Part 5 of 5 · 13 minThe Student

By July 2023, Sri Lakshmi Dhaba on the Hyderabad to Vijayawada highway was still open, if you want to call it that. The board was lit. The gas was on. Sambaiah, sixty-seven years old, the cook who had been there since 1996, still made rice and dal and chicken curry every evening the way he had for twenty-seven years. But nobody ate it. The lorries did not stop any more. They slowed down when they passed, the drivers looked once at the tree behind the dhaba, and they drove on. Mastan had told them: do not stop at Veeraiah's till I say so.

So Sambaiah cooked for nobody. In the morning he gave the food to the dogs that would not go under the tree.

Kiran had stopped going inside at night.

This is the thing you have to understand about what he had become by July. He was not mad. He ate his lunch, he talked to his mother. But when the sun went down he walked out to the back, past the line of whitewashed stones, and sat on the cot under the peepal with the bulb burning above him, and he waited. And it asked. And he answered. And it asked again.

Padma, his mother, fifty-two, sat at the counter inside and watched him through the gap in the shutter. She could not hear the voice. But she could hear her son. She could hear him answering, in the dry careful way a boy answers in a classroom, in words she did not know. Sometimes for ten minutes. Sometimes for an hour. Then quiet. Then his voice again.

On the fourth night of July she telephoned her brother in Khammam.

"Come and take him," she said. "I do not care how. Tie him. Take him."

Her brother's name was Venkat. He was forty-eight and a conductor on the Khammam to Hyderabad bus, and he was the kind of man who believed in tickets and timings and nothing else. He did not laugh on the phone. He said, "I will come tomorrow night with the boys."

He came the next evening in a borrowed Bolero with two of his sons, both bigger than Kiran. It was a little before nine. The bulb at the back was already on. Kiran was already on the cot.

Now listen to how this went.

Venkat walked straight past the stones. He did not know what they were and nobody stopped him. He took Kiran by the arm and said, "Get up, we are going." Kiran got up. He did not fight. He did not say no. The two cousins took him by the shoulders, the way you take a drunk man, and walked him across the yard to the Bolero, and he walked with them. His chappals stayed under the cot.

At the car he stopped and looked at his uncle. Padma said afterwards his face was calm.

"Mama," he said. "It will not matter."

"Get in," Venkat said.

"I am telling you it will not matter. You can take me."

"Then there is no problem. Get in."

Kiran got in. Sambaiah watched the Bolero go out onto the highway. Then he checked the bulb twice, the way he did every night.

Khammam is a little over a hundred kilometres from the dhaba. They reached Venkat's house after midnight. It is a two-storey house in a colony near the railway station. There is no peepal tree in that colony. There is no tree of any kind bigger than a drumstick tree.

They put Kiran in the upstairs room. Venkat's wife gave him milk. He drank it. He lay down. Venkat locked the house and sat in the hall downstairs with the television on and the sound off, and the two cousins slept on the floor beside him. By one he had decided it was all nonsense and had dozed off.

At two he woke. He did not know why. The television was still flickering. The fan was running. Nothing else.

Then he heard his nephew's voice, upstairs, through the floor.

Kiran was talking. Not shouting, not crying. Talking, the way you talk to a teacher across a desk. Venkat went up the stairs quietly and stood outside the door. The light in the room was off. But Kiran was sitting up, Venkat could hear the cot creak, and he was speaking in a language Venkat had heard only at weddings and funerals, from the priest, and never from a boy who sold mobile phones in Hyderabad.

Sanskrit. Fast. Clean. Not stumbling. A sentence, and a pause, and another sentence.

Venkat put his hand on the door. His hand was wet. He wanted to open it and he could not make his arm move.

And in the pause, in the dark room, somebody answered Kiran.

It was a man's voice. Dry. Exact. Not loud. It was in the room with his nephew, in his own house, a hundred kilometres from that tree, in a colony with no tree, on the first floor, behind a locked door. It asked something. He could not understand the words but he could hear that it was a question, the way you can hear a question in any language. And Kiran answered it. And it asked again.

Venkat did not open the door.

He went down the stairs, and he woke his sons, and he told them to put their chappals on. He did not explain. He went back up, opened the door, switched on the light, and Kiran was sitting on the edge of the cot with his hands on his knees, alone, looking at the wall, and he turned his head and looked at his uncle and said, in Telugu, politely, "I told you, mama."

They drove him back before dawn. Venkat said afterwards, to his sister, that he had three children and a wife in that house, and he was not going to keep that thing under his own roof. "At least at the dhaba," he said, "it is in the tree."

Padma did not argue with him. She had sent for him knowing it would not work.

They reached the dhaba at a quarter past five, with the sky just going grey. Kiran got down from the Bolero, walked across the yard, past the stones, to the cot, found his chappals where he had left them, put them on, and sat down. Sambaiah had not slept. He looked at Kiran and then at Venkat and said, "Take your sister with you when you go."

Venkat went back to Khammam that morning. Padma stayed.

That was the twelfth of July.

Now I will tell you about the last night, as the two people who were awake for it told it.

It was the night of the fourteenth. There was no rain. The highway was quiet, a lorry every ten minutes. The bulb was on. Sambaiah had checked it twice.

Kiran sat on the cot under the tree, upright, with his feet on the ground and his hands on his knees. Chanti, the cleaner boy, fourteen, was asleep on the cot by the kitchen with a sheet over his head, because Sambaiah had told him to sleep and he had done it, the way children do. Padma sat at the counter inside, with the shutter up now, not half down, because she had stopped hiding. She was not crying. She had finished crying in June. She was watching.

Sambaiah stood at the kitchen door with the hurricane lamp lit in his hand, though the bulb was burning and the tube light inside was on and he did not need a lamp.

At twenty past midnight it asked.

Padma could not hear it. Sambaiah could not hear it. What they heard was the silence that came before, a silence that made the lorries on the road sound as if they were in another country, and then they heard Kiran answer. He said a long sentence in Sanskrit. He said it slowly and clearly, the way a boy says something he has learned by heart and is proud of.

Then silence. Then he answered again. Longer this time.

It went on like that. Padma counted the lorries to keep her hands still. Thirty-one lorries. Then she stopped counting.

Around three, Kiran's voice changed. Sambaiah is the one who noticed. He said the boy had been answering like a student, with little pauses, as if checking. Now he was answering flat. No pauses. Like a man reading from a book he had written himself.

At half past three, Chanti sat up under his sheet and said, in his sleep, "Somebody is clearing his throat," and lay down again, and did not wake.

At four, Padma stood up and went to the door of the dhaba and stood beside Sambaiah. She could see her son from there. He was sitting the way he had been sitting at midnight. His back was straight. The bulb was on his head and shoulders. His lips were moving.

At ten minutes past four the voice stopped asking.

Sambaiah heard this. He heard the difference. He could not hear the words, but for three and a half hours he had been hearing the shape of it: a question, an answer, a question, an answer, the way you hear a hammer and a nail. And at ten past four the shape changed. The dry voice spoke, and what it said was not a question. It was longer. It went down at the end, not up. It was a sentence.

Nobody knows what the sentence was. Kiran did not repeat it. There was nobody to ask.

What Padma saw, and what she has told nobody but her brother, was Sambaiah's face. She was standing next to him. She was looking at her son. And she turned, because the old man had made a sound, a small sound, the sound a man makes when a step is not where his foot expected it. And she saw his face in the light of the lamp in his own hand. She said it was the face of a man who had waited twenty-seven years for a particular thing and had just understood that it had come, and that it was worse than he had thought. The lamp did not shake. His face did.

He said, "Amma, go inside."

She did not go inside.

Kiran stood up from the cot. He turned and looked at the two of them standing in the kitchen door. He raised one hand a little, from the wrist, the way a man says wait, or the way a man says it is all right. Then he turned back to the tree and walked into the dark under it, past where the bulb's light reached, and the dark under a peepal at four in the morning is complete.

Sambaiah did not move. Padma tried to go and he put his free hand on her arm, the way he had held Kiran in June, and she said later that she could not have moved that arm with a bullock.

They stood there until the sky went grey.

When there was enough light to see, the cot under the tree was empty. On it, laid straight, was a towel, folded in three and then in half, the way Veeraiah had folded towels all his life, the way nobody else at that dhaba had ever folded a towel. Kiran's chappals were side by side on the ground. He was not in the branches. Sambaiah looked, and Padma looked, and when Mastan came at nine, Mastan climbed the tree himself, all the way up, and looked. He was not in the tree. He was not behind the dhaba, or in the canal, or in the fields, or on the road.

The police came from Kodad at noon. They searched for a week. They had a dog from Nalgonda. The dog would not go under the tree, and the police wrote that down. They searched the canal with a net. They sent his photograph to the bus stands. The paper says missing. Padma signed it.

The dhaba is closed now. The board is still there, Sri Lakshmi Dhaba, and the drivers still call it Veeraiah's, but the shutter is down and has been since August 2023. Padma lives in Khammam with her brother. She does not come to the dhaba.

Sambaiah stayed.

He is sixty-eight now. He lives in the kitchen, alone. Mastan brings him rice and oil once a week on his way to Vizag. But every evening, before the sun goes down, he walks out to the back, past the stones, to the wall, and switches on the bulb, and checks it twice. When Mastan asked him once why he still did it, with the dhaba shut and nobody sleeping on the cots, the old man did not answer. Mastan asked again. Sambaiah said, "Somebody has to," and went inside.

The drivers on that road still know the line of stones. The stones are still there. Nobody has moved one since. Lorries that stop at the shut dhaba for a smoke park past the line, out of habit.

The ones who have stayed say this. They say that if you stand at the stones after midnight, when the bulb is burning and the old man is asleep inside, and you are quiet, you will hear something under the tree clear its throat. Nothing more than that, for most people. A man clearing his throat.

But three drivers, in three different months since August 2023, none of them knowing about the others, have told Mastan the same thing. They were under the tree. They should not have been. And it asked them a question. A question in Telugu, from the old arithmetic, the kind of thing a schoolmaster asks, in a dry, exact voice. Two of them answered right, by luck, they say, and got out from under the branches. The third one did not answer and is not on that road any more.

All three said the same thing about the voice. It was not an old man's voice. It was a young man's voice. It was polite. And one of them, a driver from Kodad who had eaten at that dhaba for five years and knew the owner's son by sight, said that before it asked the question, it said one word first, the way a boy from the city says it to a man older than him when he wants to be respectful.

It said, "Anna."

Nobody can tell you what it was that Kiran answered correctly, night after night, for a month. Nobody can tell you what was said to him at ten past four on the morning of the fifteenth of July, the one sentence that was not a question. And nobody on the Hyderabad to Vijayawada highway can tell you where the boy went, in that dark, when he walked under the tree with his hand raised as if to say it was all right.

But they can tell you where he is.