Part 3 of 17 · 2 minThe Audience

After the salt coffee, the children began to watch.

Not cruelly. This has to be said properly, because it matters later. They watched the way you watch a programme you like. Ammamma had become interesting, and the house had become a place where funny things happened, and they did not want to miss any of them.

Bujji got good at the imitation. He did the bit where she stood in the middle of the hall looking at her own hands. He did the voice — *"I put salt?"* — and he did it well, which was the trouble.

On the Thursday, Chinnu filmed her folding the same clothes for the fourth time, two minutes of it, with Amma's phone held low against her side.

And on the Friday, Bujji told her.

He did not mean anything by it. He was seven. He had heard the word at the dining table for a month and nobody had explained it to him, so he tried it out the way you try out a new bat.

"Ammamma, you have Alzheimer's."

Ammamma looked up from the peas with polite interest.

"Who is it?"

There was a pause of about a second and a half, and then Chinnu — who was ten, and quick, and had a cousin who had told her about a film composer — said:

"Hans Zimmer's sister."

Bujji made a noise like a punctured tyre. Chinnu had to put her head down on the table.

"Who is he?" said Ammamma.

And Amma came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands, and said, without any change in her voice at all:

"He is their maths teacher, Amma. Hans Zimmer sir. Very strict. They have homework tonight and neither of them has started it."

Ammamma's whole face changed.

"Homework?" she said. "Bring it here."

The laughing stopped rather suddenly.

"Bring it," said Ammamma, pushing the pea bowl away. "Both of you. Sit."

Chinnu looked at her mother. Her mother looked back at her with an expression Chinnu could not read at all then, and understood completely about four years later.

They brought the maths book.