At dawn in Parambil’s smoky kitchen, Thankamma feeds and instructs the new bride, who is both comforted by the bustle and pierced by homesickness. They barter with a fishmonger, and Thankamma’s stories reveal expectations for a householder. Daily routines emerge: the husband eats standing and works the fields, while the bride learns by watching.

Shamuel, the pulayan foreman, arrives with coconuts, greeting the bride warmly. Through him she observes the estate’s caste boundaries—Sara sweeps the courtyard; pulayar eat on the steps—and learns practical lore, like eave design to deter elephants. Shamuel recounts how the husband once saved a grievously wounded young elephant, Damodaran, forging a lasting, free bond that explains the animal’s comings and goings.

Under Thankamma’s coaching, the bride cooks and makes jackfruit halwa, hearing a playful superstition that feeding it to her husband will fulfill her wish. Pride in small successes is shadowed by dread that Thankamma must soon return to her own home, deepening the bride’s anxiety and attachment.

Sent to deliver lunch, the bride walks a path that prompts Thankamma’s history: the husband was cheated out of his ancestral home, came to this hostile land with Yohannan pulayan, and, despite fever and losses, drained and cleared it, attracting craftsmen and granting plots to kin to grow a community. She finds her husband working; their mutual shyness is evident as he eats and escorts her back.

They encounter Nair youths who have toppled a burden stone. Ignoring their mockery, the husband crosses a log, single-handedly restores the slab, then knocks it down and challenges them to replace it; the boys struggle and are shamed. He departs, angry but controlled. The frightened bride runs home, and Thankamma reassures her that his hardness is only a shell around care, urging patience as everything will unfold in time.