So Sivakami’s heart burned at the thought of tearing Krishnan from Rukmini’s bony bosom. How could she? How could she not?

Three nights running, Sivakami has awoken from the same dream, her heart thrumming and brow running with it, clear and cryptic as a telegram.

In the dream, Rukmini’s long-dead mother-in-law, Annam, looked at an illustrated catalogue of hairpieces. The pieces kept trying to scurry away off the pages and into the scrub. The mother-in-law seemed to be charged with minding them, though she would occasionally pick one up and tug at it until it loosened a bit and then study it, flattening it or holding it up to the sun, making the hairpiece whimper or shriek.

Sivakami was puzzled: Annam was a widow when she died, and so she appeared in the dream, with a head stubbly as a coconut. A widow has no need or use for hairpieces. Annam replied that soon her daughter-in-law would come and take the hair from her stomach. Oh, said Sivakami. So Rukmini’s stomach is full of hair? Yes, said Annam, she will come and take the hair from her stomach and fashion it into hairpieces.

Sivakami tried reason, the worst tactic one can attempt in a dream. “But why would Rukmini make hairpieces?”

“If my daughter-in-law is dead, she will not get my son’s money,” Murthy’s mother explains. “She will need some income, so she will have to make hairpieces to sell.”

“Who will get your son’s money, then?” asked Sivakami. This was not reason, but curiosity: if she had been awake, she might have asked what use a dead woman has for money.

“Our grandson,” the woman replied.

Halfway between wake and sleeping, she felt dread. In that dream voice that takes all the effort of shouting, Sivakami argued, “You have no grandson.”

“Oh,” said Rukmini’s mother-in-law, “we have a grandson, you and I.”

Here Sivakami really woke, gasping as though breathing through cobwebs. She didn’t discuss this with Muchami on the way to or from her bath, but finally, three days later, they talked. Muchami had heard of a poison that causes a big ball to grow in the stomach and long hairs to grow from it, until the victim’s life is crowded from her belly. They admit between them that they fear Rukmini’s cousins are poisoning her to get her husband’s house and possibly his money. They admit, shaking, that if the cousins consider him a threat, Krishnan may be poisoned next. They must remove him from that house.

That morning, Sivakami dispatches Janaki and Kamalam to fetch their little brother to eat pazhiah sadam at home. As he eats, she examines his stomach for signs of swelling, but Krishnan’s shorts look as baggy as ever. She asks, “Have you had stomach aches lately, Krishnan-baby?”

Krishnan furrows his brow-is this is a trick to get him to take an extra dose of castor oil? Sivakami grunts in such a way as not to make him more suspicious, and says nothing more.

While Krishnan is eating, however, Muchami slips next door to have a conference with Murthy, and when Krishnan goes back next door, Rukmini wails, “Go home, kanna! You don’t live here, you don’t belong here, we don’t want you.”

Krishnan stands still, confused, not only because Rukmini is shouting all this, each phrase louder than the last, but because she has fallen to her knees and embraced him, so he couldn’t move even if he wanted to.

Janaki and Kamalam appear, having been instructed by their grandmother to come and bring their little brother home again. He looks over his shoulder, sees them and flings his arms around Rukmini’s neck, howling, “I won’t go!”

Janaki starts to cry-she cannot do this, not so soon after Thangam’s death. She leans against a wall, tears coursing from unblinking eyes. Kamalam, silent and alarmed, takes her elder sister by the hand and the shoulder and leads her home.

Three rooms away, in the courtyard, Murthy’s cousins half-pretend they don’t know what is happening. Murthy tears his hair quietly on the veranda, waiting to accuse his cousin once Krishnan is safely out of the picture. What a sorry state the world is in, he tells Sivakami later, thanking her for having sent Muchami with that alert, when one trusts a servant over one’s flesh and blood.

Finally Rukmini tries to thrust Krishnan from her. His little hands pinch and scrabble and he starts again to yell, but Rukmini eventually pins his arms to his sides, kisses every feature of his face and runs from the room, her stomach visible on either side of her.

Krishnan tries to follow, but she closes a door against him. Sita arrives within minutes, with Muchami, who carries Krishnan home.

The cousins object when confronted, denying that they have done anything, saying the accusations are outrageous. Then they steal away in the night, more outlaws than in-laws.

It would have been safe then for Krishnan to return. Certainly, he tries it, meekly. He and Rukmini have visits, but Muchami and Murthy don’t face protests when they carry him home each dusk. Over the next six weeks, Rukmini grows gaunt. Her stomach, though it grows no bigger, becomes painful. For the final ten days of her illness, she is confined to bed, able to take nothing but a little water. Then she, too, expires.

Circumstances being suspect, Rukmini is made to submit in death to the doctor’s examination she refused in life. Cause of death is listed as cancer of the stomach, but in fact, the doctor has never seen a growth like this one-a wrinkled tumour, like a mammoth brain, but from it grow long, matted hairs, five feet long in places. He considers removing it for research-maybe he could write a paper?-but concludes the tropics have robbed him of his professional ambition-he has no desire to take the trouble of preserving and analyzing it. It is a curiosity, but it is not going to make him famous. It is too bizarre for that-just a bit of a novelty. He sews the woman’s stomach up, the flaps baggy over the deflated cavern, and sends word that the family may have her back for her funeral.

Surely little Krishnan must have done something very bad in a previous life, Sivakami thinks, the night after Rukmini’s funeral, watching the child sleep between his elder sisters. How else could it be that a child never really knows a mother at all and yet loses not one mother but two? It’s a riddle fit for gods, who are fond of perversity.

She thinks back on the scandals she has been witness to in these months and wonders, trying to keep herself from feeling prurient, how many there have been on the Brahmin quarter that she doesn’t know about. She wonders why she works so hard to keep up appearances-surely everyone’s family has misfortunes. Surely they are nothing to be ashamed of. She doesn’t condemn either Minister or Murthy for having madness and criminality in their families, but if she didn’t know them better, she might. She might wonder if these traits would rear their ugly heads in others among their families. Say if she was considering a bride or groom from a family within which lurked such shadows.

This, of course, is why she has invested such energy and effort in keeping the facade of her family stainless. Thank God no scandal has enmeshed them yet, though she often senses a circling threat. Goli’s behaviour is so unpredictable; Vairum’s beliefs are so unconventional. It’s just my imagination, she tells herself. They would never do anything to hurt the children. Well, Vairum wouldn’t. And Goli would never hurt them deliberately…

She looks at the children, as blameless and earnest in sleep as in waking, and says a quick prayer to her gods against the evil eye: please let it remain so. Thangam’s children’s futures are precarious as it is. Sivakami is their only guarantor and all she can give them is their reputations.