Part 18 of 20 · 3 minWhole-Day

The trouble with a reputation is that it goes on being true after you have stopped feeding it.

It was the third week of August before it came for him. There was a match on the ground behind the school on a Sunday, the big one, their street against the Kammari street, and Sattibabu’s brother had put actual money on it, four rupees, and at about the middle of it somebody said, quite casually, “Ey, Ramesh. Who wins?”

And the whole ground turned round.

He had not done anything like this since the jaatara. He had gone quiet for two months and everybody had allowed it, the way boys allow things, and here it was again, unchanged, waiting for him: fourteen faces and a completely sincere expectation that he could see the end of the afternoon.

All he had to do was say a name. It was one word. There were two teams, so he had an even chance of being a prophet by teatime and no chance at all of being caught out if he was wrong, because he had already learned on the roulette wheel that if you are wrong the fault goes to the wheel.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Come on.”

“I can’t. I never could.”

It went very quiet, in the way that only fourteen boys can go quiet.

“You said the whole day,” said Chinna.

“I lied.”

And then, because he had started it and there did not seem to be a way to do half of it, he told them. Not about the border. He never told anybody about the border, not once in his life, not even his mother. But he told them the rest of it, standing on the edge of the ground with the bat in somebody’s hand and the game stopped: that he had never known about the drowning, that the fisherman had that boy out of the water before Ramesh had even reached the top of the steps, and that he had stood there afterwards and let them all believe it and had gone on letting them for two months.

Sattibabu said, “You said you came running because you knew.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a rotten thing to say.”

“I know it is.”

And that was the worst minute of the whole three months, worse than the caning, worse than two out of twenty, standing in front of them on the ground with it out in the open and nothing to put in front of it.

They were not kind about it. Boys are not. For about a fortnight he was Prophet, and then Whole-Day, and then it wore out the way things wear out, and by the end of September nobody could be bothered any more, because there was nothing new in it.

But Sattibabu walked home with him that Sunday, which he had not done before, and about halfway along he said, “Was any of it real?”

Ramesh thought about it for a long time.

“A bit of it,” he said.

“Which bit?”

“The dog.”

Sattibabu laughed so much he had to stop walking, and after that they were friends properly, which they had never quite been in six years of living forty feet apart, and he did not ask about the watch again, that day or ever, and Ramesh noticed that and did not know what to do with it.