‘Do you want to drink tea?’ he asked her. Even though they would be eating as soon as they reached the shop, she did want some tea first. She looked with wonder at the way they washed the glass tumblers first in regular water and then with hot water. The boy at the tea shop poured the tea back and forth between tumblers until it was frothing at the top. He then added a little bit of the decoction over the froth and handed the glass to her. This is how you make tea, she said to herself. She hadn’t had tea since they had come to Kattuppatti. Back home, in Tholur, it was only after she drank her morning cup of tea that she could go about her tasks. But she would not get that here. She hesitated to ask Kumaresan, knowing that her mother-in-law would probably say something hurtful. She had decided she would rather give up drinking tea than brave that.

There was a large open ground on the right side of the road. ‘The Saturday fair happens here,’ said Kumaresan. She pictured it in her mind—a place filled with shops, crowds of people wandering about, taking in the sights. She imagined herself as one in the crowd, walking among the multitudes. No one there to point to her and ask, ‘Who is she? What is her caste?’ No one to say, ‘She is a witch, she bewitched him.’ Nobody in that crowd cared about how many sovereigns of gold she had brought with her. No one who would say, ‘We are excommunicating you from the village.’ She didn’t have to hesitate or be afraid to bargain. She could fight.

Kumaresan kept explaining to her many things about the town, but she didn’t really pay much attention. She was still walking through her imaginary crowd, buying bangles at a shop in the fair, happily strolling about on the dusty grounds. It was all very exciting. How lovely to just be one in so many, she thought. Going away from the crowd was the reason for her unhappiness. Could she get back to it now? Would they accept her again? What if she merged with the multitude at the fair? These thoughts swarmed inside her.

By then, they had arrived at the shop Kumaresan had rented. It was only when he stopped balancing with one foot on the ground and said, ‘Get down, girl,’ did she snap out of her reverie. When they were in Tholur, he used to secretly call her ‘pilla’. There it meant ‘boy’. But here it meant ‘girl’. Initially, she did not understand why he called her that, but she grew to like it. ‘Here, that is how men address their wives, pilla,’ he laughed. He had a way of unearthing the happiness that was buried in her heart. Beaming, she had thought, may this ‘pilla’ be the beginning of his untiring efforts to make her belong in this place.