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.

Young Kesavan enters shaking his head and clucking his tongue.

“Why, why, why, why, why…” He shakes his head.

People so often think something becomes more profound if repeated. Sometimes it does.

“Why don’t Brahmins permit widow remarriage?” he asks.

This is not what Sivakami and Janaki expected to hear.

“I think it is terribly wrong, what they did,” he continues, because this is how he feels and because he would hate to lose this job due to some misapprehension of his position on Sivakami’s part. “But if widows were permitted to remarry and if we could rid ourselves of this terrible caste prejudice, maybe this would not have been necessary for them.”

“This was not necessary for them,” Sivakami starts, and Kesavan replies, “Oh, yes.”

“And remarriage?” she continues. “What is this ‘remarriage’? Marriage is something that can only happen once.”

“But men are permitted another wife,” Kesavan says, after a slight, ingratiating, pause.

“If the first wife does not complete him. If there is no child,” Sivakami splutters. “But then it was not really a marriage, so the second is really the first. Or if there are children who need a mother.”

Janaki watches her grandmother. She has never seen her angry like this. Her convictions are what sustained her, Janaki thinks. How dare Vairum Mama try to challenge her on her beliefs? They are the reason she is alive.

No one ever knows Shantam’s opinion on the subject, because she disappears the next day, taking with her jewels-those that should have been her daughter‘s-and six silk saris belonging to her sisters-in-law. She is never seen in Cholapatti again. From time to time a rumour floats back: Shantam seen in Thanjavur, thinner and darker, living with a pearl fisherman and selling pearls on the harbour road. Shantam, cheeks and ears pierced with tridents, hair grown matted and coiled atop her half-mad head, running up to pilgrims in the Palani temple and telling their fortunes whether they want them or not. Shantam, fatter and fairer, living in Benares, masquerading as a wealthy Parsee widow running a charity home for destitute or abandoned Brahmin widows. None of the rumours is ever corroborated.

Karuppan, the barber’s second son, needs surgery and is taken to the French mission hospital to have it done, but by then he has been bleeding internally for ten or twelve hours, so it’s too late and he dies. At the beginning of the following year, the company employing Karuppan’s older brother fails. It’s a bad time for rubber, and for companies generally. He is sent home on a ship that gets caught in a typhoon and founders on some rocks. If there are survivors, he is not among them. His parents have now lost both of their sons. They never have grandchildren. Their older son’s widow, as is not uncommon in their community, remarries.

The elder barber goes back to shaving the heads of all his customers. Perhaps he still says “I’m sorry,” as he did to Sivakami, before shaving a Brahmin widow’s head for the first time.

Perhaps not.