Part 2 of 5 · 6 minA Cook in Hyderabad

Sravani told her mother that night. She did not mean anything by it. She was lying on the mat beside Lakshmamma in the dark, the way she did when she came home from hostel, telling her everything at once, and in the middle of the metro and the malls she said, "And vadina's house has a cook, amma. A proper cook. She never had to light a stove in her life."

Lakshmamma said, "Hm."

That was all. Sravani, who had grown up with that "hm", should have known what it meant. But she was nineteen and sleepy and thinking about saris.

The next morning Lasya was in the back kitchen at six. She had set the alarm on her phone and put it under the pillow so that Pramod would not wake, and she had washed her face and tied her hair and come out ready. She was not going to be found asleep at seven again.

Lakshmamma was already at the stove, lit, with the milk on.

"Atta, what shall I do?"

"Sit, amma. You are a guest."

"I am not a guest, atta. Tell me what to cut."

"Sit."

Lakshmamma did everything herself that morning. The rice, the pappu, the pachadi, the coffee for Subbaiah. She did it quickly and without looking up, and every time Lasya reached for a knife or a vessel it was already in her mother-in-law's hand. Lasya stood for an hour in a kitchen with nothing to do and understood none of it. She thought her mother-in-law was being polite. She thought it was the village way with a new daughter-in-law in the first week. She did not understand that "sit, you are a guest" was the judgement, and that it had been passed in the dark the night before, on a mat, with one syllable.

In Anthoor Pramod called at one o'clock every working day. Here there was no one o'clock. He went to the fields with his father at seven with a towel on his shoulder like his father's, and the pump set swallowed him till dusk. Lasya had nobody to read the house for her. She had Sravani, and Sravani read it wrong.

"Amma likes you," Sravani said. "She does not let anybody in her kitchen. She let you stand there a whole hour."

So Lasya tried to be useful in the ways she knew. On the second afternoon she made a list on her phone of everything the kitchen was short of, and showed Lakshmamma how the grocery app worked, and said they could have it delivered to Nellore. Lakshmamma looked at the phone and said, "The shop is across the street, amma." On the third afternoon Lasya took all the steel dabbas off the kitchen shelf and arranged them again by size, big to small, the way her mother's kitchen was, with the labels facing out. It took her an hour and it looked beautiful. When she came back from her bath the dabbas were back where they had been, the big one at the end, the small ones in the middle, the labels facing the wall. She did it again the next morning, more carefully. By evening they were back.

She did not ask. That was the thing. She did not ask why, and Lakshmamma did not say that the dabbas were kept in the order she reached for them in the dark at four in the morning, and that order had taken thirty years.

The neighbours came on the third day to see the daughter-in-law, the way they do. Four women on the verandah, one of them a cousin aunt of Subbaiah's with a loud voice and a way of asking a question like a slap.

"So, Hyderabad amma. You cook?"

Lasya opened her mouth. Lakshmamma, behind her, pouring the coffee, answered for her.

"Her mother keeps a cook. Why should she?"

The aunt laughed. The other women laughed. Lasya's ears went hot in the way they went hot, and she felt the lie come back up the way a swallowed thing comes back, and she could not say "that is not true". Because if she said that is not true she would have to say that she had said it, to Sravani, on the step, for no reason. So she smiled and poured the coffee and said nothing, and the aunt said, "Lucky girl," and that was how the whole street came to know that the new daughter-in-law had never lit a stove.

That afternoon the house was quiet. Subbaiah had come in early because of the heat and was lying on the verandah cot with his eyes shut, and Lakshmamma was in the kitchen, and Lasya was in the inner room with the one bar of signal at the window, answering Swathi. The inner room shared a wall with the kitchen. The wall was a single brick.

She heard Lakshmamma say, to Subbaiah, through the wall, in the voice people use when the house is asleep, "She will go back to the city in a year and take him. You watch."

Subbaiah said something. Lasya did not hear what. He had a low voice and he used it rarely and the brick took it. She sat with the phone in her hand and Swathi's message on the screen, "Lassi how is village life," and did not answer it.

Pramod came in at dusk with mud to his knees and his father's towel on his shoulder and his face shining. The pump set was running. He stood in the verandah and told them, all of it, the pipe and the washer and the thing his father had said when the water came, and Sravani clapped, and Lakshmamma said, "Go and wash, you are bringing the field inside," and he laughed.

Lasya waited for him in the inner room. She had the whole thing ready. The cook, the dabbas, the aunt, the wall. She was going to tell it in order so that he would see it was not her fault, or only a little.

He came in, washed, with his hair wet, and lay down on the cot and said, "Lasya, the pump set."

"I heard, andi."

"Three days. Nanna said one month."

"Andi, I have to tell you something."

He smiled, the smile that was not an ordinary one, and said, "Talk you tonight," and shut his eyes. He was asleep in a minute. He had been in the field since seven. She looked at him for a while, the mud still under his nails, and did not wake him.

She lay down on her own side and looked at the roof tiles. Somewhere in the dark the buffaloes shifted. Her mother-in-law's voice went round in her head, not loud, the way it had been said, to the stove: a stove tells you who a woman is.

Lasya had lit a thousand gas stoves. She had never thought of herself as a woman who could not light one. She lay there and found that she did now, and that it had taken three days.