Part 14 of 20 · 6 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.

The society man came at seven.

Ramesh was on the front step with his shirt half buttoned when the cycle stopped at the gate, the one with the cloth bundles tied on behind and the notebook in a plastic cover clipped to the handlebar, and his mother said “Come, come, sit,” in the voice she kept for people who could not be refused, and put the one chair in the front room for him.

His father did not get out of the pit. He stopped the loom and stood in it up to the waist with his feet still on the treadles, which Ramesh had never seen him do for a visitor, and the two men talked across the half-woven saree in voices so low and so reasonable that it took Ramesh a full minute to understand they were arguing.

It was about the rate. It was about a border pattern that had gone out of fashion in Chennai. It was about Kotaiah’s sarees, which the society had taken back from the shut house yesterday and would now have to sell as seconds, and whose fault that was. The society man kept opening the notebook and closing it again.

“Three a season,” he said, in the tone of a man who is sorry and has said the same sentence in eleven houses since Thursday. “Three from any one loom. I don’t make it. They make it in the office. And the winding, if she wants it, there is winding. By the bundle.”

His father looked at the saree in front of him for a long time. Then he held out his hand for the notebook, and signed it with the stub of pencil from behind his ear, and gave it back.

The society man is going to put his hand on your head.

Ramesh did not move, because there was nowhere to move to, and four minutes later the society man came out, wheeling the cycle, and rested his palm on top of Ramesh’s head the way men do with other people’s sons, and said, “Studying? Good. Study,” and went off down the street to the next loom.

Three a season. He had heard it through a doorway in the dark on Sunday night. Now he had heard it in daylight, in their own front room, and he had watched his father sign for it.

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.

At the interval he sat on the low wall by the tank with his hand still warm, and Prasad sat down two feet along from him, not with him exactly, with his tiffin box, the way you sit on a wall that happens to have someone on it.

Prasad ate for a while. Then he said, to his tiffin, “She always does them the next day.”

Ramesh looked at him.

“The marks. Every test. Monday she gives, Tuesday she reads them out.” Prasad put the lid back on the box. He did not say it like a boy being clever. He said it like a boy mentioning that the bus goes at six. “Every Tuesday. Since Class Five.”

“Everybody knows that?”

Prasad thought about it, and shrugged, and got up, and went off towards the pump to wash his box, and did not seem to realise he had said anything at all.

Ramesh sat on the wall.

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.