Part 8 of 20 · 5 minThe Muggu

They came for Subbamma at four o’clock in the afternoon.

The watch said it first. It said it the way it had said the vessel, flatly, out of nowhere, about something that had nothing to do with him:

There is going to be crying in this street.

And then, before Ramesh could even take his hand off the gate, it went quiet in a way he had not felt before. Not the far-end-of-a-field voice. Not the polite emptiness of fifteen. It went heavy, the way your leg goes when you have sat on it, and Ramesh stood holding his own wrist with the odd certainty that whatever that sentence had cost, it had cost more than a bee.

Four minutes.

He did not run anywhere. That is the part he would remember. He had learned something at the bajji stall after all, and what he had learned was that there was nothing to be done, and so he simply stood at his own gate in the afternoon light and waited to find out who.

It was three doors down.

The sound came out of that house the way it always comes, one woman first and then all of them, and the street stood up out of its chairs and its doorways and went towards it, and Ramesh stood where he was and did not go, because he already knew, and because he could not have said how.

She had been sitting down after her rest. It was the simplest death in the world. Eighty-one years, and a cup of coffee, and she leaned back against the wall and that was that.

By six the street was full. They brought her out into the front room and the women sat along the wall and the wailing went up in waves, dying down and starting again as each new person came in from the lane. The men stood outside in a knot arranging things in low voices: who would go to Gudur for the son, whether the son could be there by morning, whether they would wait. Somebody’s cycle went out for the drummers. Somebody’s mother sent rice to the house because that house would not be cooking.

Somebody said that Kanakam, the daughter-in-law, would never let him come alone, she would bring the baby and come on the night bus too. Somebody else said then they must wait for her, because Kanakam had oiled the old woman’s hair every Sunday for eleven years, in that front room, before the son got work in Gudur and took her away, and nobody argued with that, and it was settled.

And on the swept ground outside her door, where nobody had yet had the heart to walk, was the muggu she had drawn that morning at six o’clock with her eyes half shut. Sixteen dots and the loops going round them. It had been walked on twice at the edges and was otherwise perfect.

Ramesh sat on his own step across the street and looked at it until it was too dark to see.

He had put dots in that muggu once. Not that one, but that patch of ground, the year he was five or six, before school, when his mother had been ill and Subbamma had kept him for a week. She had given him a pinch of the white powder in his fist and let him do the dots, and he had got bored at the fourth row and started on the loops, because the loops were the good part, and they had come out crooked and run into each other and gone nowhere.

She had not rubbed it out. She had made him sit and look at it.

“See,” she had said. “The loops go where the dots let them. You want the pretty part first. Everybody wants the pretty part first.” And she had called him what she always called him, nemmadi, slow one, which from anybody else in the street was a thing to fight about and from her was only his name, and she had put a dot of powder on his nose, and started him again from the first row.

He had not thought about that for five years. He thought about it now until the loops in front of him were only grey, and then gone.

Along the lane, two women went past his step towards the death house with their saris pulled over their heads, talking low, the way women talk on the way to a house like that, about anything else. One of them was Anji’s mother. He knew her by the voice.

“That weaver’s boy,” she was saying. “Three doors down. Ramesh. He knew. Before my boy went in the water, he knew. Chinna told Sattibabu’s mother. Came running before anybody.” A breath. “God puts things in some children.”

They went on into the lamp-light and the wailing. Neither of them looked at the boy on the step, and Ramesh sat with his hands pressed between his knees and heard his own lie come back up the lane in a grown woman’s mouth, bigger than when he had let it go, with God in it now.

His mother found him there. She had been in the house since half past four and she had been crying and she smelled of other people’s houses.

“Go inside.”

“Amma.” He had been building the sentence for two hours. “If somebody knew. Before. That it was going to happen.”

“What?”

“If a person knew four minutes before.”

His mother’s hand caught him across the ear, not hard, the fastest thing he had seen her do in his life. “Don’t say things like that in this street tonight,” she said, and her voice was shaking. “Don’t say them at all. Go inside.”

He went inside.

He lay on his mat with his ear stinging and the drums starting up somewhere and the wailing going in waves, and he thought, with the whole of his small chest hurting: I knew, and it made no difference to anything. I knew, and there was nothing in the knowing.

It was the first entirely true thought he had had since the border.

He did not know what to do with it, so he did what he always did, and put it at the back, next to the vessel. But it was much too big to go there, and it would not stay.