Part 7 of 20 · 6 minThe Cheruvu

It was back in the morning.

Amma is coming to wake you.

Ramesh sat straight up in the dark with his heart hammering, and was sitting up, wide awake, entirely dressed in yesterday’s shorts, when his mother came round the door. She stopped, and looked at him, and said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

She put her hand on his forehead anyway, because that is what mothers do, and went away unsatisfied.

Ramesh sat on the mat and did the only real thinking he had done in three days.

It had gone quiet last night. It had come back this morning. In between he had slept.

He turned it over the way he turned over a marble, looking for the chip. It talked in the morning. It got slower in the evening. Last night, at the ground, it had come from the far end of a field, and then it had stopped altogether, and he had shaken it like an idiot.

It gets tired, he thought. And sleeping fills it.

He was so pleased with himself for working this out that he entirely failed to ask the next question, which any adult would have asked immediately, and which was: how much is in it, and what happens when it runs out at a time when you need it?

Instead he decided to measure it.

Breakfast was the leftover rice from attha’s visit, fried up with onion, eaten on the back step. His mother came in from the tap with the vessel on her hip and the morning’s news on her tongue, the way news arrives in that street, between the water and the stove, before anybody has thought about whether it is theirs to tell.

“The bajji man,” she said, to his father, through the doorway. “From the ground. Nagamma’s sister was at the hospital with her own boy. His arm is all wrapped. Up to here.” She showed on her own arm, elbow to knuckles. “He will live. He will not fry for a month. Six weeks, they said. With a small son and the stall sitting there.”

His father said, “Hm,” from inside the pit, which was all he ever said to news, and the shuttle went across.

“Wife will have to do it alone,” his mother said. “Who buys bajji from a woman alone at the bus stand?” And she went back out to the tap, because the vessel was empty again.

Ramesh ate. He ate all of it, slowly, looking at the rice, and the rice went down like sand.

The watch said nothing. He waited for it to, the way you wait for somebody to bring up the thing you did, and it did not, because none of that was coming at him any more. It had already arrived, last night, at somebody else.

He went down to the tank after breakfast with a plan of glorious stupidity. He was going to count.

The cheruvu at that hour was the busiest place in Venkatagiri. Buffaloes standing in up to their shoulders with their chins on the water, looking like they had been there since the beginning of the world. Two women beating clothes on the stone. A man throwing a cast net in a slow circle and drawing it in with nothing in it, twice, and not minding. The bund on the far side with the palms behind it, and the whole thing flat and silver and smelling of mud and buffalo.

Ramesh sat on the steps and burned his miracle on rubbish, deliberately, one by one, keeping count on his fingers.

Chinna is going to push you in. One. He moved. Chinna arrived four minutes later and pushed nobody in.

A bee. Two.

Someone will call your name. Three. They did, from the road, and it was nobody, and Ramesh grinned at the water like a lunatic.

He got to eleven, and by eleven they were coming slower, and at fourteen it was the far-end-of-the-field voice again, and at fifteen there was nothing at all, and it was not yet noon.

Fifteen. On a good morning, from a full night’s sleep, about fifteen.

He was still sitting there being pleased about it when the shouting started at the far end, near the deep side by the bund, where the boys go who can swim and where the boys who cannot swim go anyway.

He got there running with everyone else.

It was a boy from the Kammari street, eight or nine, and he was already out. The fisherman had got him, in about the time it takes to say it, one arm round the chest and up onto the stones, and the boy was on his side coughing tank water onto the steps while a ring of people told each other what had happened in six different versions.

The fisherman was Chenchaiah, the one with the cast net, who had been drawing it in empty all morning and not minding. He was crouched over the boy with water running out of his hair, thumping him between the shoulder blades with the flat of his hand, not hard, the way you would clear a blocked pipe. The boy was Anji. Somebody said his name, and then everybody said it.

Then Anji’s mother came down the steps at a run with her sari hitched up in one fist, and slapped her son twice across the back of the head while he was still coughing, and then sat down on the wet stone and pulled him into her lap and held on to him with both arms, rocking, saying something into his hair that nobody could hear.

Ramesh stood at the back of the ring, breathing hard, and understood, with the coldness of a fact arriving whole, that the watch had said nothing.

Nothing at all. Not a word. Because it had been empty since fifteen, and he had spent fifteen on a bee and a push and somebody calling his name.

At the front of the ring Chenchaiah stood up, stepped back out of the way of the mother, and wrung out the end of his lungi with both hands, the water pattering on the steps. Nobody was looking at him. They were looking at Anji. He picked up his net from where he had dropped it and began to gather it over his arm, fold by fold, the way it had to be gathered or it would tangle.

“Where were you?” said Chinna, appearing at his elbow. “Did you know? Did you know it before?”

Ramesh looked at him.

The truth would have taken about nine words.

“I knew,” he said. “That’s why I came running.”

Over Chinna’s shoulder, along the top of the bund, a thin man with a wet lungi and a net over his arm was walking back towards the shallow end where the fish were, on his own, without looking round, and the story was already being told on the steps behind him, and he was not in it.

It went round the ring in under a minute, and got better as it went, and by the evening there were two boys in Venkatagiri who would tell you quite sincerely that Ramesh had known about the drowning before the boy went in the water, and one of them had not even been at the tank.