Thandampani came into their lives needing sympathy. This official, this bureaucrat, felt he needed to explain his mystic name to them, to make them feel he was some kind of avatar of the gods himself. But he wanted an audience too. He would visit them in their hotel room, sit himself comfortably on one of the easy chairs and begin. ‘I am a misfit,’ he once complained. ‘I cannot talk to anyone as I talk to you. My ideas are socialist. I do not follow the rituals of religion which my wife believes in. But I have faith.’

They invited him to share their meal of idli with chutney and sambara. He ate sparingly, an idli or two. ‘These are not fresh,’ he said disparagingly. ‘You must come to my home for a meal. My wife makes idli daily for me.’ But how could they have kept these promises which they made so earnestly on the spur of the moment? Moving from place to place on their pilgrimage they had to spend their brief time in thought and meditation rather than in conversation with too many gurus. They had to avoid confusions, reach the source of their search directly themselves. Yet Thandampani enjoyed his conversations with them. He could talk freely because no one would disagree with him or interrupt the words that flowed from the full cornucopia of his thoughts, a melange of everything from politics to Hindu mythology. Moreover he knew much more than them about what was around him.

There were places which they would never arrive at, places concealed to them which were not part of their pilgrimage.

‘There are refugee camps here. They are crowded. There is nothing for these refugees to do here.’

He also told them about his beginnings.

‘I was a B.A. in chemistry and studied in a Catholic College. We had discipline there …. I remember the time I was working in a bank in a village. Everybody brought gifts to the manager. He was invited to big feasts. He was very important in that district. He had a car. I lived a simple life … my wife complains that I do not take her to temple often enough. She likes to wear nice sarees when she goes.’

When Sri, Dewa and Anna left Tiruchi temporarily to go to Bangalore, Thandampani had missed them greatly. Now, as soon as they return he visits them on the last evening of their stay here. He is upset that his new friends cannot have supper with him and taste his wife’s idli. ‘If the others cannot then you come,’ he tells Dewa who he thinks is truly liberal and broadminded.