After fourteen weeks of this, tired of heart and filled with weariness, they turn homeward. They climb a particularly steep hill, stagger towards shade and collapse. Something stirs inside Sannegowda. He slowly opens his tired eyes and looks around. There is something strange here, something half-remembered.

He stares skyward. They are lying in the shade of two interlocking trees. Exactly like the story Ningamma spread in their village. Sannegowda wakes Doddegowda and mutely points at the trees. The brothers fearfully look into the valley on the other side, afraid of what they will see.

Sure enough, there is a gleaming blue lake. They can make out a small hut across the lake. Stunned by this unexpected visualization of his made-up dream, Sannegowda carefully walks into the valley. His brother follows. Their tiredness has vanished like it had never been.

They make their way around the lake and reach the hut. After the sunshine outside, the darkness inside is blinding. In time, they make out a white bundle in the middle of the hut. It is a female baby, white-skinned, contentedly sucking her thumb and sleeping.

The brothers stay for a week, looking after the baby, giving her water and whatever else Doddegowda thinks is appropriate, waiting for someone to turn up and claim her. When no one does, they decide to take the baby home and tell the villagers that this is the gift the rishi has given them. There is a path right behind the hut and Sannegowda has a hunch that it leads towards their village, as it is in the right direction. Doddegowda shrugs and, carrying the baby, follows Sannegowda down the path.

In the late afternoon of that day, Doddegowda sees a temple wall. It is the back of their own Ooramma temple. Sannegowda confidently goes up to the back and enters the temple, as though he has always known the route from there to that hut. Doddegowda, carrying the baby, numbly follows. The lower-caste girls, who have been left to the temple and at the mercy of all the men who visit it, silently part, eyes boring into them like kolli devvas. They hate the men of the headman’s house, who initiated them into this life and left them in the dark. Doddegowda and Sannegowda don’t even see them.

Sannegowda tells the villagers that Putti’s illness got worse and she died in the middle of the forest, miles away from civilization of any form. They buried her there and returned, Sannegowda says, with tears in his eyes. He claims that they met the rishi afterwards to seek his blessings for Putti. The rishi gave the brothers a baby to bring up in Putti’s place.

Dasegowda, looking into the shastras that his family, hereditary priests of the Ooramma temple, has passed on to him, sees that Putti died an unnatural death about three-and-a-half months ago. Still, fearing the wrath of Doddegowda, he performs the last rites for her. He extracts his price, though, stipulating that there should be a tithi oota, the meal in memory of the dead, for the whole village in Putti’s name and not just that year, but as an annual rite, like the bommanru do. That is the small charge the headman’s family must pay him for keeping his mouth shut. As for the villagers, it is a good meal every year, so they ask no questions about this new-fangled custom.