And so Bhai Anna eventually persuaded her into agreeing. Kumaresan was delighted. Although he liked working the fields, he only had the cattle and his mother for company every single day. The prospect of looking at new faces, meeting new people was thrilling. He had grown tired of swimming around within the confines of his well. He was eager to spread his arms and legs without fear and swim in a vast ocean.

Bhai Anna left earlier than usual the next day mainly because he was taking Kumaresan with him. Marayi packed food for them. The egg vendor laughed. ‘Are you still living in the past? Do you think we are going to walk all the way? If we leave before dark and catch the bus, we will be there by morning. And there are plenty of parotta shops on the way.’ But Marayi wouldn’t listen. So Kumaresan boarded the bus with all the food his mother had lovingly packed.

When he reached Tholur, Kumaresan found that the town was bigger than he had expected. The streets seemed endless, and they all looked similar. Seeing the large cinema halls made him happy. He loved watching movies, but back in the village, getting Marayi’s permission to watch even one movie was a tiresome task. ‘Do you think we are big landlords who can spend money to watch some dance and song?’ she used to say. Here in the town, though, he could watch a movie a week without his mother’s nagging.

The man who owned the soda shop was a relative of Bhai Anna’s. He owned five such establishments, each in a different part of town. But they were not shops that sold soda. They were actually places—a small room in some narrow gully—where soda was made and bottled. Kumaresan’s job was to make the bottled soda and supply batches of it to other small shops that would sell it. For this he was especially given a bicycle. In Tholur these small shops were called ‘bunk shops’. It did not make sense to Kumaresan at first. He was only familiar with the two petrol bunks he had seen in Kunnoor. So he assumed that these were shops within petrol bunks. Only later did he learn that it was these small roadside shops that were called ‘bunks’. His shop manufactured soda and coloured cold drinks in bottles with round glass stoppers that had to be popped open before drinking. In the shops that sold them, these bottles were kept in small vats filled with water. His job also required him to collect the empty bottles from the shops and fill them with the soda he made.

At one end of town, Kumaresan’s employer owned a house that had been divided into several small rented-out portions. Kumaresan operated his soda shop from one of these rooms: a space that contained soda bottles, a machine that made soda, and vats filled with water. It was also where he lived. He even had a kerosene stove which he used to boil jeera to make the coloured drinks, as well as some dishes and pans in which he cooked his food. Although people in the neighbouring sections felt this was their home, Kumaresan did not; he just called it his room.