The matter reaches Annaiah’s ears and he goes and speaks to both sides. Rajegowda tells him that he saw Maadhi singing by the well and combing her hair. Annaiah immediately realizes what this means and sees that it is not a matter easily fixed.

Bhaskaraiah tries telling Rajegowda that bigamy is punishable under the Indian Penal Code, but to no avail. Why will the headman’s son listen to Cockroach? What does Cockroach know about women or their attraction – why, even the village girls giggle at him!

Maadhi hates that she cannot leave her tent because of Rajegowda’s vigil. She wants to roam amongst the fragrant flowers whose smell she can’t get out of her head. She knows all their names from Annaiah. As the leader’s motherless daughter, with no brothers or sisters, Maadhi is entitled to special privileges. She does not need to work like the other tent girls, for one thing. What her father earns is more than enough for both of them. All Maadhi needs to do is cook and keep their tent and clothes clean, which she does with ease.

If her mother were alive, maybe she would have been married and had children by now. But her mother died in childbirth and her grieving father decided not to marry again. Oh, Maadhi knows that even now several tent women make eyes at her father and are extra sweet to her in the hope that he will look in their direction.

No one really knows very much about Maadhi’s mother, other than that she was not one of them and that she ran away from her respectable house to marry Maadhi’s father. He quietly brought her to their tents one night and told one and all that they were getting married. There was some objection, of course, but Maadhi’s father was quietly determined. And Maadhi’s mother accepted the limitations of tent life and lived at peace with everybody, so finally everyone liked her. However, she died within a year of the marriage, after Maadhi’s birth.