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Chetana had any income, it was always a matter of begging and nagging hard enough to melt Subhadra’s heart so that she would part with a few paisas from her meager monthly pension.
    Vidura used to accompany them in all their activities but as time passed, both Kokila and Chetana couldn’t imagine how it had been with a third person intruding on their friendship.
    Three months after Vidura ran away and Nehru died, she came to the ashram. She was an odd woman, everyone thought, a little too modern, too masculine. Her name was Vineetha Raghavan and she was an old friend of Ramanandam Sastri. Hearing of his loss and needing some peace herself, she arrived at the ashram unannounced. This was her first visit to Tella Meda.
    She wasn’t just Vineetha Raghavan, she was Dr. Vineetha Raghavan. And she wasn’t a sick people’s doctor but an engineer, a scientist.
    Amongst all her father’s friends, Charvi disliked Vineetha the most. It was Vineetha’s bizarre friendship with her father that irked Charvi no end. Theirs was a special relationship, one she had never been able to pierce through or look into. Charvi was not sure and didn’t care if they were having sex. That wasn’t important. It was their emotional bond that grated on her nerves and kept her awake at night. For Charvi there was only one man in her life and to have another woman claim a place in his heart was torture.
    Vineetha didn’t care what anyone thought of her. It was enough that she had achieved what she set out to achieve. One of the first women scientists to be offered a post at the Bhabha Atomic Center, the first nuclear power plant in India, Vineetha felt she had done justice to the lakhs of rupees her wealthy father had spent in sending her to university in America. She had met Ramanandam Sastri at a party in Hyderabad several years ago when his wife was alive and the children were still young. The party was thrown by a literary friend and several writers and wealthy readers had been invited. She had immediately taken to the feminist writer, who was more than ten years her senior. Those who thought that they were having a sexual relationship couldn’t have been more wrong. But it wasn’t platonic either; there was a spark, something neither Vineetha nor Ramanandam could define. It was a cherished friendship and one both counted on.
    In the past few years, however, they both had been too busy with their lives and their friendship had thinned with time. Vineetha had not had time for anyone, including herself, once she started working at the nuclear power plant. For years, Vineetha along with other scientists had worked to make India stronger, but now, after Nehru’s death, the political dark clouds were settling on the Bhabha Atomic Center. Dr. Homi Bhabha, the founder of the nuclear program in India and a good friend of Vineetha’s, had gone to New Delhi to speak with the new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Sastri, who, unlike the late Jawaharlal Nehru, didn’t condone India becoming a nuclear power.
    “He takes ahimsa too far,” Vineetha complained to Ramanandam. “Doesn’t believe in weapons and war, he says. Nehru didn’t either and now we have China holding on to Indian territory.”
    “I believe in Gandhi and ahimsa, ” Ramanandam reminded her.
    “But you can’t believe in it blindly,” Vineetha said. “India has to protect her borders. Anyway, I’m not here to think about the politics and the problems at work. I’m here to relax and spend some time with you.”
    “What do you think of my Charvi’s ashram ?” Ramanandam asked, looking around the courtyard where they were sitting and the rooms that spilled around it. “Isn’t it serene?”
    Vineetha followed his line of vision and couldn’t see the serenity. The house had obviously been built for opulence, but opulence had to be maintained; this house looked like an old woman who in her youth used to be beautiful.
    The whitewashed walls were dirty and the tiles in the courtyard