Part 15 of 20 · 5 minThe Empty Road

He went out to the border after school.

He did not decide to. He came out of the gate at four with his bag on his shoulder and turned left instead of right, past the temple lane and the brick kiln and the palms, out to where the tar gives up, and he walked until he came to the place where the crowd had stood.

He had passed the bus stand on the way, and he had stopped there, and he had not meant to do that either.

The bajji stall was open again. Not properly. The kadai was on the burner and the oil was going, and the bajji man was standing at it on his own with his left arm held out and away from his body, wrapped from the elbow to the knuckles in a strip of white cloth gone yellow with turmeric paste, the way you hold a thing that belongs to somebody else. He was frying with the other hand. He was doing it badly. He dropped the mirchis in too close together and they stuck, and he had to go after them with the slotted spoon one-handed, and every time the oil spat he flinched the whole left side of himself back from it before he could stop. Six weeks, they had said at the hospital. It had been three days.

Bujji was sitting on an upturned crate beside him, handing him mirchis out of a basket one at a time. He was very serious about it. He held each one up, and waited, and his father took it without looking, and he held up the next.

There were two customers. On a Tuesday at four there were usually twelve.

Ramesh stood on the far side of the road with his bag on his shoulder and the watch on his wrist and fifteen minus whatever he had spent, and nothing was coming at him, so it said nothing. There was nothing to warn him about. The thing had already happened, three days ago, on a soft patch of ground behind the school, and it was standing in front of him now frying with one hand.

He did not know what you do. He did not know whether you go over. He did not have a single sentence that would have worked, again, any more than he had had one on the night, and after a minute Bujji looked across the road at him, the way small children look at anyone who is looking at their father, and Ramesh put his head down and walked on towards the border, fast.

There was nothing there. Of course there was nothing there. Four days of sun and one shower had taken the turmeric off the road, and the thorn bund was a thorn bund, and there was a plastic packet caught in it, and some dark patches in the dust that could have been anything and were probably oil off a lorry.

Ramesh stood in the middle of the road at the edge of his own village and had it out with her.

He did it silently, because he was eleven and not mad, and because there were people in the far field. But he did it properly.

You gave me the wrong thing.

That was the first part, and he was furious, and it came out of him in a rush. I asked you to keep things away from me. You give me four minutes of watching them come. You told me about the oil and I could not stop the oil. You told me about the crying and I could not stop the crying. You told me she would beat me and there was nothing, nothing, nothing I could do, because it was for yesterday, and yesterday is finished, and you never once told me about yesterday when it was today.

He stood there with his fists shut.

Tell me why. That is all. Not what. Why. Tell me the reason, four minutes early, and I will never ask you for anything again.

The road stayed a road. Somewhere behind him a bus went along the Nellore road and did not stop.

He took the watch off.

He had it in his hand and he had his arm back, and the scrub was right there, and it would have taken about a second and a half, and he stood like that for a good while with his arm up and his eyes hot.

Hold on to it.

Not from the watch. From the night of the jaatara, in the dark, in a voice that had decided not to eat him. He heard it as clearly as he had heard it then, and his arm came down, and he stood in the road with a cheap watch in his fist and cried for a bit, which he had not done since he was about eight, and then wiped his face with his sleeve and put it back on.

And then, because he was standing in the exact spot and had nothing left to lose, he said the true thing.

I don’t know how to make it not happen.

Which was, when he heard himself think it, not a complaint about her at all.

He walked home slowly. The looms were going in the weavers’ street, seven or eight of them, and he stopped at the top of it the way you stop at a river.

He could pick out his father’s from the top of the street. Anyone born in that street could do that with their own house, the way you know your mother’s voice in a crowd at the tank. Third on the left, the thok of the reed coming a little after everyone else’s.

It was going slowly. Not stopped. There was no breakage in it, no missed beat. It was only slower than he had ever heard it, with a pause at the end of each throw, the pace of a man who has signed for three a season that morning and can find no reason, today, to hurry the fourth.

Eleven days for six yards. Eight thousand throws for one saree. You cannot go faster at the end because you were slow at the beginning.

His father had said that with his feet in a pit, and Ramesh had heard none of it, and it had been sitting in his head for four days waiting for him.