Part 17 of 20 · 3 minThree a Night

What nobody tells you about deciding to work is that the decision takes one evening and the work takes the rest of the year.

The first week was the eleven words. The second week he did six days and then did nothing at all on Sunday and Monday, and on Tuesday he could not remember Thursday’s list, and he sat and looked at the book and understood with a kind of horror that it went backwards if you left it. Nobody had mentioned that. Nobody had said that it leaked.

The third week he got fourteen out of twenty in a class test and came home so pleased with himself that he did not open the book for four days, and the test after that he got seven, and he cried about it in the bathroom with the tap running so nobody would hear, which was not something he would be telling Sattibabu.

He was not good at it. That is worth saying plainly. He did not turn out to have some hidden gift that only needed uncovering. He was an ordinary boy of slightly below average quickness who had been behind since about Class Four, and the only thing that had changed about him was that he now sat down at eight o’clock with a book, most days, whether or not he felt like it, which was almost never.

His father did not say anything about it for six weeks.

Then one night in August the loom stopped early, and his father came and stood in the doorway of the front room where Ramesh was sitting on the floor with the lamp and the book, and looked at him for a while.

“How many are there?”

Ramesh looked up. “Of what?”

“Of those.” He nodded at the book. “In the year. Altogether. How many words.”

Ramesh had never once thought about it. He turned to the back and counted the lists, and multiplied badly, and got it wrong twice, and said, “About six hundred?”

“Six hundred,” said his father. He came in and sat down on the edge of the cot with his forearms on his knees, in the attitude of a man about to make a calculation, which was the attitude in which Ramesh had seen him happiest his whole life. “And how many nights are there?”

“Till the annuals?”

“Till the annuals.”

They worked it out together on the back page of the Hindi book, with the stub of pencil his father kept behind his ear for marking thread, and it came to something over two hundred nights, and six hundred divided by two hundred is three.

“Three a night,” his father said.

“That’s nothing.”

“It is nothing.” He handed the pencil back. “That is the whole trick. It is always nothing. It is nothing eight thousand times, and then there is a saree.”

He got up and went out, and that was the entire conversation, and Ramesh sat with the book on his knees for a long time afterwards.

It was the first thing his father had ever taught him that was not about cloth, and it was still about cloth.

He did three a night. Some nights he did nine because he was behind. Some nights he did none. In the second week of September he worked out, without any help from anybody, that if he did his three before dinner rather than after, they stayed in, and if he did them lying down after dinner they were gone by morning; and he changed his habit accordingly; and that small piece of self-knowledge, arrived at alone by a boy of eleven, was worth more to him in the end than four minutes of anything.