Part 12 of 17 · 2 minTwo Hundred Whys

Chinnu was harder, because Chinnu was ten and had already decided she was the villain of the story and was enjoying it a little.

Amma did not argue with her. She sat on the end of her bed and said, "Do you want to know what you were like?"

"I was fine."

"You asked why two hundred times a day."

"Everyone says that. It's an exaggeration."

"It is not an exaggeration, it is a count. She counted, one Tuesday, because your grandfather bet her it was not as many as she said. Two hundred and eleven."

Chinnu sat up slightly.

"Why is the sky like that. Why does the milk man come. Why is Nanna's brother fat. Why do we die. You asked her why we die, in the kitchen, at four years old, while she was making sambar, and she put the ladle down and sat on the floor and answered you properly, and then you asked why again, and she answered again."

"That's — that's just what you do with a kid."

"Yes," said Amma. "It is exactly what you do with a kid. Now think about what you have been doing all month when she asks you the same thing four times."

Chinnu did not say anything.

"There was rasam on that wall for a year," Amma said, pointing. "Behind the calendar. You did it with both hands when you were two, all the way up as far as you could reach, and you were so proud of it that she would not let anybody wash it off. She washed everything else in this house every single day. She left that."

"Why?"

"Ask her," said Amma, and then, seeing her daughter's face: "Kanna. I am not being cruel. I mean it. Go and ask her. She will not know the answer. But she will love being asked, and you will love the answer she gives you instead."

Chinnu went.

Ammamma said, with great certainty, that the mark on the wall was made by a monkey that came in through the window in 1971.

Chinnu laughed. Then she said, "Tell me about the monkey," and Ammamma did, for twenty minutes, and none of it was true, and it was the best twenty minutes of Chinnu's month.