Part 19 of 20 · 6 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.

Latha found him at the tap a few minutes later, sent out to wash her hands, and stood beside him and did it very slowly, which meant she had something to say.

“Is it still magic?” She nodded at his wrist. “Your watch.”

Ramesh turned the tap off. He had imagined this moment a great many times, with answers, all of them clever.

“It was never magic,” he said. “I made up the bus. I didn’t know anything about the bus.”

Latha stared at him with her wet hands held out in front of her. She had come prepared for a fight, and she was so astonished to hear a boy say he had made something up that she forgot, entirely, to be triumphant, and went back inside without drying them.

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.

The quarterly marks card came home on the last Saturday of September in a brown cover, and he gave it to his father himself, at the loom, and stood there.

His father climbed out of the pit to take it. He held it the long way, at arm’s length and tilted to the light from the door, the way he held a length of cloth to look for a thread that had gone wrong, and read down it once. Hindi, thirty-four out of fifty. Maths, twenty-one out of fifty, which was a pass by four marks and nothing more. Telugu, social studies, science, all of them in the middle of the column where nothing is wrong enough to comment on.

Then he took the pencil from behind his ear and signed it on the line against his knee, and handed it back.

That was the whole of it. There was no pause. Ramesh had been braced his entire life for the pause, the long flat weaver’s look while the count came out wrong, and it did not come, and he stood in the doorway holding a brown cover and did not know where to put his hands.

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.

It rained in the first week of October, a proper rain, and the next evening the bajji stall was back at the bus stand on the soft ground where it always stood. The bajji man was using both arms now. The burned one had healed into a long shiny patch from the wrist to the elbow, paler than the rest of him, and he kept that side a little away from the kadai without seeming to know he did it. Bujji was on the step with the newspaper, tearing it into squares.

Ramesh was passing with two rupees of attha’s money and meant only to buy something. Then he looked down and saw the kerosene burner.

One of its three legs was standing in a patch of wet earth, where somebody had thrown out a pot of water on top of the rain, and it had already gone in by the width of a finger.

Nothing told him. The watch said nothing at all, because nothing was coming at him. Ramesh went to the edge of the road and found a flat piece of broken stone slab, came back, crouched down under the edge of the stall, and wedged it in under the burner’s leg until the whole thing stood level again.

The bajji man looked down at him. He looked for quite a long moment, at the boy and at the stone, and then he nodded, once, nothing more, and dropped the next handful of mirchis into the oil. Bujji leaned over the side and gave Ramesh a broken one, still too hot to hold, for nothing.

When he came back up the street, the patch outside Subbamma’s door had a muggu on it again. Kanakam had stayed on in the house after the month’s rites to keep it open, and every morning now she swept the ground and drew on it, not as well as the old woman had, the loops a little lopsided; and she did it the way Subbamma had always done it, which Ramesh had watched ten thousand times without seeing: dots first.

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.