Part 13 of 20 · 6 minNowhere to Sleep

By the interval he had four.

He had not wasted them. That was the frightening part. He had spent them on exactly the things he had planned to spend them on, on his mat, last night, when fifteen had seemed like riches. A boy behind him with a compass. The maths sir asking him to read out a sum. Somebody’s cricket ball. The interval itself, which is where boys get hit by other boys, and where Ramesh, for the first time in his school life, got out of the way of something before it arrived and felt the whole yard tilt slightly in his favour.

Every one of them had been a good one. The compass was Venu’s, and Venu had been going to put the point of it into the back of Ramesh’s shoulder out of plain boredom during geography, and four minutes later it went into the wood of the bench where the shoulder had been. The sum he read out wrong, but standing up and ready, with his finger already on the line, instead of being found with the book shut. The cricket ball came over the wall from the high school side like a stone out of a sling, and hit the drinking tap where his head had been. Each time he had been glad. Each time he had felt the number go down inside him like water in a pot.

Four left, and it was half past eleven.

He had not got as far as the wall before they found him.

Chinna had talked. Of course Chinna had talked. By the interval it had gone round the whole of Six A and into Six B, and Sattibabu and Chinna came across the yard towards him with five or six boys behind them who had never once in two years said his name, and one of them was a big boy from Seven with a moustache starting.

“Ey. Whole-Day. Is PET sir coming out?”

It was the question that mattered most in that yard at that hour. There was a game of goli going on behind the cycle stand where the PET master had forbidden goli, and eleven boys had money in it.

Ramesh had four. He did not spend one. He looked at the office verandah, where the PET master was drinking tea from a steel tumbler with the Telugu sir, and he looked at the tumbler, which was nearly full.

“At the end,” he said. “Not before the bell.”

It went off across the yard like a paper boat going down a drain, and Ramesh felt, for most of the interval, like a man who owned a bus.

When the PET master did come out, at the end, about three minutes before the bell, he came round the back of the latrines instead of down the verandah steps, which he had never once done before, and he caught two of the goli boys by their collars, and one of them, walking past Ramesh afterwards holding his ear, gave him a look that said the whole thing had been half true, and that half true was going to be remembered.

But that was later.

He sat on the low wall by the tank in the sun with his lunch cloth open on his knees and did not eat, and worked at it like a boy trying to make a bicycle chain go back on.

Fifteen a day. Sleep filled it. School was seven hours long.

He turned it over and over and it kept coming out the same and it kept being worse. At home the two things had sat next to each other so neatly that he had never once put them together: it runs out and sleeping brings it back. At home he could not have run out, not really, because at home he was never more than ten steps from a mat.

Here there was no mat. There was no bed, no corner, no half hour, nothing. There was a compound, four hundred boys, and a bell every forty minutes until four o’clock.

What he did next was, in fairness to him, the only logical thing available.

He tried to go to sleep in class.

It was social studies, which was the last period before games, and the master was reading from the book about the Kakatiyas in the voice of a man who had read it aloud eleven hundred times. Ramesh put his head down on his folded arms on the desk and shut his eyes and thought, very seriously, filling.

He did not even get to properly pretend. You cannot sleep in five minutes on a wooden desk in a hot room with your heart going. He lay there with his eyes shut listening to the master’s voice and the fan and forty boys breathing, and what he mostly felt was how completely stupid this was going to look.

He was right about that.

“Ramesh.”

He got up with his cheek printed with the seam of his own sleeve, and got two on each hand for sleeping in class, which was the first time he had been hit all day, and he stood there afterwards holding his hands under his arms with his eyes stinging, not from the cane.

Because he had just spent the last one working out what it meant. Not the caning. The other thing.

She had given it to him at the boundary, on the day they take her out and feed her so that her hunger is spent outside and never comes in. She had given him a warning that only fills up when he sleeps. And he went to school six days a week, from half past eight until four, which was every single hour in which anything in his life was ever actually decided — the marks, the masters, the annuals, the pit, all of it — and in all of those hours there was nowhere to sleep.

It was not that the miracle was small. It was the right size. It was simply, precisely, exactly the wrong shape for the place where he needed it, and it had been the wrong shape since the first minute, and he had spent three days being too pleased with himself to look.

The weavers’ street, when he turned into it, was going slower than a Monday should. Four looms, maybe five. Halfway down, outside Kotaiah’s house, where the door had been shut since before the jaatara, the society man’s cart was standing with the bullock asleep in the shafts, and Kotaiah’s wife was handing things out to him through the door without a word: a half-woven warp rolled on its beam like a sick man carried out on a cot, and then three finished sarees tied up in a bedsheet. The society man counted them onto the cart and wrote in a long thin notebook. Ramesh’s father stood in his own doorway three houses up with his arms folded and watched every bit of it, and did not go and help, and did not go back in.

He walked home at four with nothing on his wrist but a cheap watch that was four minutes fast.