Part 7 of 17 · 2 minNot the Illness

The lizard came in on a Tuesday, above the calendar, and Ammamma saw it first.

What happened next was not confusion. It was not the illness. It was a seventy-eight-year-old woman getting onto a plastic chair in one movement and shouting the house down.

"BALLI. BALLI. Somebody — Lalitha — BALLI—"

Bujji came in eating a biscuit, looked at the lizard, looked at his grandmother standing on a chair with her sari gathered up in both fists, and said, "It's a lizard."

"Take it out. TAKE IT OUT."

He took the broom and shooed it out of the window in about nine seconds, entirely unbothered, seven years old, and then stood there being enormously pleased with himself while his grandmother came down off the chair and held his face in both hands and called him a lion.

Chinnu asked her mother about it afterwards.

"Is that the Alzheimer's? Being scared like that?"

"No," said Amma. "That one is just her. She has been like that since 1961. Her sister put a lizard in her plait at a wedding and she screamed so loudly they stopped the muhurtham."

"What happened?"

"She did not speak to that sister for six years."

Chinnu blinked. "Six *years*?"

"Six years. Over a lizard. Your Ammamma could hold a grudge like a government file." Amma said it fondly, and then, less fondly: "She was not a saint, kanna. Do not build one. She was sharp with people. There were two years when the business went badly and she was very hard to live with, and I was seventeen and I hated her for most of one of them."

That was the same week Chinnu discovered the Hindi.

She had a worksheet and no help in the house, so she took it to the person who had done compound interest in her head.

Ammamma looked at it for a while with great confidence and then read a word out loud, wrongly, in a way that made Bujji fall off the sofa.

"Ammamma, that's not—"

"That is what it says."

"It really isn't."

"Then it is a printing mistake," said Ammamma with enormous dignity, and pushed the worksheet away, and said, "I failed Hindi twice. In school. Twice. Ask your mother."

"She failed Hindi twice," Amma called from the kitchen. "In 1958 and again in 1959."

And the three of them laughed, all of them, including Ammamma, longest of all — and it was completely fine, and Chinnu noticed that it was completely fine, and started to work out why.

The Hindi you could laugh at. She had been bad at it for sixty years, she knew she was bad at it, and she did not mind.

The bolt on the kitchen door you could not.