Part 4 of 4 · 5 planned · 7 minFour Minutes

The call came on the twelfth day at seven in the morning, and it was four minutes, and it was the wrong four minutes.

She was asleep on the chair by the table with her head on her arm and the receiver was in her hand before she knew she was awake.

"Andi."

"Lasya. I have four minutes. Only four. The ship came yesterday with a doctor and half the camp is in the line for him and the other half is in the line for the phone, and I gave six minutes to amma because Sravani rang the camp from the hostel. Amma has fever. Two days. She is all right, Sravani says, but she wanted to hear me."

"How is atta?"

"Fever. A little high. Sravani has gone home."

"Did you eat?"

"Yes. Did you?"

"Yes."

Hiss. Rafeeq's voice, far off, "one minute", and Pramod saying something to someone else, in English, about the doctor, and then "Lasya" and the line going dead at four minutes, because four was what it had been.

Now hear how two people can hold the same four minutes and come away with two different things.

What Pramod knew: that his mother had fever, that his sister had rung an island to find him, that he had stood in the line since five and given six of his ten minutes to Manubolu because a mother with fever comes first, and that the four left were four minutes of his wife's voice, which was more than he had had on the eleventh day, when the phone had been down for the whole island because of the ship.

What Lasya knew: that the phone had not rung on the eleventh day, and on the twelfth it had rung for four minutes, and he had said "I gave six minutes to amma." She did not know about the phone being down. She heard it as a sum: ten minus six, you get four, that is what you are worth today.

She had the proper sentence ready. It did not fit in four minutes with a fever in them. And he had not said the thing he had decided in the two-hour line on the eleventh day, which was that he had stopped minding about the officer, that his father would survive being proud of a thing that was not true, that none of it was worth nine minutes of silence. Four minutes with his mother's fever in them was not the place either.

So the officer still stood between them, unmade on her side, forgiven on his, and neither of them knew what the other had done to it.

On the thirteenth day Lasya did not sit by the phone.

She did it on purpose. That is the part she is not proud of, and she will tell you so herself. At nine in the morning she looked at the landline on its table and thought: if four minutes is what I am worth, let the four minutes ring in an empty house. And she took her bag and went to Neethu's.

She stayed at Neethu's until two and said nothing was wrong. Neethu looked at her twice and did not ask.

On the fourteenth day she took the bus to Mattool alone. She walked the shore with her chappals in her hand and did not pick up a single shell, and when she saw a whole one she stepped over it. She sat on the sand until the sun went into the water, and the landline, she knew, had rung in an empty house while she was sitting there. She knew it the way you know a thing you have arranged.

It had. Both days. I will tell you the fourteenth day from the island, because Lasya was told it later, and because it is the broken place in this story and you should see both sides of it without anyone explaining it to you.

Pramod stood in the line from six, nine men ahead of him. He had decided that today he would say it: that he had stopped minding, that she should stop too. He got to the table at a quarter to eleven. Rafeeq dialled. The phone rang in Anthoor, and rang, and Rafeeq said, "Nine minutes left," out of habit, and Pramod stood with the receiver to his ear listening to a landline ring in a house with his wife's chair by it and nobody on the chair.

He let it ring the whole nine minutes. Then he said to Rafeeq, "There is nobody," and put it down, and turned to the man behind him, the clerk from Kochi who had called him sir, and said, "Take mine," and gave him his minutes, and went back to the shed and the files.

On the fifteenth day he did not stand in the line.

He went to the shed at six and carried files until dark. Lasya sat at home on the fifteenth day because she had punished the phone enough, and it did not ring, because he was not in the line, because the house had been empty twice. Neither of them knew what the other had done, and both thought the other had decided something.

That is the broken place. Two people on either side of a sea, each one certain, and each one wrong.

Neethu came on the fifteenth evening, without Ammu, without halwa, and sat on the step instead of coming in, and said it in her slow careful English, with her hands.

"Lasya. You are doing the thing. The thing from my house. Again."

Lasya was standing in the door. "What thing?"

"The thing where you decide what he thinks and then you are angry at what you decided. In my house you decided Neethu said he is dull. Now you decided the phone says four minutes. You are not sitting by the phone. I came yesterday and you were not here. Where were you?"

"The beach."

"Alone?"

"Alone."

Neethu looked at her for a long time, the way she had looked at her at the table with Ammu's homework.

"I know," Lasya said. She sat down on the step next to her. "I know, Neethu. I knew on the bus. I just do not know how to stop it once I have started it."

"You pick up the phone," Neethu said. "That is how. There is no other way. Even in Malayalam there is no other way." And she patted Lasya's knee and went home to Sajith.

On the sixteenth day the landline rang at six in the evening and Lasya was on the chair and had it on the first ring.

"Andi?"

A silence. Not the hiss of the island. A different silence, a village silence, with a dog in it.

"It is me," said Subbaiah.

Her father-in-law. Who had never, in a year of marriage, said more than three sentences to her in a row, and who had never once rung this house of his own accord.

"Mamayya."

"He is fine."

Three words. She waited. Subbaiah's whole character was the silence after three words. She could hear him breathing in it, and Lakshmamma somewhere behind him saying something sharp, and then Subbaiah went on, in the flat voice of a man who has been made to do a thing by his wife and is doing it because she is right.

"He rang here yesterday. Four minutes. He asked about her fever. Then he asked if you are eating."

Lasya did not say anything.

"I said I do not know. I said I will find out. So I am finding out. Are you eating?"

"Yes, mamayya."

"Hm," said Subbaiah, and the line went quiet, and then he put the receiver down the way he put down a bag at a bus stop, carefully, without a word.

Lasya put her own receiver down. Then she slid off the chair and sat on the floor under the landline and put her face in her knees. He had got four minutes on the fifteenth day from somewhere, and had not used them on the house that did not answer. He had rung Manubolu and asked his father, who did not ask things, to ask if she was eating.