“Do you think when Nandu Vadyar hears music he’s hearing the same thing we are?” Janaki asks metaphysically.

“I don’t care what he hears.” Bharati resumes her lunch. “Anyway, that’s why I must have courage to listen to Vani Amma even after the sun goes down and the ghosts come out!”

Their four little friends jump and shiver as if on command. Janaki, because she is lieutenant and foil, and because she’s smarting from having had her question dismissed, remains icily still.

“I saw a ghost, Janaki, two days ago,” Bharati gasps, her eyes dancing, “when I came to hear Vani Amma play and Draupadi was late coming to get me. Can you guess where?”

“Tamarind tree, again?” Janaki assumes a diagnostic expression. “By the gate?”

“Have you seen the ghost that lives there?”

“Oh, there’s more than one,” Janaki world-wearily informs her. “Describe it.”

“Huge, skin of fire, dripping fangs, broken horns,” Bharati lists as though cataloguing the merits of a recent clothing purchase. All four of their friends are squirming, stricken.

“No, I haven’t seen that one,” Janaki admits with a tone of detached interest. “I think it almost got my brother once.”

“I shielded my eyes and ran.” Bharati mimes the tableau. “I could hear it chasing me until its power sucked it back into the tree.”

“But how can you bear to go back, Bharati?” One of their companions asks, reason and curiosity overtaking her fright.

“Because that’s the only place I can hear Vani Amma play,” Bharati harrumphs, adding dreamily, “I would overcome any fear, I would scale mountains and swim up waterfalls to live in her music.”

The whole rest of their class, munching lunches, looks frumpy and discontent in contrast with Bharati. Even Janaki, despite their close association, can never come close to matching her friend in style or mystery. Bharati seems to have been born sophisticated; there is something tragic that twinkles about her, something real or tinsel, one cannot tell, but it is intriguing either way.

On the bullock cart ride home, Janaki thinks on what may await her. She hopes her mother has arrived. She hopes her little sisters look like her, especially the one, Kamalam, who is coming to stay.

Vani normally commences playing shortly after the children get home. Today, though, as the bullock cart rounds off the town road onto the Brahmin-quarter approach, Janaki can already hear the music-vibrant, furious. Vani must be well into her session to have the raga at such a pitch.

The front hall, as always, is dim and cool, but the floor is shimmering with trails and patches of golden dust, as though a character from fairy stories has wandered through their home and enchanted it. The hair on Janaki’s neck stands up: her mother, loveliness itself, is seated against a pillar, smiling faintly. The contours of Thangam’s shoulders are accentuated by shadows of fairy dust, the pleats of her sari spread against her swollen belly. Kamalam, a little girl who does look like Janaki, leans against Thangam shyly. Another, littler girl, Radhai, is galloping to and fro in the garden with Muchami, banging trees with a stick.

Laddu, Sita and Janaki all grin and shuffle their feet in front of their mother.

“His.”

“His.”

“Hi,” they say.

“Kiss your mother,” Sivakami says loudly from the kitchen doorway, and the children go to Thangam, bending awkwardly to peck her on the cheek. She touches them lightly with her hand as they incline toward her. She smiles as if to put them off, and Sivakami, watching, feels pained. Has Thangam been made unable to show affection, too embarrassed by her father’s favouritism, and now by her fecundity? But why make the children suffer for that? thinks Sivakami. Vairum is not even home.

The children look at Sivakami as if to ask what to do next, and she beckons them to the pantry to receive their after-school snacks. Laddu and Sita sit against the wall in the main hall, Janaki in one of the doorways to the garden. Janaki expects to be asked questions, but she’s not. Sita and Laddu look proud and anxious to be noticed. Sita creeps gradually closer until she can take Thangam’s hand. Thangam lets her, without clasping the hand in return.

Saradha comes into the hall from the kitchen, bustling and bouncing, straightening things that don’t really need straightening. Janaki watches her and understands that, annoying as her methods are, this is her peculiar way of giving herself a feeling of stability. She listens, disturbed, to Vani’s music. It sounds mad this afternoon, twirling and popping like Deepavali fireworks off the roof above them. She thinks she recognizes “Jaggadodharana,” a song of praise for Lord Krishna, but each note is scissored frighteningly into sixteenths, blurring its sound. She hums along-yes, it is that song-and starts singing the lyrics, about the god born to a mortal, and his mother playing with him, as though he is merely her plump, silken baby, hers to hold, out of the world’s eye. Janaki first heard the song at a wedding a year earlier, and made a relative there teach her the words. Lord Krishna is humanity’s essence and its saviour, says the song, and his mother plays with him as though he is no more than her precious baby.

Then Vairum blurs through the pantry door and pulls up sharp at the sight of his sister and her mass of offspring, and Janaki suddenly remembers when Vani went away to have her baby and it died. Janaki has often thought about this cousin who vanished before she ever had the chance to meet him. It took her a while to understand that, unlike her and her sisters and brother, who have all been taken away and all eventually returned, this baby will never arrive here. She has always wondered what he looked like-crystal crossed with a moonbeam? A bubble on a cloud, attached to the world by dew-covered spider lines. They tore and he floated away. Had he come to live with them, he would have been Janaki’s special companion, her complement, she thinks. He would have seen light where she saw dark, he would have been Vani’s melody to Janaki’s taalam. She used to crave dirt; he might have licked whitewash from clean corners and she alone would know.

Vani hits and pulls furious strings. The melody hammers on the drone as Janaki’s imaginings plink glassily onto the brick floor and she drowses, half in sun, half in shade, her hand half-consciously tapping the song’s rhythm on her knee. She’s awakened by Sita knocking on her head.

“I’m going to go have a veena lesson like I always do at this time,” she remarks pointedly. “I’ll wake you up when it’s time for supper.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Janaki starts toward the back of the house. “Let me change, wait for me,” she calls over her shoulder as she runs.

At four o‘clock, as every Monday and Wednesday, she and Sita have a veena lesson at Gayatri’s house, with a terrible teacher of good family engaged by Gayatri’s mother-in-law. Gayatri had invited Sita and Janaki to participate since her daughter Akila was quite young and it would help to have older girls along, since she knew Janaki would like nothing better, and since she couldn’t invite Janaki without inviting Sita. Janaki ekes all she can from their teacher’s limited store of knowledge, while Sita, though she loves the idea of having lessons, is terrible and never practises. Still, Gayatri and Sivakami privately agreed that any constructive activity could help curb Sita’s destructive impulses, and Gayatri was glad to help Sivakami, much as she disliked having Sita in the house. Even if Sivakami had intended to give her granddaughters veena lessons, which she hadn’t, it would be impossible for the girls to receive a teacher at home, given that teachers generally teach in exactly the hours when Vani conducts her own afternoon session.

Sita will, of course, have left by the time Janaki gets out of her school uniform and into a regular paavaadai, and Janaki knows this, but changes quickly just in case. Sita has gone, so Janaki trots to the back door off the courtyard and leans out peering to her left, so she can see Bharati, who sits beneath a mango tree as she always does at this time.