The tent people, as they come to be called, keep very much to themselves. They work seven days and seven nights to dig a well for themselves on the other side of the wall, as they are forbidden to use the village wells. They perform in all the neighbouring villages and have tremendous good luck and earning.

The girls happily pick the swetasancharis and wear them in their hair. They sit on the wall, combing their hair and swinging their legs. Respectable boys avoid them and keep a distance though the girls are beautiful, with their dark hair, dark eyes and sharp features. They are much more beautiful than any of the village girls. Still, even low castes like Basava and Rudra stay away. Hearing tales of the way they hypnotize young men to part with more money than they can afford, or how they accurately predict the fortunes of one and all, people grow more and more afraid of them.

The tent girls never speak to the village folk or to any of their other customers except during working hours, which are three hours in the morning and three again in the evening. They do not allow anyone to come near them after those hours. Many people say that the girls are not human at all, but kolli devvas, out to destroy trusting men with their honeyed traps. The villagers grow increasingly unhappy with their presence.

Puttaswamegowda wants to find a way to send them away. But his nephew Krishnegowda’s town friend, Bhaskaraiah, warns him against doing anything hasty.

Krishnegowda – Annaiah and Gangi’s grandson – lives in Puttaswamegowda’s house under Ajji’s hawk-eyed watch. His parents Nagegowda and Marakka left for a long pilgrimage to Kashi and other places no one had heard of, when he was about eight, leaving him in Ajji’s care. There has been no word of them since. Krishnegowda is intelligent and does well at his studies, though Ajji has this vague feeling that there is something wrong with him. Perhaps it is because right from his childhood, all the other village children always complained that he cheated while playing even their simple games of goli, bugri, gilli-danda or lagori. Like Rajegowda, Sundru and Parvati, he went to school at their village, then middle and high school at the bigger one nearby. Then he went to college in the market town to study botany.

Bhaskaraiah is currently staying with them, as he is doing a research paper on ‘The customs and sociological roots that influence aspects of village life in South India’ for his master’s degree in sociology from the Karnatak University, Dharwad. Since Krishnegowda has boasted that nothing matches the taste and quality of rice and ragi grown in his village, the food-loving Bhaskaraiah has quickly decided to base his paper there and dropped into the headman’s house for an indefinite visit.