Part 20 of 20 · 6 minThe Ring

He lost it on the first day of Dussehra, in the crowd outside the Durgamma temple, and he never knew exactly when.

That is the ordinary truth of it. There was no moment. There was a crowd, and the drums, and his mother’s hand on his shoulder steering him through, and somebody’s elbow, and about forty minutes later he put his right hand on his left wrist the way he had a thousand times a day for three months, and there was nothing there.

The strap had been three holes too big since the beginning. It had been three holes too big on the road at the boundary. It had never once been his size.

He went back. He went back four times. He went along the whole length of that lane with his eyes on the ground while the crowd came the other way, and people trod on his feet, and a woman told him kindly to get out of the road, and he did it again in the evening when the lane was empty and there was nothing on it but crushed flowers and paper and the flattened brown mess a festival leaves behind. He asked at the two shops. He asked a policeman, who was quite decent about it and said forty rupees, thambi, ask your father, and turned away.

He got home after dark and did not eat, and lay down on his mat and cried the way you cry when you are eleven and cannot explain any part of it to anybody in the house.

Nobody knew what it was. That was the whole of the grief. To his mother he had lost a bus-stand watch. There was not one person alive who knew that a woman had put it down in the dust without turning round, and that a boy had picked it up because he was going to have to walk past it anyway.

He cried until he was tired of it and then he slept, and then she came.

It was not the road. It was not anywhere. It was the dark that dreams have instead of rooms, and she was standing in it, and she was the same and she was not the same. The hair was the same and it was longer than she was tall. The blackness was the same, the kind the light lands on and does not come off. But she was not sitting on the ground with her feet flat like a labourer after work. She was standing, and she was very tall, and somewhere behind her in the dark something large was breathing, and Ramesh understood in the way you understand things in dreams that this was who she had been all along, and that the woman on the road had been a small part of her that came out to the edge of a village once a year to be fed.

He was not frightened. He wanted to say afterwards that he had been brave. He had not been brave. He simply was not frightened, which is a different thing and is a gift in itself.

She was holding his watch.

“You want it back,” she said.

“Yes.”

“What for?”

And Ramesh opened his mouth to tell her, and stood there in the dark of the dream with his mouth open, because he could not think of one thing. Not one. He got up on his own, before his mother. He did three words a night. He walked home from the ground with Sattibabu. He knew what was going to happen tomorrow, which was Wednesday, which had Hindi in it, and he knew it not because anything had told him but because he had put it in his own head on Monday evening sitting on the floor with a lamp.

“You need a proper one now,” she said. “A nice one. That one is not even good. The strap is too big.”

“It’s yours,” he said. “I know it’s yours.”

“Mm.” She turned it over in her fingers the way he had turned it over on the step that first morning, looking at the scratched glass and the lion on the back that might have been a dog. “And I need mine.”

Then she put it on. Not on her wrist. She slid it over one finger, strap and all, and it went round easily and sat there like a ring, a small dull steel thing on a hand that size, and she looked at it for a moment the way a woman looks at a bangle she has had a long time.

“Go on,” she said. “You’ll be late.”

He woke at five past six, five minutes before his mother, on his own, the way he had all autumn.

His father gave him the watch that evening, after the second day’s puja, in front of everybody, out of a small box with a rubber band round it. It had come from Nellore with his uncle. It was a proper one, with a leather strap and a white face and a red second hand, and the strap had a hole in it that fitted, and his mother said it was too good for him and his father said nothing at all and looked pleased in the corner of his mouth.

Ramesh put it on and thanked him, and then he went out to the step and sat down with it and listened.

He listened for four days. He is not embarrassed about that. Every morning he lay still after waking and gave it a chance, and every time he was about to walk out of the gate he gave it a chance, and it did nothing at all except keep excellent time, because it was a watch.

And it did not matter. That is the strange, flat, enormous thing he had to sit with for the rest of that month. It did not matter that it was silent, because he was already awake before the warning would have come, and already at the prayer line before the cane came down the row, and already had Wednesday’s words in his head since Monday, and if he was going to be hit for something he now generally knew what it was in advance, because he had done it, and he could go and not do it again.

The four minutes had been for a boy who had nothing else. He was not that boy any more, and she had taken her watch back the way you take back a lamp from somebody who has reached the window and opened the shutters himself.

He wore the new one four minutes fast for a while. He set it that way the first evening without really deciding to, and for about six weeks the whole of Venkatagiri ran four minutes late to a boy who had once been the slowest thing in it.

Then one morning in November, without any ceremony, he sat on the step with the radio going in the front room and turned the little knob and set it right.

The annuals were in March. He was going to be twelve in March. He had a book with about four hundred words still to go in it, at three a night, and nobody at all was going to tell him how any of it came out.