Part 2 of 20 · 6 minThree Times Slapped

The loom started before the crows did.

That was the sound Ramesh had woken up to every day of his life: the pit loom in the front room going thok, thok, thok, his father’s feet finding the treadles in the dark, the shuttle going across and coming back, across and coming back. On any normal morning it was the same as the ceiling being above him. It was not information.

This morning something else spoke first.

Get up.

It was not loud. It was not even really a voice. It arrived the way your own thoughts arrive, except that it was not his, and it came from somewhere near his left wrist, and it was extremely calm.

Get up now, or amma will hit you.

Ramesh, asleep, filed this under dream, rolled over, and put his arm across his face.

He had eaten last night like a boy who had run four kilometres and been frightened out of his skin, which is what he was. Three helpings, standing at the stove, not talking, while his mother told him exactly what she thought of eleven out of twenty-five and he did not hear a word of it. Then he had slept the way a stone sleeps.

His mother hit him awake at ten past six.

Not hard. It was the standard morning slap, delivered flat to the back of the thigh, the one that says the sun is up and so are the rest of us. It stung for four seconds and left no mark and Ramesh had received roughly two thousand of them in his life.

He sat up with his heart going and his mouth open, and looked at his wrist.

The watch said fourteen minutes past six. The clock on the shelf, the one his father set by the radio and would not permit anyone to touch, said ten past.

“Get up, get up, get up.” His mother was already going out of the room with the vessel on her hip. “Attha is coming today, the whole house is upside down, and you are lying there like a sack of paddy.”

Ramesh looked at the watch for a long time.

Four minutes.

He decided, in the way that eleven-year-olds decide things, that this was a coincidence, and that the sensible response was to go back to sleep.

He got as far as lying down.

The water is hot. Go and bathe now. If amma has to call you twice she will use the ladle.

“It’s a dream,” Ramesh told the ceiling, out loud, reasonably.

She has already filled the bucket.

“It is a dream and I am dreaming it.”

Four minutes later his mother called him to bathe. He did not go, on principle, because a boy who goes running the moment a dream tells him to is a boy with something wrong with him. She called him a second time. Then she came in with the ladle.

It was not a beating. It was three taps on the shoulder with a hot aluminium ladle and a review of his character that took them both all the way to the bathroom door, and it covered his marks, his sleeping, his father’s back, the price of thread, and a boy in the next street who had got a government job.

Ramesh stood under the bucket with the water running off his ears, holding his left wrist up out of the splash, and thought about it properly for the first time.

Twice. Both times, four minutes.

He came out and dressed and sat on the front step where the light was, and turned the watch over. It was rubbish. Anyone could see it was rubbish. Forty rupees at the bus stand, the strap too big by three holes so that it hung on his wrist bone like a bangle, the glass scratched in one corner. The second hand went round without any hurry. On the back was stamped a word in English that he could not read and a picture of a lion, or possibly a dog.

“Test it,” he said.

Nanna will ask for the paper. Tell him it is in the school bag. Then go and get it before he asks twice.

Ramesh sat absolutely still.

Then he got up, went inside, took the maths paper out of the fold of his shirt where it had been hiding since yesterday, put it on top of the school bag, and came back and sat down.

Four minutes later the loom stopped. His father came to the doorway, wiping his hands on the cloth at his waist, and said, “Where is that paper?”

“In the bag, nanna.”

“Bring it.”

“It’s on top.” Ramesh did not look up. “You can take it.”

There was a pause of a length he had never once achieved in his life, in which his father looked at the back of his son’s head with an expression Ramesh could not see and would have paid money for.

“Hm,” his father said, and went and got it himself.

Ramesh stayed on the step with his hands pressed flat on his knees and his ears roaring.

He was not thinking, a goddess has given me the future. He was eleven, and he had been awake for one hour, and what he was thinking was much simpler and much more dangerous than that.

He was thinking: I have got a thing that stops me getting hit.

The street was coming awake around him in the way it did on a holiday, which is to say slowly and loudly at the same time. Somebody’s radio. The milk cycle with the cans banging. Two doors down, old Subbamma was drawing the muggu on her swept patch of ground with the pinched white powder falling out of her fist in a line, the way she had done it every morning for sixty years, dots first and then the loops around them, and she was doing it with her eyes half shut because after sixty years your hand knows.

The jaatara was over. The town was on holiday for two days anyway, because nobody in Venkatagiri had ever gone back to work the day after the goddess went to the border, and the whole street smelled of yesterday’s oil and marigolds gone brown in the sun.

Two whole days. No school.

Ramesh looked down at the watch, and the watch ticked, four minutes ahead of everything.

He was still smiling about it when it spoke again.

The vessel is going to fall.

“What vessel?”

The watch did not answer. It had, he would learn, no interest at all in questions.

Four minutes later, from the back of the house, there was a noise like the end of the world as the big brass vessel came off the shelf, and his mother’s voice went up, and Ramesh sat on the step with his mouth open, because that one had not been about him at all.