Part 3 of 5 · 12 minThe Night the Bulb Went

The first rain of 2023 came to that stretch of the highway on the 14th of June. Every dhaba between Kodad and Nalgonda fills up on the first rain, because nobody wants a wet road in the dark. Sri Lakshmi Dhaba was full that night. Sixteen lorries in the yard. Every cot taken. Sambaiah at the stove from seven without sitting down once.

Now I have to tell you about a driver called Ramesh. He was thirty-one. He drove a ten-wheeler for a cement company, Hyderabad to Vijayawada and back, twice a week. He had a wife and a daughter of four. Kiran had seen him three or four times since March, a thin man with a moustache who ate fast and laughed loudly. A normal man. Remember that. That is the whole point of what happened to him.

Ramesh came in at 11:20 that night. He parked past the whitewashed stones, the way every driver on that road parks without thinking, the way you lock your door. He ate rice and dal and two eggs. He had been drinking before he came; Kiran could smell the toddy from the counter. His eyes were red and he was talking too much. Then he paid, and he went out to the yard, and he looked at his cab, and he looked at the tree.

The two cots under the peepal were empty. They were always empty after midnight. Every other cot in the yard had a man on it.

Ramesh took his towel from his shoulder, threw it on the nearer cot, and lay down.

Sambaiah saw it from the kitchen door. He put down the ladle and went out. Kiran watched from the counter. He had never seen the old man move that fast.

"Ramesh. Get up."

"Why, tata. It is cool here."

"Get up. Sleep in the cab."

"The cab is an oven. The whole day it was in the sun. You sleep in the cab."

"Ramesh, I am telling you. Get up from there."

Ramesh laughed. He was lying on his back with his arm over his eyes. "The bulb is on, tata. Your famous bulb. What will happen with the bulb on? Nothing. Go and cook."

Sambaiah stood there a long time. Then he took hold of Ramesh's arm and pulled. Ramesh pulled it back and said something rude, and turned on his side with his face to the tree trunk.

Sambaiah came back to the kitchen. He went to the back wall and looked up at the bulb, the way he looked at it every night, twice. It was burning. A plain sixty-watt bulb in a tin shade, with insects going around it. Then he went back to the stove.

Mastan was not there that night. Note that. Mastan, who would have dragged Ramesh off that cot by his legs, was in Vizag with a broken axle. So the only man at Sri Lakshmi Dhaba who would have done something was a sixty-seven-year-old cook, and he had already done what he could.

By 12:30 the yard was quiet. The rain had come and gone twice, loud on the tin roof and then nothing. The drivers were asleep. Chanti was asleep on his cot by the kitchen door with his knees pulled up. Padma had gone to bed at eleven. Kiran was at the counter counting the day's money into piles. He could not sleep before two anyway.

At 1:50 the thunder came.

It was one crack, very close, the kind that makes you duck even though you are inside. And with the crack, the current went. The whole dhaba went black. The fan stopped. The fridge stopped humming. The tube light over the counter went out with a tick.

Kiran sat in the dark with his hand on the money and waited for the back bulb.

For twenty-seven years that bulb had burned every night, through every power cut, because Veeraiah had put it on the inverter in 1996, on its own line, and had told Sambaiah that if the red light ever showed, the battery was to be changed the same day, whatever it cost. Sambaiah had told Kiran this in April. The red light was showing. Kiran had said yes, next week. A new battery was six thousand rupees. He had thought, it is a bulb.

He sat in the dark and waited for the yellow light to come through the kitchen door from the back wall, the way it always did when the current went.

It did not come.

He understood it in his stomach before he understood it in his head. The inverter was dead. The battery he had not bought was dead. The bulb was out.

The rain was coming down hard on the tin roof. Then it stopped. Not slowed. Stopped, all at once, the way a tap stops when you turn it. No drip. No wind. The insects had stopped too. Kiran could hear his own breath and his own heart. Nothing else.

He sat there. He did not move. He did not know why.

Then he heard Chanti sit up. The cot creaked.

"Anna."

The boy's voice was very small.

"Anna. Somebody is clearing his throat under the tree."

Kiran had not heard anything. He listened. Nothing. Then, through the kitchen door, from the back, from under the tree, he heard a voice.

Kiran told it the same way every time afterwards. It was a man's voice. Dry. Not loud, not a whisper. A clear speaking voice, the kind a teacher uses in a small room, every word separate from the next. It was not angry. It was not anything. It was exact. And it was in Telugu, plain Telugu, the way an educated man from that district would speak it.

It said: "Listen. There is a number. Multiply it by itself, you get the same number. Divide it by itself, you get the same number. Add it to itself, it is not the same. Which number is it?"

Then nothing.

Kiran sat with his mouth open. He was not thinking of Ramesh. He was thinking, one. It is one. One times one is one. One divided by one is one. One plus one is two. He did not say it. He did not move his lips. He was just thinking it, the way you think the answer in a class before anyone asks you.

And then he heard Ramesh.

Ramesh's voice was thick. He had been asleep. He was still half asleep. He said, "Hanh? What?" And then he laughed, the loud laugh, and said, "Ten. Ten, sir. Ten lakhs. Give me ten lakhs." And he laughed again, and the laugh turned into a yawn, and the yawn turned into nothing.

That was all. The dry voice did not speak again. It had asked once. That is the rule. It never asks twice.

Kiran got up. He knocked the money off the counter. He did not notice. He went around the counter towards the kitchen door with his hands out in front of him in the dark, towards the shelf where the big torch was kept, and he was saying, "Ramesh. Ramesh anna. Get up." He was not shouting. His voice would not shout. It came out like a whisper.

He reached the kitchen door, and a hand closed on his arm.

He did not see Sambaiah. It was black. The old man's fingers went around his arm above the elbow and stopped him dead, the way a post stops a bullock. Kiran had carried sacks with Sambaiah; he knew he was strong for his age. This was not that. Kiran pulled, and his arm did not move.

Sambaiah said one word. "No."

"Tata, he is under the tree. He answered wrong. Tata, let me go. Let me go. The torch."

"No."

"Tata."

The hand did not loosen. Kiran could hear the old man breathing, slow, close to his ear. He could not see his face. Somewhere behind them Chanti was whimpering, very quietly, the way a dog does.

They stood like that. Kiran says it felt like an hour. It was probably two or three minutes. He listened to the yard, and there was nothing to hear. No cot creaking. No footstep. No cloth moving. No sound of a man choking or kicking or calling out. Nothing. That silence was the worst thing he had ever heard in his life.

Then the rain started again, all at once, loud on the tin, like somebody had opened the tap.

Sambaiah let go of his arm.

"Now you can go," he said. "It is finished."

Kiran did not go. He stood in the door until the current came back at 3:10 and the tube light ticked on. Then he lay on his bed with his eyes open. He heard Sambaiah go out to the back wall and stand under the dead bulb. He heard him come back. Neither of them said anything.

At 5:40 the sky went grey. A driver called Nookaraju got up to wash his face at the tap, which is on the back wall under the bulb, inside the line of stones. He was gone about ten seconds. Then he came back around the building very fast and woke every man in the yard, not shouting, saying it over and over in a flat voice, "Under the tree. Under the tree."

Kiran went out.

Ramesh was in the peepal. He was hanging from the lowest big branch by his own lungi, the green checked one from dinner, tied in a plain knot, the kind you tie a bundle with. His feet were about four feet above the cot. He turned very slightly with the wind, and back. His eyes were open. His mouth was open, wide, not like a man choking but like a man in the middle of a word. His hands hung straight down. There was not a mark on him. Not a scratch. Not a torn nail.

His chappals were on the ground beside the cot. Side by side. Toes pointing out. The way you leave them at a temple door.

And the cot was dry. It had rained for an hour and a half, hard enough to flood the yard. Every lorry was streaming. The ground was mud. The cot under the peepal, and the ground under it, and the chappals, were dry as a Sunday afternoon.

Nobody touched him. The drivers stood in a line along the whitewashed stones, in the mud, and nobody crossed the line. Kiran crossed it. He stood under Ramesh and looked up at his face, and he said later that the thing he remembered most was that Ramesh's mouth was shaped like the beginning of a word, and the word was not ten.

The police came from Kodad at 8:30, a sub-inspector and two constables in a jeep, and the doctor from the government hospital at nine. The drivers said nothing. Nookaraju said he found him. Sambaiah said he had tried to move him. Kiran said the current went.

The sub-inspector walked around the tree. He looked at the branch, the knot, the chappals. He looked at the dry cot in the middle of a yard of mud for a long time, then at the line of stones, and he asked the doctor, "How long have you been at Kodad?"

"Two years, sir."

"Then you don't know. Write suicide."

The doctor wrote suicide. The constable who climbed up to untie the lungi did it fast, and when he came down he went straight to the tap and washed his arms up to the shoulder, and he did not say why.

Ramesh's wife rang at eleven. Kiran took the call. He has not told anyone what she said. He said "Yes" and "The police have him" and "I am sorry, amma," and then he stood with his hand on the phone until Padma sat him on the bench.

Mastan came at noon. He had driven eleven hours from Vizag, and someone had rung him on the way, so he already knew. He did not go to the tree. He did not go to Kiran. He went straight through the kitchen to the shelf under the bulb where the inverter sat. The red light was on. He tapped the battery with his knuckle, the way you tap a drum, and it made the sound a dead battery makes.

Then he turned and looked at Kiran in the kitchen door. He looked at him for a very long time, the way a man looks at a wall he is going to have to knock down. Then he went and sat on the bench outside and drank his tea and did not say one word to Kiran all day. That was the punishment, and Kiran understood it.

Now listen to what Kiran did that night.

He went to Kodad on his motorcycle and bought a new inverter battery for six thousand four hundred rupees. He carried it back between his knees. He did not let anybody touch it.

At eleven he was behind the dhaba with the battery and the spanner, under the bulb. The bulb was on. The current was on. Only four lorries that night, all parked far past the stones. Sambaiah had wanted to stand with him. Kiran sent him in. "The bulb is on, tata. Nothing happens with the bulb on. That is the rule, no?" Sambaiah looked at him and went in.

So Kiran was alone, inside the line of stones, two steps from the cot where Ramesh had slept, in the full yellow light of the sixty-watt bulb, with the peepal leaves moving a little above his head. He was bent over the battery, tightening the terminal with the spanner, thinking about the terminal and nothing else.

A voice beside his right ear said a line of Sanskrit.

It was the dry voice. The exact one. It was so close that he felt the air of it on his ear, the way you feel someone's breath when they lean in to tell a secret. It said one line, in the old language, in a clear teacher's voice, and it was the second line of the verse. The verse from the temple feast of 1963. The verse Narasimhulu had said the first line of, and Kiran had finished without meaning to, and been thrown out for.

The voice said the second line. The line Kiran had said.

Kiran did not move. The bulb was on. He could see his own shadow on the ground, and the shadow of the tree, and nothing else. There was no one beside him. He knew that. He did not turn his head.

Then the voice said the third line. Only it did not say it. It said the first half of it, four words, and stopped. And waited.

And Kiran, bent over the battery, with the spanner in his hand and the light on his back, found that he knew the other four words.