When Radha was young, she was always made to feel special. Everything was in her favour. Her reputation was impeccable, her chastity and moral purity assured. She would do nothing to mar the status of her family in the social circles they moved in. Her mother, Mrs Shivalingam, was a woman greatly revered and respected in her generation. It was always the dignified personage of Mrs Shivalingam who was at the forefront of all the marriage rituals even while bathing the bride with milk and honey. It was what women of their privileged social standing had to submit to—subject themselves to a kind of subtle sleuthing, a prying to detect flaws and imperfections in the most intimate parts of the female body. What if there were scars, signs of former misdemeanours? To submit to this ritual was the tradition of these high-caste Vellala families. Submission was ingrained in the woman from the time of her birth, carried on to these prenuptial rites. Virginity was a special requirement or she, the woman, would be spurned. The milk and honey that was poured on the as yet unviolated body, the virgin body, made her feel she was a goddess, part of that mythology of fertility, being prepared for procreation. When Radha had come of age, she was fed special food—eggs, sesame oil, the flour of different grains stirred into a thick porridge, and fruits—to make the womb strong for bringing forth many children. Radha had seen the goddesses bathed by devotees in the temples of Thanjavur and Madurai and Nallur, with milk and honey, with theertham and kumkumum. The bride to be who stepped shivering and naked for the ceremony had to submit to the scrutiny of those experienced eyes of women who had acquired knowledge of the men they had slept with for years, whose most intimate habits they had grown used to with acceptance and submission. The woman’s awareness of her own sexuality was not of any importance. The Kamasutra was generally read by the men. A woman’s compliance with those unwritten strictures on chastity and virginity were the guidelines to a happy and successful marriage. Sometimes things did not always work out as expected. During one bride bathing ritual, Radha’s mother had detected an early pregnancy in the young woman. What secret terrors of being discovered the young woman must have had, and yet she had escaped. Mrs Shivalingam had kept it a secret. The bride was swathed in her vermilion koorai saree and led to the manaverai, her eyes cast down demurely, to await the bridegroom. The fires in the sacred yaham continued to burn steadily.