As they approach the headman’s house, a dog suddenly growls, provoking the headman’s house cock to squawk. But dawn is still an hour or so away. Silence descends again as the oil lamps in the headman’s house draw the girls into their warm circle. Maadhi stops outside, unsure of whether she, a lower-caste untouchable, can actually go into that house. Parvati impatiently pulls her up the steps and draws her into the hallway. Both girls see the unconscious Annaiah at the same time. With a cry, Parvati runs to him and raises his head onto her lap.

Maadhi, saucer-eyed and nervous, is about to touch Annaiah when she and Parvati hear a moan from the back of the house. Maadhi rushes there like an arrow and stops at the door transfixed, holding her garland with tight fingers.

And Parvati knows.

With a cry, she runs to the door and sees Sundru’s still-clothed multi-coloured body all tangled up, pushing away, fighting and scratching the clinging Honni’s naked form, muttering, ‘Maadhi, Maadhi.’ Parvati gives a shattered sob and collapses into Maadhi’s arms. The tent girl stands, stoic and frozen, holding the sobbing girl with one hand, her swetasanchari and suryavamsi garland in the other, looking at the tableaux of hostility.

By the time Thimmakka, Ajji, Bangari and the other women reach the Ooramma temple, the sky is flashing fresh streams of lightning. The village folk are almost vibrating with terror. Even the stoic Bhaskaraiah, adjusting his spectacles and sipping paanaka from a steel lota, is unsettled by the eerie tension in the air.

The air smells of fear and the paanaka and the hogesoppu that many men are openly smoking to calm themselves down. Dasegowda is shaking himself into a fury, trying to talk to Ooramma. Normally uncooperative about anything that concerns Annaiah or the Kamanahabba, he has seen the fear in the faces of the village folk. He is pleased that they have sought him in their hour of greatest need. Also, he has triumphed over his rival on that man’s most important day.

Although he rushed to the temple to organize prayers, all his well-meaning efforts seemed to be in vain. No matter what prayers he utters, how much he howls and leaps in the air, Ooramma remains a block of stone. Maybe she doesn’t want to appear on Kamanahabba day?

Something finally gives and crashes. The villagers look up in hope. Has Ooramma come to save them? No. As if to compound all the horrors of the day, the lightning from the sky has crashed against the temple itself. The stone cock on the temple splits open and crows, as if it is real.