Saroja was motherless. He didn’t know what had happened to her mother. Later, after getting to know her, when he had asked her about this, she’d merely said, ‘She died.’ When he asked her how, she said, ‘I don’t know.’ It was not that she was scared he would probe further; she simply did not want to dwell on the subject. So he never brought it up again. She liked that about him. After all, what could she tell him about a mother whose face she didn’t even remember? When she had asked her father, she was told, ‘She died.’ That was all. He didn’t reveal anything about how and when.

Kumaresan knew that she had a father and a brother, but he had not seen their faces properly. Both of them worked in a leather factory. They left every day at dawn and by the time they returned it was dark. He could hear the noises they made when they left in the mornings, but he never stepped outside then. He was afraid to show them his face. In fact, he did all he could to make sure they never laid eyes on him. As a result he did not see them either. On Sundays, their one day off, her brother would spread a cot under the tree and sleep soundly, like a corpse. Her father, however, would go out somewhere even on that day. No one knew where.

At night, he could hear them talking. He tried to use their voices to conjure mental images of the two men, but nothing really took shape. Saroja’s was the only face that he could hold in his mind. So he tried to make her face more masculine and then derive the other two from it—an older one for her father, and a younger one for her brother. It was not easy for him to imagine a manly version of her. But he thought everything would look like Saroja; he wanted everything to look like Saroja. When he told her this much later, she had laughed so hard it brought tears to her eyes. ‘No, they both look different,’ she told him, and brought two photographs for him to see. They were old photographs, taken when her father was a young man and her brother a little boy. They only muddled the images in his mind even further. Even though he preferred Saroja in her feminine form, in his mind he dressed her up in men’s clothes to imagine how her father and brother would look. It was like a game. He enjoyed applying different kinds of makeup on her. His hands touched her face several times during the game. She never complained.

From 9 a.m. onwards, he could hear the notes of Ceylon Radio from Saroja’s house. She listened to it while cooking. Even when she was talking to people, she liked to have music playing in the background. Sometimes she would purse her lips and whistle, the sound blending and moving in step with the song.