“Sure,” Goli finishes, and drinks water, a long stream poured down his throat from a tumbler, which Janaki waits to refill, twice, from a brass jug. He belches monstrously. “If he’s going to be an engineer, lawyer, medical doctor, he has to go to college-may as well be there!”

“Oh-ho, Athimbere,” Vairum growls, making the honorific, “elder sister’s husband,” sound sarcastic. Goli turns slowly to face his brother-in-law. “How’s your money situation? Problems?”

Sivakami is in the kitchen and doesn’t hear Vairum’s remark, but hears the main hall grow silent.

“Not at all, Vairum,” Goli smiles tightly. “I don’t know when things have gone as well. So many opportunities opening up. A person just has to know how to take advantage.”

“You certainly know how to take advantage, Athimbere,” Vairum spits. “That is definitely one of your strong suits.”

“I’m sure we all prefer not to know what you are talking about, Vairum, but what I am talking about”-Goli opens his face like a late-season sunflower to the rest of the company-“is investment. I’m sure there are many present who wouldn’t mind knowing how to improve fortunes grown paltry with time.”

“Investing with you, Athimbere, would be the equivalent of burying one’s wealth and forgetting the location.” Vairum flicks his hand twice toward his leaf, folds it toward himself and stands. “But anyone stupid enough to give you his money deserves to lose it.”

“Vairum!” Sivakami says from the kitchen. “That’s bad manners.”

“No, Amma.” Vairum sighs fast and wearily. “It’s a warning. I would hate, I would really hate to see anyone in this room lose money he can ill afford.”

“How disrespectful can a man be? Listen to your mother!” Goli shrills. “You keep your head in the clouds and act superior to try to keep the people of your village beneath you. They are not fooled!”

“So they’ll do what they choose.” Vairum disappears out the back.

“You are not fooled,” Goli commands those around him, and they all wag their heads, “No, no, yes, yes.”

The hall empties of the men, who go to the veranda to chew betel and chew over the latest gossip. Inside, the women sit to eat, including Vani, whose bright chatter is not dulled by the events of the morning. Janaki receives a welcome bonus: Vani’s story changes today. Now the dacoits cut off their own thumbs as part of their initiation ritual. Their weapons are adapted. Vani’s relative cooks and feeds them from his own hand, as he also does his thumbless lover, who had cut off her own digits as a gesture of unity with her first lover, killed young in a raid on a Hyderabad haveli. None of the other children had paid attention enough to realize they are lucky to be present at the change; none is paying attention now.

Saradha has her daughter the next week. The house throbs and surges with children, children having children, children expecting children, steaming milk and screaming mouths and Vani’s music, which beats like the sound of peace dovetailed with conflict.

Around this time, Sivakami is approached with a strange request. The neighbour two houses down, all of whose grandchildren have died at birth, asks Sivakami if she might birth her daughter’s next child. Sivakami is insulted and flattered-decorum means she can’t comply, while sympathy makes it difficult to turn the woman down. Gayatri hits upon a solution: if Sivakami can’t lend her hands, she can lend her handiwork. Sivakami doubtfully offers the family one of the scenes she has worked, an episode in the life of Krishna, the invincible child. She threads beads onto a string and sews the ends to the piece to make a necklace. Her neighbours gracefully accept. Some weeks after the daughter of their house, with the talisman hanging around her neck, gives birth to a healthy child, Sivakami receives another request. Sivakami fulfills it but worries that there is something untoward in this. She hides it from Vairum, who doesn’t pay much attention to the comings and goings of women and children from their house. She is not sure why she is uncomfortable disclosing the new vogue: perhaps because it is superstitious behaviour and she knows how he feels about that. Perhaps because she is helping others to have children.

Sivakami readies Thangam to go to Malapura. It has been thirty days since Krishnan’s birth and so it’s time for Goli to fetch her, but Thangam and Sivakami know how this usually goes: the packing and waiting, the unpacking and being taken off guard. This time, though, things might be different, since Goli hasn’t left Cholapatti in the weeks since his arrival.

He sleeps at the local chattram, not only dropping in on Sivakami more frequently than ever he did when he lived nearby, but occasionally convening his cronies around the veranda, where he tosses out schemes and schematics, logics and logistics, and figures vague or specific but always theoretical. The small group of men around the veranda is composed, Muchami tells Sivakami, of men who have faith in him despite that earlier mishap, including a couple who are hoping that, if they support him a little more, they might make their money back.

Sivakami hears, via eavesdropping and Muchami, Goli promoting a train-wheel foundry; a touring, and then a stationary, rice mill; a stationary, and then a touring, cinema; a stable of stud bulls; and a soap and petticoat depot.

Now: Sivakami is no businesswoman, though she keeps well abreast of Vairum’s instructions to Muchami with regard to the management of the lands. She rarely understands in advance how a purchase or sale or other strategic change will benefit them, but she more or less apprehends such matters in retrospect. She is also an excellent manager of household expenses, keeping Thangam’s manjakkani entirely separate from her dowry, separate expenses and separate income. Weddings are paid for from the dowry lands and the children’s daily expenses from the manjakkani, while Sivakami’s own paltry expenses are paid by Vairum. She accounts for every paisa, recording these in a ledger kept in the floor desk in the main hall.

So Sivakami knows they are about to run a surplus on the dowry monies. The next wedding to be arranged is Sita’s. She is ten, and were it not for a law recently passed against child marriage, it would be time to marry her off. As it is, they now must wait four years. Why should that money sit gathering dust? Sivakami thinks, influenced, it seems, by this new spirit of investment and improvement inflating her son and son-in-law. She doesn’t pretend to know any method of increasing money other than saving, nor does she think Goli has much money sense, but what if they were to support one of Goli’s schemes, with Vairum as a collaborator of sorts? Vairum has such an instinct for finance that it would surely then succeed. Sivakami starts to imagine the money being transformed into comfort for Thangam and her children, and a rapprochement between Goli and Vairum. Maybe Goli could become independent of his employment income! Maybe they could settle down in one place. Maybe close to here. Deep in a sleepless night, she conjures a good life for the new baby, Krishnan, her beading forgotten in her lap.

The next day, she opens the subject as she serves Vairum his morning meal.

“Vairum, kanna, let me talk to you about something.”

Vairum looks skeptical, as always with his mother, as though he has more important things on his mind. Sivakami serves the sambarpearl onion, his favourite-and bitter-gourd curry.

“You know that child-marriage outlawing nonsense means we must wait at least four years to marry Sita off,” she says. “So we have a surplus of cash that you will surely double by the time we need it.”

Vairum now looks wary.

Sivakami plunges on. “So I was wondering: why not give a show of family support? I know you will say your brother-in-law is not a good money manager…”