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beyond belief. The vessel was heavy too. She retched and gagged, but didn’t stop drinking. When she was done, her mother-in-law put a handful of jaggery into her mouth. But the bitterness did not leave her palate for a week. No worm crawled inher belly either. She was taken here and there, and was told that she was being given medicines to conceive. But nothing worked.
    She had laughed once, whispering into Kali’s double-curve-studded ears, ‘If you had married a goat instead of me, it would have given birth to a litter by now for all the shoots she must have eaten.’
    Stony-faced, he had replied, ‘I should have been born a male goat for that.’ Even now, thinking of that made her smile till her eyes welled up with tears.



EIGHT
    In the matter of offering prayers, Kali and Ponna left no stone unturned. They did not discriminate between small and big temples. They promised an offering to every god they encountered. For the forest gods, it was a goat sacrifice. For the temple gods, it was pongal. For some gods, the promises even doubled. If a child were indeed born, the rest of their lives would be spent in fulfilling these promises. Kali, in fact, was ready to forgo his cattle and all that he had saved with his incredible frugality, if only their prayers would bear fruit. But no god seemed to pay heed.
    How many prayers and promises they must have made in Tiruchengode itself! If you went past the forest where the Pavatha shrine is, and climbed further up, you would arrive at the Pandeeswarar temple on top. They called this deity the Pillayar on the hilltop. He was guarding the varadikkal, the barren rock that was nearby. An ordinary soul could not reach there; one needed both mental and physical strength.
    When they were younger, Kali and Muthu went there with a large crowd of young men on every new-moon daywithout fail. People would arrive there in bullock carts. Elderly folk and ailing people would touch the first step and pray and lie down in their carts.
    Muthu and Kali’s crowd of young men positioned themselves in the mandapams, the pillared halls that marked every significant climb, and laughed at those who needed to rest before proceeding further. They would make a competition of running up the steps. It was pretty much like running on flat ground. It was only after the dip at Nagar Pallam that it got steep. One had to be patient, particularly while climbing down. If not, then one ran the risk of tumbling down the hill, without any control, all the way till the hollow landing. The young crowd usually left their homes before the crack of dawn, walking and running to reach the hill six or seven miles away. To cross distances was a sport. Nothing gave them as much joy as this.
    People sold millet rice in the pillared halls on the hill. The rice was mixed with thick yogurt and was full of the fragrance of millets. Two full pitchers were enough to keep hunger at bay. Besides, they were of an age when they didn’t worry about hunger. In fact, going to the temple was only a feeble excuse to undertake this journey. It was over as soon as they stood in the inner sanctum, touched the camphor flame, prayed and smeared the holy ash on their foreheads.
    No one went into the forest where the Pavatha shrine was. A fear of that place had been instilled in everyone. On days when there were bigger crowds, they even appointed someone to make sure no one strayed into the forest. Walkingpast it, they came to a rocky patch where small trees grew out of the crevices between the rocks. They were so narrow, no one could walk through them. So instead they jumped from rock to rock. The ruckus they made leaping about like this scattered even the monkeys away.
    Then a flat surface. If you walked over it, keeping to the left side, you would come to a gigantic rock that stood like a sickle. Its tip looked like it was ready to pierce the sky. They would place their feet on small fissures and climb to the top of even this rock. There was a