Part 4 of 4 · 7 minThirty-Three Hours

On the sixth evening Pramod was late again, and Lasya sat at the table with Ammu and a page of English sentences, because that is what there was to do.

Ammu wrote with her tongue out and her whole body. "The cat sat on the mat." Then she put the pencil down and looked at Lasya with the face of a child who has been carrying a thing for a day and has found the moment to put it down.

"Lasya aunty. I have to ask you one thing."

"Ask."

Ammu said it carefully, in English, one word at a time, the way she had heard it, because she repeated everything exactly.

"Pramod uncle said to Achan that Lasya aunty is the cleverest person he knows. And that he is afraid she will get bored of him."

Lasya's pen stopped on the page.

"When?"

"In the car. Yesterday. Achan brought him from the office in the car because of rain. I was in the back. They thought I was sleeping. I was not sleeping."

"What did your Achan say?"

"Achan said do not be silly. Then uncle said talk you tonight." Ammu frowned. "Aunty, what is talk you tonight? I asked Amma and she laughed."

Neethu, at the stove, was laughing. "That child! She hears everything, nothing is safe in this house…"

Then she turned round with the ladle and saw Lasya's face.

Neethu put the ladle down and came and sat across from Lasya, and did the thing she did at school with the slow children, which was to say it slowly, in English, with her hands.

"Lasya. Listen. That day. In the kitchen. The beans. You remember?"

Lasya nodded. She could not have spoken.

"I said to you. Your husband is quiet. The quiet type." Neethu put one hand flat on the table, still. "Like my father. No talk. Sajith is this." The other hand, flapping, noise. "I married noise. But my mother always said, the quiet ones, Lasya, those are the ones who last. Last. Like, stay. Till the end." She put the two hands together. "I said, you are lucky. That is what I said."

"You said dull."

"I said what?"

"A word. Twice. It sounded like the weather word. For dull. Cloudy."

Neethu put both hands over her face.

"Ayyo, Lasya. That is not dull. That is the word for the ones who stay. The same sound, almost." She took her hands down. "You said ariyam, I know, I know. So I thought, good, the girl is clever. Five days you have been thinking I called your husband dull?"

Lasya did not answer. She was adding it up. The tea. The remote. Nice place, say it properly. Do not, they will think you have to look after me. The two hundred metres. Thirty-three hours of Malayalam, and this was what they had cost.

"Where is the office?" she said.

"Lasya, it is raining, he will come…"

"Where?"

Neethu told her. Ten minutes, down the slope, the long room with the tin roof past the bus stand. Lasya went out of the door in her house sari with no umbrella and Ammu called after her, "Aunty, you did not say what it means!"

The rain was the long steady kind. By the bus stand she was wet to the skin and did not notice. The office had one tube light on at the far end and a watchman at the gate under a sheet of plastic who looked at a soaked woman at eight at night and said, "Who?"

"Pramod sir's wife."

The watchman's face changed. "Ah. The Hyderabad madam." He opened the gate. That was what the office called her, she found out later. It was not unkind.

Pramod was alone at the long table under the tube light, with wet files in stacks and a towel on his shoulder like his father, and he looked up and saw her in the door with the water running off her, and his face did the thing it had done when the chappal floated past.

"Lasya. What happened. Who…"

"Ammu told me."

He put the ruler down.

"Ammu told me what you said in Sajith sir's car. The cleverest person you know. Afraid I will get bored of you." Her voice was not working properly. "Is it true?"

He did not say talk you tonight. He looked at the files for a moment and then at her.

"Yes."

"Bored of you? Andi, I counted your one o'clock calls for a year. I sat on that swing at one o'clock in somebody else's house. Bored of you."

"You asked my senior to teach me something," Pramod said. Quietly. "In front of his wife. In front of his child. On the first night."

"I was showing off." It came out of her in a rush, with the rain. "To Neethu. To be the kind of wife who can joke about her husband, the modern kind, the kind they are, I wanted to be the one who was on their side of the table. And then I thought Neethu said you were dull, she did not say it, I heard it wrong, thirty-three hours, andi, thirty-three hours and I understood one word in three and I said I know, I know, and I took the remote, and I corrected you, and I did not know you heard it like that. I did not know. I thought you were ashamed of me in front of him."

"Ashamed of you." He said it like a word in a language he did not have. "I thought you were ashamed of me. In front of a man who cooks fish. I did not know you did not know."

"You did not ask."

"You did not tell."

They stood there. The tube light buzzed.

Then Pramod, who had sat for a week with a six-year-old and a book of sums rather than say a thing, said a thing. Badly. In Malayalam. The first phrase from 33 Hours, which he had heard Neethu say forty times in a week.

"Enthu patti?"

It came out wrong, the stop in the wrong place. It sounded like a Nellore man asking about the weather.

Lasya laughed. It came out of her at the same time as the crying did, so that she stood in the door of the GST office with the Hyderabad madam's hair stuck to her face, laughing and crying at once at her husband's Malayalam, and he came round the table with the towel from his shoulder and put it on her head, and that was the end of the five days.

They walked back up the slope under one office umbrella, which covered neither of them.

Neethu was at the door. She looked at the two of them, soaked to the skin, her sari, his trousers, and she put her hands on her hips and said it one more time.

"Enthu patti?"

"Onnumilla," said Lasya.

And this time it was true, and Neethu, who had taught children for ten years, heard that it was true, and went inside and brought the good towel.

Sajith looked up from the television at his junior standing dripping in the hall with his arm round his wife, and said, "Pramod. Whatever that is. Teach me that," and nobody explained it to him, then or later.

The quarters dried on the seventh day. They went home with a steel dabba of Neethu's chicken curry and a drawing from Ammu in sketch pen of two people on a bike with the rain coming down in straight lines, and the question written under it in careful capitals, WHAT IS TALK YOU TONIGHT, which Lasya put on the kitchen rack next to the podi dabbas, where it stayed.

The first night back in the 1 BHK the landline was dead, and the signal was gone, as it always was, and the rain was on the roof. The foot of floor between the mats at Sajith's was a thing that had happened to other people.

"So," Lasya said into the dark, in the voice of a woman with a question she has been saving for a week. "Talk you tonight. What is it? Ammu asked."

"Ammu asked me the same thing," Pramod said. "In the car. Before her father told me not to be silly."

"And what did you tell her?"

"I told her it is a grown-ups' word."

He reached for the light.