“No, no, please, thank you.” They understand, and don’t press.

“But… water?” asks the first man who spoke.

“Yes.” She holds out her jug and they pour water into it from one of their vessels.

“Where will you stay in Thiruchi?”

“With…” Oh, no, what if Saradha’s related to them? “My granddaughter.” She didn’t think quickly enough-she should have said a chattram. But they might be staying in a chattram and might have insisted on taking her.

“Her husband’s good name?” asks the first man again.

It’s easier to tell the truth now than lie. “Sivasamba lyer.”

“Ah.” No recognition.

“And your good names?” she asks politely.

“Ranganathan lyengar.”

Oh, they are lyengar-a different sub-caste from hers. She ceases listening again, relief pounding in her ears. No relation. She nods with real happiness as Ranganathan Iyengar introduces his brother, their wives, their children. They are slightly, almost imperceptibly, chillier toward her, which is as she prefers.

They have just finished their meal and lie down to rest through the heat of the day. Sivakami lies down too, but when the food in their bellies goes to their heads, she slips down off the cool platform back into the sun. She can’t risk their accompanying her, which they surely would do. She is sure to be caught in a lie if she is forced to talk any longer and would rather her face be burnt by the sun than by embarrassment. It’s terrible that she prefers her lies to the truth, but, she has learned, that’s what some lies are like.

Three furlongs down the tracks from where she left the cheery pilgrims, she finds a crumbling roadside shrine hung with crisply browned jasmine garlands. The god within is everyone’s favourite, chubby Ganesha. Sivakami smiles sadly at his friendly elephant face, grasps her left ear in her right hand and her right ear with the other and squats a few times, the traditional abasement for him. As she rises from her last squat, she falls forward onto her knees and grasps the shrine, sobbing.

Her tears turn instantly to dry pits in the dusty ground. She squints up at her old friend, and quietly shrieks, “Take me. Take me!”

The god responds good-humouredly, “I cannot take you. But I cannot stop you either. Come along if you want.”

“Take me, I say! Please, Lord.”

“Come, foolish lady,” he smiles, but not as though he has time to waste, “if you want to so badly.”

Sivakami circles the shrine thrice, in a temper. Has she not been a firm and doubtless devotee? Has she not lived by every prescription she knows?

The gods do love their jokes: human prayer is always earnest and divine replies so often ironic. Sivakami throws up her hands and returns to walking along the track, stepping from one tie to the next. She doesn’t look back nor about. She maintains a dim awareness of her feet, one in front of the other, in front of the other, on the wooden ties which fall one in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other in front-just like the train-in front of the other in front of the other… in fact there’s a train on the track. There’s a train on the track train on the track train on the track… She can’t see it yet, but the vibrations are growing. She hasn’t looked around in some time. Now she finds she is deep within a ditch, the track laid in a furrow with embankments on both sides taller than she is.

Here is her reward, the answer to her prayers. She need only accept.

The head of the train appears. Accept.

Its face nears. It screams and the noise hits her, a foretaste of steel. The rails sing all about her, showing her the way: this is how to die. This is how to die. This is how to die-

Sivakami flings herself against the steep embankment, reaching for a pole sticking out of it. Her body flat against the slope, she pulls herself up, toes pushing like a gecko’s into crumbling dust, fingers grasping, beyond the pole, for the thin grass and roots. Her hands have reached flat ground when suddenly her toes slide away on something slick: the railway is everyman’s toilet and Sivakami loses her toehold in some malnourished tot’s leavings even as, with a thud, the beast of her possible deliverance arrives to flatten the space she left behind, singing, Don’t you want to die? Don’t you want to die? Sivakami slides back down to meet her fate, flashing beneath her feet, but then she hits the pole. She wraps herself around it, clinging upside down like a baby monkey to its mother.

As the train passes, a thousand startled travellers crane out their windows to gawk back at the little Brahmin widow, her dust-stained sari blown from her stubbly head. Their bewilderment almost matches her own. She has always thought of her life as a series of submissions to God. What if she has been making her own decisions all along?

The train has passed. Elation and disappointment pound in her head like the waters of the ocean she never saw. She steps down to collect her brass jug from where it fell to one side of the track, then she climbs again, slowly, from the moat, by stepping on stones and wildflower patches. She has eluded death-why did she do that?

She collects her breath and, trembling, waits for the sound of waves to subside. It doesn’t. She is hearing water.

It’s her beloved and reviled Kaveri. She leaves the track and walks over a hillock toward the sound, passes through a parting in some brush, and there it is, familiar and unknowable as ever. She fills her brass jug, and rinses the film from her eyes, the dust from her skin, and the residue of recent adventures from the soles of her feet. Her exhilaration is ebbing. Did she defeat her god? Is she now truly alone?

Sivakami glances up from her thoughts to see one of her Cholapatti neighbours-Visalakshi, from three doors down-coming toward her, a friendly but puzzled expression on her face. Oh, she has been spotted, now everyone will know. What is Visalakshi doing here?

But it isn’t Visalakshi: it’s some other young woman with the same figure, same round cheeks and frizzy hair, stopping at a respectful distance to ask, “Mami is all right? Does she need some assistance?”

“No, no, child,” Sivakami replies, and then realizes she does in fact. “I am… I need to find, Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter.”

“Hmm.”

The young woman makes a great show of thinking. She calls her family over and they all think. Clearly none of them knows. Finally, the eldest man in the group speaks on their behalf.

“Well, you must go to Thiruchi proper. All right? Cross that bridge, then you will see it.”

Sivakami intended on going that way regardless, so she is spared the embarrassment of not taking their advice. She bids them a decorous farewell.

Rested and cooled, but still as deeply shaken by her failure as her success in not dying, she follows the little path back to the road and starts following it toward the next bridge. She recites Kamban’s Ramayana to herself-she knows it so well that she hardly needs the book, but it, too, had become a talisman-the only book she has ever read. Each verse falls from her lips like a curtain against the entry of thought.

As she reaches the end, she spots a Brahmin walking in the same direction. She hurries to overtake him and accosts him by asking, “To go to Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter?”

He turns: it’s the priest from the Vishnu temple at the end of the Cholapatti Brahmin quarter! A vicious gossip. She recalls his pious, lascivious voice, like a bletted papaya.

But no, it’s just some other paunchy, middle-aged Brahmin. He informs her officiously that Rama Rao Brahmin Quarter is close to Malai Kottai, and points, with confidence approaching boredom, back the way she has just come. He clearly assumes she is a cook or some equivalent. She must be quite black, she thinks, after all these hours in the sun. For her part, she suspects he has just performed a funeral on Saradha’s street, at extortionate prices.