Part 3 of 20 · 6 minThe Weavers’ Street

By nine o’clock Ramesh had a system.

He had worked it out on the step, with the seriousness of a boy who has been handed the secret of the universe and wants to use it properly. The rules, as far as he could tell, were these. The watch spoke when it wanted to and not when he asked. It said what was going to happen and never once why. And it was always, exactly, four minutes early. He had checked it twice against the radio clock, standing on a stool, while his mother asked him from the kitchen what in God’s name he was doing.

What it mostly said was small.

The milk cycle is coming. And four minutes later the cans came banging round the corner.

A dog is going to come at you at the drain. And it did, and Ramesh was already up on the wall, and the dog, which had been terrorising the boys of that street unopposed for two years, stood in the road looking up at a child who had somehow been on the wall before it arrived.

Ramesh looked down at it and felt like a king.

He went up the street with the watch sliding round and round his wrist bone, stopping every few houses to be told something and then watching it come true. Sattibabu’s mother was going to shout for Sattibabu. Somebody’s bore pump was going to start. A lorry was going to come through and everyone would have to get in. He walked around inside four minutes of borrowed time like a boy walking around inside a house he has just been given, opening all the cupboards.

Nobody noticed a thing. That was the strangest part. He was the most powerful person in Venkatagiri and he was also a small boy in a shirt with a missing button, and the street simply went on around him.

The weavers’ street ran off the main road behind the school, and you heard it before you turned into it.

Not one loom. Nine, eleven, some days fifteen, all going at once out of the dark of the front rooms, and none of them together, so the sound came at you as a kind of rain. Between the doors the street belonged to the yarn. They warped it out in the open where there was room, two hundred feet of it stretched between the pegs, and the women walked it back and forth with the threads coming off their fingers, counting under their breath, and if you were a child you got out of the way, because a boy who fell into a warp got a hiding from four families at once.

Nagamma was at the dye pots at the corner with her arms indigo to the elbow. Two doors down, a girl of about fifteen sat winding bobbins off a swift with one hand and eating with the other. The whole street smelled of wet cotton and rice paste and coconut oil.

His father’s loom was the third on the left, sunk in its pit, and his father was in it up to the waist with his feet down out of sight on the treadles.

“Come,” he said, without turning round.

Ramesh came and sat on the floor beside the pit, out of the light.

He had done this ten thousand times and he was bored in the first ninety seconds, the way he always was. The shuttle went across. His father’s hand caught it. The reed came back and packed the thread down. His feet changed. The shuttle went across the other way. Across, and back. Across, and back.

There was about an inch of saree.

“How long is that one, nanna?”

“Six yards. And a blouse piece.”

“How long does six yards take?”

“Eleven days,” his father said. “If nothing breaks.”

Across, and back.

“How many times does the shuttle go?”

His father did not stop, and did not look, and did something with his mouth that on another man would have been a smile. “Count it and tell me.”

Ramesh counted to two hundred and something and lost it and started again and lost it again, and gave up, and his father said, “About eight thousand. For one saree.”

“Eight thousand!”

“Eight thousand.” Across, and back. “There is no way to do it in seven thousand nine hundred. You cannot go faster at the end because you were slow at the beginning. It is only eight thousand, one at a time, and then there is a saree. And if you have counted wrong at the start,” the reed came back and packed the thread down, “there is nothing. Not a bad saree. Nothing. Rags.”

Ramesh nodded, and did not hear a single word of it, because he was eleven and because at that moment the watch said, quite clearly:

He is going to ask for the small scissors.

Ramesh stood up. He walked over to the shelf by the door, took the small scissors out of the tin where they lived under the sizing brush, came back, and stood holding them behind his back with his heart going like the loom.

He counted. He got to about a hundred and eighty and lost count and started again.

“Ramesh.” His father’s hand had stopped in the air. “Go and get the small…”

“Here.”

And he held them out.

His father looked at the scissors. Then he looked at his son, properly, for what Ramesh was fairly sure was the first time that year. A long, flat, weaver’s look, the kind he gave a warp when the count was coming out wrong and he could not yet see where.

“How did you know that?”

And this is the moment. Not the road at the boundary, not the black woman, not the watch itself. This one, in a front room with the loom stopped and the dust hanging in the light from the door, with a pair of scissors in his hand.

Ramesh could have said: nanna, something happened at the border.

“I saw the thread was fraying,” he said.

It came out smooth and quick and it was the first properly good lie of his life, and it worked. His father grunted and took the scissors and said, “Hm. Sharp today,” and put his feet back on the treadles, and the loom started up again, and Ramesh stood there in the doorway glowing all the way down to his feet.

Sharp today. His father had said that.

He went out into the street with the warp stretched shining down the middle of it and two hundred feet of thread that somebody had counted by hand, and he did not think about eight thousand throws of the shuttle at all. He was thinking about how easy it had been. He was thinking that if a pair of scissors could do that, then Monday, at school, in front of everybody, he was going to be somebody else entirely.

Behind him the loom went on, eleven days from a saree, and nobody in that street had ever been given a single thing four minutes early in their lives.