Part 17 of 17 · 3 minHands Over Hands

It did not get better. It is important to say that, because this is the kind of story that usually ends with things getting better.

She got worse, slowly, the way it goes. By the next summer she could not always find the veranda. She called Chinnu by Amma's name almost always now, and Amma by her sister's name, and Bujji simply *nayana*, which is what you call a boy when you have run out of the particular one.

The bolt stayed on the kitchen door. The chart stayed on the fridge, and got rewritten twice as the school timings changed, and Nanna's slot grew from one hour to two without anybody proposing it.

At the end of that summer Chinnu sat down on the veranda floor with the flower basket and said, "Ammamma, I can't do the knot. Show me."

Ammamma could not have explained the knot. She had no words left for it.

She took Chinnu's hands in her own hands and did it that way. Her fingers over the girl's fingers, the thread going where it had gone for sixty years, twist and loop and pull.

Chinnu got it on the ninth try.

"I did it. Ammamma, look, I did it."

"Chi," said Ammamma, enormously pleased, with no idea in the world who this girl was. "Who taught you that?"

"You did."

"I did? *I* did?"

And she laughed — that same laugh, the one from the salt coffee, the one that made her hold on to something — and Chinnu laughed too, and this time they were laughing at the same thing, from the inside, together.

Chinnu asked her mother that night why they were doing all this. Not to complain. She wanted the actual answer.

"Because she is clever?" said Amma. "She is clever. It is not the reason. There are clever people in this world dying alone in rooms that nobody comes to."

"Then why?"

"Because for fifty-one years she made people want to."

Amma sat down on the end of the bed.

"Not by being remarkable, kanna. She was frightened of lizards. She failed Hindi twice. She did not speak to her own sister for six years over a joke at a wedding, and there was a year when I could not stand her. She was an ordinary difficult woman who had good years and bad ones.

"But she walked your brother up and down a veranda for four hours a night for eight months and never once mentioned it afterwards. She answered you two hundred and eleven times in one day. She left rasam on a wall for a year because a two-year-old was proud of it. She gave credit to people having a bad year and never wrote it down, so nobody would have to feel it.

"She was putting it away the whole time. She did not know she was doing it. And she cannot draw on it now — she cannot ask, she cannot remember to ask, she cannot even tell you my name — and it does not matter, because it is all still there and we are drawing on it for her.

"That is the only thing I want you to take out of this house. One day you will be past being able to ask. You will not be able to explain yourself, or be charming, or earn it. Whoever is standing in the room with you on that day will be standing there because of what you are doing about it now, at ten years old, while you still can."

Chinnu thought about it for a long time.

Then she got up and went and put her name down for an extra slot on the chart.