Part 10 of 17 · 2 minThe Lock

On Thursday Nanna took the knobs off the gas stove.

It took him eleven minutes with a screwdriver. He put them in a drawer in his own cupboard. He also put a bolt high up on the outside of the kitchen door, higher than Ammamma could reach, and he did all of it without saying anything to anyone, and then he went to work.

At eight-forty Ammamma went to make coffee.

The children were at the table. They watched her go to the kitchen door and find it bolted. They watched her look up at the bolt. She could see it. She simply could not understand what it was doing there or why it applied to her.

She tried the door twice more, gently, the way you try a door you think might be stuck.

Then she stood there.

She stood in front of that door for a long time with her hand still on it, in her white sari, in her own daughter's house, in the kitchen she had cooked in for eleven years — and Bujji, who was seven, opened his mouth to do the voice.

He got as far as the first sound of it.

And Chinnu, without turning her head, said, "Don't."

Bujji shut his mouth.

They sat there, the two of them, and watched their grandmother try a door she was not allowed to open, and neither of them laughed, and Chinnu found that her face was hot and her chest hurt in a way she had no word for at ten years old.

She went upstairs and got her mother's phone and deleted the video.

Then she sat on the top step for a while, and then she came down and went to the kitchen door and took her grandmother's hand off it and said, "Ammamma, come. Come and sit. I will show you my school photo."

And Ammamma came, immediately, gladly, because somebody wanted her for something.

That is the whole trick, and a ten-year-old had found it by accident, four days before the grown-ups worked it out on purpose.