Part 1 of 4 · 7 minWater in the Quarters

The monsoon came to Anthoor the way it comes every year, which is to say that one evening the sky went the colour of a steel plate and after that nobody saw it again for a month. For the first week Lasya liked it. The rain on the quarters' roof was a sound she could sleep to, and the BSNL signal, which was bad in the sun, was no worse in the rain, which she took as a kindness.

On the ninth night the drain behind the quarters gave up.

She woke at two because her chappal floated past the cot. That was the first thing she understood, a chappal going by on its own, slowly, like a boat with somewhere to be. Then she understood the smell, and then the cold on her feet when she put them down, and then she screamed, which she had promised herself a year ago she would never do in front of Pramod.

"Andi. Andi. There is water."

Pramod was already up. She would think about this later, that he was already up before she screamed, standing in the dark with the torch, and that the first thing he did was not the TV, not the bike key, not the landline that was already under a foot of brown water and making a small complaining sound. The first thing he did was open the kitchen rack, take the steel dabbas of podi her mother had made, the kandi podi and the karivepaku podi and the nuvvula podi with her mother's handwriting on the lids, and put them on the top shelf, one by one, where the water could not reach.

Lasya stood on the cot with her sari held up to her knees and watched him do it and did not say anything. She loved him so much in that minute that her ears went hot in the dark. She did not tell him. There was a foot of water in the house.

They sat on the cot till morning with the torch between them and the water deciding what it wanted. At six it stopped rising. At seven Sajith's small car came through the lane throwing brown waves on both sides.

Sajith was Pramod's senior at the GST office, a big loud man from Anthoor itself, who had been born in this rain and did not see it. He stood at the door in a lungi with his trousers rolled over it and looked at the water in the quarters and laughed.

"Every year somebody gets this. This year it is the new fellow. Come. Neethu has said. No argument. One week, two weeks, till it dries. Bring clothes only."

"Sir, we cannot," Pramod began.

"Who said cannot? Neethu said come. In my house what Neethu says is the government." He picked up the bag Lasya had packed in the dark and walked out through the water with it on his head, and that was that.

Sajith's house was ten minutes away, up the slope where the water did not go, two floors, white with green doors, a verandah with a wooden swing on chains, and a kitchen you could see into from the gate. There was already somebody frying something in it. The somebody was Sajith, who had gone straight from the car to the stove without changing his wet lungi.

Neethu came out wiping her hands. She was thirty, a schoolteacher, small and fast, and she spoke Malayalam the way the rain fell, all at once, and English the way you cross a flooded road, one careful step at a time.

"You are Lasya. Good. Come. Sit. You are wet. Ammu, bring the towel. Not that towel. The good towel."

Ammu was six. She came with the good towel and looked at Lasya for a full minute, at her sari and her face and the chain on her neck, and then asked, in English she had been saving, "Are you a film star?"

"No," Lasya said.

"Then why do you look like that?"

Lasya laughed for the first time since the chappal. Within the hour Ammu had shown her every doll in the house, the swing, the place under the stairs where the cat had kittens, and had decided that Lasya aunty would sit next to her at every meal.

That first evening was the one Lasya would come back to afterwards and turn over, the way you turn over a stone to see what was under it.

Sajith cooked. Not helped; cooked. He stood at the stove with the fish in a clay pot and the coconut and the kudampuli, with the rain outside and the radio on, and talked to Neethu over his shoulder the whole time, in Malayalam, quick and loud, and she talked back from the table where she was correcting school notebooks, and neither of them stopped for a second. When the clothes on the line under the roof were dry he took them down and folded them on the sofa in a pile, shirts, Neethu's saris, Ammu's school uniform, with the fold at the right place. Then Ammu came with a comb and sat between his knees and he braided her hair for the morning, two plaits, with ribbons, without looking, still talking.

Neethu saw Lasya looking at the fish and said, "Pramod told Sajith. You cannot eat fish. For you, chicken. Separate pot. No problem," and it was already on the stove, and nobody made anything of it.

Pramod sat on the swing with his tea. Lasya saw him watching his senior at the stove with the comb in one hand and the ladle in the other, and what was on his face was respect, and something behind the respect that she did not look at properly, because she was busy.

She was busy with her Malayalam.

"Malayalam in 33 Hours" had been her companion for a year in the quarters, between the 1 p.m. call and six o'clock. She had the numbers, the vegetables, "thank you", "enough", "what happened", "nothing", and a dozen sentences she had said only to the YouTube screen. Now there was a Malayali woman in front of her, and she tried one.

"Chorum curryum nannayittundu," she said. The rice and the curry are very good.

Neethu put her pen down and clapped. Actually clapped. "Ayyo! Sajith! Lasya is speaking Malayalam! Say again."

Lasya said it again, and then the one about the rain, and then the one about the child being beautiful, and Neethu answered each one in a flood that Lasya caught a quarter of and nodded through as if she had caught all of it, and Ammu corrected her pronunciation with great seriousness, and Lasya glowed. She said more than she knew. Remember that.

Then dinner, all of them on the floor, Sajith serving, the fish for three and the chicken for one, the rain on the roof, the kind of evening that makes a borrowed house feel like a house.

And Lasya, warm and clever and full of chicken curry, said the thing.

"Sajith sir, teach my husband something. He thinks a kitchen is a place where food appears."

Everyone laughed. Neethu laughed with her head back. Ammu laughed because the grown-ups did. Sajith laughed loudest and said, "Pramod! Tomorrow you make the tea. Government order."

Pramod laughed too.

Half a second late. Lasya did not hear the half second. She was looking at Neethu.

They were given the spare room upstairs, with two mats and a fan and a window that looked at the rain. It was the first night in a year that they had slept in somebody else's house. Lasya lay down with the day going round in her head, Ammu, the swing, the chicken, the Malayalam, the clapping.

"Andi?" she said to the dark.

Pramod was facing the wall.

"Sleep," he said. "Tired."

He had never once said that to her. Not in the quarters, not in the Andamans, not after the longest day at the office. She lay there and listened to the rain and told herself it was the water in the quarters, and the carrying, and the podi dabbas, and that it was nothing. Then she said the word for nothing, in Malayalam, under her breath, to practise, and went to sleep.