She woke, awash in guilt and homesickness. She must return and do a puja for that Ramar, she thought, she has been neglecting it, the Ramar that had been her responsibility as wife and mistress. She departed for Cholapatti the same morning, with an adolescent nephew for an escort.
It is early evening when they arrive, expecting no one since no one is expecting them. They walk in the failing light from the train station at Kulithalai, Sivakami as excited as her nephew is bored. When they pass the market stalls that proceed from the roundabout, someone calls out and runs toward them: Annam’s servant girl. She is round-eyed and panting. “Oh, Amma, Amma, you have come so quickly. You got Muchami’s letter, already?”
Sivakami bypasses puzzlement and goes straight for concern. “What’s happened?”
At this sign of trouble, her nephew looks a little more interested. The girl stretches out the drama. “Didn’t Muchami tell you?”
A few more people gather, the men hanging back a little and not acknowledging Sivakami out of respect, making Sivakami even more aware of her discomfort at being in public. She has to know what happened, though, and tries to hear the men’s loudly muttered contributions from four feet away. The servant girl holds her ground, not to be robbed of this juicy revelation. “Well…”
But then, a shout: Muchami is coming. Everyone bursts into babble and the servant girl is drowned out. She pulls back to pout silently as the crowd parts to admit Muchami to the inner circle. “Amma, you didn’t get my letter already, Amma?”
“What letter? You often send me letters. What’s going on?”
“Nothing really bad happened, Amma, it would have, but it didn’t…” Muchami would prefer she had read it. He doesn’t want to see her disappointed with him. “And what it was, was-you know Cunjusamy, the gundu, whose father was Kandan?”
“Yes, yes.”
“He… tried to get at the money, your money, that’s in the hall.”
Everyone around them begins to break in and augment. “He made holes around each window, pulled out all the windows and climbed in…”
“Muchami brought the police in through the front door, while Cunjusamy was coming in through the back.”
“Muchami and the labourers had dressed up like policemen…”
“He used witchcraft to go in through itty-bitty holes in the doors, without opening the locks…”
Muchami shushes the thousand and one well-meaning informants and asks if Sivakami wants to wait for him to get the bullock cart. When she insists on walking, he follows at a discreet distance. They encounter several Brahmin men on the cart path, but they pretend not to see her, exposed as she is by the necessities of modern travel.
At home, Muchami explains what he knows, showing her the holes by the light of kerosene lanterns. He doesn’t know how the invented story about the policemen served Cunjusamy’s motives. Maybe he heard Muchami coming and decided to make a dash but didn’t want to admit it.
Sivakami asks Muchami how Cunjusamy knew about how the money was kept. He explains fully, undefensively, the scene and what he understands, his voice wobbly with shame: Cunjusamy bored a hole in each door from the courtyard to the main hall, not knowing if Muchami or someone else might be sleeping there. Finding no one, he broke through, but stopped before he entered the main hall and effected the robbery, because, he said, Sivakami had four policemen guarding the riches. She asks how he happened to catch Cunjusamy in the act. In telling her, he regains a little pride.
The next morning at four, he is waiting, as he did before, behind Murthy and Rukmini’s house, where she and her nephew are staying, to escort her to the Kaveri River for her bath. She goes, fighting waves of nostalgia, forcing herself not to pretend she has just awoken from her late husband’s arms. On her way back to her house, she stops in at the roadside temple, as used to be her habit.
Back at the house, she does a long, sincere puja to the Ramar. At about eight o‘clock, she asks Muchami to tell her once more what happened, so she can examine the house by the light of day. She finds it essentially in order. Then she and Muchami count the money, using his letters, which she has brought. All accumulated wealth is present and accounted for, not a paisa short. Muchami isn’t looking for compliments and Sivakami doesn’t pay any, but they are in the air: Muchami can both count and be counted on. After counting out Muchami’s salary, plus a little bonus, miscellaneous retaining fees-for the scribe, for example, and the two old couples she supports-they roll the coins in rags torn from Hanumarathnam’s old dhotis and Sivakami deposits the rolls tidily in the Dindigul safe.
Just as she finishes, Chinnarathnam, Hanumarathnam’s old friend from up the road, stops in to inquire whether she needs any assistance in dealing with this intrusion. She asks Muchami-whose proximity to Sivakami is never questioned by anyone, including her-to give Chinnarathnam a storytelling tour of the house while she sequesters herself in the room under the stairs. Even were Sivakami still married, she would not talk to him directly, but now that she is widowed, her orthodoxy dictates that she not even permit this male non-relative to see her. When they have finished and gone back out to the vestibule, she emerges to stand half behind the door to the main hall, and talks to the concerned neighbour through Muchami.
Since no money was taken, Sivakami is inclined to do nothing, but Chinnarathnam advises that it would not be a bad thing to engineer a little something to discourage Cunjusamy, or others like him, from trying such a stunt again. Chinnarathnam is friends with the police commissioner at Kulithalai, and could request that someone from the police interview Cunjusamy. He doesn’t have to be charged with anything, even though what he has done can’t be particularly legal.
Sivakami accepts the advice, asking that Chinnarathnam invite Murthy to come along. Hanumarathnam’s cousin has looked in several times with stalwart offers of help, making Sivakami feel there was nothing in particular he felt he could do. Her nephew also perks up at the suggestion of police involvement and, late that afternoon, Muchami, Murthy and the nephew call on Chinnarathnam and they, under escort of a keen-looking young officer, proceed to Cunjusamy’s house. As per Chinnarathnam’s suggestion, they make themselves seen. Everyone they pass gawks and squawks. No one asks where they’re going.
The mission finds Cunjusamy on his veranda, popping peanut sweets in his mouth and staring into space. Muchami later imitates him when he re-enacts the story for Sivakami’s benefit: Cunjusamy’s eyes look nearly as empty as the sockets of the enormous deer skull on the wall above him; in fact, the long-dead deer looks more perceptive. The party is almost at his step before he jumps up and chokes. He spits the offending morsel past them onto the road and recovers a little of his dignity, the sort that owes less to character than to bulk. He hesitates a moment, before deciding on belligerence as the only available avenue. “What do you want?” he shouts.
They feel his hot, peanutty breath whoosh past them, and the nephew edges behind Muchami. Chinnarathnam replies, “The facts. Just the facts.”
The policeman steps forward and explains, “We just want to get to the bottom of this. Won’t you come along, sir?”
“I didn’t take anything!” Cunjusamy’s chins wag indignantly.
Murthy steps forward with a finger raised, saying, “Aha!” while Chinnarathnam muses, “That’s what’s so curious.”
The policeman gracefully gestures Cunjusamy to precede them into the street, also glancing pointedly at his billy stick. Cunjusamy marches out, still spluttering. All of the village is quiet before them, and noisy in their wake.
At Sivakami’s house, they come into the main hall, where Cunjusamy is waved to a bench. Sivakami positions herself in the pantry to witness. The policeman pulls a notepad from his breast pocket and paces to and fro, then stops and stoops in a single action, his nose level with Cunjusamy’s, his eyebrows beetled penetratingly. He booms, “Where were you on the night of?”