; he kept out of sight of the children gathered round his sister on the veranda; he thrashed and screamed when Muchami and Sivakami said it was time they registered him for school. He played less; he whined more. On the tenth day, the whining, too, ceased.

When Sivakami asks him why he is sitting near the front door-still out of sight of pa.s.sersby-he tells her he is waiting.

"Waiting for what, my dear one?"

"Waiting to go home to my Samanthibakkam," he answers, impatient and helpless.

She cannot touch him and cannot help him, and so she turns away.

The next morning, as Vairum is mumbling his prayers in front of the Ramar, Sivakami notices a speckling of white from his armpit to his shoulder blade. He is shirtless following his bath, as prescribed, and wearing a fresh dhoti. She comes closer, thinking he must have spilt some holy ash, though it seems a strange place to manage to spill it. There is none on his neck or shoulder. She comes close, squints and reaches out her hand. She doesn't care if she has to take another bath; she catches her son with her left hand and rubs the spray of white freckles, hard, with the other. They don't come off.

Vairum, shocked at her touch, shrugs her now-trembling hand away and then tries to see what she is looking at.

"What is it, Amma?" he asks, annoyed.

"Nothing," she murmurs with a stiff smile, though she is already muttering horrified prayers against leprosy, sotto voce. "It's nothing. Finish your prayers."

Some hours later, she hears a female voice, and Vairum's in response. It couldn't be Thangam, because Thangam hardly talks, and it couldn't be a neighbour, because Vairum doesn't talk to the neighbours. Sivakami moves to the pantry and looks before she is seen. A young girl, probably fifteen years old, is laughing, addressing her son. Though Vairum looks bashful, he doesn't seem to resent her. The girl tosses her head and then notices Sivakami, who moves out toward her.

"I'm Gayatri. I'm married, up the street, you know. The big house." She smiles, forthright, friendly, and hands over the fruit she has brought.

Ah, Minister's bride. She had not yet come to join her husband when Sivakami left Cholapatti. A Kulithalai girl, she didn't have far to come. "You're married to Chinnarathnam's son?" Sivakami eyes Gayatri's strong shoulders and good height. Her sari is of an excellent silk.

"I used to come for holidays when you lived here-before, I mean-but I was just a kid, so you probably don't remember me. But now I'm a proper lady of the house and all."

"I came to your wedding," Sivakami tells her, feeling drawn to Gayatri's liveliness. "Do you know how indebted I am to your father-in-law, how much he helped me, when we were away, and our house was vulnerable to thieves?" She is glad for a chance to revisit this debt. "My husband had great respect for him."

"Oh, so do I. He's eased my homesickness so much. He's such fun, a real father to me." Gayatri casts around for a place to sit.

Vairum is once more gazing gloomily at the door.

"Hey, bright eyes," Gayatri addresses him as she claims a spot against a post, waving away Sivakami's offer of a mat. "Why don't you get us a tumbler of water?"

Sivakami clucks and hurries to do this herself but notices that Vairum, without changing his expression, was rising to obey the newcomer.

Sivakami returns with snacks and water, for Gayatri and Vairum. She takes another plateful out to Thangam and the crowd of children that play quietly around her as though Thangam's gravity weighs down their wildness. She returns to her guest with a bit of the usual apprehension. This girl didn't know Hanumarathnam and so won't try to ferret out and share Sivakami's grief. Sivakami calculates that she'll be one of the curious ones, and summons those of her stock responses most successful in forestalling questions.

But Gayatri doesn't dig for the reasons Sivakami has returned to Cholapatti. She talks about her own family and married life, what she enjoys, what bothers her. Polite and interested, she asks Sivakami questions about herself for an hour or so before announcing regretfully that she must return to home and ch.o.r.es.

"I'll come again tomorrow. Do you need anything?" she asks. "Anything your servant can't get you?"

Sivakami can't think of anything. She hasn't had a conversation as such since she left Samanthibakkam. Her loneliness is more acute for having been briefly relieved; the sick feeling of worry over that archipelago sparkling on Vairum's back also reintensifies.

Gayatri asks Vairum, "Do you play palanguzhi, palanguzhi, loudmouth? Something about you makes me think you'll be good at it. You can count, can you? Add, multiply?" loudmouth? Something about you makes me think you'll be good at it. You can count, can you? Add, multiply?"

Vairum takes a second, then a.s.sents.

"I'll bring my board tomorrow when I come," she says. "You better be here, got that? No gallivanting with those roughnecks outside, no school, no going back wherever you were before. We have an appointment, you and me. Okay, sport?

"Bye, Akka," she says to Sivakami, using "big sister" as an honorific, as opposed to "aunt." Gayatri apparently has decided Sivakami is more friend than elder. "Send your man if there's anything you need from me."

After she leaves, Sivakami and Vairum raise their eyebrows at each other. He continues to dream by the door, and Sivakami feels a bit lighter as she goes about her ch.o.r.es. She determines that she will ask Gayatri's father-in-law, Chinnarathnam, what to do about Vairum's condition.

It is in those days that the letter from Hanumarathnam's sisters arrives. The sisters had sent it first to Sivakami at her father's house, and Sivakami's brothers had sent it on.

Safe.

(One always puts this a.s.surance of well-being at the top of a letter, to avoid causing undue alarm.)Dear Sivakami,Hope this finds you and the children and your father and brothers and all their family members wellYou must have been quite overwhelmed at Thangam Kutti's wedding to give us the wrong house key! Silly-billy! Did you forget you had had the locks changed? Muchami told us about the nasty robbery attempt! You should have told us! How were we to know?!As we explained, matters must be seen to! An empty house is a target!Send to us the right key, and we'll make sure that everything with the house is grand!Your loving Akkas ...

Sivakami folds the letter and goes out back to the courtyard where Muchami sits on the stones, taking his mid-morning meal. He is still on the first course, rice with okra sambar, and a fried plantain curry.

"More sambar?" she asks. "Curry?" She prefers to serve him, unusual as that is for a Brahmin mistress, though she keeps a decorous distance even while she does.

"Sambar," he nods.

She fetches and serves it from a small blackened iron jar that she holds with tongs. "So tell me what happened when my sisters-in-law came to see about the house."

"Ayoh, Rama, that's right, we were interrupted when I started telling you about it before." He signals that he has enough by holding his hand above his rice. "Why did you give them the old key?"

"I didn't know why they wanted to get into the house." She puts the sambar back in the kitchen and returns with more rice on a plate.

"Podhail."

Sivakami straightens. "What?"

"Buried treasure. I'm sure of it." He's ready for more rice, which she pushes onto the now-cleared s.p.a.ce on his banana leaf. "Remember-" He pauses, unwilling to upset her, but continues softly, "Ayya's last word?"

Hanumarathnam's head falls back, exhaling a word... Sivakami has thought back on that moment dozens of times in the years since it happened. If it had been night, and they had been alone, she would have been at his side. She doesn't think he could have said anything important: he spent so long in preparation for his death and was so methodical. Sivakami has thought back on that moment dozens of times in the years since it happened. If it had been night, and they had been alone, she would have been at his side. She doesn't think he could have said anything important: he spent so long in preparation for his death and was so methodical.

"It might have been anything," she mumbles, swiping at her left eye, which had started to tear, and going back into the kitchen with a sniff.

"A lot of people thought he said 'podhail,'" he explains.

"Including my sisters-in-law, you think?" she asks from the kitchen.

He has carved a well in the mound of rice for ghee and rasam, and Sivakami fetches these and pours them in.

He scoops and presses his rice to mix in the lemony broth. "I'm sure of it. They tried first on their own, then sent for me when they discovered they had the wrong key. When they learned I didn't have any key at all, they had their manservants climb into the garden. With spades. I felt really torn, because this is not their house, and I'm supposed to be keeping it from harm. So I asked, Have you come to do some gardening? 'Yes,' they said. 'Gardening.'"

Sivakami squats on her haunches in the kitchen door as he continues.

"I think they must have been planning to inspect the floor of the house to see if there was any seam, you know, some place that had been dug and then bricked over. But they had only the garden. The servants were lazy b.u.g.g.e.rs, pardon me, so at first they said there was nowhere to dig. But the ladies and gentlemen were so anxious, they called the servants back and had themselves helped over the wall. had themselves helped over the wall. Can you picture it? Your sisters-in-law, with their great big-" he indicates with his hands the width of the sisters' widest parts-"in their nine-yard saris, and, ayoh, Rama. Not to be disrespectful. Curry?" Can you picture it? Your sisters-in-law, with their great big-" he indicates with his hands the width of the sisters' widest parts-"in their nine-yard saris, and, ayoh, Rama. Not to be disrespectful. Curry?"

Sivakami brings it, on a plate. "Then?"

"I went over with them, what else could one do? The garden was a mess, of course, with fallen fruit and rotting coconuts. I said it was very nice of them to take care of it. I was thinking that if you weren't coming back, what was the point? Let it grow over, like it did after their parents died. When little Vairum returns to take his house, then is the time to clear the garden."

"They wouldn't have accepted such advice from you."

"That's why I didn't say anything. I helped them to clear the garden."

"Oh, I thought you had done all that in antic.i.p.ation of my return," Sivakami responds, bringing more rice and then yogourt.

"Well, I would have, when you told me you were coming back, but no, in fact, all this happened a month before. It's when they ordered the manservants to dig that I remembered your husband's final word. Thokku?" Thokku?"

Sivakami goes to fetch a dollop of the condiment and deposits it on one side of his banana leaf. She trusts Muchami absolutely, so she has no worry about discussing the possibility of buried treasure with him.

"If my husband thought there was treasure here, he would never have waited to tell us from his deathbed."

"You're right, I say." Muchami takes a mouthful of food. "They would have dug up the whole garden, but I pleaded for the trees. They said what's the point, it would be fifteen years before Vairum returned, but I begged, I'm telling you, and so they just dug around the roots and after each one I would pack the soil back in. I didn't ask any more questions. Anyway, all the weeds got cleared."

"Yes, it looks very tidy," Sivakami says wryly.

"So, at the end of the day, the sisters and husbands are barking at one another, the servants are dirty and sweaty, none of them have eaten since morning, and they're no richer. We all go back over the wall. They go to Murthy's house to bathe and eat, and I'm sure they must have told Murthy's mother the real reason, or she guessed. So then, my sources tell me, they hit on the idea that they should go talk to Jagganathan. About what he saw."

This was the boy who once followed Hanumarathnam to spy on him with the siddhas, and lost his voice in the adventure.

"Did I tell you that, since your husband died, he's got his voice back?" Muchami folds the bottom half of his now-empty banana leaf over the top, picks it up, stands and belches and goes to throw the leaf out the back door of the courtyard.

Sivakami squats against the house, under the eave. "Mm-hm, you told me. He didn't discover it for some months, until he stubbed his toe and yelled."

"After so many years without use, it was more of a croak. He still doesn't talk much-he's out of the habit. But that mother of Murthy's was inspired to ask him. Now that your husband is gone, maybe, she thought, he wouldn't be afraid to talk about what he saw."

"They thought he would say he saw my husband turning lumps of clay into bricks of gold, and so our house and garden have golden bedrock?"

Muchami rinses his mouth with well water and pours a half-bucket over the spot where he just ate, a Brahmin habit he has picked up in this house, cleansing the spot not only of a little spilled rice, but of the largely theoretical contaminations of cooked food, a horror to Brahmins for obscure reasons.

"Jagganathan probably knew what they wanted, but he wasn't talking. If he couldn't have such a reward, he who had suffered so much, why should they? I saw them after, glum faces..."

"Don't be gleeful," Sivakami tut-tuts. "It's not cla.s.sy."

He smirks. "Then they went home."

Sivakami rests a cheek on her knee, frowning in thought. "The soil is all turned, it's a good time to put in some new plants..."

He's a little puzzled at the switch in topic but goes along with his mistress. "When?"

Three days later, a jack tree, two papaya trees, a banana tree and a rose bush are delivered to Sivakami's house. Muchami had told the tree vendor that the lady of the house wanted them to come to the front, strange as that may seem. When he arrives, the whole street sees Sivakami telling the shrubbery parade that no, they are mistaken, come around the house to the back, oh, okay, come into the garden through the front hall, then. Muchami does the planting and she supervises.

That evening she calls a scribe to pen a letter to her sisters-in-law: Safe.

My dearest Akkas,Hope this finds you and my brothers-in-law and nieces and nephews and your in-laws in the pink of health.Oh, I am so sorry and embarra.s.sed to have given you the old key! Where was my head? It's not every day one's daughter gets married, so I guess that's my excuse! Now, as you may have heard, I have returned to live in this home, my son's home, where I belong. I am his humble custodian, and so of course, you must come again, and see to matters which must be seen to, as such.Thank you so much for making the effort to tidy the garden for me. I so appreciated it! Just today, I planted jack, papaya, banana and roses in the newly turned soil. But guess what? When we made the holes, we dug up more than worms: a little metal box, no lock, just a latch. Inside was a tiny k.u.mk.u.mum box and a note, in my late husband's hand. The note said, "My only success at transformation, save for my two children." With the date and his mark. He would have buried it just months before he got the final fever. In the k.u.mk.u.mum box: you could barely see it, a sifting ofgold dust, so fine and scarce we would have missed it inside, but outside in the Cholapatti sun, it shone.What do you make of that? Pretty unexpected, isn't it? He never said anything to me.Although this has reminded me of something I had nearly forgotten. I'm sure you may not remember for grief but the moment he pa.s.sed on, he said something. I myself thought he said "poonal, " but I was all the way across the room. Some others heard "padigal" but I couldn't think of what he might have wanted to tell me about the stairs, inside or out. I heard from others, though-who thought I should dig up the floor of the house-imagine!-that they heard "podhail." "I'm still not really convinced: it would have been a lot of work searching for that box, for not much return. Perhaps he wanted me to find the proof that he really did some transformations; perhaps he was too shy to tell me earlier. And I did find it! I'm sure he would have wanted you to know also.

Sivakami finishes the letter with chat, verbose as she's never been with those two.

The scribe is suitably impressed with the information he has just learned, and Sivakami knows it will be all over the marketplace by sundown. Muchami has already been instructed to confirm and clarify rumours. Sivakami sits up with her beading long into that night, thinking how nice it would have been to find a note from her husband testifying that his son was one of his successes, how nice it would have been to show Vairum something like that.

WHILE SIVAKAMI IS WORKING UP THE NERVE to talk to Chinnarathnam about Vairum's condition, she has been taking measures of her own. Each night before Vairum goes to sleep, she has rubbed veeboothi on the patch of white, which has become increasingly solid in only a few days. Vairum asks what she is doing, but she refuses to tell him and perhaps he senses how serious she is because this is one of the few instances in which he obeys her and submits, both to the topical application of the ash and to a pinch Sivakami makes him ingest, which she administers with more mutterings.

It is the third morning after she noticed the freckles, and Gayatri comes, as she has made a practice of doing daily, to drink a cup of coffee and play a game of palanguzhi with Vairum. The coffee-drinking is proof of her modernity; Sivakami never touches the stuff. When they sit down, Gayatri says to the little boy, "Go wipe your mouth, squirt. You left some yogourt in the corner from breakfast. I'll set up." She starts counting cowries into the small bowls carved into each side of the board. "Is the game of fours all right, or do you want the twelves again?"

"Twelves," Vairum replies. He likes this game best: twelve cowries in each of the three bowls to either side of the centre bowl, which is empty at the start but acc.u.mulates cowries, round after round, like a bank. Either player-if he or she counts right-can claim either bank, even both. Vairum feels intoxicated by the sight of the cowries piling up and even overflowing a central bowl as the game progresses.

He returns and Gayatri says, "You go first." She looks at him closely. "You missed it again. Don't you know how to wipe your face?"

"I did it." He swipes at his mouth with the back of his hand.

Gayatri frowns and, grasping his chin, tilts his face up. "Sivakamikka," she calls, letting go and rubbing her hand on her sari. "Have a look at this."

Sivakami comes from the pantry, already knowing what Gayatri is going to tell her.

Gayatri fetches her father-in-law at Sivakami's request. He comes and has a look at the new white patch, which has appeared like the beginnings of a clown's mouth around Vairum's frown, as the little boy huddles defiantly in a corner of the main hall, playing palanguzhi solitaire, barely looking up when he is asked.

"I'm sure it is not what you think it is," Chinnarathnam calls to Sivakami, who is staying decorously out of sight in the pantry. "My advice is that you have a licensed medical pract.i.tioner come and see the child."

"What is it, Amma?" Vairum says, rising.

"It's nothing, child," says Chinnarathnam. "We will have it looked after. I know an LMP," he says to Sivakami, using the English acronym. "He comes through Kulithalai once weekly. I will call for him."

Chinnarathnam and his son (Gayatri's husband-the man who has been called Minister since he was small, though he holds no official post yet) arrive with the LMP a few days later. Chinnarathnam will mediate because Sivakami will not come out in front of the LMP, nor speak to him directly.

The LMP examines the child. Palpating the patches, he asks, "Can you feel this? Is it numb?" Vairum looks at him with a catlike expression of defiant incomprehension until Chinnarathnam gently asks him, "Vairum. Tell him, little one-does it hurt?"

"No," Vairum grunts, but the LMP sighs sharply and repeats, "No-numb. Can he feel anything at all?" Can he feel anything at all?"

"Ah, yes," Chinnarathnam clucks with mock humility, the sound conveying the superiority landed gentry feel toward the working man. "My apologies. Child, can you feel this man's fingers on your face?"

"Of course," Vairum snorts.

Chinnarathnam smiles at the LMP, who is officiously not making eye contact with anyone as he continues pressing Vairum in other places and firing off further questions, interrupting their replies.

"It's called vitiligo," he finally grunts, repacking his black bag. "A condition of the skin: not painful, not contagious, as far as we know, and incurable. Do you understand?"