The ancestors are treated as a class of being with an address, a hunger, and a legal claim on their descendants. Between death and full ancestorhood the deceased is a preta, an unsettled ghost with no proper body, and the ten days of pinda offerings after cremation are described as constructing one limb at a time; sapindikarana at the end merges the new dead into the collective of fathers. From then on they are fed annually and named in threes. The practical consequences are enormous and not all comfortable: the preference for sons is partly a ritual necessity, adoption has historically been driven by it, and childless couples in India still feel the pressure in explicitly religious terms. Reform is happening at the edges — daughters performing cremations and shraddha is increasingly common and periodically makes the news — and Gaya, where a single set of rites is held to discharge the obligation permanently, does brisk business from families who want it settled.