Part 1 of 20 · 6 minThe Road at the Boundary

The paper said eleven out of twenty-five, and Ramesh had read it enough times on the way out of the school gate that the number had stopped meaning anything except that he could not go home.

He knew exactly how it would happen. His mother would be at the door before he reached it, because she was always at the door, and she would take the paper out of his hand without asking, because she always did, and she would not even shout at first. That was the part he could not face. She would hold it and look at it and go quiet, and then she would call his father in from the loom, and his father would come with the thread still on his fingers.

His father counted for a living. Eighty threads to the inch, and the count either came right or the saree was worth nothing, and a man who spent his day proving that things add up had a particular way of looking at a boy who could not make eleven into twenty-five. He never hit Ramesh. He only asked questions that had one answer, and waited.

So Ramesh turned left at the temple lane instead of right, and kept walking, and then walked faster, and then ran.

He ran past the last of the pucca houses and the brick kiln with its smoke leaning sideways and the palm trees that marked where the town stopped pretending to be a town. The tar gave out. The road went on as gravel and red dust towards Nellore, and the noise of the jaatara came up behind him the way weather comes, all at once and from everywhere.

He had forgotten it was the day.

They took her to the border every year. That was the whole point of it. You did not keep Poleramma in the middle of the village where she would get hungry among the houses. You carried her out to the edge, to the place where the fields ended and the scrub began, and you fed her there, so that whatever she wanted would be wanted out there and not in here. Ramesh had watched the procession every year of his life from the safety of the crowd, holding somebody’s hand, half bored.

He had never been out at the border ahead of it, alone, with the drums coming towards him.

He got off the road. There was a bund with thorn scrub on it and he went down behind it and put himself flat, and the drums came up the road and past him, and the whole village went by four feet from his head.

He could see almost nothing, and that was the mercy of it. Through the thorn he had a strip of the world about as wide as his hand: feet, mostly, and the bottom of the palanquin, and the turmeric going down into the dust in handfuls until the road turned yellow. There was a smell of neem and camphor and crushed marigold. Somebody’s anklets. The drums so close that his chest took them instead of his ears.

Then the drums stopped, all together, the way they do, and in the silence afterwards he heard the buffalo.

Not much. He wanted to say afterwards, always, that he did not see it, and that was nearly true. He saw the crowd close up. He saw a shoulder move. He heard a sound that he did not have a word for and that his body understood before he did, and then the drums came back much louder than before, and he pressed his face into the dirt and kept it there.

When he looked up again the road was empty.

They had gone back the way they came, all of them, drums fading towards the houses, and Ramesh was lying behind a thorn bund at the edge of the village on the wrong side of the boundary, alone, at the hour when the light goes orange and the crows start arguing about where to sleep.

He would have got up then. He had every intention of getting up.

But somebody was still there.

She was sitting on the road where the crowd had been, in the yellow dust, with her back to him, and she was eating.

She was very black. Not dark the way people are dark, but black the way a well is black at noon, black that the evening light landed on and did not come off. Her hair was down and it was longer than she was tall. She sat on the ground the way a labourer sits after work, easy, both feet flat, and she ate with her hands and she was in no hurry at all.

Ramesh did not move. There was nothing brave or clever in it. His legs had simply stopped taking instructions.

He was eleven. He did what an eleven-year-old does, which is that he began to pray, silently, extremely fast, to the only person in the world who could possibly help him, who was sitting nine feet away with blood on her wrists.

Amma. Poleramma thalli. Don’t let anything reach me. Keep everything five steps away from me, that’s all, five steps, so I can see it coming and get out of the way. Then I can stop it happening. Please. Five steps.

It was, he thought later, a stupid prayer. He had asked for a distance, as though the things that hurt you come at you across open ground where you can watch them arrive. He was a boy whose entire experience of disaster was a mark on a paper and a hand at a door, and he asked for the only protection he could imagine, which was a bit of room.

She stopped eating.

She did not turn around. She tilted her head very slightly, the way you do when someone at the back of the bus says your name, and she stayed like that for a moment, and Ramesh’s whole body went to water.

Then she laughed, once, low, entirely to herself, as though a child had said something at the exact moment nobody expected a child to speak.

She reached out with one hand, without looking, and put something down in the dust at the edge of the road, and went back to eating.

Ramesh stayed where he was until the light had gone completely and the road was grey and the place where she had been sitting was empty and had been empty for some time.

Then he crawled out, and picked it up, because he was going to have to walk past it either way.

It was a watch. A cheap one, the kind that hangs in strips at the bus stand for forty rupees, steel-coloured, the glass scratched in one corner, the strap too big for him by three holes. It was ticking.

He ran the whole way home with it closed inside his fist, and his mother was at the door, and she took the paper out of his hand without asking.

That night he dreamed of nobody. There was only the dark and a voice in it, close, unbothered, speaking to him the way you speak to a small boy you have decided not to eat.

Hold on to it.