Part 4 of 17 · 2 minEleven Cups

The next week she made coffee eleven times in one morning.

Not eleven cups. Eleven separate times — the whole thing, from the beginning, decoction and all, because each time she finished she put the tumbler down somewhere and walked away and forgot, and then some minutes later she thought: nobody has had coffee.

By ten o'clock there were tumblers all over the house. On the washing machine. On the shoe rack. One on the floor beside the tulasi pot, gone cold with a fly sitting on the rim, very neatly covered with a saucer, because whatever else was going, her manners were not.

Nanna found the one on his files.

It had left a ring. Not on anything important — a photocopy — but he had been awake since four with a problem at work and he had a headache and he was three months behind on something he had told nobody about, and he picked up the tumbler and turned around and said, loudly, "Can somebody please WATCH her."

The house went quiet.

Ammamma came to the kitchen door with a wet cloth in her hand. She had understood the volume and not the words. She looked at Nanna's face and then at Amma's, and then she folded her hands together in front of her, and said, "Sorry. Sorry, sorry."

That is a thing she had never done in her life. She had been a woman who was owed apologies, not one who gave them.

Bujji stopped chewing.

Amma crossed the room and took the cloth out of her mother's hands and said, "You did nothing. He is shouting at the office, not at you. Come, sit, we will do the flowers."

Later, in the kitchen, with the tap running, Amma said, "She said sorry."

"I know."

"She does not know what she is sorry for. She only knows I am in trouble."

"I know," said Nanna. "I am not made of iron. I have been awake since four."

"I know," said Amma. "Neither of us is made of iron."

And they stood there together with the tap running, which was, that week, the closest thing they had to a conversation.