Part 16 of 20 · 5 minEleven Out of Twenty-Two

He sat down with the Hindi book that night at about eight o’clock, at the end of the front room where the light was, with no plan except that he could not think of anything else to do.

His mother was already there.

She had the winding wheel out on the floor, the small one that had belonged to her own mother and had lived in the loft for as long as Ramesh could remember, and beside it a hank of yarn on the swift and a pile of empty bobbins, and she was turning the handle with one hand and guiding the thread with the other, and the wheel made a thin dry whirr like an insect that has decided to stay the night. It was the winding the society man had spoken of that morning. It came by the bundle, and it did not come to much by the bundle, and it had been in the house since eleven o’clock.

She looked up when he sat down with the book, and looked at the book, and moved the lamp six inches along the floor so that it lit both of them, and went back to the wheel.

Neither of them said anything about it.

It was horrible.

He wants it on the record, whoever is keeping the record, that it was horrible. The list had twenty-two words in it and he knew six, and the six he knew were the easy ones, and the other sixteen simply refused. He read them. He read them again. He shut the book and tried to say them and got two. He got angry with the book, which is a thing you can only do at eleven, and then he got angry with himself, which is a thing you can do at any age, and at about twenty past nine his mother told him to come and eat and he said “in a minute” and she stood in the doorway for a second longer than she needed to before she went away.

At a quarter to ten the loom stopped.

His father came up out of the pit the way he did at the end of the day, in two movements, a hand on the edge and then a knee, and stood for a minute rubbing the small of his back, and went past to the water pot. On the way he passed the end of the room where Ramesh was sitting on the floor with the book open and his lips moving.

He stopped.

Ramesh did not look up, because he was in the middle of a word and because he did not know what face to have if he did. He heard his father stand there. He heard him drink, and put the tumbler down on the pot, and stand there a bit longer.

Then his father went back to the pit, and said nothing, and after a moment the loom did not start again; he only sat on the edge of it with his feet hanging in, in the dark, and stayed.

His father had said nothing to him a great many times in eleven years. Ramesh knew all the kinds. There was the nothing that meant wait, and the nothing that meant a question was coming with one answer in it, and the nothing that meant the paper, and the nothing across a doorway on Sunday night. This was not any of those. He did not have a name for it. He found that he had read the same word four times and still did not know it, and he started it again.

He got eleven of them that night. Eleven out of twenty-two, and it took an hour and forty minutes, and he was so tired that the script had started to slide about on the page.

Eleven out of twenty-two.

He sat and looked at that for a while, because a week ago he had brought home eleven out of twenty-five and run out to the border rather than face it, and here was the same wretched number again, and this time it was going the other way.

And here is the whole of it, the thing this entire business had been walking towards since a black woman put something down in the dust without looking:

The watch could tell him a test was coming. It could not tell him the paper. But the paper was only ever a list of things that had been sitting in a book in his own house for four months, and any one of them could have been in his head already, on any of the four hundred evenings he had spent not putting it there.

You cannot get the answers four minutes early. You can only have got them already.

Not know before. Have got. In the head, in advance, from an evening in the past that is finished and cannot be changed — which is the exact place the watch had never once been able to reach.

The future came at you four minutes out and you could do nothing with it. But the day before yesterday, when it had been today, had been entirely his, and he had spent it on a bee.

He did not put it like that. He was eleven, and what he thought, sitting on the floor at ten o’clock at night with his eyes burning and eleven Hindi words in his head, was simply:

I have been trying to get out of the beatings. I should have been getting out of the reasons.

Then he ate his cold dinner standing up, and went and lay down, and did not make a plan of any kind.

The watch filled up while he slept, the way it always did. Fifteen of them, waiting.

In the morning he used one, at the gate, to get out of the way of a cycle.

He did not use another one until Thursday.