The young woman looks doubtful, but Sivakami hurries from the train along with a few rumpled families, squeezing past the rest of the passengers, still awakening, sitting up, scratching and yawning. She descends the rungs of the metal steps and hops onto the platform from the lowest, which is still high for her. She is some thirty paces from a pump and as she walks toward it she feels some cheer. It will be good to brush her teeth and wash her face. Soon, she will arrive home. She need only think of how to disguise her unescorted arrival. She is glad to have a mission to distract her from her terrible thoughts, her shame.

She takes out her neem stick and sets her bundle down. The water gushes out brightly and she moves the bundle out of its reach. She fills her brass jug and squats to scrub her face over the drain. She hears a voice calling “Granny, Granny!”-no doubt some young person meeting her grandmother after a long time, and she thinks of the grandchildren she might see soon. She wets her neem stick and puts it in her mouth as the train starts to pull away. She looks up at the train, then down. Where is her bundle?

The young woman who shared her carriage has come to the window and is waving and pointing, “Granny! Granny!” But then she is carried past into another void.

Did she see who took it?

Sivakami runs a little in each direction like a caricature of a woman in distress, then realizes she may as well finish cleaning her teeth, and stands chewing the stick like an imbecile. Her bundle is gone-her money, her ticket, her Kamba-Ramayanam. The only person left on the platform is a peon sleeping against the ticket booth at the far end. She savours the neem’s bitterness as she scrubs its frayed end over her teeth and tongue.

The platform sits on a plot of scrubby dirt and there are colonies of some kind in the near distance. This doesn’t look like a big station with frequent ongoing trains. She trudges toward the ticket booth, but it’s still closed and she doesn’t know what she would do if it were open. The dozing peon, in a rumpled uniform of khaki shorts and shirt with fewer buttons than advisable, rolls onto his back. From the west, a woman in a khaki sari arrives and starts sweeping the station-likely her husband died in service, and she was given his job because the railways take care of their own. Sivakami doesn’t try to talk to anyone. She tries to think.

Saradha lives here somewhere. Somewhere in Thiruchi, on a street by the name of Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter, in house number “ 6,” as she recalls. She probably lives closer to the main station than to this place called Kottai, which is not what she thought it was. So if Sivakami follows the train she just disembarked, she will eventually arrive. She hopes she encounters a Brahmin quarter somewhere before long. She is parched.

Sivakami walks to the end of the platform, climbs off it to reach the track, where she puts her right foot upon a tie, and then her left foot on the next one. That’s the first step.

Or was Vairum’s last word the first step? Or was the first step when she took Vairum back to Cholapatti to raise him on her own? Or was it Hanumarathnam’s, fleeing to read his fate’s fulfillment in the sky? Now she tries not to think.

The sun rises, hot and hard. She passes through the centre of a labourers’ encampment, the unwashed wives tying sun-bleached hair back with other strands of hair, leaning over the day’s fire, the day’s gruel. The children point at Sivakami and run toward her, bellies out. Their mothers approach, shyly and swiftly, until Sivakami is forced to stop because a cordon has formed around her.

“Amma, Amma, where are you going, Amma?”

“I’m going to find my granddaughter.”

How dare they speak to her?

“Amma, Amma, why hasn’t she come to fetch you, Amma?”

“She doesn’t know I’m here.”

Why are they not making way?

“Amma, Amma, please sit, Amma. Please sit.”

“Please, please let me go on.”

So many people she was never meant to meet.

“Amma, Amma, be careful, Amma.”

“I will. I will. Please, let me go on.”

They part to permit her egress, grinning at her distress, or so she feels.

God willing, her Cholapatti neighbours will never know she has gone through this. How many of their lives contain miseries hidden from her? She remembers wondering this when Rukmini, poor dear, and Gayatri were going through their troubles. But her compassion for them doesn’t reduce her own desire for privacy: we are ill equipped to bear even our own sadnesses, she knows, and many burdens are only made heavier by sharing.

She sees a big hill and wonders if it is Malaikottai, the Ganesha temple she has dreamed of visiting. Maybe Saradha will take her there. She wonders how far she is from Saradha’s house.

She squints against the rails’ glare, the sun a feverish palm on her crown. A burst of laughter causes her to turn her head. She almost missed it: a pilgrims’ pavilion, a stone gazebo, in a triangle formed by the rail line and two roads.

Sivakami approaches. She must get out of the sun for a moment. She would rather the place have been empty, but…

The bunch sitting on the cool stone rip into peals of merriment again and their babble, as Sivakami approaches, resolves into speech. She stops. They are Brahmins. They will wonder if she is known to them. She may be, by marriage or some other connection. They call out to her. “Mami, please, Mami, sit. But… are you alone?”

“Yes, yes, alone,” she says, wishing she had just gone on.

“Please, sit.” They rise to make room for her.

“Sit, sit,” she insists, now that they are all standing. “Sit, I say.”

She clears her throat and looks away. Her mind is working more quickly even than she can think. She has the first word, she should use it to her advantage. “Where have you all come from?”

“Namakkal, Mami. Do you know it?”

She grew up in its shadow.

“I went there once, as a small child, with my grandparents. I don’t remember it. Wonderful, is it?”

“Oh, yes, a very fine place. And you, Mami, where do you come from”

“Cuddalore.”

That just popped out.

“Oh, our niece married into Cuddalore.”

“Ah, so you have been there?” she asks, terrified they will make reference to some landmark or family she doesn’t know.

“No, not us. This is as far as we have ventured. We are making a pilgrim tour, going to Palani, Srirangam, all the important places.”

“Very good, very good.” Sivakami is so relieved that she can no longer listen.

“And you, Mami?” they ask, their curiosity bursting to the surface. “How do you come to be so far from home, and alone?”

“A… penance,” she responds. Penance? “For… the sake of my son… who was ill.”

“Oh, no, Mami.” They are all sympathy. Their curiosity, though, is unrelieved.

“Yes, yes. He is well now, recovering, in Cuddalore, with his wife and family.” Sivakami listens to the sound of her voice. Has she ever been lied to as easily as she is now lying? “I pledged a pilgrimage,” she continues slickly.

“But if he was sick, shouldn’t he do the pilgrimage?” One of the wives asks, unable to contain herself.

“I pledged, I pledged to do it. Alone. Myself, alone. Maybe he will also do it someday. He is a good and pious boy, very attached to me. He protested.”

Sivakami, relieved both of the heat and the pressure of possible acquaintanceship, speaks with increasing conviction.

“But I told him, God accepted a small price for your health, for a useless old widow to undertake a journey alone. He shouldn’t be so attached. I have no husband; my children are grown. I wish for God to take me. My work on this earth is over.”

It’s what old people say, but this is the first time she has said it, and now it occurs to her that she might mean it.

“Will you take some of our food, Mami?” asks another of the wives.