Part 4 of 5 · 7 minThe Ticket

In Anthoor, at one o'clock, the phone rang. Every working day, for a year. Lasya had built her afternoons around it the way a village builds its day around the temple bell. Here there was no one o'clock. There was Pramod in the fields with his father and a towel on his shoulder, and there was the inner room, and the window with its one bar of signal.

On the fourth morning she sat at that window with the phone and looked up the buses from Nellore to Hyderabad.

There was one at six in the evening the next day. A sleeper. It reached Hyderabad at five in the morning. She looked at the seat map for a long time. Then she booked it. One seat. She paid with the card and the confirmation came with its little tick, and she sat there with the ticket on the screen and a lie ready in her mouth: amma is not well, nanna called, I have to go. She said it to the window twice to hear how it sounded. It sounded like something her mother would see through in one second, and her mother was six hundred kilometres away, so that was fine.

Sravani found her like that, with the ticket open and her face wet, and because Sravani was nineteen and had never been anywhere but a hostel, she read it the only way she could.

"Vadina, you are missing your mother."

Lasya did not say no. It was easier than the truth.

Sravani went straight to the kitchen, because Sravani carried everything straight to the kitchen, and said, "Amma, vadina is crying, she misses her mother."

Lakshmamma was at the stone. She said, "Then let her go."

She meant it kindly. She meant, if a girl misses her mother in the first year, nobody should hold her. Sravani carried it back to the inner room the way she carried everything, word for word, and the words were, "Amma says you can go, vadina."

Lasya heard "go". She heard it the way she had heard "sit, you are a guest" and "Sravani drew it". She said "thank you, Sravani," and looked at the ticket.

Pramod came in at noon. He had never come in at noon. His father had sent him. Subbaiah had looked at him across the pump set and said, "Your wife's face is wrong. Go," and Pramod had put the spanner down and come, mud and all, and found her at the window with the phone in her hand and the bus ticket open on the screen, because she had not thought to close it.

He read it. Nellore to Hyderabad. One seat. Tomorrow.

He did not shout. He had never shouted at her and he did not know how. He stood in the door with the mud drying on his legs and he said, quietly, "If you want to go, go. I will take you to the bus."

She had wanted him to say don't. She had wanted him to take the phone and cancel it and ask her what was wrong, properly, in a room with the door shut, the way he had asked on the honeymoon. Instead he said he would take her to the bus, which was the kindest thing a man can say and the worst, and he went back to the fields.

She did not cry after that. She was past it.

In the afternoon Subbaiah came to the verandah.

Subbaiah had said perhaps forty words to her in four days, and most of them had been "eat". He came and sat on the far end of the cot, a yard from her, with his towel on his shoulder, and looked at the street.

"That pump set," he said. "It was stuck for a year. I could not lift it. Everybody said call a mechanic from Nellore, two thousand rupees. I said my son will come at Sankranti."

Lasya said nothing.

"He fixed it in three days. In the heat. He did not have to." Subbaiah looked at the street. "He did it because he did not want to sit inside and watch two women not talk."

Then he got up and went to the cattle shed, and that was the longest speech anybody in Manubolu had heard him make, and Lasya sat on the cot and could not decide which of the two women he meant more.

Evening came. Lakshmamma cooked. Lasya did not go to the kitchen; there was no point going to a kitchen where you were a guest. Pramod came in from the fields and ate on the verandah, outside, with his father, which he had not done before. Lakshmamma ate standing in the kitchen door. Lasya ate in the inner room with the plate on her knees. Sravani carried plates between three silences and understood none of them and cried in the bathroom for five minutes because the house felt wrong, and came out with her face washed and said nothing, which was the first grown-up thing she did that week.

Then the power went.

It went the way it goes in villages, all at once, with a tick, and the fan stopped and the one bulb in the inner room went out and the dark came in from the fields. Somebody in the street shouted "current!" the way they do. Lasya lay on the bed in the inner room with the phone face down on her chest. Sravani was asleep on the mat. Subbaiah was asleep on the verandah cot. The house settled into the dark, and the dark had the back step in it.

The back step was outside the kitchen, on the other side of the inner room's wall. The single brick. Lasya had heard "she will go back to the city and take him" through it. Now she heard a cot creak on the verandah, and feet, and then the back step, and then Pramod's voice, low, and his mother's.

They thought she was asleep.

"Amma. What happened with Lasya?"

"Nothing happened. Ask her."

"I am asking you."

A silence. Then Lakshmamma, in the voice she used to the stove. "She does not try. That is all. Four days, she has not tried. Her mother keeps a cook. What does she know about a kitchen? She stood in mine for an hour like a post."

Lasya lay still.

"Amma, there is no cook."

"Sravani said."

"Sravani said what Lasya said. There is no cook. Her mother cooks. Her mother came to Kerala last year and taught her every podi and every pickle and the biryani, and Lasya wrote it all in a notebook. Every dish. She brought the notebook here. It is in the suitcase. She cooks for me every day, amma. Every day, from that book. The pulihora today was from it. It burned because nobody told her to pull the husk."

The silence after that was long. Lasya could hear the buffaloes.

"Then why did she say it?"

"Because she was afraid of you."

"Of me?"

"Of you, amma. She wanted to look like somebody. She is more than me. She always was. I was the one who was less. Everybody said so at the wedding, you said so, her father gave me a bike as if to say sorry. I did not tell you about the notebook because you would have said she was showing off. And she said the cook thing because she was afraid you would see that she could not light a stove and think that was all she was."

Nothing. Then Lakshmamma again, and her voice had changed, and Lasya had never heard it change.

"Afraid of me."

"Yes."

"Nobody has been afraid of me in this house in thirty years."

"She is."

Lasya lay in the dark with her phone on her chest. After a while she turned it over. The screen came on, bright in the dark room, with the ticket still open on it. Nellore to Hyderabad. One seat. Tomorrow.

She pressed cancel. She did it fast, before the screen could go dim. The app asked if she was sure and she said she was. Then it told her, in small grey letters, that the refund would be credited within seven working days.

Seven days. She laughed, once, in the dark, with her hand over her mouth so that nobody on the back step would hear. Seven days was exactly how long it had taken her to understand anything in this house, and she had been here four.