Once washed, if he lifted each bottle and held it against the light, he could detect even the tiniest crack. He particularly liked the sheen of the green bottles. Periyasami always teased him, ‘Why are you staring at it so intently, like you are looking at a young virgin girl?’

Kumaresan replied, ‘You should clean a bottle so thoroughly that you can see through it clearly.’

Periyasami said, ‘Oh, you are teaching me now! You have clearly mastered everything! Dey! Don’t I know? You think of that skinny, wiry girl when you clean these bottles, don’t you? Tell me. With just one look at your face I can tell that you are imagining the shape of her hips as you trace the curve of the glass bottles.’

Periyasami said whatever came to his mind. He always referred to Saroja as ‘that skinny, wiry girl’. But it was true that Kumaresan washed the bottles with great care. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be that careful all the time.

At the arrack shop, they did not wash the bottles regularly. Whenever it got to the point where one couldn’t see the liquid through the dirt encrusted inside the bottle, the crates would come back to Kumaresan’s shop for washing. He’d wash them until they sparkled, and the people who brought the crates back from the shop would take soda in those clean bottles as well as in some of the fresh bottles lying around in the shop. When he checked the washed bottles for cracks, there were invariably two or three that he had to discard. He had five or six crates of bottles to wash every week. But he didn’t mind, because he liked any work that involved staying in the shop and not going out.

One day Kumaresan was in a hurry. Periyasami did not wash the bottles he had brought back. Instead, those bottles too were filled with soda at the machine and then sealed with the round marble stoppers. Kumaresan carried the bottles outside and placed them in the crates tied to the bicycle. He had developed a knack of carrying three bottles in each hand, holding them by their necks in the gaps between his fingers. That day he was carrying three in one hand and two in the other.

As he was placing the bottles in one hand in the crate, the ones in his other hand suddenly exploded. Since even just one bottle exploding always set off the others near it, all three bottles in his hand burst at the same time. Kumaresan could not understand what had happened. Periyasami rushed outside. So did the neighbours in the row of houses. Kumaresan stood there with bloodied hands and feet, but he felt no pain yet. He could not even tell who ran where and came back with pieces of cloth to tie bandages on him. It was only when Periyasami was taking him on the bicycle to the hospital that he slowly started to feel the pain. In the three months since he had started working in the soda shop, this was the first mishap that had occurred.