Part 15 of 17 · 2 minReal Work

The other half of it was Chinnu's idea and it was better than anything the adults had come up with in a year.

"She doesn't want to rest," Chinnu said. "She *hates* resting. We made a rule that she has to rest and she has been trying to break out of it since March."

"She cannot go near the stove," said Nanna.

"I'm not saying the stove. I'm saying — give her work she can do."

So they made a list, and this is what was on it.

**Peas.** She shelled them perfectly. She had shelled peas for sixty years and her hands did not need her memory to do it. If she shelled the same bowl twice, somebody quietly brought more.

**Flowers.** Every evening. She strung a garland for the god room with her eyes half shut, and it came out even, and nobody in that house could do it half as well, and everybody in that house made sure to say so out loud.

**Folding.** Not the almirah — a basket of napkins and handkerchiefs put aside for her, which she folded and refolded as long as she liked, and which came to no harm from being folded eleven times.

**The plant.** Hers. Nobody else was allowed to touch it.

**The album.** This was Bujji's. He brought it to her at 4.30 every day and she went through the photographs and told him who everybody was. She got about a third of them wrong. He wrote down what she said anyway, in the back of the maths notebook, and some of those wrong answers are now the only version of certain stories that family has.

**The song.** She taught Bujji a song about a river that she had learned in 1954 and could not stop knowing. He was slow. She was patient. It took eleven days and she never once said he had already asked.

Within three weeks the house had a different sound in it. Not a quiet, careful, hospital sound.

**The homework.** Hans Zimmer sir, it turned out, set sums every single night, and had done for months, and would go on doing it for as long as anybody needed him to. On the evenings when she could not settle — when she stood in the hall at seven o'clock with her hands not doing anything and something rising in her face — one of them would fetch the maths book and say, "Ammamma, Hans Zimmer sir has given sums," and she would sit down at once and be entirely all right.

Somebody working in the next room.