‘My children want only what they can get from me; my money, my house, my land. I’m the slave in the house. No, I won’t give my house to anybody. I will hold on to it. After all, it’s in my possession—my children can look after themselves. No, no, I won’t give my house so easily to anyone. I am holding on to the oppuwa. Are they waiting for me to die? Well, till I die everything will be mine. If I sell the house now they will take everything from me and throw me out on to the road. This is the only thing I have … this too they want to take from me. The deeds are with me, they won’t get them.’

I could not understand how a mother could feel this way towards her offspring, nor how children could feel as her’s did towards their own mother. All natural feelings seemed to have been eroded; how could they all exist together under one roof in this atmosphere of hatred, suspicion, distrust?

‘Look at my younger son,’ she continued in her distraught way, ‘he was going to marry a young girl. But what happened? He ended up living with her mother. She is an old woman. I am just a year or two older than her and she is living with my young son. And what does she do with her daughter? Gives her in marriage to the younger uncle, the mother’s own brother. And my son, I am sure he is charmed—he has a stomach ailment. He cannot eat. He has all this pain. This woman is to blame. He doesn’t do anything for me—he only comes and worries me for money time and time again. One day I had to make a complaint to the police—yes, about my own son.’

Had the memory of the milk she had nourished her sons with turned so easily to gall? How had they all turned against her, I wondered. I thought of my own mother. In the past she had made arichenai and abishekam for me to propitiate the gods. Had she forgotten me now as had my own brothers and sisters? Would the gods help my family to turn their faces in my direction as they once had? When I stood before Kali I too asked for protection from the forces of evil which surrounded me—but these forces of evil emanated not from my own people but from strangers who acted as if they must expend whatever evil they possessed within themselves on me …

The woman went on talking. Didn’t she know who I was? Had she been wearied by the silence of the gods whom she spoke to so that she had had to turn to a human being once again, this time a complete stranger?