Brihannala

The girl who had been suffering was not allowed to walk home alone.
The girl Archana had selected accompanied her all the way to the house.
They took an auto from the college road, and throughout the journey the girl kept one hand against her stomach, though the terrible pain that had frightened everyone earlier had already begun to settle.
When they reached the house, her mother came out almost immediately.
At first, she looked puzzled.
“Why are you back so early?”
Before her daughter could answer, the accompanying girl stepped forward.
“Aunty… something happened in college.”
She explained everything.
The sudden pain.
The other girls saying it was probably normal.
Archana coming back from the canteen carrying salt, turmeric, lemon, camphor and fenugreek.
The thread.
The coin.
The strange ritual.
And finally, Archana choosing her specifically and telling her to take the girl home.
The mother's expression changed completely.
The casual confusion disappeared from her face.
“Go inside,” she told her daughter firmly. “Straight to the bathroom. Don't touch anything else.”
The girl obeyed.
Her mother carefully collected everything that had come back with her daughter—the small pieces of cloth, the thread, the cloth around the coin, and every remaining piece from the ritual.
She separated the one-rupee coin from everything else.
Then she walked around the back of the house, carrying the discarded ritual materials with her.
The accompanying girl followed at a distance, watching silently.
The mother burned the cloth and the other materials according to the customs she followed at home.
When she returned, she looked directly at her daughter.
“Tell me something. Is your mother—or anybody in your family—an arulvakku solbavar?”
The girl hesitated.
“Yes, Aunty. My grandmother used to do it. My mother still knows those things.”
The woman nodded slowly.
“That is why you went with her without fear.”
The girl stared at her.
“What?”
“You were brave enough to accompany someone when everyone else was frightened. Maybe that girl sensed something about you. Maybe she simply chose you because you were the nearest person she trusted. We don't know.”
She paused.
“But according to our belief, when someone who is connected to these traditions crosses something considered a bad omen, sometimes another person nearby can get affected.”
The girl looked toward the bathroom.
“So you think that's what happened?”
“I don't know what happened,” her mother answered.
“But you did the right thing by bringing her home.”
Then she became serious again.
“Now you go and bathe before you enter the house properly. Wash your clothes separately. Don't bring anything from there into the house.”
The girl nodded.
She left.
At the other girl's house, almost the same thing happened.
Her mother opened the door and immediately noticed that her daughter had returned much earlier than expected.
“What happened?”
The girl explained everything.
Her mother's eyes widened.
“You accompanied her?”
“Yes.”
“Was anybody else there?”
“She was the one who chose me.”
“Did she know anything about you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. She doesn't know me. She doesn't know you either. She just looked at everyone and chose me.”
Her mother remained silent for several seconds.
Then she said,
“Go and bathe.”
The girl did not argue.
Her mother collected the clothes she had been wearing and told her to set them aside for washing. She then performed a small household ritual that she personally believed would remove any lingering theettu or theemai associated with the incident.
She tied a black thread around her daughter's left leg and another around her left wrist.
The one-rupee coin that had come from Archana's ritual was wrapped in a fresh yellow cloth.
Instead of throwing it away, her mother placed it carefully in the family's pooja room.
She stood there for a moment with folded hands.
Whatever she believed had happened, she clearly did not regard the coin as something worthless.
By evening, the story had already reached the girls' group chat.
The two girls described what had happened after they reached home—their mothers' reactions, the bathing, the discarded clothes, the threads tied around their wrists and legs, and the one-rupee coin being wrapped in yellow cloth and placed in the pooja room.
The girl who had originally suffered the pain finally typed:
Guys, I'm completely fine now.
The messages stopped.
Then:
Girl 1:
Seriously?
Girl with the pain:
Yes. Completely.
Girl 2:
What did your mother say?
She explained what her mother had told her.
According to the family's traditional beliefs, she said, if the situation had been ignored, the problem might have become more serious. Her mother had even spoken about old beliefs concerning bad omens, possession, and possible difficulties later in married life or pregnancy.
Immediately, several girls objected.
Girl 3:
That's superstition.
Girl 1:
Definitely.
Girl 2:
But the pain really disappeared.
Girl 3:
That doesn't mean the ritual caused it.
Nobody could prove anything.
The girl herself was equally uncertain.
She wasn't suddenly convinced that the ritual had supernatural power.
But she couldn't forget how much pain she had been in—and how quickly she had felt better afterward.
Finally, she typed:
I'm not saying Archana cured me.
I'm not saying my mother's explanation is true either.
Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe the pain would have stopped anyway.
But I know how I felt before she did that.
And I know how I feel now.
There was a long silence in the chat.
Then somebody wrote:
Tomorrow we should ask Archana where she learned all this.
Another girl replied:
Yes.
Because she clearly didn't just make that up.
Archana saw none of those messages.
And even if she had, she would not have told them.
Because what she had learned from Revathi belonged to a completely different part of her life.
Nobody at college knew about Revathi.
Not her friends.
Not Prakash.
Not the HOD.
Not the girls who mocked her.
And most importantly, not her family.
Revathi was simply a person who had entered Archana's life during those months when she had been working at the hotel.
A sister-like presence.
A teacher.
Someone who had shown her practical ways of surviving in a world that had suddenly become unfamiliar.
And the things Revathi had taught her were private.
Archana had never spoken about them at home.
She had never told Lakshmi where she spent those hours during the hotel closure.
She had never told Suresh about the rituals.
She had never mentioned Revathi's name in the family.
Even when her parents later discovered that she had worked at the hotel, they had learned only about the job itself—not the relationship that had formed there.
That secrecy was not because Archana was ashamed of Revathi.
Quite the opposite.
There were some relationships that became precious precisely because they belonged to a part of one's life that nobody else had touched.
Revathi had never asked Archana to explain herself.
Never asked about her family.
Never demanded to know why she had been forced into the life she was living.
She had simply called her thangachi.
And Archana had quietly accepted that affection.
So the girls could speculate all they wanted.
They could ask where Archana had learned the ritual.
They could wonder whether she had learned it from someone in her family.
They could decide it was superstition.
They could decide it was coincidence.
But they would not discover Revathi.
Not yet.
And Archana intended to keep it that way.