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children that all they could do was to dream of happiness while other children in the neighborhood were happy, content, loved, and getting on in life.
    When Kareena reached the tender age of seven, Thoma lost all his money, property, and power. He no longer owned a home. He was forced to seek a rental to accommodate his family. He sent five of his children, all the way from the third to the seventh to foster care to escape starvation, to ward off being drafted to the underground life of the local Church’s cemetery. By abandoning five of his children, he effectively shifted 50 percent of his responsibility of bringing up his ten children to the world outside his home. He pretty much cast them to wolves, sent them to streets crowded by wandering dogs and meowing cats. Kareena led the pack of the abandoned children.
    The only good thing about the foster family run by Catholic nuns was that Kareena could get away from her so-called home in Mannuthy. Kareena bravely told the nuns of the convent that though the foster home was nothing but a piss pot, yet it was far better than her deplorable rental home in Mannuthy.
    As for Ann, she tried to convince her children that being thrown tothe wolves was not as bad as living with her and Thoma, with their clockwork regularity of moving from rental to rental like some migratory birds. Ann finally lost count of the rentals Thoma dragged her and her children through. She gave up counting and became a female Buddha getting the ultimate enlightenment of life; that is, Mother Earth was her home, and the big sky above was her roof.
    Years later when she turned seventeen, just when she got over the shock of being born, Kareena was happy to get out of Thoma’s family for good. The year was 1967. She got job in the Central Reserve Police of the government of India soon after she finished high school. “I am going to heaven,” Kareena told everyone. She meant that she was going away from hell.
    There was celebration in Thoma’s family. It was soon followed by a long train trip to Rajasthan. Everybody in the family even today remembers the name of the train, the platform it took off from in Trichur, and the time of departure. That day was August 15 for Kareena, not literally but symbolically, because she gained independence from her miserable life in Mannuthy, just as India gained independence on that day.
    Even though she was freed, she would realize that she was going to be incarcerated in another prison of obligation to support a large family. She was the first in the family who supported them through a salary from a regular job. And that too—a girl supporting a family that hardly did anything to bring her up, a girl who should have saved every rupee she earned to meet her own dowry obligation, a girl and not a boy! Mind you, a girl, not a boy. This was unheard of in those times. When all was said and done, she should be remembered for that supreme sacrifice alone.
    It was years later that Josh, her younger brother, would step into the cauldron of despair and save the family from total devastation and obliteration. Josh prevented a total shipwreck by buying a home for the family, the one and the only home that Thoma ever owned after his expulsion from his ancestral home. The new home came with a land of two acres, or two hundred cents. To say that this was a welcome change from the rental house in Mannuthy or the otherrental property prior to that would be a gross understatement. Getting a home of their own was too good to be true; it was a long-cherished dream built over a ladder of time and it was the merciful end to the eternal dragging through rattraps of rentals. It beat the wildest expectations everyone in the family had dreamed up and it became an astonishing reality at last.
    It was Josh who brought salvation to the family, rescuing it from claws of death and decay. He brought Thoma, Ann, and their children freedom, peace, and dignity and a place to rest in peace at the end of the