Part 1 of 7 · 14 minThe Bell

Before I begin, do one small thing for me. Count.

Count the times death came close to you and missed. The fever that would not break when you were small, and the night your mother did not sleep. The bus you ran for and did not catch, and read about the next morning. The river that was deeper than it looked. Most people forget one.

In the Telugu country there is a word for such a thing. They call it prana-gandam, a danger to life written in a person's stars, which either takes them or is missed. When it is missed, the family breaks a coconut at the temple, somebody ties a thread on your wrist, and everybody tells you that you have a long life ahead of you now.

If you count one, read on easily. If you count two, read on anyway.

On the last Tuesday of November, the weekly market at Pedavanka was as full as it had been all year. The paddy was cut and sold, and there was money in shirt pockets.

The market stood where it had always stood, on the open ground behind the bus stop, under three old tamarind trees. By nine in the morning blue plastic sheets were stretched from branch to pole, and under them sat the sellers with their goods: brinjals in purple heaps, dried fish on sacking, jaggery in brown blocks that drew the wasps, steel pots stacked one inside another. A woman strung jasmine without looking at her fingers. A man fried bajji, green chillies in batter, in a black pan of oil.

At the far edge, beyond the last seller, the ground ran out into thorn bushes and the road to the next village began. There was nothing there. Then there was a sound.

Tring-tring.

A brass bell, the kind that is struck with the thumb. Nobody looked up. A woman buying onions went on arguing about onions. But the baby asleep on her shoulder woke, stiffened, and began to cry, and would not be hushed.

After the bell came the bicycle, the way a thing at the bottom of a pond comes clear when the mud settles. It was black and heavy, of a make nobody sells now, with a steel box tied to the carrier by a strip of cycle tube. After the bicycle came two hands upon the handlebars. And behind the hands, because hands must belong to someone, a man.

He was lean, with a neat moustache and old pock marks on his left cheek. He wore a white half-sleeve shirt, khaki trousers held at the ankle with cycle clips, and rubber sandals. A stub of pencil was pushed into his shirt pocket beside the peppermints. His name was Suryam, and he wheeled the bicycle in among the people the way a man walks into his place of work.

He set the bicycle on its stand beside the jasmine seller, untied the knot of cycle tube, and opened the box. Inside, on a fold of cloth, lay a glass syringe with a steel ring on its plunger, a roll of cotton, and a small bottle of spirit. Under them, pressed flat, lay an old register with a brown cloth cover and a red spine. He wet a pinch of cotton. The smell rose sharp and clean above the jasmine, the smell of every hospital corridor you have ever waited in, and none of the people standing in it smelled it at all.

Then he began his round.

The jasmine seller first. He swabbed the outside of her upper arm, slid the needle in, drew back the plunger, took the needle out, and pressed the cotton to the place with his thumb for a slow count of three. She went on stringing flowers. She had not felt the wet, or the point, or the thumb. The glass barrel stayed empty. He moved to the man buying jaggery. Swab, needle, press. The man scratched his ear and asked the price again. A woman with a basket on her head. Swab, needle, press. An old man asleep against a tamarind root. A constable eating bajji out of a cone of newspaper.

Now, you might ask why he troubled with arms that felt nothing and gave nothing. No one taught him to. In the years when he had a pay book and a thumb to put in it, he was never the one who gave the needle. He boiled the needles, carried the box, and held the arms still while the nurse went down the line. His hands had watched her so many thousand times that they learned it without him, and they went down every line the same way still.

Only the children knew he was there.

All along his path the babies woke and cried, one after another, so that the crying moved through the market like a slow wind through a field. Behind him they fell quiet again with wet faces. Mothers jogged them and blamed the heat.

By the pot seller a young mother stood with a baby girl on her hip. Suryam did the mother's arm. Then, because his hands did not know how to pass an arm in a line, he brought the needle to the baby's arm, just below the shoulder, where the fat makes a crease.

It stopped.

It stopped a hair from the skin, as if it had met a pane of glass. He pressed. The steel ring bit into his finger and the needle did not move forward by the width of a thread. The baby looked at him with her whole face and screamed.

"What is it? What is it? There is nothing there," the mother said, and turned the child to her other hip.

He took the needle away without hurry. It had stopped at every child's skin for fifty years, in every market, and he still brought it there every time, the way the tongue goes to a broken tooth.

At the dried fish stall a small girl in a green frock was holding her grandmother's hand. When she saw him she went behind the old woman without a sound, pulled the loose end of the sari across her face, and put one finger out through the folds.

"Ammamma," she said, which is what a child calls her mother's mother. "That man. The man with the needle."

The grandmother, whose name was Rattamma, looked exactly where the finger pointed. She saw the pot seller counting change.

"Which man? Stop it, Bujji. Every week a new drama. Stand straight, or there are no bangles for you today."

Suryam went down on his heels in front of the child. From his shirt pocket he took a peppermint, a white one, round and flat, and held it out on his open palm. He did not speak. He kept his hand quite still, as one does with a bird. The smell of spirit came off his fingers.

Bujji looked at the peppermint. She looked at the hand under it. Her fist tightened in the sari until the knuckles went pale, and she shut her eyes, and that was her answer.

He put the peppermint back in his pocket. As he stood he did Rattamma's arm. Rattamma felt nothing, and slapped the pointing finger down.

It was then, pressing the cotton to the old woman's arm, that the cotton shook.

The back of the hand that held it was covered with brown spots, the spots of a man of seventy, and they had not been there at the last market. The fingers would not lie still. When he lifted the syringe, the point of the needle drew a small circle in the air. The hair at his temples had gone grey.

The last life he had taken was nearly burnt through. There were days left in it, not weeks. He never waited for hunger; he simply had not found anyone since.

So the hands stopped working and the eyes began. He went over the crowd slowly, stall by stall, face by face, the way a man who cannot read learns to read everything else. A shaved head in a month when nobody shaves. A scar in a place where scars do not come by accident. There were a hundred black threads in that market, tied against the evil eye, against fever, for nothing. A thread alone told him nothing. He needed a man with two marks on him, and then he needed to hear the man say so.

He found him at the tea stall.

The stall stood at the road end of the market, where the yellow and black autos waited in a row. On the bench sat a young man in a driver's khaki shirt, with one foot drawn up beside him and the sandal kicked off. He was scratching his ankle while he talked, without knowing that he did it.

On the outside of the ankle was a scar, old and white. Two short cuts, one laid across the other like a plus sign. Suryam knew that scar the way you know your own front door. It is what villagers do to a snakebite: they cut across the fang marks with a blade to let the poison run. People who carry that scar are the ones for whom it was enough.

On the young man's right wrist was a black thread, knotted thick. It was not the thin thread of the evil eye. It was the kind a mother ties at a temple with a vow behind it.

Suryam wheeled the bicycle into the shade of the stall and stood by it, and did not move again.

"Tell him, Nagaraju," said the friend beside the young man. "Tell the tea fellow how you took your auto for a swim."

"He has heard it, Yesu."

"He has not heard it today."

Nagaraju laughed and told it. Four years ago, a night of rain on the canal road, a lorry coming with one headlamp. He had swerved. The auto had gone down the bank and into the water on its back, and his leg had been caught under the handlebar, and the canal had come up over the seat.

"I drank half of it," he said. "I came out without my sandals and without my phone. My mother tied this before my hair was dry." He turned the wrist to show the thread. "I was twenty-four. And at nine there was the cobra in the haystack. She says I have been born three times and she has had the pain of only one."

Yesu's lips had moved along with the last sentence. He had heard it that many times.

But stories grow in the telling, and a cross-cut may come from a snake with no poison in it. There was one way to know. He wheeled the bicycle round behind the bench until he stood two paces from Nagaraju's back.

Tring-tring.

In the same moment a lorry loaded with paddy sacks turned in from the road and blew its horn at the crowd, the long horn that plays a tune, and went on blowing it.

The tea seller's son, a boy of ten who was washing glasses, turned at once and let a glass slip back into the bucket. But children always turn. They do not count.

Nagaraju did not turn. He blew on his tea.

Suryam stood where he was. The lorry crawled through the people a hand's width at a time, and the horn did not stop. Nagaraju's left arm lay along his knee, brown, with the vein standing up in the crook of the elbow. Suryam's eyes stayed on that vein. The needle in his fingers turned its small circle, and the circle grew wider.

Stand in that minute with him, because it is the whole of what he is. He did not call the man's name, though he had heard it twice. He did not step round to the front of the bench. Being looked at is not the same as being turned to, and only the turning is his. He waited with his thumb on the bell, and a baby three stalls away cried and cried.

The horn stopped. The noise of the market came back into the place where it had been. Nagaraju drained his glass, set it on the bench, and felt about with his foot for his sandal.

Tring-tring.

Nagaraju turned.

He looked straight into Suryam's face, as no grown person had looked into it since the last one.

"What is it, sir?" he said, smiling. "Health department?"

"Hold out your arm," Suryam said. "It won't hurt."

They were the nurse's words, heard over a thousand arms, and he said them as she had, flat and quick. Yesu had gone to the counter to pay, his back to them.

"Free, is it? Put it, put it. After a cobra, what is a needle."

He pushed up his sleeve and held out his left arm.

The swab. "Cold," Nagaraju said, and wrinkled his nose at the smell of it, and that was the first time in that market that any grown person had felt the spirit on the cotton. The needle. He felt that too: a cold dot, no bigger than a mustard seed, a little above the elbow.

Suryam hooked his finger in the steel ring and drew the plunger back, and the barrel filled.

It was not blood. It was something pale, the colour of lamp-light on ghee, and it rose slowly and thickly in the glass until the glass was full. Then he drew the needle out and pressed the cotton to the place with his thumb, for a slow count of three.

He turned away to the bicycle. He laid his own left arm along the saddle, found the vein, put the needle in, and pushed the plunger home.

The spots went from the back of his hand as damp goes from a stone floor in the sun. The fingers lay still. The grey left his temples. He wiped the needle, laid the syringe on its cloth, and took out the register.

It was full of a woman's neat handwriting, blue ink gone brown, not one word of which he had ever been able to read. He took the stub of pencil from his pocket and drew one cross, small and careful, in the margin below the crosses already there. The margin was grey with them. Then he shut the register, shut the box, and tied it down, and every movement was the movement of a man of twenty-nine.

Nagaraju was rubbing his arm when Yesu came back.

"Who were you showing your arm to?"

"The injection fellow. Health department. There, with the cycle."

Yesu looked. He saw the lorry and a great many backs. "What injection? There is nobody. You have sat too long in the sun."

Nagaraju looked again. He could not find the white shirt among the heads. On his arm there was a point the size of a pin's end, and no blood. He laughed.

"Then it was a mosquito with a government job," he said, and yawned until his jaw cracked. "I will take no more fares today. I could sleep on this bench."

He drove home slowly. He ate a little of what his mother put before him. He lay down before the lamps were lit.

Before dawn he died in his sleep. His mother found him when she brought his coffee. Dr. Murthy came from his clinic by the bus stop, lifted the eyelids, listened at the chest for a long time, and found nothing to explain it. He did not notice the point on the left arm. He wrote heart failure on the certificate, and said that it comes to young men nowadays. The black thread was still on the wrist.

One young man, in one town. By the next Tuesday the market was as full as before, and the babies slept through it on their mothers' shoulders. There was nothing to ask, and nobody to ask it of.

Suryam saw none of it. He had left Pedavanka before noon, by the road that runs out past the thorn bushes.

As the crowd fell behind him, the weight went first. The tyres stopped marking the dust. Then the hands paled on the handlebars, and then the bicycle under them, until on the empty road he was thinner than breath on glass. Last of all went the bell, a small tring-tring from a road with no one on it. Somewhere down that road, in another town, people were already gathering.

He was not always this. Once he was the man who carried the box. The man who could not read the lid.