A sudden awareness hits Chikthayi through the daze. He is not alone. The flowers are also with him. Inside the cup of his eyeball is the shape of the suryavamsi and inside that, a swetasanchari. The swetasanchari turns into … Putti? No, it’s her own form reflected in his eyes. Chikthayi gasps, shuddering with need. He softly starts a song which Chikthayi dreamily senses. She goes back in time with it to when Annaiah and Putti had met here and she was standing far away. Now the song is around her and Chikthayi feels the suryavamsi closing in on all sides. The flames in the petals are devouring her.

‘Don’t go in, Chikthayi! Stay away!’ Putti’s voice is screeching to her, much the same way she had before.

Shaking her hair and body free, Chikthayi jerks away from Annaiah’s hands. He looks at her with a sweet, sorrowful smile.

‘You hear her too, don’t you?’ he asks.

Chikthayi nods.

Leaning back against the bamboo root, he tells her that Putti haunts him night and day.

She looks at him in puzzlement. Annaiah gazes into her eyes again and she sees Putti, a beautiful vision. She feels his blood boil, take on a fever as Putti walks to him. He struggles, trapped in the suryavamsi whose huge petals close over him in one throbbing orb of flame-red orange. The flames tear into Annaiah and Chikthayi shudders, feeling the burn.

Putti’s hair swings bewitchingly. Her eyes become huge, hot and red, her clothes a milky white and her feet turn inwards. She runs wild-eyed and laughing around Annaiah, who is being eaten up by the flame.

Chikthayi can now see a dark-skinned man, chest rippling, guzzling sharey from a goatskin as he stokes the flames that Annaiah is struggling in. Desperate, Annaiah’s hand reaches out of the flames, scrambling to find something. He touches a shrub, quickly picks a white flower and blows the pollen at Putti. She turns into flames, the gumma vanishes and Annaiah is left standing all alone, shivering in the chill that Chikthayi feels running up and down her own skin.

‘It’s the demand of the suryavamsi flower,’ Annaiah tells Chikthayi. ‘The lover must suffer like this. I have dealt with this need every day behind the wall for the last eight years. And yet my suffering and duty is not over: for the rest of my life, I have to serve Kamadeva and tell the story of how the love of one mortal woman has shackled him here. I have to be here until both of them are destroyed by fire. Only then can I leave.’

Chikthayi listens, caught in the turmoil of his emotions. His eyes turn pleading and piteous as Annaiah’s hands reach again to her hair. ‘Chikthayi, I am so alone. I am afraid. Please be with me on this terrible journey.’

Drowning in his whirlpool, eyes, she opens her lips to say, yes, of course I will.

And …

Chikthayi hears her two-year-old crying for her in the headman’s house. He has woken in the middle of the night and his mother is not there. She rapidly pulls herself out of Annaiah’s embrace and, without a backward glance, clambers across the banyan tree. Coiling her hair into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, she runs home. The very next morning Chikthayi leaves the village with her husband and child and never wants to come back.