How sad for Muchami, she thinks, that he cannot see what I see. No one ever saw what she did: that tender child. (A gem, a coin, all elbows and iron.) A mother should know. All is forgiven.

Janaki lays down banana leaves for the third round of feasting, when the family can finally eat. Visitors from up and down the quarter are leaving for their homes with promises to return to hear Vani play that afternoon.

The family members are seating themselves when a car pulls up outside the front door. Vairum looks unsurprised, and Janaki thinks he is smiling slightly. Perhaps some business associate is coming to meet him here? That would be strange; he always has them meet him at his Kulithalai office.

No, it’s a woman. Janaki can’t make her features out against the light, until the visitor steps into the hall’s cheery gloom. A shout fades in from the street. “Bharati! It’s Bharati!”

So it is.

Vairum is striding up to greet Bharati. She holds her palms together. “Namaskaram, Mama. Namaskaram, Mami. Namaskaram.” She offers graceful greetings to Gayatri, who, though gaping, reflexively puts her own palms together and then brings them apart an inch or two, unsure of what to do.

“How are you?” Bharati greets Sivakami’s grandchildren, who stand and stare. She directs a particular greeting at Janaki: “Are you well?”

Janaki waggles her head with fearful rapidity, and Bharati gives her a hard and subtly victorious smile.

“So good you could come home, Bharati.” Vairum is waving her toward the line of banana leaves. “You must take lunch with us.”

“Oh, not necessary, I…”

“I insist,” he says. “Sit. Sit.”

Kamalam stands stock-still, while Saradha splutters and turns half away from the sight of a devadasi preparing to take food in her grandmother’s home. But it’s not her grandmother’s home, Janaki is reminded as she catches Vairum eye-it’s his. He doesn’t even bother holding her glance. They have no right to challenge him-they are guests in his home. And before this, he gave them everything good. They owe him their lives.

Sivakami sees the visitor arrive-a sophisticated-looking young woman, not one she recalls having met before. She sees Vairum usher her to eat. There is plenty, of course. Saradha comes to fetch another banana leaf but doesn’t appear to hear Sivakami asking who their guest is. Sivakami looks for Muchami, but he has gone. She beckons Gayatri back, signalling, a fist with thumb extended: “Who is she? What’s going on?”

“Bharati, Akka.” Gayatri can barely meet her eye at first, then looks at her with concern. “It’s Bharati, the star of the movie, of Saraswati.”

Sivakami looks into the main hall. Vairum is watching her.

SARADHA, KAMALAM, JANAKI AND RADHAI ferry out the food, carrying vessels from the kitchen out to the main hall and back, stiff and regular as figures moving in and out of a cuckoo clock. They serve payasam, appam, pickles, curries, pacchadis, applam, rice, sambar. Somehow, though, they are all present to witness the first fistful of rice Bharati lifts from the leaf to her mouth.

There-there.

The house is defiled.

She lights them with her famous smile. “Delicious. My compliments.”

The four sisters look back, variously, but all unsmiling. A flash-bulb pops-a reporter from Anantha Viketan who must somehow have caught wind of the visit. As though his intrusion has broken some film-thin membrane between public and private, the life of the home and the life of the street, neighbours pour back in.

“The devadasi’s daughter,” Gayatri finishes gently, and Sivakami sees a low-caste intruder take rice in her home, in front of her mother-in-law’s Ramar, in front of all the neighbours.

Vairum is still watching Sivakami. Now he smiles.

Muchami has gone around to the garden door. Too late, he sees. He looks toward the kitchen. Sivakami doesn’t look at him. She is seeing for herself now. Muchami hangs his head.

Thangajothi has never met her mother’s father. She knows him only from the wedding photo hung on the pantry wall. She has spent hours looking at that photo; she used to ask to have it taken down for her. She thinks her grandparents the handsomest couple she has ever seen. Since last year, though, she has stopped looking at it so much. It’s true that when these photos are taken, the subjects hardly know each other and often look shy and mildly surprised to find themselves in the same frame. In the photo of her grandparents, though, each looks wholly alone. It has begun to make her sad.

From the back of the salon, she watches the hubbub of neighbours part to make way for a man she now recognizes as her grandfather. His high and distracted beauty has not altered, though his face is lined and hair grey. He flutters and booms greetings to the crowd and the family.

Janaki feels faint. Bharati looks at her, alarmed, and makes the same signal as Sivakami did-a fist shaken, thumb out, emphasized with a thrust of the chin-What’s going on?

Janaki signals her back with a hand flipped, fingers spread, bewildered and accusatory: How would I know?

“Ho, ho!” Goli is making his way through the crowd of Cholapatti Brahmins, offering namaskarams. “Yes, quite a while!” he says to one stiff greeting. “Very well!” he answers another coldly formal inquiry. “Very, extraordinarily, well.”

Goli’s clothes are worn, he carries no briefcase, no walking stick. Janaki cannot imagine where he has been all this time, and with whom, and shudders to think what he has been doing. She wonders if he held on to his job with the government.

Vairum has risen. He walks across the room to the garden door, and Muchami steps back as he holds his hand out over the ground and washes it with a tumbler of water, all without taking his eyes off Goli. He wants to see Goli see Bharati, Janaki realizes. He has set this up.

“And you, Vairum!” Goli crows. “Your man told me you had come around and I’m here to tell you bygones are bygones, but don’t think you’re getting off that easy.” He spies lunch. “Don’t mind if I do…” As Bharati rises, though, he halts cartoonishly, mid-stride, and then tries to fling himself back into the crowd. “Is that the time? Duty calls, my friends! Lovely to have seen you!”

But the crowd won’t part. Janaki sees faces she doesn’t know-has Vairum enlisted help? Goli can’t get out.

“Amma!” Vairum calls. “Come! Some visitors!”

Sivakami thinks she hears Goli’s voice. It can’t be. He hasn’t come since Thangam died; her sons do the yearly death anniversary rites for her. Sivakami has trained herself not to think of him.

She peeps out from the pantry. It is Goli. Well, she must feed him. She sees Muchami, at the garden door. Why doesn’t he look glad? She is glad. Goli can do no more harm now, and what does no harm does good. Children need a father. Why is she shaking like this? And are these tears running down both her cheeks? She can’t tell: one of her cheeks feels numb.

“Amma!” Vairum calls.

Vairum has called her “mother.” How long has it been? All is forgiven.

“Come!” he calls.

Now: no Brahmin widow walks through her main hall in front of guests. How the neighbours would talk! But Sivakami is not the woman she used to be. Her house is not defiled-this is not her house. And she left her fear walking a train track near Thiruchi. She can’t lose her son the way she lost her husband: without a word. She goes to Vairum.

“This is a great day!” Vairum proclaims to all assembled, arms outstretched, as Sivakami stands hunched beside him, twisting her fingers. “Finally, all my prolific brother-in-law’s known kin are gathered.”

Bharati, ashen, crosses the room to the garden door. Muchami fetches a brass jug of water and pours water for her to wash her hands. Janaki throbs in sympathy with her friend’s embarrassment. Vairum should not have invited her, she thinks, but Bharati never should have accepted.