Even in the row houses back home, her neighbor ­Mythili akka had been a special case. She wouldn’t let anyone inside her house. She would talk to them outside, under the beech tree, and send them away. She distributed the leftovers from her house to others, but never took anything from the others. It took Saroja a long time to understand what was going on. She had heard people say about Mythili akka, ‘Does she think she was born superior to us?’ But she had initially thought these were personal gripes.

Some time after she got close to Kumaresan, she got the urge to make something special for him. So she asked him, ‘Do you like kalakala?’ He did not even know what that was. She decided to make it for him anyway. She bought some wheat and sifted it clean. Then she washed the grains, dried them in the sun and ground them into a flour. She could make a lot of snacks with that wheat flour. Eating rice every day was a costly affair. So she would make dosai, kali, chapatti, puris—everything with wheat flour. Even puris she cooked only on occasion, when her brother asked her affectionately, because that required a lot of oil.

She could make many other snacks with wheat flour. Pakodas, made with chickpea flour, would last only a day or two. But kalakala could be stored for up to a month without it going bad. She kneaded the wheat flour, formed it into narrow strips, cut those into small pieces and then fried them in oil. She loved these. Whenever she felt like snacking, she would take a handful of these and munch on them noisily. When she finished making them, she gave Kumaresan a plateful to eat. He loved them too.

‘Is this what you called Kala?’ he said, deliberately teasing her, because Kala was a female name.

‘Not Kala. It is kalakala,’ she replied.

‘Oh! Two Kalas, is it?’ he joked.

She picked up a few pieces and shook them in her hands. It made a sound: kalakalakalakala . . . She said, ‘That’s the kalakala.’

The snack was so tasty that he couldn’t stop eating it. Everything she made was delicious; she could make all sorts of things. The obvious pleasure with which he ate the kalakala made her immensely happy. Since she had made so much, she distributed portions of the snack to each house in the row.

But Mythili akka said, ‘What is this? No one in our house will eat this.’

Saroja felt like she’d been slapped.

Another neighbour, Parvati, said to her, ‘Don’t you know Mythili only accepts things from people of certain castes?’

Until then Saroja had not thought much about caste. She could not believe that there were such people. ‘What is her caste?’ she inquired.

‘It’s the caste that boasts so much without any reason to.’

So the other neighbours kept their interactions with Mythili akka and her family to a minimum. But the experience with Mythili akka paled in comparison to the ordeal Saroja was facing here.