One thread remained. If Sharada Kamath had truly gone to Mangalore and never returned, as the family claimed, then either she had died there in obscurity, believing her child lost to her forever, or she had not gone as far as everyone assumed.
It was Radha's reasoning, this time, that carried them forward. She, who had grown up among these hills, understood better than Ganapathi how the wealthy hide their shame, not by distance, but by silence. "A family like the Kamaths," she said, "would not need to send her far away. They would only need everyone to believe she was far away."
Together they travelled to a small convent-run home for the elderly outside Ambikanagar, a two-hour bus ride through cardamom estates gone wild with monsoon green, where Radha's aunt had once mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that a quiet old woman from the Kamath family had lived there for decades under a different name.
She was sitting on the veranda when they arrived, a thin woman in a plain white sari, her hair silver and her eyes the particular grey-brown of someone who has spent a lifetime looking at things that are no longer there. Ganapathi did not need the register the nuns kept, though he checked it anyway, the way he always checked a thing twice before trusting it, because the moment she turned and saw his face, she went very still, and then she began, silently, to weep.
"You have his eyes," she said, when she could finally speak. "Vasant's eyes. I would know them anywhere. I have looked for them in every stranger's face for thirty years."
She had not fled to Mangalore. She had once tried, when he was three years old, to reclaim her son in secret, only to be turned away at her own family's insistence and told the boy had already died of fever, a lie designed to end her searching for good. Broken by a grief she believed final, she had let her family quietly place her in the convent home for the rest of her days, a woman erased twice over: once by her father's pride, and once by his lie.