The water for washing the brushes Chikkanna took from the big fountain of the Brindavan Gardens, below the Krishnaraja Sagara dam, at Srirangapatna, in the district of Mandya, in Karnataka, in the south of India; he took it with a steel cup from the pipe that feeds the jets, the jets that every evening at seven light up with music for the tourists, and he carried it up to the scaffolding of the statue of the goddess Kaveri that the State government was having built on the bank for the six evenings of rite to the river announced from the eleventh to the sixteenth of October, with the priests called from Varanasi; and the fountain's pipe, like all the pipes in the gardens, drinks from the reservoir, which on the twenty-fifth of September stood at one hundred and five feet and seven tenths out of one hundred and twenty-four and eight, according to the board that the dam's attendants update by hand beside the north gate. Chikkanna was thirty-four years old and had been painting since he was seventeen, with the brushes of his father Siddaiah, who before him had painted shop signs, festival carts, numbers on boats and the façades of village temples, and who in September, when his right hand had begun to tremble, had left him the box and his place in Nanjundappa's crew; since then the one in the family who paints was him, and he was painting the goddess's robe, green, yellow, red and blue at the point where the robe becomes river.

On the twenty-fifth of September his father had gone to Mandya with the men of the Raitha Sangha to sit down in the middle of the road to Bangalore, at the Jayachamaraja Wadiyar Circle, against the four thousand cusecs a day that the committee for the Kaveri waters had decided to send to Tamil Nadu for fifteen days; and in the evening he had come back with a request from Puttaswamy, who leads the union in their village, to the young men working at the gardens: to leave the statue without eyes, because a goddess without eyes is not inaugurated, and the minister would have had to say out loud why. The father passed on the request and did not support it. The well at the house, thirty metres beneath the cane field, had run on diesel since the canal water no longer reached their field, which is the last on the branch, and October's diesel lay in the twenty-four days of work on the statue, at six hundred and fifty rupees a day, which Nanjundappa paid all together once the work was finished, with the signature on the attendance sheet; the father knew it, and at the table he said that a job begun is a job finished. Nanjundappa, who was sixty-eight years old and had made the statues of half the district, on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, when Chikkanna asked him whether the statue could be left as it was, said something else: that in the six evenings eight thousand people a day would come to the gardens, perhaps ten thousand, that the flowers, the roasted corn, the peanuts and the bangles would be sold to them by women from their own villages, that the reservoir is emptied by the cusecs to Tamil Nadu and not by the paint, and that a statue does not drink. In January Chikkanna had made the eyes of the small goddess of the village temple, on the bank of the canal, and at the first puja the women had touched his right hand, one after another, the hand he had painted them with; since then, in the village, whoever passed in front of the goddess knew whose hand it was. The steel cup, on the plank of the scaffolding, that afternoon was full to the brim.

On the evening of the twenty-seventh Nanjundappa had the site lamp brought up onto the scaffolding, the one with the orange cable that ran from the gardens' junction box, because the next morning the officials were coming up to inspect the statue and he wanted it finished, and he put into Chikkanna's hand the number zero brush, the finest in the box, which in all the work nobody had yet wetted because it serves one thing only, the pupil and the outline of the eyes, which in a statue are done last and which the master had kept for him, the youngest of the crew, for the hand that does not tremble on the ladder. Chikkanna climbed to the height of the face; he dipped the brush in the black, held it over the steel cup, and a drop fell into the fountain water and spread to the rim. Then he came down. He came down with the brush in his hand and the black still on the tip, and held it out to Nanjundappa handle first. He said he would not do the eyes. Nanjundappa asked him whether he knew what that meant, and Chikkanna answered yes: the September attendance sheet stayed without his signature, and without a signature, according to the agreement the master had made with all his crews for forty years, the pay for the twenty-four days did not come out, not that month and not after. Nanjundappa took the brush, tapped it once against the rim of the cup and said nothing more.

That night, at home, downstream of Srirangapatna, along the Visvesvaraya canal, his father started the pump with the last diesel in the can and let it run until the cistern was half full, then switched it off and stayed with his hand on the engine, still warm, and told him what it meant: that Nanjundappa would not give him another crew, that without the twenty-four days there was no diesel for October, and that the box, if he left it, nobody in their house would ever take up again, because his own hand trembled and of sons who paint he had one.

On the morning of the twenty-eighth Chikkanna went back to the gardens with his father's box and with a cloth bag, inside it his two shirts and his identity card, and found the statue finished: Nanjundappa had done the eyes in the night, under the orange lamp, and the two officials of the department, who came up at nine to inspect it for the minister expected on the eleventh, found it in order; neither of them saw that the goddess's left eye sat a little higher than the right, a millimetre, perhaps two, and Chikkanna saw it, he told his cousin Manju afterwards, because the pencil lines over which the master had passed the black had been drawn by him. He set the box down on the plank of the scaffolding, with the lid closed, and went to the north gate, where the bus for Bangalore stops, and got on it with the cloth bag; in Bangalore he knew nobody.