Part 15 of 20 · 3 minThe Empty Road

He went out to the border after school.

He did not decide to. He came out of the gate at four with his bag on his shoulder and turned left instead of right, past the temple lane and the brick kiln and the palms, out to where the tar gives up, and he walked until he came to the place where the crowd had stood.

There was nothing there. Of course there was nothing there. Six days of sun and one shower had taken the turmeric off the road, and the thorn bund was a thorn bund, and there was a plastic packet caught in it, and some dark patches in the dust that could have been anything and were probably oil off a lorry.

Ramesh stood in the middle of the road at the edge of his own village and had it out with her.

He did it silently, because he was eleven and not mad, and because there were people in the far field. But he did it properly.

You gave me the wrong thing.

That was the first part, and he was furious, and it came out of him in a rush. I asked you to keep things away from me. You give me four minutes of watching them come. You told me about the oil and I could not stop the oil. You told me about the crying and I could not stop the crying. You told me she would beat me and there was nothing, nothing, nothing I could do, because it was for yesterday, and yesterday is finished, and you never once told me about yesterday when it was today.

He stood there with his fists shut.

Tell me why. That is all. Not what. Why. Tell me the reason, four minutes early, and I will never ask you for anything again.

The road stayed a road. Somewhere behind him a bus went along the Nellore road and did not stop.

He took the watch off.

He had it in his hand and he had his arm back, and the scrub was right there, and it would have taken about a second and a half, and he stood like that for a good while with his arm up and his eyes hot.

Hold on to it.

Not from the watch. From two nights ago, in the dark, in a voice that had decided not to eat him. He heard it as clearly as he had heard it then, and his arm came down, and he stood in the road with a cheap watch in his fist and cried for a bit, which he had not done since he was about eight, and then wiped his face with his sleeve and put it back on.

And then, because he was standing in the exact spot and had nothing left to lose, he said the true thing.

I don’t know how to make it not happen.

Which was, when he heard himself think it, not a complaint about her at all.

He walked home slowly. The looms were going in the weavers’ street, seven or eight of them, and he stopped at the top of it the way you stop at a river.

Eleven days for six yards. Eight thousand throws for one saree. You cannot go faster at the end because you were slow at the beginning.

His father had said that with his feet in a pit, and Ramesh had heard none of it, and it had been sitting in his head for four days waiting for him.