Part 11 of 20 · 4 minThe Prayer Line

They took Subbamma out at eight, and the school bus of the whole street stood still for it.

Her son had come from Gudur on the night bus after all. Ramesh watched from the gate with his bag already on his shoulder, and the drums went down the lane ahead of her, and the men went behind, and the women stood in the doorways and did not follow. His mother put her hand flat on the top of his head for a second as she went past, which she had not done in about two years, and then she went after the others.

He waited until the lane was empty. Then he set off for school, and did not spend a single one.

That was the plan and he stuck to it. Hands in pockets. Past the weavers’ street where three looms were going and eight were not, because of the death. Past the bus stand. He counted his fifteen the way you count money in your pocket without taking it out, and by the time he came through the school gate at twenty past eight he had all of them, and he was ten minutes early, and he had never in his life been ten minutes early to anything.

Then school happened to him.

He had forgotten what it was actually like. Two days of a village street had let him think the world came at you one thing at a time, politely, in a line. School was four hundred boys in a compound the size of two fields, and everything arrived at once and from behind.

Ravi is going to run into you. One. He stepped sideways and Ravi went past like a train.

The bell. Two. Which he had not asked for and did not need, and which the watch spent anyway, because it had never taken instructions from him about anything.

Somebody is going to pull your bag. Three.

He had been inside the gate for six minutes and he was down to twelve.

Ramesh stood by the water tank with a cold feeling starting somewhere under his ribs, doing the arithmetic he should have done on his mat two nights ago. Six minutes. Twelve left. School finished at four.

He did not have the words for it, but what he had just discovered was this: at home, the future had been thin. A mother, a father, a loom, a street. Here it was thick. There was so much of it, arriving from every direction, and the watch could not tell the difference between a bell he did not care about and a thing that mattered, so it simply reported everything, and every report cost.

Then the prayer bell went, and he stopped worrying, because the prayer line was the thing he had been dreaming about since Saturday.

The PET master took the line. He took it the way he took everything, which was with a cane held loosely down along his leg, walking the rows from the back, and the rule was very simple and everybody understood it: you did not talk, you did not lean, and your line was straight. Ramesh had been caned in that line eleven times in two years. Twice for talking. Nine times for not being where he should have been standing.

He is coming down your row. Four.

Ramesh straightened up so fast that Prasad, next to him, looked round.

He stood there with his heels together and his arms at his sides and his chin level, and the PET master came down the row behind him, and Ramesh heard the flip-flop of his sandals get closer and stop, directly behind his own back, for about two seconds.

Then they went on.

The song started. Four hundred boys, all of it out of time. Ramesh stood in the middle of it with his eyes open and his heart going like a bird, and he was so happy he could not sing.

It had worked. That was the thing. Everything else he had done with it since Friday had been a dog, a comb, a bag of ice. This was the actual thing he had prayed for on the road at the boundary, the exact thing, delivered: something had come at him and it had not reached him. Five steps. Four minutes. Whatever she had given him, it had just kept a cane off his back in front of four hundred people.

He thought, quite clearly, standing in that line: I am going to be all right.

He had eleven left, and the first period was Hindi.