Part 10 of 20 · 3 minThe Night Before School

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

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.