A kinship formed in flesh and fish. ‘Viranar kari and Senkulattu [Red Pond] min’, explained Andal, an elderly woman, ‘make us a lineage, the Sakkarei Kandiyar lineage.’ Claims on the meat from the goats they collectively sponsor and sacrifice to their tutelary deity Viranar form ‘temple shares’ (kovil panku). Rights to the fish from the pond that they communally own are ‘pond shares’ (kulattu panku). Temple and pond shares, joint stakes on the agricultural bounty of their territories sanctioned by their tutelaries, make individuals into a lineage. Meat and fish substantiate a genealogical claim – a contemporary evocation of an assumed historical consanguinity. They embody the rights, obligations, and claims-making that underpin all kinship-polities from the lineage to the street to the region. This is a kinship built on bone, realized in tissue, connected by veins, lubricated by fat, and quickened by blood. One as vulnerable as flesh and as vital as entrails. A kinship vivified by the death throes of fish plucked out of ponds to flop about on the shores, writhing and gasping for breath. One instantiated in the heaps of dead fish stacked into piles and arranged in neat rows around which the bookkeeper weaved, counting the shares, matching them to the lineage-mates’ names in the register, and recording those having collected their share. The blood, scales, slime, and guts – snatched by waiting crows – as women sit cleaning and cutting the fish. The tamarind tang of fish curry wafting through the air at lunch time on the day when the communal pond is harvested. A kinship that resonates with the distressed bleats of goats and the squawks of roosters about to be sacrificed. The splashes of blood spilling to the earth as the priest slices through the neck of a goat in one sure stroke. The mound of decapitated goat heads after the sacrifice. The ritual priest bearing aloft the massive bronze sabre, a lime sheathing its curved tip, dripping with goat gore. Entrails tumbling out as the butcher splits open the carcass from the goat sacrificed that morning. The piles of butchered meat, carefully weighed, uniformly divided into bowls, and equally distributed among the kinsmen with claims to it.