Part 8 of 20 · 3 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.

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.

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.