Part 9 of 20 · 5 minWhat They Said in the Dark

His parents came back from the death house at about ten.

Ramesh heard them at the gate and turned over on his mat and shut his eyes, because a boy who is awake at ten gets asked why, and he did not have an answer that would survive the question.

They did not put the light on. They sat down in the front room in the dark, the way people do when they have been in a house of mourning and have not got the energy to be anywhere properly, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.

Then the watch said:

Nanna is going to say your name.

And it went heavy again. Not as heavy as it had gone that afternoon. Heavy enough that Ramesh’s hand moved to his own wrist in the dark and stayed there.

He did not want the four minutes. He wanted them very much less than he had ever wanted anything in his life. He lay with his eyes shut and his face towards the wall and there was nothing to be done about it, because the watch had never once cared what he wanted, and so he simply lay there in the dark and waited to hear his own name coming.

His mother said, “Eighty-one.”

“Mm.”

“She swept that ground this morning.”

“I know it.”

The chair creaked. Somebody poured water. Out in the street somebody went past with a torch and the light went along the wall above Ramesh’s head and away.

“The society man came on Thursday,” his father said.

“I know he came.”

“Three a season. That is what he is saying now. Three from any one loom, and the rate is what it is, and if I put out five they will take three and the other two can sit in the house and go yellow.” A pause. “Kotaiah has stopped. Did you know that? He has put the loom to the wall and gone to Nellore to his brother-in-law.”

“He will come back.”

“He will not come back.”

Ramesh lay still. The heaviness in his wrist was like a stone now, and he thought, without any words for it, that whatever this was going to be, it was costing the watch more than a boy falling in a tank.

“There are the fees in June,” his mother said, after a while.

“There are the fees in June.”

And then, in exactly the same voice, tired, level, not unkind, not raised at all, the way a man says a thing he has already decided and has been carrying about for some weeks waiting for a night quiet enough to put it down:

“And if Ramesh fails again in the annuals, then he stops. There is no use paying fees for a boy to sit in a room and look out of the window. He can come to the pit. I started at thirteen. He can start at twelve.”

His mother said something short that Ramesh did not catch. It had two words in it and one of them might have been his name.

“Then let him pass,” his father said.

That was all. That was the whole of it. Somebody put a glass down, and after a few minutes they went to bed, and the house made the small settling noises it made every night of the world.

Ramesh lay on his mat with his eyes open in the dark for a long time.

He had heard it twice. Once four minutes early, in a voice that was not quite a voice, and once for real through a doorway, and both times it was the same, and that, he thought, is what the watch actually gives you. Not a way out. A second helping.

He thought about the pit.

He had sat beside it his whole life and never once been inside it. He knew the smell of it, the rice paste and the wet cotton, and the way his father’s shoulders had started to go forward in the last two years, and the way he came out of it in the evening and stood in the yard for a minute before he could talk to anybody. Eleven days for six yards. Eight thousand throws for one saree. His father’s feet, out of sight under the floor, doing it and doing it and doing it.

Twelve. He would be twelve in March.

And here is the thing, and it is not stupid, it is only small, because he was eleven years old and had been given a miracle three days ago and had spent it on a dog and a comb and a bag of ice candy.

What he thought was: I have four minutes. I have four minutes, fifteen times a day, and I have to get out of this with them.

He did not think: I have to study.

It did not cross his mind. It did not come anywhere near his mind. He had in his hand, on that mat, in the dark, everything he needed to understand the whole of the rest of his life, and what he did with it was make a plan.

Some time after eleven he got up and went out to the water pot for a drink he did not want, and on the way back he stopped in the front room where his father was asleep in the chair with his head over to one side, and picked up the loose end of a warp thread that had come off the peg and was lying across the floor, and wound it back onto the peg the way he had seen it done ten thousand times.

It took him four goes. He got it in the end.

Then he went and lay down, feeling as though he had paid something towards a debt whose size he did not remotely understand.