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twenty-one flags ‘adorned with a striking mixture of Saivite and Vaishnavite sacred symbols’, such as a bull representing Shiva’s companion Nandi, an eagle representing Vishnu’s steed Garuda, and a boar representing Vishnu’s Varaha avatar.
    The shed was bolted and locked, so Fernando invited me to put my eye up against the wide hinge of a small door, to peer into its soft black interior. ‘What do you see?’ he asked.
    Not a carriage, I told him, but a big golden palanquin, some of its paint peeling, its throne empty.
    Fernando said: ‘I think that must be the bigger palanquin. It is taken out during the years the Ther isn’t. Then there should be a smaller palanquin behind that. Do you see it?’ I did. ‘That is taken out on the first Saturday of every month. And the Pon Ther is in the next room.’
    I stepped back and looked once more at the shed. Something puzzled me, and it took me a couple of minutes before I figured it out: It had no Ther-sized door at all. In front of where the Ther stood, patiently waiting to stretch its legs once every half-decade, there was merely a wall of solid-looking brick.
    ‘That’s right,’ Fernando said, smiling. ‘When it is time for the Ther to be taken out, they demolish the wall. Then they also demolish the section of the compound wall that separates it from the road.’ He pointed, and now I saw that half of the compound wall was clearly of a more recent vintage than its other half. ‘And then, once the procession is over, they brick the walls up all over again.’ With such joyous exertions is the Ther loosed upon Tuticorin every five years.

    The Ther’s twenty-one processional flags are kept in the custody of the Pandiyapathi, the gentleman whose identity Fernando had promised to explain during my first day in Tuticorin. There were, he said, originally seven Parava villages in the area: Vaiparu,Vemparu, Veerapandiyapattinam, Tuticorin, Punnakayal, Manapadu and Alanthalai. Each fishing village had its own leader, a hereditary thalaivan. But the chief of chiefs, the foremost amongst the seven leaders was always the thalaivan of Tuticorin, or the jati thalaivan. ‘We believe the jati thalaivan’s family is descended from one of the Pandya princes,’ Fernando said. ‘This is why he is known as the Pandiyapathi.’
    The current jati thalaivan is J. Berchmans Motha, a militaristic, spare man in his seventies, whom I had spotted in an adjoining pew during Kattar’s Mass, sitting without movement for forty-five minutes. Fernando had actually taken me around to his house the previous afternoon, a modest brown bungalow on Kerecope Street, right behind Justin Photo Colour Lab. It was around 2 p.m., and Motha, woken by our incessant ringing of the doorbell in the middle of his siesta, came to the porch tousle-haired and grumpy, admonished Fernando for disturbing him, and asked us to come back another day. It was the only time during my stay in Tuticorin that I saw Fernando at a loss, and it must have lasted all of five minutes.
    When we did return, Fernando was careful to call ahead, and we were consequently met by a Motha with neater hair and a lukewarm smile. The smile, gleaned as it has to be through the foliage of his moustache, is not the expression he is most comfortable with. By default, Motha looks deeply disappointed with the human race, much as a father would be with a wastrel son; his eyes, behind spectacles, engage minimally with others, and his conversation is grudgingly given, some mental pair of scales weighing each sentence to judge whether it should be squandered on this undeserving world. But he was never unpleasant, and he was more generous with his time than I could have hoped.
    Twenty-two generations ago, Motha’s direct ancestor, Joao da Cruz, was the incumbent jati thalaivan who led his people inthe conversion to Catholicism. The position has passed from father to son since then, every jati thalaivan serving as a vital liaison between the Paravas