Part 9 of 17 · 2 minThe Stove

It was a Wednesday and it was nearly nothing and it has been the worst afternoon of that family's life ever since.

Amma had gone to the shop. Four minutes. The children were doing homework at the dining table with the fan on. Ammamma had gone into the kitchen and turned the gas knob, because at three in the afternoon for fifty-one years you put the milk on.

She did not light it.

Then she went and sat on the veranda with the good plant and forgot entirely, and the gas came out into the closed kitchen with the exhaust off, for somewhere between six and nine minutes, while two children did their homework eleven feet away with a ceiling fan turning.

Amma smelled it from the gate.

What she did next she did without any thought at all, in an order she could not afterwards reconstruct: she did not touch the light switch, she went in and turned the knob off, she opened both windows and the back door, she got Chinnu and Bujji out into the yard, and she went back for her mother.

Ammamma did not want to come. She said the plant was not watered.

Nobody was hurt. Nothing caught. The house smelled faintly for a day and then did not.

Nanna came home at eight and Amma told him at the gate before he had taken his shoes off, and he went inside and stood in the kitchen doorway looking at the stove for a long time, and then he said, in a voice the children had never heard from him, flat and quite quiet:

"We cannot do this."

"Prasad—"

"We cannot. I am not saying it to be cruel. I am saying it because I am the one who has to think about what nearly happened in this house today, and nobody else in this family will think about it, so I have to."

"I know."

"There are places. Proper places. With people who are trained."

"I know what there is."

"Then say something."

"I am going to say," said Amma, "that she carried you your coffee every morning for the first two years we were married, because you were shy of me and would not ask."

Nanna put his hand over his eyes and stood there in the kitchen doorway.

Chinnu and Bujji heard every word of it from the stairs.