Part 5 of 20 · 5 minAttha and the Ice Cream

The house had been in a state since dawn, because attha was coming, and attha coming meant three things: the good vessels, the mutton, and his mother becoming a slightly different person for a day.

Ramesh had been sent out from under everyone’s feet at eleven and told to be back by one and not to be filthy. He was, therefore, at the tank end of the street at half past twelve, filthy, and had entirely forgotten about lunch, when the watch said:

Attha will bring ice.

He stopped dead in the road.

“Ice?”

Nothing. Of course nothing. It had said its one sentence and gone back to ticking, and Ramesh stood in the sun doing the arithmetic that would decide his afternoon. The boys were going to the tank. They had been talking about it all morning. If he went, he would be gone two hours.

Four minutes later his aunt’s family came round the corner from the bus stand, attha with the bag on her arm, and her husband behind, and Latha in a frock the colour of a mango, and attha was carrying, held out from her body with great care in a wad of newspaper going transparent at the corners, a dozen ice candies from the shop at the stand, which had cost her more to bring than they cost to buy, and which had eleven minutes to live in that heat.

“Where’s that boy? Ramesh! Where is he? These will be water in a minute.”

“Here, attha.”

He was already at the gate.

His mother looked at him. It was quite a look. “You’re here?”

“I came back,” said Ramesh.

“He came back,” said his mother, to the street in general, in the voice of a woman informing the world that the age of miracles had commenced in her house that morning, “before he was called. Amma, look at him. Yesterday I hit him twice to get him out of bed.”

“He’s grown,” said attha, and put an ice candy in his hand, and pinched his cheek with the wet cold fingers of the same hand, which is a thing aunts have done since the beginning of time. “Orange for you. You always take orange.”

He always took orange.

He stood there with it going soft and the sweet cold running down his wrist past the watch, and out in the road Sattibabu and Chinna and the rest went by towards the tank at a run, and did not get one, and by the time they came back at three they would have missed the whole thing entirely.

That was, Ramesh decided, the single greatest thing that had ever happened to anybody.

It was a good afternoon. It was one of the best of his life, and he would think about it later in a way that made his chest hurt. The mutton came out at two. The men ate first, in the front room, and Ramesh was allowed to sit at the end because attha said he should, and his father did not object. His uncle talked about the rate for cotton and about a man in Gudur who had bought a lorry. His mother and attha ate afterwards in the kitchen with the door open, talking with their mouths full about people Ramesh had never met, laughing in a way his mother did not laugh on ordinary days.

Latha, who was nine, and who had decided some years ago that Ramesh was an idiot, sat on the step with him afterwards and said, “They said in the bus you failed.”

“Mm.”

“Did you?”

“Eleven,” said Ramesh. “Out of twenty-five.”

“That’s failed.”

“I know it’s failed.”

Latha considered this, and then, because she was nine and merciful, changed the subject. “What’s that?”

And Ramesh, who had been waiting since half past twelve for somebody to ask him that, said, “It’s a magic watch.”

“It’s not.”

“It is.”

“Prove it.”

He should not have. He had been getting away with things for a day and a half and he had entirely lost the ability to tell the difference between the four minutes he actually had and the general glow of being right.

“Your bus,” he said. “Going back. It’ll be late.”

He had no information about the bus whatsoever. He had never in his life thought about the bus. He said it because Latha’s face was doing the thing where she is about to laugh at you, and because the Nellore bus was late roughly as often as it was not, and because at that moment a bluff felt exactly as good as a fact.

“How late?”

“Very,” said Ramesh. “You’ll be standing there ages.”

The bus came at twenty past six.

It was, that evening, magnificently, unusually, on time. So on time that his uncle, who had allowed ten minutes for it to be late the way everyone did, had to run the last thirty feet with the bag, and attha shouted at him from the door, and Latha got on last and turned round on the step and looked back at Ramesh with an expression of pure nine-year-old triumph that he would remember for a long time.

Ramesh stood in the dust with his hand still half up from waving.

It didn’t say anything about the bus, he thought. I said it. Not the watch.

It was the first true thing he had thought about the whole business in two days, and it made him so uncomfortable that he put it away at the back, next to the vessel, and went in for dinner.