The next few years went by without much incident. Their lives were led with military precision. That was the only way Akhila knew how to preserve order and keep her family from floating away from its moorings. Dawns diminished to dusk and Sundays dwindled to be the day when she washed, starched, dried and ironed the six cotton saris that comprised her entire office-going wardrobe.

  Akhila thought of her father every morning when, heavy with starch and sunlight, the sari rustled around her as though someone were turning the sheets of a newspaper. When she tucked the last pleat in at the waist and flung the pallu over her left shoulder, the bottom of the sari hiked up her legs playfully, so that the last thing Padma did before Akhila left home was to crouch at her feet and teach the sari the laws of gravity. Tug, tug … what goes up has to come down and stay there. By evening, the sari had neither the vitality nor the starch to resist the pull of the earth. The humid air and the dripping heat corroded even the staunchest human spirit, so what hope did a blob of starch have? It was perhaps in those years that the starch entered Akhila’s soul. Imbuing her every action and word with a delicate film of stiffness that soon became her natural way to talk and be.

  Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon, Akhila lay on the swing like her father had. The iron chains moaned as always, only now they were the echoes of her grief, for what had been and would never be again.

  Amma would comb Akhila’s hair. Tugging at the knots and disentangling them with a gentleness that almost made Akhila want to cry. It was the only time she felt as though she could close her eyes and life would take care of itself without her having to plot and plan.

  Narayan joined the tank factory as a machinist. Narsi became the first graduate in the family and then, the first postgraduate. He found a teaching job. Akhila felt the iron bands around her chest begin to loosen: Dare I breathe again? Dare I dream again? Now that the boys are men, can I start feeling like a woman again?

  Narsi decided he wanted to get married. She was the college principal’s daughter and a brahmin. No one could fault his choice and there was nothing anyone could say except perhaps – Don’t you think you should wait for your elder sister to get married before you think of a wife and a family?

  But who was to mouth this rebuke?

  Akhila waited for Amma or Narayan to say something. To broach the subject of Akhila’s marriage. When they didn’t, Akhila swallowed the hurt she felt and let the anger that grew in her flare. She insisted that a suitable bride for Narayan be found. ‘Let both the weddings take place together. Same wedding hall, same day, same time … Narayan has taken care of this family and it is not fair that he is sidelined simply because Mr College Professor is in a tearing hurry to get married.’

  Even then, Amma and her brothers never asked, ‘What about you? You’ve been the head of this family ever since Appa died. Don’t you want a husband, children, a home of your own?’

  In their minds Akhila had ceased to be a woman and had already metamorphosed into a spinster.

  Besides, there was Padma. When she had her first period, Amma dressed her as a bride and had her photograph taken in the local studio with her back to a mirror, so that the intricate flower arrangement on her braid would be seen as well. She gave the photograph to Akhila to admire and stood looking at it from over her shoulder.

  ‘My little one is a woman now,’ she said quietly.

  The message couldn’t have been more explicit. Soon it would be time for her to be married and dowries don’t accumulate by themselves like dust on a window sill.

  Padma was twenty-two by the time Akhila put together a dowry for her. Gold jewellery; a diamond nose-stud; a steel almirah, a cot and a mattress; stainless steel and bronze cookware; silver lamps; a gold ring and an expensive wristwatch for the groom; and twenty thousand rupees in cash. And even then, it wasn’t easy. Prospective grooms worried that once they married her, there was little more they could expect from her family. Finally they found someone who was willing to believe Akhila when she said she wouldn’t forsake her Padma.

  Akhila was thirty-four. What does a single woman do next in life?

  She took a train into work in Madras every morning from Ambattur. Her job didn’t demand much from her; after all, she was just a clerk. In the evenings, she took the same route back and was home by seven. Her mother would wait for Akhila to arrive before she put the pressure cooker on. They ate, they listened to the radio, and by a quarter to ten were in their beds. They lived quiet, starched and ironed lives where there was no room for chiffon-like flourishes of feeling or heavy zari-lined silken excesses.

  When they fell ill, they went to Steadford hospital. And for their souls, Akhila and her mother visited the Shiva temple at Thirumulavayil on Mondays. While Amma stood with her palms pressed together, her eyes closed and her lips moving in prayer, Akhila would stand entranced by the Nandi that guarded the entrance of the temple.

  Akhila would touch the flanks of the stone bull that unlike all other Nandis rested with its back to the sanctum sanctorum. An aberration like me, she told herself with a wry smile every Monday.

  If the Nandi’s position had been correct, the temple would have been one of the holiest of Shiva shrines, rivalling even the Kailasa temple. For in the Thirumulavayil temple yard grew the rare lingam and yoni flower. Manifestations of Shiva’s and Shakthi’s presence on every branch, scenting the air with the power of a divine consummation.

  No matter how many times Akhila saw the Nandi, it still intrigued her. This Nandi that had turned its back on its lord and master to protect a devotee from being killed by his enemies. Had the Nandi ever wondered what came first – devotion or duty? Had the Nandi known that with this gesture it had de-sanctified the temple and turned Shiva’s presence away? Had the Nandi known what it was doing?

  Once a month, Akhila took her mother out to lunch at the Dasaprakash Hotel where they always chose the Special Meals. A thick, viciously-red tomato soup; two puris and a bowl of vegetable korma; a helping of curd rice; a helping of sambar rice; a bowl of rasam; three kinds of vegetables; an appalum; two pickles; as much plain rice as one wanted; and finally a fruit salad that came with half a cherry on top and a cream wafer stuck into the melting ice cream.

  Akhila would watch with concealed irritation as her mother ate. She pecked at the food as if she hated every crumb and yet when Akhila suggested that they try another restaurant, Amma was vehement in her protests. ‘What is wrong with Dasaprakash? It is one place where brahmins can eat without worrying about who’s doing the chopping and cooking or even the washing-up. Haven’t you noticed that even the boys who serve us wear the sacred thread?’

  To Amma, all waiters were boys and all brahmins above reproach. Which is why, even though they saw Sarasa Mami, Subramani Iyer’s widow, standing with her oldest daughter Java at the bus stand, Amma simply gathered the folds of her sari tightly around her and pretended not to notice them.

  If it had been anyone else, Amma would have used her tongue like a scythe, chopping brutally at their reputation, their character, their lack of shame, and end with her favourite – ‘If I was in her place, I would have fed my children poison and killed myself. Anything is better than selling one’s honour.’

  But Sarasa Mami was a brahmin. And it was easier to forgive a brahmin, no matter how serious her crime, than the rest of the world that was made of flesh-eaters and gravediggers.

  Perhaps I’m doing Amma an injustice, Akhila thought, eyeing her mother. Maybe Amma found it easier to accept what Subramani Iyer’s widow did because it could have happened to her.

  When Subramani Iyer’s eyes remained fixed on the ceiling one morning as if he had been stricken by some revelation at the crack of dawn, Sarasa Mami raised her eyes to the heavens for help. What am I going to do? she wept, beating her chest. How am I to cope? How do I look after three girls and a blind boy?

  What was she expecting? Akhila watched Sarasa Mami beg and plead with the various gods her family had worshipped for generations. Did she seriously think that one of those gods would descend to earth and help her in her distress?

  For a while Sarasa Mami coped. She sold all the little pieces of jewellery she owned. Finally, when there was nothing left to sell and hunger gnawed at her wilting honour and shook the respectability out of their bones, she sold her eldest daughter Jaya.

  From the tin trunk, she took out the only Kancheepuram sari she owned and unfolded it gently. Sarasa had clung to it for that last journey of her life. She, like all good Hindu wives, had prayed every day that she be allowed to die before her husband did. She had wanted to climb the stairway to the heavens, lit by the radiance of the bright red circle of kumkum on her forehead. The strands of jasmine in her hair would scent her passageway and all those who saw her would think how blessed she was to die looking like a bride. And this sari was the one that would have put the world’s nose out of joint when it flocked to pay its last respects to a woman it had ignored when alive. Now that this was no longer to be, Sarasa allowed her dreams to roll out of the folds of the sari. Mothballs that dissipated into nothingness when touched by air.

  What did Sarasa Mami think of when she helped Jaya with the sari? A little lower around the hip. Let the curve of your waist show. Tighter over your bosom. Don’t hide the tilt of your breasts. Let it fall over your shoulder and cascade down your back so that when you walk, it hints at the fullness of your hips. Maybe she felt she was helping dress a bride or maybe it was a corpse that swam into her mind as she teased and arranged the layers of woven cloth.

  And Jaya? What did Jaya think when her mother asked her to bathe earlier than usual one evening? Did she feel a cloud of butterflies dance in her stomach when Sarasa lined her eyelids with the density of darkness and wound jasmine buds in her plait? Jaya must have thought that at least tonight she wouldn’t go hungry. They never did after that night.

  It wasn’t as if Jaya stood on street corners soliciting lust. There was a thin veneer of respectability Sarasa concocted to disguise what was expected of Jaya. The men who lived in the bachelor quarters needed someone to cook for them, she said. That was all Jaya did, she claimed when someone asked. ‘They treat her well and are generous,’ she added.

  It soon became a familiar sight; the blind Srini pretending to be a motor car as he jogged along by his sister’s side every evening on their way to the barracks. Parp … parp … his mouth honked when they crossed the road. Vroom … vroom … his lips blubbered when she hurried to escape the knowing looks the neighbours threw at her like darts.

  What do the dead think of the havoc wrought by their absence? Subramani Iyer? Appa? In some bubbled realm of no-return, do they twist and writhe in pain? Or is that what death is all about? To be able to leave. To cease to care. To be free.

  At first, the whole neighbourhood watched in horrified silence. Then they talked in voices that quivered with righteous indignation of the slur Sarasa Mami was inflicting by this brazen behaviour. On Subramani Iyer’s good name. On the brahmin community. On womanhood. Wasn’t there a more honourable way to stay alive?

  ‘You tell me how,’ Sarasa told a neighbour who decided to confront her. ‘I’m willing to work. Do any kind of work to earn a living. I went to each one of the houses in the neighbourhood and asked if anyone wanted a maid. And everyone behaved just like you did. Giving me a handful of rice as though I were a beggar woman and then shooing me away.’

  ‘I didn’t do that,’ the neighbour defended herself.

  ‘You didn’t. What you did was even worse. You hid in a room inside and asked your daughter to tell me that you had gone out to the shops.’

  ‘It was true. I had gone out to the shops,’ the neighbour pressed.

  Sarasa shrugged, unwilling to debate on what had transpired some months ago. Hoping that her silence would sweep away from her doorstep this woman and her vicious curiosity disguised as neighbourly concern.

  ‘But even so, this?’ the neighbour persisted, letting her distaste show with a curl of the lip, nostrils that tightened and an open-handed comprehensive gesture.

  ‘If I was younger, I would have sold myself to keep my family fed and clothed. But this is tired flesh. No man has any use for it. And it isn’t as if she is consorting with several males. There is just one man. A regular. And she is happy.’

  ‘You are disgusting,’ the neighbour spat as she walked away. ‘And unnatural. What woman would talk of her daughter having a regular?’

  By that evening, for the brahmin community of that neighbourhood, the inmates of House 21 had forever ceased to exist.

  It was fortunate that they didn’t live in an agraharam, Akhila thought. In the brahmin ghetto where even air is allowed entry only through narrow passages; where vermilion stripes anointing the lime-washed walls of the house exteriors suggest a rigidity of thought and a narrowness of acceptance; where the intricate rice powder kolam on the doorway prevents the arrival of any new thought, and all aberrant behaviour is exorcised by censure and complete isolation.

  Often Akhila thought that if some wandering god were to pass that way, he would know an agraharam from the very sight of houses clinging to houses. Like an exotic species of caterpillar with a million red and white legs running into one another, emitting a curiously unique stench of asafoetida and soapnut.

  But even though they didn’t live in an agraharam, the brahmin community behaved as though they did. So Sarasa, her whore daughter, her blind son and soon-to-be whore daughters were excommunicated. To Amma, this was a fate worse than death. For what was a brahmin if not accepted by the brahmin world to be one?

  ‘Look who is here,’ Akhila said under her breath. But Amma refused to rise to the bait. She pretended not to hear her and stared ahead into the horizon, willing the bus to appear and ferry them away before Akhila did something embarrassing like going up to them and beginning a conversation.

  ‘That is Jaya and her mother standing there,’ Akhila persisted. ‘Don’t you want to talk to Sarasa Mami? She was once your best friend, wasn’t she? Why don’t you? No one will know. We are so far away from home. Or, is it that you don’t want to have anything to do with a woman who’s reputed to have sold her daughter into prostitution?’

  Amma pursed her lips and frowned. ‘Will you be quiet?’

  ‘Don’t be unkind,’ she added as an afterthought.

  ‘Who is being unkind?’ Akhila snapped, angered by her mother’s self-righteous tone. ‘Are you accusing me of being unkind? Not me. It’s you and your brahmin cronies who have ostracized that poor woman and her family.’

  ‘I wish it weren’t so. But when one lives in a society, one has to conform to its expectations. I am not one of those revolutionaries who can stand up to the world. I’m a simple woman. A widow. And I need to belong to the society we live in.’

  ‘Do you realize it could have been us standing there, Amma?’ Akhila asked softly.

  ‘I know it could have been us. Which is why I don’t ever say a word against her, no matter how much the others have slandered her.’ And then Amma turned towards Akhila and put her hand on her shoulder. ‘But I had you.’

  Akhila felt the heaviness of her hand press down upon her. Amma had her to rescue her from the threat of penury and degradation. Amma had Akhila to replace her husband as the head of the household. Amma had her – Akhila. Akhilandeswari. Mistress of all worlds. Master of none.

  What Akhila missed the most was that no one ever called her by her name any more. Her brothers and sister had always called her Akka. Elder Sister. At work, her colleagues called her Madam. All women were Madam and all men Sir. And Amma had taken to addressing her as Ammadi. As though to call Akhila by her name would be an affront to her head-of-the-household status.

  So who was Akhilandeswari? Did she exist at all? If she did, what was her identity? Did her heart skip a beat when it saw a mango tree studded with blossoms? Did the feel of rain on her bare skin send a line of goose bumps down her spine? Did she sing? Did she dream? Did she weep for no reason?

  Akhila often thought of a Tamil film she had seen some years before. Of a woman like her who was destined to be nothing more than a workhorse. A woman who gave up her life and love for her family.

  When the film came to the cinema theatre near her home, Amma and she had gone to see it. Though they had read enough about the film to know what the plot was and the character of the heroine, the film took them both by surprise. Akhila could have been the heroine and her despair Akhila’s. They had watched the film in silence and when the lights came on during the interval, Akhila saw her mother avoid her eyes. That night they didn’t talk much and Amma went to bed early. Akhila couldn’t sleep. She looked at Padma who lay curled into a ball by her side. Padma who was maturing into a woman. Her face had lost its babyish roundness and had begun to hint at what her adult face would look like. If I had a man who loved me madly and wanted to marry me, would I give him up for Padma, Akhila wondered. No, she wouldn’t, she told herself Akhila dismissed the film as silly sentimental sop and turned on her side. In those days, she was still young enough to think that this would not be the pattern of the rest of her life. One day, she too would have a home and family of her own.

  But ten years later, when Akhila thought of the film, she felt darkness lick at her. Would her life end like the life of the woman in the film?

  Akhila never let her mind dwell on these things. To do so would be entering dangerous territory. Instead, on her thirty-fifth birthday, she decided to get herself an education.

  She enrolled in the open university for a Bachelor of Arts degree. Akhila chose history as her main subject. There is probably no one more suited to study history than a spinster, she thought. To trace the rise and fall of civilizations. To study the intricacies of what made a certain dynasty behave in a certain manner. To watch the unravelling of life from the sidelines. To read about monarchs and concubines; wars and heroes; to observe and no more.