Part 4 of 7 · 14 minThe Man Who Stayed Home

The cattle fair at Rayalagudem is held at Shivaratri, the great night of Shiva, when the cold is going out of the mornings. For five days the open ground below the temple hill becomes a town of animals, and that year there were more men on it than cattle.

Every bullock wore a bell at its throat. The dust stood chest high, and the sun came through it the colour of weak tea. The air smelled of dung smoke, cut fodder and hot jaggery.

Among so many bells, one more was nothing. Tring-tring. Then a black bicycle stood between two fodder carts, with a steel box tied to its carrier, and then there were two hands upon the grips.

Look at the hands, because in this part of the story they matter. They were the hands of a man of twenty-nine, steady, without a spot on them. It was hardly a month since the cinema hall, and most of Ramesh's season lay unspent in him. Suryam had not come to Rayalagudem in need. He had come because it was a crowd, and crowds were his work.

He opened the box, wet the cotton from the bottle of spirit, and began down a row of cartmen. Swab, needle, press. Nobody felt it. His hands covered the line, and his eyes went from face to face.

At that fair no price is spoken aloud. Broker and buyer join hands under a towel and bargain with their fingers. Beside a pair of white bullocks stood a broker who was working with both hands at once, a towel over each forearm, his right hand in the seller's and his left in the buyer's. He was a broad man of fifty or so, with a nose rope looped on his shoulder and his shirt open against the heat.

Down the middle of his chest ran a scar as straight as a ruled line. It is the scar that is left when the breastbone has been opened to get at the heart.

The buyer took his hand out of the cloth. "Six years old, that near one. You said four."

"Listen, brother," the broker said. "At eight I went head first into our well after a bucket, and they pulled me out by the feet. At forty-five my heart stopped on the hospital table, and they started it again. A man who has been sent back twice does not lie about a bullock's teeth. Count them yourself."

"Ramanaiah, you sell that well of yours with every pair."

Suryam wrote nothing down. He had never written anything. He had carried the nurse's words for eight years without a letter to hold them, and he carried this the same way: the name, the well at eight, the heart at forty-five, and his village, which the seller had named, a place on the far side of the canal. The old people call it prana-gandam, a danger to life written in a person's stars, which either takes the person or is missed. This man had been missed twice.

One test was left. He wheeled the bicycle round behind the bullocks and put his thumb to the bell.

Tring-tring.

There were four thousand bells on that ground. Ramanaiah turned at that one.

Ramanaiah looked at the pock marks on the left cheek, at the steel box, at the glass syringe. He smelled the spirit on the cotton, and his face went the colour of ash. He looked quickly at the men on either side of him, to see who else had turned. Nobody had.

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

The left arm began to rise from under its towel. Ramanaiah caught it with his right hand and held it against his chest, as one holds back a child from the road.

"Nayanamma," he said, which is what a man calls his father's mother. Then, in the flat singsong of a thing learned very young, he said the rest.

"If a cycle bell rings behind you in a crowd, and nobody else turns, do not turn. There is a man with a box. He will ask for your arm, and he asks nicely. Do not give it. Go home, child, and stay where people are few. Under forty he has no hands."

He let the towels fall. He let the nose rope slide from his shoulder. And he ran.

Where the carts ended, Ramanaiah went up the canal bank and along the top towards the bridge. Suryam walked after him as far as the last cart. There the front wheel went faint, and his fingers paled on the grips. He stood and watched a heavy man of fifty-two with a mended heart run in the noon sun, stop with his hands on his knees, and run again.

In fifty years nobody had run.

The bullocks stood where they had been left, untied, chewing, until a young man of twenty came pushing through the crowd for them, calling "Nanna!", which is father. The seller called him Chanti. Suryam rang no other bell at Rayalagudem.

Now, you might ask why he did not let the man go. His hands were young, and there were other fairs. The answer was in the register on the carrier. Every man who had ever turned at his bell had a cross in its margin. This one had turned, and had no cross. In eight years at the Centre he had never left an arm in the line undone, and he did not begin now.

So on the Monday after the fair he went across the canal, to the village the seller had named.

The Monday market of that village was a small one. It sat under a single banyan where the cart road came in from the canal bridge: a dozen sellers on gunny bags, a tea bench, an oil man with his tins. He hung over the road, no more than a wanting, and counted the people as they came. At forty the bell rang. He set the bicycle on its stand beside the oil man.

One street opened off the market. The fourth house in it had a green door, and in the shed beside it stood a pair of white bullocks, unsold. At first light a woman came out, swept the step, and drew a pattern on it in rice flour, letting it fall between her finger and thumb. Then she went in, and he heard the bolt.

He tried the street that first morning. At five steps the tyres stopped marking the dust. At ten he could see the ground through his hands. He came back under the banyan and waited for his fingers. The green door was sixty steps from the oil man's tins, and it might as well have been in another district.

That was the first Monday. There were five more, and he stood through every one. He worked down that small line, and the babies cried on Mondays, and their mothers said it was the teething. And he listened, for a market is where a village tells what goes on behind its doors.

Chanti came each week with a list in his father's writing. On the second Monday Lakshmi, the woman of the green door, came for vegetables.

"He will not come out," she told the brinjal seller. "Not to the temple, not to the bus. He sits on the cot with the door bolted, and asks me how many people are in the street."

On the third Monday the neighbour, Subbaiah, had the tea bench. "I called over the wall to him to come and look at my buffalo. He called back, how many are with you?" The bench laughed. "It is that operation. He has gone strange."

On the fourth Monday there was a political meeting in the town, with buses sent round the villages. By eleven there were forty-three people under the banyan.

At noon the brinjal seller tied up her basket. Two brothers went off with a sack between them. Forty. The oil man's wife called him to his meal, and he went. The cotton dropped through Suryam's fingers, and there was no bicycle beside the tins.

What was left of him hung over the road. Before the tea man's stove was cold, the green door opened. Ramanaiah came out into his street in his vest, thinner than he had been at the fair. He watered the two bullocks. He walked to the corner and back in the sun. The whole time he kept his face towards the banyan, where there was now nothing to be seen.

Suryam watched him do it, and had no hands.

All his working life the line had waited for him. The village crier went round with his drum the evening before, and at the hour the nurse had fixed the street stood in a row with its sleeves pushed up. Now a cattle broker behind a bolted door was fixing the hours, and the attendant was under the banyan every Monday before the first seller had spread her sacking. He had become the line.

On the fifth Monday Lakshmi bought turmeric, and betel leaves by the hundred, and the market learned that Sunitha's wedding was fixed for Thursday of the following week. It was to be at the house, and not in the hall in the town.

"Thirty-six," Subbaiah told the bench. "He sat up with the list, Chanti says, and counted every head himself, the bride and the priest also. For an only daughter. I am not called. But I live across his wall. Do I need calling?"

Nor I, said the tea man, and nor I, said the bench, one after another. Suryam was pressing the cotton to the tea man's arm. He counted those who had said it. There were nine.

On the Thursday he was over the street from mid-afternoon, with less weight than the smoke of the cooking fire. A pandal had been put up before the green door, a wedding canopy of bamboo and palm leaf that roofed the street from wall to wall, with a banana stem tied to each pole. Ramanaiah stood in his doorway in a white shirt with long sleeves, and as each guest stepped under the canopy his lips moved.

Count with him. The household was four. The priest, the cook, the piper and the drummer made eight. At dusk the boy's people came in one van, twelve, as they had been told. Twenty. Lakshmi's brother brought his family, and five cousins came from across the canal. Thirty-six. There the list ended.

Then Subbaiah came round the wall with his wife. Thirty-eight. The tea man came. Thirty-nine.

For a little while nobody came. Ramanaiah wiped his face with the end of his upper cloth.

Then a lad of fifteen came running up from the cart road with a bundle of leaf plates on his head. He was the cook's boy, sent to the town at noon for more plates by a cook who had fed village weddings before.

Tring-tring.

The bicycle stood by the left pole of the pandal, and Suryam's hands were on it. In the doorway Ramanaiah stopped counting.

After the fortieth came the whole of the tea bench, and after them the street. In a village nobody waits to be called to a wedding. By the hour fixed there were two hundred people under the palm leaf.

A baby on its grandmother's lap beside the pole began to cry. Then one in the women's row. Then a third at the back, and a fourth, until the piper had to blow harder.

Suryam opened the box, for a line is a line. In the second row a girl of two sat on her father's knee, and his hands brought the needle to her arm. It stopped a hair from the skin, as at a pane of glass. She pushed her face into her father's shirt. He took the needle away and did the father.

When he looked up, Ramanaiah was standing in front of him.

He had come across the pandal with a plate of betel leaves. He spoke low.

"Six Mondays you stood under the banyan. I saw you from my window." The plate shook, and he steadied it against his belt. "I ask one thing only. When the wedding is done she goes to her husband's house, and it is I who must put her hand in theirs. Not before the send-off."

Suryam looked at him. Then he turned to the piper at his elbow, swabbed the piper's arm, and went on down the row, away from the pole.

In the canal villages he had watched the nurse let a frightened man finish his meal, or say his prayer to the end, while the attendant stood by with the box open. He had always been good at waiting.

The thread was tied a little before midnight. Ramanaiah did each thing that a father does, and between one and the next his eyes went to the white shirt.

Then came the send-off, when a bride is given into the hands of her husband's people and leaves her father's house. Ramanaiah laid Sunitha's hand in the hands of the boy's mother. He put her into the van himself and shut the door on the end of her sari, and had to open it again. The red lights went down the cart road to the bridge, and over it.

He did not go in. He walked to the left pole, where Suryam stood with the box open under the tube light. He unbuttoned his cuff. He turned the sleeve up above the elbow, fold upon fold, and held out his arm.

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

The arm was there already. But those are the words.

"She said you would ask nicely," said Ramanaiah.

The swab. "Cold," he said. The needle, and the cold dot. Suryam hooked his finger in the steel ring, and the plunger rose. The pale stuff, the colour of lamp-light on ghee, came up in the glass to the first mark and a little beyond it, and stopped.

He waited, with his finger in the ring. No more came. It was no half dose. It was the whole of what there was. A man of fifty-two with a mended heart has not much left in his account, and he had spent six weeks of it on a cot behind a bolted door.

Suryam pressed the cotton to the place for a slow count of three. He laid his own left arm along the saddle and pushed the plunger home. Nothing altered in his hands. There had been nothing in them to alter.

Across the pandal Lakshmi saw her husband standing by the banana stem with his arm held out to nobody. She touched Subbaiah's wife on the elbow. "See," she said. "Today also."

Ramanaiah yawned. He turned the sleeve down, told Chanti to see to the hired chairs, and went in. He lay down on the cot in the front room. He left the door unbolted.

Before dawn he died in his sleep. The village had its explanation before the pandal was taken down. The wedding had tired him, and his heart had never been strong since they opened it. At least he had seen the girl off. Nobody looked at his left arm.

While the guests were going he stood by the pole and looked in at the house he had watched for six weeks from sixty steps away. The pattern on the step had been trodden out by two hundred pairs of feet. Lakshmi brought the flour tin, bent down, and drew it over again, because it was nearly morning.

He untied the register from the carrier, brown cloth cover, red spine, and opened it on the saddle. Annamma's handwriting ran across every page, and he had never been able to read a word of it. Down the margin, beside her lines, he drew one cross in pencil. Then he tied the book back under the strip of cycle tube, beside the box.

The guests went off down the street with their sleeping children. The wedding lights along the eaves went out one string at a time. His fingers paled on the grips. He wheeled the bicycle out by the cart road towards the bridge, and the tyres left no mark.

At the bridge he did not turn back towards the upland fairs. He turned towards the delta, to the town that had killed him. Gannerulanka had been normal for a long time. And at Sri Rama Navami, when they drag the chariot through its streets, it would be full of people.