Ravana settles himself on a bamboo mat. Two curvaceous young women fan him. “I declare the proceedings open,” he announces lightly.

This is the night Sivakami is to attend the Ramayana she sponsored. Muchami has minimized the degree of attrition it has suffered, so she is shocked, when she approaches the pandal, to find no more than twenty people in attendance, made up of a few neighbours, with some Kulithalai Brahmins she doesn’t know, even though the coronation of Rama has already begun. She has brought Vani, and had called for Murthy and Rukmini before leaving. Rukmini came but said it seemed her husband was already at the performance. Gayatri, sitting on her veranda with her children as they passed, said the same thing.

Now Sivakami turns to Muchami, who is following with Mari at a respectful distance. “Muchami! Where are Murthy Anna and Minister Anna?” she whispers loudly.

Muchami, miserable and mortified on her behalf, looks around. “I can’t imagine, Amma.”

Sivakami takes a place on a mat to one side of the stage and says to Vani, “I suppose Vairum was meeting some associate and will come when he’s done?”

Vani doesn’t answer. Sivakami looks at her hard and looks for Muchami again, but he has taken a place with the non-Brahmins, too far away to ask him the same question.

Back at the Self-Respect Ramayana, each of the characters is tried, one by one. Vairum, caught up in the mood of the crowd, finds the hearings eerily convincing. It never would have occurred to him to fault Rama and Sita for behaving as they do in the story, but it’s really quite arguable. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to see his gods as he did before. Perhaps this is what it means to be a Hindu in the new age. Mother and father are to be worshipped as gods, and they have their limitations, as Vairum increasingly can see. Why shouldn’t the gods, too, admit their faults?

Next, the politicians are tried: the chubby Gandhi, the buck-toothed Nehru, a host of others, found short-sighted-nay, blind; neglectful; unwilling to face their own prejudices. The crowd is in a frenzy.

Finally, the men of the salon: Brahmin and non-Brahmin but all clearly elite, marked unmistakably by their fine clothes, soft hands, softer bellies. They are given no chance to speak because they are clearly guilty, guilty, guilty.

Vairum recalls his euphoria at that long-ago courtroom victory when he won his sister her due. Here it is again, the triumph of right over might. The excitement of the crowd, unbelievably, is still mounting. Their clamour coalesces into a chant: “Parade! Parade!”

Like a snake with a belly full of squirming mice, the throng surges out along the path where, so recently, Murthy stretched his now defiled body, and heads toward the other tent.

“There’s another Brahmin!” shouts one of the hired goons. “Take him!”

Vairum is alarmed as two of the bailiffs reach for him.

“Ugh!” The one to reach him first pulls back. “Stop! Leper!”

The thugs surround Vairum but none is willing to touch him. One throws him a rope. “Tie your own wrists, leper.”

“No!” Two of Muchami’s nephews push through the crowd and shove them aside, defending Vairum against attack as they had when they were all lads in school. “He doesn’t count. He has attended every night of your Ramayana.”

“It’s lascivious curiosity, just as they like our women,” sneers the roughest-looking bailiff.

“Yeah, take advantage, but don’t take it home,” says another.

“Really, he is different. Even the Brahmins know it,” says the older nephew gently. By then, several of Vairum’s friends, who were willing to defend him but, unlike the nephews, unused to having to, have advanced with similar protests.

The mass has continued to flow around them, and now Ravana comes past on his horse, with the prisoners of the salon, roped together, trudging abjectly behind.

“What’s this, a stray?” Ravana trumpets from far above, then squints at him. “Leper?”

“They say he’s an exception, sire,” the tubby bailiff explains.

“Oh, they say so, do they?” Ravana glances from one nephew to another. “Well then, it must be so. We must trust the locals, fellows, or how will they ever trust us? Hop to, my nasties,” he calls to the salon cortege. “There’s more than one way to conquer,” he nods to the foiled vigilantes. “In making war, as in making love, you must use your head as well as your hands.”

He gallops on with a laugh and wink.

VAIRUM IS SWEPT ALONG in the crowd to “The Coronation of Rama,” the grand finale of the conventional Ramayana.

Thus it is that Sivakami witnesses her gods arrested and tried, in a monkey court where the only monkey is found innocent, and the enemy of her gods, whose painted demon face revealed little intelligence and much vanity, is surprised but gratified to find himself revered as a hero. She sees her gods and her neighbours pelted with shoes (no one should have been wearing shoes on ground that had been consecrated for the performance, she thinks-did they bring them in bags?) and thus turned into untouchables. Rama is defiled, hit with the very sandals-his own-that his younger brother had placed on the throne when the god was sent into exile.

From her vantage point, backed safely by Muchami and Mari into a corner of the clearing, along with Vani and Rukmini, Sivakami feels curiously unsurprised to see Vairum arrive with the crowd from the other Ramayana, more surprised to see Murthy and Minister arrive as prisoners.

She had been wondering whether all this was her fault, whether she attracted the other Ramayana with her extravagant gesture. Gayatri and Muchami had assured her, no, no, this could never be the case. It’s not the kind of thing she would say to Vairum. She and he make eye contact now, across the crowd, but she can’t tell what he is thinking. From her protected corner, she tries but can’t tell if he is wearing shoes, as has been his habit since Minister bought him his first pair.

Hours later, the hoopla shows no sign of abating, and in fact feels as though it might turn ugly. Muchami edges Sivakami, Rukmini, Vani and Mari along the clearing to the path and signals to Vairum to join them. Vairum says a word of farewell to a couple of friends and comes to them. He is barefooted, but as they make their way along the path, he dives for a moment into the brush and recovers his shoes.

They are all silent as they walk and Sivakami soon realizes she is the only one who can break the quiet. None of the others will speak before she or Vairum does, and Vairum never feels the need to account for his actions.

“If you didn’t want the Ramayana, I never would have commissioned it,” she says, not trying to keep the reproach out of her voice.

“I never said I didn’t want it,” he replies, aware that this doesn’t begin to explain his behaviour.

“How could you humiliate me so?” she whispers.

“I had no intention to humiliate you. My convictions are different from yours, that is all.”

It’s true that he attended the other Ramayana because he couldn’t stand to attend Sivakami’s, and yet, even as he says he didn’t mean to humiliate her, he feels the statement turning into a lie. Could he have borne his neighbours’ company for her sake? Another son might have, but what other son is subjected to all he must endure, for the sake of caste?

“I can’t stand to be a Brahmin sometimes. If you weren’t a Brahmin, you wouldn’t be in white, with your head shaved, hiding in the house, living constantly in a state of victimhood while thinking yourself better than everyone else.”

“We are better,” Sivakami says simply, bewildered. “Why are you not proud?”

“I just can’t stand it!” he roars at her, turning backward along the path to face her, and the others, arrayed behind. “That there is no escape. Can’t you… I want to see things differently sometimes!”