Part 18 of 20 · 5 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.

It turned round on both sides, which was the trouble. The Kammari street boys were sitting along the far boundary under the neem, and among them, cross-legged, with a scab on one knee, was Anji, who had gone into the deep side of the tank in June and come out of it coughing. For two months his mother had told half the Kammari street that the weaver’s boy had seen it coming. Anji had been looking at Ramesh ever since, at school, at the pump, with a wary kind of respect, the way you look at a temple bull. He was looking at him now.

And at the edge of the ground, on his way back from the tank with the net bundled on his shoulder and his lungi still dark to the knee, Chenchaiah had stopped to watch his sister’s son keep wicket.

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.

He said the name, too. It seemed important, suddenly, that it should be said out loud on that ground and not just the fisherman. “It was Chenchaiah,” he said. “Chenchaiah had him out before I got to the steps.”

Chenchaiah looked up at his own name, the way anybody does, and looked at the boy saying it, and then went back to watching the wicket, as though somebody had remarked on the weather.

Anji’s face did something slow. He looked at Ramesh, and then he turned all the way round on the grass and looked at the man with the net on his shoulder, whom he had presumably been walking past every day for two months, and Ramesh stood there and watched a boy of nine work out who had actually pulled him out of the water.

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.

On the Wednesday of that fortnight he went down to the tank after school instead of home. Chenchaiah was on the steps at the shallow end with the net across his knees, mending it, working the flat bamboo needle through the mesh and pulling each knot tight with his teeth.

Ramesh stood on the step above him. He had a sentence. He had carried it all the way down the road, and somewhere between the road and the water it came apart, the way sentences do.

Chenchaiah did not look up. After a while he held out one corner of the net without a word, and Ramesh took it and held it, and pulled when the old man’s hand showed him when to pull, and they did the whole of one torn side like that while the buffaloes stood in the water with their chins on it and the light went orange and then went.

When it was done Chenchaiah took the corner back. “Hold it tighter,” he said, and bent to the next knot, and that was all, and Ramesh walked home in the dark feeling as though he had been let off something he had not been charged with.

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.