She updates Gayatri on the running of the charity and describes the partition plans. The older woman concurs on their impropriety. The Madurai Meenakshi festival comes up in the course of their meandering palavers. Janaki doesn’t even realize how much she has been thinking of her old friend until she starts talking about her.

She describes the encounter at the chattram and asks Gayatri if she knows about the family.

“But it’s incredible, Janaki, that you would ask me about them!” says Gayatri. “I had forgotten that you and the elder daughter were in school together.”

“Why,” Janaki probes, impassive but for a trace of a pout, “is it so incredible?”

Gayatri clears her throat. “Until a few months ago, I only knew what everyone knows: they’re a devadasi family. I think there are, or were, at least four children from C. R. Balachandran. And I know there were a couple of other children from a couple of other fathers.”

Gayatri glances away at that last statement and Janaki, aware of her own dull anger, tells her quietly, “Rumours connect my father with that family.”

Gayatri’s head snaps up. “Who told you that?”

“Isn’t it a mark of prestige to patronize a devadasi?” Janaki doesn’t see the need to reveal her source and is more interested in getting to the heart of the matter.

“It depends what you mean by patronize.” Gayatri smiles kindly. “But let me tell you what happened. I heard about it from my husband. He, if you can believe it, went to their house.”

There is a debate in the legislature at present, Gayatri tells her, as to whether the devadasi system should be outlawed. Janaki recalls that vaguely-maybe Rukmini Arundale said something when they were in Madras?

Minister, whose contacts in the Kulithalai area are very much trusted, had been requested to escort an investigatory delegation to Bharati’s family home. The committee member most strongly opposed to the courtesan system opened the conversation by asking whether they wouldn’t rather find more respectable ways of living. Bharati’s mother had refused to talk to this committee or any individual on it. But Bharati’s grandmother replied, “I respect myself,” with dignity that surprised them all: the non-Brahmins, who wanted the system abolished, and the Brahmins, who were against declaring it illegal. “How dare you imply that you are attacking immorality,” the old lady had thundered at them, “when all you’re doing is attacking the carriers of culture in your shrivelled world?”

“My husband said she might have been beautiful once,” Gayatri said, “but so peevish! Though my husband did say she had excellent diction.”

Janaki is silent.

“‘Do you think that Brahmin girls will ever conquer the expressive arts?’ the old lady asked my husband. ‘We were not even permitted to cook. Do you think you can domesticate the spirit of culture? Brahmin women suffer, oh, I know they suffer. But they don’t suffer the hardships that temper steel into artistry. They suffer the hardships that make women insipid. You want their husbands neither to take pleasure in them nor to take pleasure elsewhere. As though we are p… p… prostitutes!’”

Gayatri, who had quite entered into the spirit of the old woman’s speech, jumps as Janaki snaps, “Well, I am utterly in favour of outlawing them. Nobody’s going to make art illegal-they want to make it respectable. What’s wrong with that? The devadasis’ options will increase. They won’t have to prey on men, breaking up families and living without any kind of security, resorting to blackmail and who knows what?”

Gayatri makes a motion to her to lower her voice-her daughters-in-law and grandchildren are about.

Janaki whispers loudly, “How do they explain an artist like Vani Mami, anyway?”

“You have a good point, Janaki,” Gayatri responds delicately. “But I can’t blame the women entirely. Especially lately. The system has been breaking down. They don’t have the protections they once had. You asked whether it is not a mark of prestige to support a devadasi. It was-when it was done right. But more and more now, these women are being forced to behave like common prostitutes, which is degrading. Men don’t live up to their responsibilities like they used to.”

This statement clearly applies to Goli in any situation.

“May I tell you what has happened in their family?” Gayatri asks.

The old lady apparently considered her life, after she was plucked from Madurai like a jasmine at dawn, to have been a parade of disappointments. The essential tragedy, she said, was that none of her daughters was very beautiful or talented. She had chosen the middle girl, Bharati’s mother, as the most promising. She convinced her own sponsor to fund an education for the girl like the one she herself had had. But, she grumbled, there was not a sufficient appreciation of devadasis in Kulithalai.

“So many men who, somewhere else, in another time, would have had the ambition to patronize a dasi. Here they don’t even think of it. Okay, this,” she said, pointing the heel of her hand at Bharati’s mother, “would not have attracted the wealthiest and most powerful, but she should never have been left scrambling!” Then, as Bharati bloomed into beauty with adolescence, the old woman grew bitter. “This is the girl I should have had,” she shouted at the committee, pointing at her granddaughter.

Janaki startles. “Bharati was there? But I thought she was living in Madurai.”

“I’ll get to that.” Gayatri holds up a hand and continues quoting Bharati’s grandmother. “‘This girl should have been born a hundred years ago, in the shadow of a famous temple’s towering gopurams!’ she said. ‘Poets would have immortalized her. Corpulent Brahmins with diamond ear studs and betel-stuffed cheeks should have been kept awake at night scheming on means to finance her maintenance. Kings would have declared themselves unworthy!’”

Bharati’s dancing and music masters had not even lived in. The committee was made to understand this had been a sore point for her grandmother. This prompted them to ask: many a live-in master is brutish and demands distasteful favours, which the family must permit because how else can they give the child the training she needs? This surely was the type of suffering Bharati’s grandmother had talked about: did any of her teachers ever commit improprieties upon her young person?

The old woman was appalled that the committee would ask such a question, and as good as kicked them out of her house for their rudeness.

“So that was that, but I wanted to know what was happening with the girl-what is her name again?”

“Bharati,” Janaki mumbles.

“Yes-Bharati,” Gayatri repeats, a little quiet as though she just remembered Janaki’s stake in this story. “A beautiful girl.”

Janaki doesn’t reply.

“I asked Muchami.” Gayatri lowers her voice confidentially. “Bharati came of age around the same time as you. When she finished school, her mother let her be taken to Madurai. Their relatives there arranged a performance to try to attract a patron for her. She attracted a man in his forties. He is a Brahmin but not a man of good reputation. He had dropped two previous devadasis after he tired of them, and he…” Gayatri makes the signal for drinking, her thumb pointing at her mouth. “His family still has money, but I imagine Bharati must be concerned that he may well drop her, too. She came back here for an abortion. I don’t know if it was the first.”

Gayatri stops and they both are silent.

Janaki wants to remain angry but finds she cannot. Her own life seems so simple by comparison.

“Sometimes”-Gayatri looks almost scared to say this-“men are known to patronize more than one woman. Women get diseases…”

“Are you saying this is what my father does?” Janaki asks.

“You opened the topic, Janaki.”

Janaki is too emotional to apologize. “Does… does my grandmother know about the rumours?”