Part 17 of 20 · 6 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 fees went in that second week. Ramesh knew because the receipt came home in his own bag, a pink carbon slip with the clerk’s signature running through the school stamp, folded into his Hindi book by the class teacher with instructions to give it to his father and not to lose it. His father was in the pit, so he gave it to his mother, and she read it standing at the kitchen door, all of it, the way she read anything with a stamp on it, and reached up to put it in the tin on the shelf where the ration card lived.

It was while her arm was up that he saw her neck.

She wore two chains. One was the black-beaded one that every married woman on the street wore and that nobody ever took off. The other was thinner, plain gold, her own mother’s, the kind of thing you stop seeing on a person the way you stop seeing the ceiling. The black beads were there. The thin one was not. There was only a paler line on her skin where it had lain for twelve years, and she brought her arm down and went back to the stove and said, “Wash your feet before you come in my kitchen,” in precisely her ordinary voice.

Nobody mentioned it. His father did not mention it at dinner, and his mother did not, and Ramesh did not, because an eleven-year-old knows exactly which things in a house are not to be mentioned even when he knows almost nothing else. But that night, after the day’s words, he turned back to the first week’s list, which nobody had asked him to do, and found that it had leaked, and sat there until he had put it back.

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.

In July the society man came, as he had said he would, and took three sarees out of the front room wrapped in their paper, and left the fourth leaning against the wall. His father unwrapped it that evening and looked at it for a while under the light, a good one, no fault anywhere in the count, and wrapped it up again and put it on the shelf above the loom, where it stayed.

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.

It was Prasad, of all people, who made three a night something you could carry about. In the last week of August he came and sat on the tank wall at the interval, two feet away, and put down between them a fat bundle of paper strips with a rubber band round it. His elder sister had cut them for herself two years before, in the same class, from the same book: every word of the year on its own strip, the Hindi on one side and the English on the other, in a round careful hand.

“She’s in intermediate,” Prasad said. “She doesn’t want them.”

“Why are you giving them to me?”

Prasad shrugged, the shrug of a boy who had never once in his life been told he was dull and so did not entirely understand the question. “You’re doing the lists,” he said. “I’ve seen you.” And he went back to his own side of the yard.

Ramesh kept three strips at a time in the shirt pocket he had once tried hiding the watch in, and took them out at the bus stand and at the tap and in the queue for the pump, and the strips went soft at the edges from his hands.

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.