She introduces the topic with Vairum as soon as her brothers leave, immediately after the morning meal on the Sunday, the day of the dawn celebration, when first light saw Vani stir the first milk into the first pongal pot of her married life. Vairum is rather at loose ends, since Vani, her mother and the two unmarried paternal uncles, who will linger a couple of days in Cholapatti, have all gone to pay some obligatory calls. He sits before the floor desk with a slate for rough work, a copy book for fine work and an advanced physical chemistry text on the floor beside him.

He has turned the desk to face the door of the garden, ostensibly to receive a little of the breeze. Sivakami, at work cutting vegetables in the doorway of the pantry, watches him for a few moments and sees that he is staring out the garden door and not at his slate and paper. Every quarter-hour or so, he starts, as though a bubble around his head has burst, and bends with violent discipline toward the desk. But little by little, as though his chin is being lifted by an unseen finger, his head rises until his gaze again dreamily mixes with the morning sunshine, the sounds and smells of the drowsy garden. Sivakami watches him go through this cycle three times before she decides his assignments cannot be terribly urgent. She snaps the blade down into its block and goes to crouch beside him.

His instinct with his mother is always to look self-important and preoccupied, but brusqueness is, in this moment, too great a reach. He succeeds only in looking as though he just woke up.

“Do you recall your grandmother?” Sivakami asks. Her carefully chosen opening line only disorients Vairum further.

“I thought my grandmother died when my father was small,” he says cautiously.

“Oh, yes, no-that is to say, my mother.”

“No.” He is trying. “I don’t think I do.”

“You were very small when she used to come and visit us here.”

“I was very small when my father died, and I remember him.”

Sivakami was unprepared for this but tries not to show it. “You remember him?”

“Yes, of course, everything. Everything about him.”

Vairum is getting impatient. She launches more firmly toward her point.

“Well, my mother didn’t come when you and your sister fell sick with the fever, because she had visited recently, and I said we were fine here, we were managing. Then she would have come when your father took ill, she was preparing to come, but then he died and she fell sick herself. From the shock…”

She looks to see how Vairum is taking this. He doesn’t understand why she is talking about all this now.

“Even if she had come, you might not have remembered her. There were so many people around at that time, it was hard for both you children.” Sivakami shifts her position. Her knees crack. “When my mother fell ill, of course, I went to see her. Do you remember that? Murthy and Rukmini took care of you and Thangam. I meant to go for one week, but I stayed for three.”

Vairum shrugs-maybe he remembers, maybe not. Murthy and Rukmini’s house is like a second home. They always took their meals there when Sivakami was isolated with her period, for instance-who could remember whether they stayed for a few days or weeks?

“I stayed on then because she died, and, you know, there were things to be done. But before she passed on, there was something else. When I arrived, she already knew she was dying. She called me to her side, when no one else was around, especially your uncles or their wives, and she gave me an instruction. It was something I had to promise her, at her deathbed, as her only daughter.”

A person would have to be made of stone not to be interested by a promise extracted at the deathbed. Vairum’s rock-diamond eyes glitter. He is intrigued.

“Now, the time has come for me to fulfill my pledge. Do you want to know what it was?”

He nods, just a little.

“I will take them to court,” he responds, rising, even before Sivakami has proposed it. His eyes shine with ardour to be a tool for justice. “It is the only way, Amma, and you must not prevent me from fulfilling your pledge to your mother and getting my sister the money that is rightfully hers. Now you have told me, you must stand out of my way.”

Sivakami has not even told him about her worries on Thangam’s behalf, only that this was what her mother had wanted, a pledge she must fulfill and a point of justice. It appeals to Vairum’s sense of the noble, the romantic; he’s perhaps more than usually susceptible to things of this nature at the moment.

Sivakami is glad that she didn’t have to use Thangam’s neediness as a motivation. Vairum doesn’t, in her opinion, need any more reasons to despise Goli.

For his part, although Vairum says that Vani’s uncles will certainly represent the case, he doesn’t mention how he will relish being on their side, one of a team with them, his comparatively puny shoulder between their massive ones, breaking down his uncles’ door (in a legal sense) and demanding his sister’s due. Vairum knows he shouldn’t be so grateful to be part of his bride’s family, he knows he should have accepted her coolly into his household; she should be the grateful one. But that’s not how he feels.

He notices his niece, Saradha, observing him unsurely. She has come through the kitchen from the courtyard and is flushed with heat. Fair skin, shining black hair: a perfectly attractive child. Vairum beckons her.

“Come. You want to draw a picture? Come and draw a flower on my slate.”

She comes and sits and draws and smiles, as she will once a day until he leaves.

Vani’s immense uncles come the following morning, as they have made it a habit to do on this visit, to take their coffee upon the veranda. They peruse newspapers Minister has sent through Vairum as a welcome gesture. They take snuff. Occasionally, one grunts and points out an article or announcement to the other. They don’t appear to notice the children swarming the veranda’s periphery, watching them, perhaps because it is not unusual to find swarms of curious children around any visitor to a village, perhaps because the uncles know they are a curious sight, with their linen jackets and wobbling, shiny cheeks. They are the largest specimens of humanity these children have ever seen.

After three-quarters of an hour or so, they go inside, abandoning the untidily folded newspapers and leaving the tumblers and bowls with sugary traces that soon attract ants. Vairum is looking over the document his mother has given him, the yellowed parchment that confirms the legitimacy of her claim.

He scrambles to arrange bamboo mats for the uncles while they cluck absently, “Relax, son.” They beckon for the parchment and for him to open the second of the double garden doors to admit more light. Each carefully reads the text on the scroll. To Sivakami, out of sight in the kitchen, each sound-the sniff of an uncle, the low crackling of the scroll-is a word fate is writing on the taut parchment of her eardrum.

Then they begin to discuss:

Uncles: “Why is your mother pursuing the claim now?”

Vairum: “She promised her mother that she would.”

Uncles: “But why now?”

Vairum: “Because… she can, now. Because you can help her.”

Uncles: “No, we think it’s because she needs it, now.”

Vairum: “Why does she need it? I look after her.”

The uncles purse their brows.

Uncles: “Hasn’t your mother begun to care for your sister’s children? ”

Vairum: “Yes…^»

Uncles: “How is she paying for them?”

Vairum: “My… well, the children’s parents, their grandparents…”

Uncles: “No, there must be some need, you understand, to convince the court. The grandparents have very little money, the father must maintain a household of his own. Your mother must need the money for the children.”

Vairum: “No. My sister’s children are not orphans. My mother is pursuing this because she promised her mother, a deathbed promise, that she would. Her dying mother. That’s enough, isn’t it?”