Although there is little in her affairs that she needs to wrap up-Muchami will look after the tenants as usual and Vairum comes once a month or so-there is one matter she wants safeguarded. She entrusts a biscuit tin of completed beadwork pieces to Gayatri, those that are still requested, every month or two, by Brahmins along the quarter whose daughters are about to give birth. Sivakami still has never spoken of it to Vairum and has no reason to believe he knows.

She will take with her the scene she is at work on now: Krishna dancing on the five hoods of the monster cobra. This scene should be finished before Vani gives birth. Apart from that, she packs a satchel of snacks she has made as a gift for Vairum and Vani, and another, much smaller one, containing her spare sari, her copy of the Kamba-Ramanayanam, between whose pages she has stowed five ten-rupee notes, her beadwork and the small brass water jug she always drinks from, so as not to have to share a vessel.

MUCHAMI IS EXCITED FOR HER, but also concerned: Vairum is so unconventional. What if he forces Sivakami to do things that make her uncomfortable? She is not young any more, he thinks, as he weaves thatch to repair the cowshed roof. The least Vairum can do is permit her her ways.

He tears a piece of thatch by pulling it too hard and realizes he has been getting angry with Vairum before anything has even happened. He certainly did look happy, and Vani looked better than she has in years. Maybe their contentment and gratitude for Sivakami’s help will soften Vairum’s radical edge.

He wonders how he will fill his days while she is gone.

“It will be quiet around here,” he remarks to her late one morning.

His routine has altered considerably. He no longer has a child to look after, and Mari has been having health problems for the last year or two. She has been increasingly nervous and irritable, prone to dropping things and occasionally fainting. Sivakami has relieved her of many of her duties. Though he looks in during the day to make sure she’s all right, Muchami prefers to leave their hut to her.

“Maybe I should go in for some other work: start a business. Can you see me in import-export?”

Sivakami laughs over the vegetables she is cutting. “You could do anything you want. Yes, I suppose the house hasn’t been left empty since I went to live with my brothers-what’s that, forty years ago?”

“A lifetime.” Muchami walks to the garden door to spit a stream of betel juice into the growth.

“How did you stay busy back then?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he says, trying to remember. “It was easier when one was young. There was always activity at the market, gossip, scandals, friends needing help.” He doesn’t mention midnight liaisons that occasionally left him fatigued during the day: an extra hour for siesta was a welcome thing. He still indulges, but only very occasionally. “The properties also needed more managing then, before Vairum organized them all. Life starts to run itself after a while.”

“You should rest up while I’m gone. Vairum may not want to come here so much when he has a child, and the first year, things may fall into some disarray. You will be useful then.”

“Yes, it could happen.” He smiles at her, feeling nervous. Is he only fearful of how Vairum might treat her there, so far away from her routines and the village she knows? No, there’s something else: “Amma, when you go, do a ritual over Vani against the evil eye.”

Sivakami stops slicing okra and looks at him.

“I am afraid,” he tells her, and it’s true. He is chilled to the bone at the prospect of what might happen if this pregnancy doesn’t succeed.

“You are right,” she says, allowing herself to feel the fear she had suppressed with her own happiness. “I will do it, yes.”

It’s 7 a.m. when Vairum comes to fetch her in his new car, a red Buick sedan. She has been ready and waiting for a couple of hours, sitting in the door to the pantry while Muchami keeps her company from the courtyard. Vairum stops at the house only long enough for a drink of water. He has to draw it at the well because the big clay water pot in the pantry is drained and turned upside down.

“Ready, Amma?”

The house already has an empty feel, the shutters closed, the children gone. Sivakami begins locking all the doors in the house, from back to front, and Muchami goes through the garden to stand on the street beside the car to await his final instructions. Alone, Sivakami does a final oblation for the Ramar, thinking of the two other times she has performed a farewell for these gods: before going to her brothers’ house and before going to Munnoor when Thangam died. She prays, innocent and hearty, that all should go well in Madras, stifling a moth-wing flutter of worry. Muchami was quite right to remind her to do a ritual against dhrishti.

She locks the front door behind her, inserts the key carefully into her travel bundle, and turns, feeling self-conscious, to the car, which has attracted a crowd. Vairum takes the bag of snacks with a small, sardonic grin as the uniformed driver holds the door open. Sivakami mounts the running board and enters the cavern of the car’s back seat. It is a rare sunny day in November, the height of the rainy season, and the air inside the car has congealed into a warm stillness. Vairum is lending his ear to a man in the crowd who seems to have a proposal. The neighbours and children press in a bit closer, their interest renewed by seeing Sivakami within the car. Gayatri and Minister are here, too, waving cheerily, but Sivakami, feeling uncomfortably like a bride in this red chariot, can’t smile back. She’s a little irritated at being made the subject of a spectacle. It is inappropriate, but she couldn’t expect Vairum to sympathize with that. Finally, Vairum enters the car. He settles himself on the grey upholstered seat while the driver closes the door and runs around the front to start the car.

It takes them some twelve hours to reach Madras, during which time Sivakami takes no food or water-no food because she eats nothing she hasn’t cooked herself, nor water because she will only drink that reserved for Brahmins. Vairum and his driver eat at a grand restaurant in Pondicherry, where Vairum has a meeting. She waits for them in the car, watching the gawkers cluster, again, into a crowd. The gleaming, showy vehicle would have drawn an audience anyhow, but the sight of an orthodox Brahmin widow tucked inside inspires comments. Sivakami unwinds her prayer beads from her wrist and says mantras until Vairum returns.

He is silent for most of the journey. For a brief time, following the meeting, he looks over some papers, and he takes a short nap. Otherwise, he stares out his window and she out hers. She imagines the quiet between them is companionable, that they are both lost in the same rosy visions of the months and years to come-but he doesn’t say and she doesn’t really know what he is thinking.

It is after eight o’clock when they reach Madras. The city welters up around them, almost before Sivakami realizes it has. The houses on Vairum’s street look, to Sivakami, grand enough to be government offices. In the car port, the driver opens her door, and she follows Vairum’s striding form up the stairs, yearning to be invisible as she feels his employees’ discreetly curious eyes. Upstairs, she creeps along the narrow balcony, keeping her gaze on the floor. In the outdoor reception area, Vani falls at her feet and ushers her through the majestic carved wooden doors into the sitting room. The black and white tiles are cool, like taut silk. Sivakami’s callused feet make slapping sounds that ring in the airy room’s besieged hush-the quiet of a house sheltered from traffic noise by tall trees and a serious class differential. The sound of her feet against the brick of the Cholapatti floor was immediately dulled by the roughness of the floor, and the sounds of the village, always entering without leave.