Part 4 of 20 · 6 minThe Ball

The trouble with a miracle is that it will not answer questions.

Ramesh spent the whole of that morning finding this out, and he went about it properly, the way you do when you are eleven and have nothing else on. He sat on the wall by the drain with his feet hanging and conducted experiments.

One. He asked it things. What is amma cooking? Is attha bringing anything? Who is going to win? Nothing. The watch ticked at him with the enormous patience of an object that has never once been obliged to explain itself.

Two. He tried to catch it out. He stood in the middle of the empty street where nothing at all could possibly happen and waited to be told about it. He was there eleven minutes. A crow landed. The watch said nothing about the crow.

Three, and this was the one that took him a while, he worked out that it did not care about the world in general. It only spoke when something was coming at him. The dog. The lorry. His mother. It was not a window onto the future of Venkatagiri. It was more like somebody standing behind him at a level crossing, who could see further down the line than he could, and who would say train and nothing else.

Except for the vessel. The vessel had not been coming at him at all.

Ramesh thought about the vessel for a bit, decided it did not fit, and did what people do with facts that do not fit, which is that he put it somewhere at the back and went off to play.

The boys were at the end of the street where the road widened, and they had the ball out, which meant Sattibabu was there, because the ball was Sattibabu. It was a proper rubber one, red, bought in Nellore, and it had bought him two years of being the person who decides what is played and who bats and when everyone goes home.

“Ramesh! Field.”

He fielded. He was put at the drain end, which is where you put the boy you do not want, and he stood there in the sun with his hands on his knees and let three balls go past him because he was not watching the game at all. He was watching Sattibabu.

Because ten minutes earlier the watch had said, in its flat way:

He is going to ask you for the watch.

And Ramesh had felt his whole chest go tight and hot, and then, and this is the thing he would be proudest of for weeks, and it is a completely ridiculous thing to be proud of, he had started to plan.

He had four minutes. He used them the way a general uses an hour.

First he took the watch off and put it in his shirt pocket, so that it was gone but the shape of it showed. Then he put it back on, because that looked stupid. Then he decided the whole thing hinged on not seeming to want it, and practised, twice, not seeming to want it.

Sattibabu came over between overs, tossing the ball up and catching it, which was a thing he did when he was about to be generous to somebody.

“That watch.”

“Mm,” said Ramesh, at the sky.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Road.”

“Which road?”

“By the border.” Which was true, and which Sattibabu heard as nowhere, because that is what you hear when a boy says he found something on a road.

Sattibabu tossed the ball. Caught it. “It’s not even a good one. The strap’s too big.”

“Mm.”

“I’ll give you the ball for it.”

And here is where Ramesh should have said yes. Any boy in that street would have said yes with both hands. The ball was the ball. The watch was forty rupees of scratched glass that hung on him like a bangle.

Hold on to it.

He heard it again the way you hear a thing said in a dark room, and he felt the back of his neck go cold in the middle of a hot morning, and what came out of his mouth was not no.

What came out of his mouth was: “You’ll ask twice.”

Sattibabu blinked. “What?”

“You’re going to ask me twice, and then you’ll say I can have the ball and the bat handle, and then you’ll say your mother is calling you.” Ramesh looked at him for the first time. “So ask.”

There was a small silence into which the entire street seemed to lean.

“Give me the watch,” said Sattibabu, uncertainly, “and you can have the ball. And the bat handle.”

“See,” said Ramesh.

He had no idea. That was the beautiful, terrible part. The watch had told him one sentence, he is going to ask you for the watch, and everything after it, the twice, the bat handle, the mother, was pure eleven-year-old guesswork about a boy he had known since they were both in nappies. He knew Sattibabu the way you know your own street. He had bet on it, out loud, in front of six people.

And it had come off.

Chinna said, “How did he do that?” and somebody else said “Ey!” and Sattibabu had gone a colour, and Ramesh stood in the middle of it with the sun on the back of his neck and something opening up inside his chest like a window.

He should have stopped there.

“I can see the whole day,” he said.

It was out before he had decided to say it. Nobody had asked. It was not even slightly true, he had four minutes, and only about things arriving at his own head, and he heard himself say it and heard how good it sounded and did not take it back.

“The whole day?”

“From morning.” Ramesh shrugged, in a way he had seen a man at the bus stand shrug. “That’s why I knew about the dog.”

They had all seen him on the wall before the dog came. Two of them had been there. It went round the group and came back changed, the way things do, and by the time it reached the far side of the group it was that Ramesh had known about the dog the previous night.

They played on. He was moved from the drain end to proper field. Sattibabu bowled him three easy ones and did not once ask about the watch again, and kept looking at him sideways, and Ramesh batted badly and did not care at all.

Walking home he was so happy he had to stop twice.

He had a goddess on his wrist, four minutes of the future, and a street full of boys who thought he had the whole day. Two of those three things were real.