Part 10 of 20 · 5 minThe Night Before School

He could not sleep, so he made a plan, and the plan was beautiful.

He did not get to it straight away, because the house would not settle.

Some time after midnight the chair in the front room creaked, and his father woke up in it the way men wake up in chairs, all at once and cross about it, and instead of going to bed he struck a match. Ramesh, on his mat with his face to the wall, watched the lamplight come up yellow on the plaster and heard the pencil come out from behind his father’s ear.

He was counting. Ramesh knew that sound better than his own name: the low run of numbers under the breath, the pause, the scratch, the numbers again. Only it was not threads. “Three,” his father said, very quietly, to nobody. “Three, and eleven days a piece. Thirty-three days. And the yarn is theirs, and the yarn is cut from it.” Scratch. “And then the rest of the season sitting.” A long silence, and then the numbers went back to the beginning and came out the same, and he did them a third time as though a count done three times might be persuaded to change its mind, the way a warp never once had.

His mother came out from the back room without a light. She did not say anything to him. She went instead to where Ramesh’s school bag hung on its nail by the door, and took it down, and sat on the floor with it in the lamplight, taking the books out one at a time to see they were all there for Monday, the way she did on the last night of every holiday.

She took out the Hindi book and opened it.

It was the book he had been given at the start of the year. The spine cracked when she opened it, a small, clean, brand-new crack, loud in the quiet room, and two of the pages in the middle had never been parted and stuck together at the edge, and she separated them with her thumbnail and looked at them.

Ramesh stopped breathing.

She closed it. She put it back in the bag in its place, between the maths and the notebook, and did the straps up, and hung the bag back on the nail. She did not look over at the mat. She did not say a word about it, then or in the morning or ever, and that was somehow very much worse.

“The fees,” his father said, still to the paper.

His mother’s hand went up to her throat, where the thin chain was, the one from her own mother, the only gold in the house, and rested there. “There is this,” she said.

“Not yet.”

“In June there is this.”

His father put the pencil back behind his ear and blew out the lamp, and after a while the chair creaked again, and after a longer while the back room door closed, and Ramesh lay in the dark with his eyes open and the feel of that small new crack going round and round in his chest like the shuttle.

He lay on his mat with the drums finished and the street gone quiet and the watch on his chest where he could feel it ticking through his shirt, and he laid the whole of Monday out in front of him like a boy laying out marbles.

Fifteen. That was the number. He would get fifteen, because he would sleep tonight, and it filled up when you slept. That was the rule, and he had worked it out himself, and he was extremely proud of it.

So: none on the way to school. He would walk with his hands in his pockets and waste nothing.

One for the prayer line, so that the PET master’s cane never came near him. One for whether the Hindi madam would call on him. One for what the maths sir would ask. Some for the interval, because the interval was where boys got hit by other boys. And the rest for the classroom, where the answers were, and where the whole of his future was going to be decided in front of forty people who currently thought he was thick.

Fifteen was plenty. Fifteen was riches.

He turned over and thought about how it would go. He would be first in the line. He would answer before Prasad, who was always first and who had a fountain pen. He would get through a whole day without being hit once, and then another, and then the annuals, and he would pass, and he would not go into the pit at twelve.

Nanna will see, he thought. And amma. And Latha.

He had, in three days, been given a genuine miracle by a goddess who had come to the border to be fed and had stayed behind afterwards to laugh at a frightened boy, and he had used it on a dog, a comb, a bee, a bag of ice candy, six boys at a cricket match and one enormous lie about a bus. He had failed to stop a man being burned. He had known about a death and been slapped for nearly saying so. He had lain in the dark two hours ago and heard his own future decided in a voice too tired to be angry.

And he had understood, out of all of it, one single fact: that he had fifteen of them, and that sleeping brought them back.

He was asleep before he had finished counting the plan through a second time.

He had not thought about it even once, and there was nobody in that house awake to think of it for him, and it would not occur to him until about half past eleven on Monday morning, with his heart going and the whole class looking at him and the Hindi madam waiting: a school day is seven hours long, and there is nowhere in it to sleep.

Outside, the street was dark all the way down to Subbamma’s door, where the muggu had finally been walked away to nothing.