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there.
    Kali kept looking at Ponna as she crossed the threshold and entered the house. The things she had done in the hope of getting a child! She would do whatever was asked of her. Everyone had been patient for six months after the wedding. But there had been innuendoes even before that. Then they started asking direct questions. The only way to save oneself was to conceive in the first month of marriage. Otherwise, the interrogation would begin in some form or another. His mother, who was patient for six months, started her treatments soon after that.
    She kept a watch on Ponna’s menstrual cycle that month. As soon as it came to pass, she told Ponna to drink the juice of some shoots on the morning of the third day. She said forcefully, ‘Don’t eat anything else even by mistake. The juice will be bitter. You will have to close your eyes and swallow it.’ After that, Ponna got used to eating different shoots and drinking different potions. Her tongue became numb to all the bitterness. The goal was to beget a child, and she was ready to do anything to attain that goal. The bitterness of themedication paled in comparison. But her mother-in-law’s medication didn’t go down all that easily.
    Before Ponna woke up and stepped out, her mother-in-law was busy crushing a big bunch of tender neem leaves. It made Ponna retch. At her own parents’ home, she would throw a fit even when her mother made her take regular medicine. Her mother would yell, ‘Am I asking you to eat neem shoots?’ But now she was having to eat neem shoots for real. It made her very angry at her mother-in-law.
    ‘Should I put a child on her lap the month after the wedding? I can only drop a grinding stone into her lap. Can’t she be patient for a year or two? We are young. She is unable to see us enjoy a few good years without hassles like children. She can’t bear to see me happy.’
    Kali smiled and said, ‘It is only neem juice, right? All the worms in your stomach will die.’
    ‘You mother wants a worm to crawl in my womb. And you are saying it will die. Are you two playing with me?’ And she punched him in his chest.
    ‘Ah, it feels like you are throwing flowers at me. Please punch me more, darling,’ he pleaded. But he didn’t say that she needn’t drink the bitter extract.
    His mother extracted the juice out of the crushed neem shoots by filtering them through a pure white cloth. It gave very little juice. After repeating the process some three or four times, she got a quarter cup of the extract. She had somehow procured a measuring cup that was normally used in wedding rituals; she cleaned it and got it ready overnight.She poured the neem extract into that vessel and closed the lid. She then asked Ponna to come after pouring water over herself fully clad in a sari. After that, Ponna had to stand, dripping wet, facing east in front of the house. Dawn was appearing, waving its raised hand to everyone. ‘Pray,’ she said to Ponna. She too prayed.
    ‘O you who are travelling west,’ she said, addressing the sun as she prayed out loud. ‘She is drinking this so that my lineage will perpetuate. Please let it grow,’ said her mother-in-law. Ponna murmured something to herself.
    Kali’s mother had invited a white-sari-clad distant relative, a grandmother. She must have been a hundred years old, but other than her cataract-covered eyes, she looked fine. She had seven or eight children and a drove of grandchildren. Ponna’s mother-in-law too was a widow. But, for some reason, she was not supposed to hand over the earthen bowl of medicine to Ponna. To receive something from a woman in white is like receiving something from the goddess Amman herself. The old woman lifted the bowl above her head, prayed to the dawn and gave it to Ponna.
    ‘Don’t think about anything, dear one. Close your eyes and just gulp it down. The gods will open their eyes,’ she said. Ponna did as told.
    Even though she drank it up very fast, it was bitter