Part 6 of 20 · 5 minThe Ground

The stalls stayed up for two days after the goddess went to the border. That was how it always was. She went out to the edge on the big day and the fun stayed behind in the middle of the town, which nobody found strange, and which Ramesh would think about a great deal later.

By dark the ground behind the school was a different country. Petromax lamps hissing white over the bangle stalls. The ring-throw man with his stubby wooden stands, and a comb and a plastic clock and one enormous bar of soap arranged on them like treasure. The wheel going round with its bolts groaning, hand-cranked by two thin men who leaned on it with their whole bodies. Everything smelled of frying oil and dust and the sugar of the pink candy floss they wound onto sticks.

Ramesh arrived with five rupees of his own and a goddess on his wrist.

“Ey! Whole-day!” Chinna, delighted. “Do the rings.”

There was a crowd at the ring-throw within about a minute, because word had got round the boys, and because Ramesh, with the watch saying, flat and bored, the third one goes on, put the third ring straight over the comb from ten feet.

The noise the boys made brought more boys.

He did it again at the balloon stall with the pellet gun. He did it again at the little wooden roulette with the painted numbers, where a man with a beedi behind his ear took one look at an eleven-year-old winning twice and said, without heat, “Go home, thambi,” and turned him round by the shoulders.

He was flying. He was so high he had stopped hearing himself. Somebody’s cousin asked him what number would come next and Ramesh said seven, just said it, out of the air, with the whole ring of faces looking at him, and it was not seven, and he said “the wheel’s fixed” and everybody nodded, because a boy who had just done the rings could not be wrong, so the wheel must be fixed.

He was working out how to get on the giant wheel free when the watch spoke.

It sounded different. He noticed that even at the time. It was slower, and further off, like somebody calling you from the far end of a field.

There is going to be screaming at the bajji stall.

Ramesh turned round.

The bajji stall was thirty feet away and it was the busiest thing on the ground: a kadai of oil the size of a bicycle wheel over a kerosene burner, the man dropping in the mirchis and them coming up gold, his wife bagging them in newspaper, and their son, a boy about six, maybe seven, hanging round the back of the stall the way small children hang round their parents’ work, in everybody’s way and told for the ninth time to sit down.

Ramesh had four minutes.

He knew precisely what to do with them, because he had spent two days being cleverer than everything, and it did not once occur to him that he might fail.

He went. He got about halfway before he understood he did not have a single sentence that would work, because what do you say? Sir, your oil. Sir, move your son. He was a boy in a torn shirt in a crowd of five hundred people, and the man was frying, and the wife was taking money with both hands, and there was a queue.

“Uncle.”

“Wait, wait.” Not even looking. “Two minutes.”

“Uncle, the.”

“Wait.”

He tried to reach the boy. There were three adults and a bicycle between him and the back of the stall, and by the time he had got round the bicycle a woman had picked her way in front of him with a baby on her hip, and Ramesh, small, eleven, entirely without authority, stood behind her elbow saying excuse to nobody, watching the clock in his head run down.

It was the burner, in the end. Not the oil. The kerosene burner’s leg went into a soft patch of ground where somebody had thrown water, and the whole thing tipped about four inches, and four inches was enough. The oil came over the near rim in one slow bright sheet, and it did not go on the boy, which Ramesh would be grateful for every day for a year, but it went across the man’s forearm and the back of his hand, and the noise he made stopped the entire ground.

Then everyone was moving at once, and there were twenty people there, and a woman ran with a pot of water, and someone said no, not water, and someone else said get the doctor, and someone had already gone.

Ramesh stood exactly where he was with the crowd going round him like water round a post.

He had known. He had known for four minutes, which was two hundred and forty seconds, which is longer than it takes to do almost anything, and he had spent all of it saying uncle to a man who was frying bajjis.

He walked home before it finished. Nobody noticed him go.

At the gate he stopped under the light and shook his wrist, and then held the watch up to his ear like a man testing a bulb.

“Say something.”

The second hand went round. That was all it did. It had nothing whatsoever to say about the road, or the dark, or his mother waiting inside, or anything else, and it stayed that way while he ate, and while he lay in the dark for a long time with his eyes open, and it was still silent when he finally went to sleep.