He rose reluctantly and, opening the thatched door, stepped outside. She could hear him saying, ‘Welcome, thatha. Welcome, maama.’ There was no dearth of these niceties here. People were always ready to say ‘Come! Come!’ and raise their hands in a friendly gesture. But the same hands were also prepared to hit and chase away the people they did not want around.

Saroja was not sure if she should step outside or not. There was a heaviness in her stomach. For two days now, she had been experiencing some dizziness. In the mornings, she felt weak and dull. She even felt unsteady while walking, and feared that she might fall. She needed to hold on to something at those moments. She had never faced such things before. She decided to wait for him to come back inside. When she focused her attention outside once again, she heard him splashing some water from the pot on his face.

‘I painstakingly fetch all this water in the middle of the night,’ complained Marayi, ‘and you pour it all out without a thought!’

He did not reply to that. In fact, he did not respond to her most of the time. She often scolded him, ‘It is like rain on a buffalo. It makes no difference. See!’ But he still would not answer.

Some of the men settled on the cot that had been laid down on the rock, others on the large stone nearby. Kumaresan sat in front of them and said, ‘Tell me, maama. Why have you come at this hour?’

‘It has dawned everywhere, mapillai,’ said one of the men. ‘It is only you who doesn’t seem to notice time flying by.’

Everyone laughed. The door to the hut stood open. Saroja huddled away to make sure they could not see her if they glanced in that direction. From where she sat, she could not really make out their faces clearly, but she could hear them perfectly.

‘Mapillai,’ began one of the men, ‘I don’t know what you were thinking when you did what you did. But you are the talk of the entire village today. At the meeting last night, a lot of people said very emphatically that we should not start the preparations for the festival. We don’t know what her caste is, they are saying. We don’t know where he married her, according to what rituals . . . The point is that he has brought a girl here about whom we know nothing. The entire village bears a mark of impurity if there is a woman here whose caste or family are unknown. And if we start the festival here with this defilement in our midst, we might incur the wrath of Goddess Mariyatha. That’s what people are saying. They are saying let’s not have the festival at all.’