"Why did you decide to marry my father?" Pakku asked his mother one night.
She gave him a look that said she knew he was not asking because he wanted to help Kanna chose between her prospective husbands.
"I was poor," she said. "My father died when I was fifteen, my mother some years earlier. I was alone in the world and needed a husband. That made me an attractive prospect for young men with little means."
Men like Pakku, though she did not say it.
"I had several proposals from men who could offer me nothing more than everything I needed, but your father was kind. He said he would have to pay the bride price to me, since my relatives had left me to fend for myself. It wasn't much, but it kept us fed and clothed for two years after he died."
Pakku nodded. In his conversations with the girls there had been a tacit understanding, that things would change when they were married and came under the control of husbands who might be less obliging than their fathers.
Once she married Kanna would be lost to him, and Pakku could not bear that.
