Then she hears high-pitched voices singing songs in an alien language, not unlike the one Annaiah uses while telling his stories. It sounds like that, at any rate. Who is singing it? What mystery is this? If it has anything to do with Annaiah and his powers, she needs to know.

Thimmakka climbs the banyan tree and looks down at the other side. The garden she saw during her last visit is not there. Instead, several small fires are lit all over, making the place look like Ooramma’s jathre. In front of each fire, a woman is seated, bejewelled and glittering in the glorious moonlight, looking like reflections of Thimmakka herself that night. Unlike Thimmakka’s mallige-braided hair, however, these women have left their hair unbound. In the light of the fires, Thimmakka can see that they have red staring eyes, twice the size of her own. Annaiah’s kolli devvas!

They are cooking, alternately wailing and laughing. The scene sends chills up and down Thimmakka’s spine. The women are using their legs as firewood. She feels shudders down her own legs, which seem to have developed a restlessness all of their own. Her eyes are drawn to a figure moving among the fires.

She focuses, sitting still. A man with velvet-like dark skin and a flowing beard, his rippling muscles reflecting the fires around, is putting garlands on the women. The flowers look and smell like the fragrant ones in Parvati’s garland, making her feel dizzy.

The garlands glow red-gold-white. Every woman writhes as soon as it is put on her, as if in severe pain. Each bursts into flame and ends as a pile of black-grey ash. Thimmakka feels goosebumps rising all over. What is this? And what is she doing here?

Suddenly, she notices the woman closest to her, who seems to be saying something directly to her. Terrified, Thimmakka realizes that the woman looks like Chenni, except that her eyes are red and large. Even as Thimmakka looks at her, stricken and stunned, trying to tell her she didn’t mean to kill her, the man comes to the Chenni lookalike. He puts the vivid garland around her. The woman collapses. Thimmakka is trembling as the man slowly turns to look at her. She already knows that it is Annaiah.

‘Is that … is that Chenni?’ Thimmakka asks him in a shaking voice.

Annaiah grimaces as if in pain and doesn’t answer. Instead he says: ‘That heap over there is Gangi. That is Chikthayi. This is Putti.’ He gives a strange strangled laugh. ‘Do you also want to join them, Thimmakka?’

She looks at him.