Part 13 of 20 · 3 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, two nights ago, 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.

Four left, and it was half past eleven.

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.

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