Part 14 of 20 · 3 minA Beating With No Reason

On Tuesday he woke with a full fifteen and lost the first one before he was off the mat, because the watch told him his mother was coming, which he could have worked out himself from the sound of her feet.

He got to school with eleven. He was careful. He stood in the prayer line and did not need one, because he was early on his own account now, out of pure fright.

At ten past ten, in the middle of the maths period, it said:

The Hindi madam is going to beat you.

And it went heavy on his wrist, the way it had gone heavy for Subbamma, the way it had gone heavy in the dark when his father said his name.

Ramesh sat very still in the third row with the sum half copied off the board.

Four minutes.

He used them. He used every one of them, and he used them well, and that is what makes it the worst four minutes in the whole of this story.

He checked his homework first, because that is the obvious one. It was done. It was done badly, but it was done, and it was in the bag, and he took it out and looked at it and put it back. He checked his shirt for the button. He checked his nails, because she checked nails. He tried to remember whether he had said anything to Prasad in her class yesterday, and he had not. He went through the whole of Monday in his head, at speed, hunting for the thing that was coming for him, and he could not find it, because there was nothing in Monday to find. He had not talked. He had not been late. He had done nothing at all.

The bell went. The class changed. She came in with the register and the pile of half sheets, and Ramesh understood about one second before she opened her mouth.

“Yesterday’s test.”

Of course.

She read them out. She read them out in order, worst first, because that was how she did it, and he stood up when his name came, and it was two out of twenty, and the two boys below him got one each and the caning went along the three of them at the front of the room in the order of their marks.

It did not hurt very much. He had had worse in the prayer line for nothing at all.

He stood at the front holding his hand and looked at nothing, and the thing that was happening inside him had no words in it yet, but it was very large and it was moving.

He had known for four minutes. He had known, and he had spent every second of it searching, and there had never been anything to find, because the thing that caused it was not in front of him. It was behind him. It was nineteen blank spaces on a half sheet of paper from ten o’clock yesterday morning, and it had been finished and over and out of his hands for twenty-four hours before the watch said a single word about it.

The warning ran four minutes ahead.

The cause was a day behind.

And there was no arrangement of those two facts, none at all, in which a boy could get from one to the other in time to do anything about it.