Part 3 of 4 · 7 minThe Flood Claims

On the fourth and fifth days Pramod left at seven and came back at nine, and the flood claims were as real as the rain.

The GST office in Anthoor is one long room with a tin roof, and the water had come into it the same night it came into the quarters, and every file on the bottom two shelves had been under it. Pramod spent two days on his knees separating wet paper from wet paper with a steel ruler, and the shopkeepers of the main road came in one after the other with photographs of their stock on their phones, and he wrote it all down.

Sajith went at nine and came back at six.

"Pramod is doing my work also, that boy," he said at tea, with his feet up, pleased, the way a senior is pleased with a junior who does not complain. "Give him anything, he does it. Good fellow."

Lasya heard "that boy".

She did not hear the rest. She heard a man in his own house, with his feet up, calling her husband a boy, kindly, the way you talk about a servant you are fond of. She put it next to the thing Neethu had said in the kitchen, the dull thing, and the two of them fitted together like a lid on a dabba.

Now you must understand what those two days were for Lasya. She was a woman alone in another woman's house, in a town where the rain did not stop and the only person who had ever belonged to her was coming home at nine and eating with his head down. She helped Neethu. She learned where the sugar was. And all day, without meaning to, she watched Neethu's marriage and held it up against her own.

Sajith rang Neethu three times a day for nothing. Sajith argued with her about the electricity bill at the top of his voice and then rubbed her feet while the film was on. Pramod rang once, at one, and had stopped doing even that.

On the fourth evening she called Swathi in Hyderabad.

"Lassi! Where are you, your phone was dead for a week."

"Flood. We are at his colleague's house. It is fine. Very nice people. The wife is a teacher. I am speaking Malayalam."

"Good, good. And him?"

"Fine. Busy. Flood claims."

There was a pause on the line, the pause of a girl who has sat next to you in sixty films.

"Lassi. Your voice."

"What about my voice?"

"Nothing. Tell me what happened."

"Onnumilla," Lasya said, and then, "Nothing. Swathi, I will call you later, Ammu is calling me," and she cut the call, and Ammu was not calling her.

Ammu was at the table with a school project. It was a family tree, a big sheet of chart paper with a tree drawn on it and boxes for the leaves. Ammu had done her own: Achan, Amma, Ammamma, Appooppan, two uncles in Dubai, a cat.

"Lasya aunty, draw yours."

So Lasya drew hers, to pass the hour. Nanna, Amma, herself. Pramod. And then the box next to Pramod, and Ammu said, "And Pramod uncle's amma and achan? And his village? Where is his village? Is it near the sea like here?"

Lasya held the sketch pen over the box.

She had been to Manubolu. She had lit a stove there in January. She knew Lakshmamma's saying and Subbaiah's towel and which field had the pump set. But she realised, with the pen in the air, that she had never once in a year asked Pramod to describe it to her. Not the way Ammu was asking. What it looked like from the bus. What he had done there as a boy.

She drew it anyway. Subbaiah. Lakshmamma. Sravani. Manubolu, Nellore district, paddy, a borewell, not near the sea. It was more than she had thought she knew. Ammu was satisfied. Lasya sat looking at the tree for a long time after Ammu had gone to bath, at the box that said Pramod, with her own handwriting all around it.

On the fifth day they went to the quarters together, because Sajith said the water had gone down and somebody should see.

The water had gone and left the mud. It was over everything, the floor, the lower wall, the legs of the cot, the dead landline, a smooth brown skin that smelt of the drain. The podi dabbas were safe on the top shelf, the only clean things in the house.

Pramod took off his shirt and got down on his knees with a bucket and a cloth and started on the floor. Lasya stood with the broom.

"Go back," he said, not looking up. "You will get your sari dirty. This is my work."

He meant: I will not let you kneel in this. He meant the thing he had meant with the podi dabbas, which he could not say.

She heard: this is my work, not yours. Go back to the nice house and the nice people and leave me to the mud, which is where I belong, since you have made it clear in front of my senior where I belong.

She stood with the broom for a minute and then she swept the verandah, which did not need it, and then she stood at the door and watched his back go up and down over the floor for an hour, and neither of them said a word in a house that had been theirs for a year.

The bike was the first time they had been alone all week. Ten minutes from the quarters up the slope to Sajith's in the rain, her arms around him because of the wet road, her chin at his shoulder where it had been on every ride to Mattool beach.

"You have not spoken to me for five days," she said into his shoulder.

He did not answer for the length of the main road. Then, at the turning, with the rain coming sideways, "You have been speaking enough for both of us. In front of them."

"What does that mean?"

The bike slowed for the slope.

"Talk you tonight," Pramod said.

And for the first time in a year of hearing it, with his smile behind it, as the thing that put off every hard thing with a promise, it made her furious. Because there was no smile behind it this time. It was just a door shutting.

"Stop the bike."

"Lasya, it is raining."

"Stop it."

He stopped at the corner, two hundred metres from Sajith's gate. She got off. She walked. He sat on the bike in the rain for a moment and then rode past her slowly and did not stop and did not look, and she walked the two hundred metres with the water running off her hair and reached the gate after him and came in through the kitchen so that Neethu would not see her face.

Neethu saw her face.

That night there were two mats in the spare room, a foot apart, as there had been for five nights, and the fan, and the rain. Nobody said "sleep, tired". Nobody said anything. Pramod lay on his back with his eyes open and Lasya lay on her side with hers shut and the foot of floor between them was the widest thing in Kerala.

Outside the door, on her way to put Ammu's uniform on the chair, Neethu stopped. She stood on the landing and listened, the way a woman does in her own house when there are guests. She heard nothing. Not a fight. Not a whisper. Not the sound of two people turning over. Nothing at all, from a room with two people in it, and that was worse than a fight; a fight she would have known what to do with.

She went down to Sajith, who was asleep in front of the television, and shook his foot.

"Enthu patti, those two?"

Sajith opened one eye. "Who?"

"Pramod and Lasya. Something has happened."

"Nothing has happened. He is tired. The claims." He shut the eye.

Neethu stood with her hands on her hips and looked at the stairs, and did not believe a word of it, and did not know what it was, and went to bed thinking, for no reason she could name, about the morning in the kitchen with the beans.