When she finishes and looks up, triumphant, the sun has come out. The black world around her has turned red-gold. The world of Kamadeva has blended into the real and he is invisible among the mortals.

‘Poor Ramani!’ the listeners exclaim. Annaiah says, no, her penance and love for Kamadeva are genuine. She never braids her hair again in memory of that wondrous night. She goes back to the wall, her hair a shining sheath around her, and waits, every seventh full moon, for the man with that laugh to call her again. She is the jogati, he is the jogi and the world is not complete unless the two of them are together.

3

PUTTI’S STORY

o one knows how old Annaiah is or where he comes from. Krishnegowda’s great-grandmother, the oldest woman in the village, whom everyone addresses as Ajji, remembers that Annaiah came to the village as a young man when she herself was a little girl, perhaps six or seven years old.

She says that Annaiah had a very strange name that no one could pronounce. Everyone liked him at once, and Doddegowda offered him a place in his own household for as long as he cared to live in the village. The black-haired young man in strange dark robes without seams wrapped around him confessed to Doddegowda that he had led a very nomadic existence and would probably leave the village shortly. But how wrong he was, says Ajji with a smile.

About a week after Annaiah comes, the villagers are surprised to see him, just as the dawn is breaking, digging hard with his bare hands, near the newly sprouted banyan tree. For water? Roots? What? Annaiah says nothing. After some time, from deep within the bowels of the earth, he digs out a beautiful green-stone idol. Brushing the dust off, he shows them Kamadeva, holding his fabled bow of sugarcane and a quiver with five flower arrows.

The village elders and Doddegowda, all of whom have arrived by the time Annaiah gets the idol out, promptly decide to build a temple for the idol at that same spot. No one has heard of a temple to the god of love, but then no one else has found such an idol on their land. In any case, this land is at the other end of the village from the village goddess Ooramma’s temple. Evidently, two gods have decided to bless and protect their village. Annaiah quietly offers his services as the priest to Kamadeva. There is such radiance about him as he says this that the normally strict village folk, without asking for his caste or even his religion, agree that it is his due. After all, it was to him that the idol revealed itself.

Annaiah takes up his duties in due earnest. He seems to live in a near-constant trance. He often climbs the wall, and when he comes back there is a strange smell about him, which none of the villagers then recognize as sharey. Unlike the stone-walled Ooramma temple – which has two strict rules, the deposit of dakshine during the weekly prayers and an annual jathre – Kamadeva asks for nothing material. But Annaiah insists that every villager, including the four lower-caste families, has to visit his temple and listen to his tale of Ramani and Kamadeva.