Part 19 of 20 · 3 minThe Shutters

The change, when it came, did not announce itself, and the person it happened to was the last to notice.

It was his mother who said it first, and she did not say it to him. It was the end of September and attha had come for the day again, and Ramesh was outside at the tap, and through the window he heard his mother say, in the middle of something else entirely, “He gets up on his own now.”

“Since when?”

“I don’t know since when.” A pause, and the sound of a vessel being set down. “I noticed last week. I was standing there with the water and he was already up.”

Ramesh stayed at the tap with his hands in the cold water and did not move.

She was right, and he had not known it either. Somewhere in the middle of August the mornings had turned over. The watch still said its piece four minutes before she came, every day, faithfully, the very first of the fifteen: amma is coming to wake you. And for weeks now it had been saying it to a boy who was already sitting up with his shirt on.

It had stopped being a warning. It had become a remark.

He tested it, over about a fortnight, in the careful way he had once tested it on a wall by a drain, and the results were these.

He had not been hit at home since the second week of August, and there had been no clever dodging involved; there had simply been no occasion for it. He had not been caned in the prayer line since June, because he was early, and he was early because getting up had stopped being a fight. In the Hindi tests he was getting thirteen, fourteen, sixteen out of twenty, which was not first and was not near Prasad, and which was the middle of the class, and the middle of the class was a country Ramesh had never visited in his life.

And in one entire week of that September he used the watch twice. Once for a cycle at the gate. Once for a ball at the ground.

Thirteen unspent, every day, running out somewhere behind his eyes at about four in the afternoon, unused.

He thought about that a great deal and never got to the bottom of it, and the nearest he came was one evening in the first week of October, sitting on the step doing nothing, when it went through him all at once and left him slightly cold.

She had given him a thing that told him what was coming so that he would not be hurt by it. And the only way he had ever found to stop being hurt by it was to stop giving it reasons to come — which had taken three a night, and a book, and about ninety evenings, and had used up not one single minute of what she gave him.

He had been carrying it around for three months like a boy carrying a lamp through a house in which somebody, room by room, had been quietly opening all the shutters.

He did not stop wearing it. It did not occur to him to stop wearing it. It hung on his wrist bone the way it always had, three holes too big, four minutes fast, saying less and less, and the annuals were in March and he was going to be twelve in March, and for the first time since the road at the boundary he had stopped thinking about either of those as things that were coming at him.