Part 1 of 5 · 7 minThe Four O’Clock House

The quarters had been packed for a week before the train. That is to say, Lasya had been packing for a week and Pramod had been watching her pack, which in their house counted as helping.

"Three saris, Lasya. For five days."

"One for Bhogi, one for Sankranti, one for Kanuma. And one ordinary."

"That is four."

"The ordinary one does not count, andi."

"It is a village, Lasya. Not a function."

She looked at him over the suitcase. "Then why are you wearing your new shirt?"

He had no answer for that, so he said "talk you tonight" and went to put the bike at Sajith's house, where it would wait for them under a tarpaulin. Into the side pocket of the suitcase, under the saris, Lasya slid a notebook with a brown cover. In it, in her own handwriting, were her mother's podis and pickles and the chicken biryani, written down last year the way a student writes down lab practicals. She had cooked from it every day for a year. She did not tell Pramod it was in the bag. She did not know why she did not tell him.

The train from Kannur, a night and a morning, and then the bus from Nellore, red and shaking, with a conductor who knew Pramod by his father's name. Manubolu came up out of the paddy at eleven in the morning, a line of houses and a tank and a temple with a flag.

Subbaiah was at the bus stop. He had a towel on his shoulder and nothing in his hands, and when they got down he took the suitcase from Pramod without a word and started walking. That was the whole welcome. Lasya, who had rehearsed a greeting in the bus, walked behind him with her handbag and her rehearsed sentence and used neither.

The house was at the end of the second street, past the pump. Tiled roof, a verandah with two cots, a cattle shed on the side with two buffaloes looking at her the way the conductor had. Behind the house was the kitchen, a separate room with a wood stove built into the wall, black above it from forty years of smoke, and a grinding stone set into the floor with a wooden handle polished by hands.

Lakshmamma came out of that kitchen wiping her hands on her sari. She looked at her daughter-in-law once, head to foot. Lasya felt the look stop at her chappals, which were the Hyderabad kind with the thin strap, and then at the platinum chain, and then at her face.

"Come in, amma. The journey was long?"

"Not very, atta."

"Then the bus was kind. It is not usually." Lakshmamma turned to her son. "You have become thin. They do not feed you in Kerala, or she does not?"

"Both feed me, amma."

"A man who says both is not eating anywhere," said Lakshmamma, and went back to the kitchen. Lasya stood in the verandah and understood that her mother-in-law had a saying for everything, and that she would hear all of them before Kanuma.

Sravani came at four, from the hostel in Nellore, with a bag on her shoulder and her hair in a plait that she undid the moment she saw Lasya. Within an hour she had gone through Lasya's phone, two of Lasya's saris and the entire question of what Hyderabad was like after nine at night. She called Lasya vadina from the first minute and sat so close on the cot that Lasya could smell the hostel soap on her. Pramod, passing, said, "She has found her hero," and Sravani threw a cushion at him. It was the easiest hour of the trip.

Now listen to what the first morning did.

Lasya woke at seven. In Anthoor seven was early. She came out of the inner room with her hair tied and her face washed, ready to be a daughter-in-law, and found a house that had been running for three hours. The verandah was swept. The muggu was drawn. The buffaloes were milked and the milk was boiled. Subbaiah had gone to the fields. Sravani was still asleep because Sravani was a hostel girl and nobody expected anything of her, and that, Lasya noticed, was a different thing from nobody expecting anything of you.

She went to the back kitchen. Lakshmamma was not there; she was at the cattle shed. The stove was there. A hole in the wall, black, with a tin pipe going up, and beside it a basket of coconut husks and dry palm fronds and a matchbox.

Lasya knew what to do with a stove. She had learned every dish in the brown notebook on a two-burner gas stove with a knob that said high and low. She picked up a husk. She struck a match. The husk did not catch. She struck another, holding the flame to the brown fibre, and it blackened and smoked and went out. She pushed two husks in and a palm frond on top and put the match to the frond, and the frond caught at once and burned bright and fast and was gone in ten seconds, leaving the husks warm and dark and unlit.

The smoke came out of the stove instead of going up the pipe. It came into her eyes. She bent closer and blew, the way she had seen somebody do in a film, and the smoke came out in a cloud and she coughed and her eyes ran and she was still blowing when she felt someone behind her.

Lakshmamma did not say anything at first. She knelt beside her, took one husk, held it low in the mouth of the stove, put a match to the bottom of it, and blew once, short, from the side. The husk caught. The flame went up into the pipe where it was supposed to go, and the smoke went with it, and the stove was lit.

"A stove tells you who a woman is," Lakshmamma said. She said it the way she said everything, plainly, to the stove and not to Lasya. Then she stood up and went back to the cattle.

Lasya stayed on her knees. Her eyes were still running from the smoke. She told herself it was the smoke.

Pramod found her there ten minutes later with her face red and her hands black. He looked at her, and at the stove burning properly now, and understood about half of it.

"The smoke does that to everyone," he said. "It did it to me till I was ten."

"She lit it in one second, andi."

"She has been lighting it for thirty years." He put a hand on her head, the way he did. "The pump set in the fields is stuck. Nanna cannot lift it alone. I will be back by evening."

It was true. The pump set had been stuck since the rains, and Subbaiah was sixty and could not lift it alone, and Pramod was the son. He went. Lasya washed her hands at the tap and looked at her black fingernails and thought about the brown notebook in the suitcase, and the gas stove in Anthoor with the knob, and how none of it counted here.

That evening Sravani sat with her on the step while the sun went down behind the tank. Sravani wanted to know everything, and everything to Sravani meant Hyderabad. The malls. The metro. Did Lasya go to films alone. Did Lasya's mother let her.

"In Hyderabad," Lasya said, and then she said it, lightly, the way she said things to look a little bigger, "we have a cook. So I never had to do this stove business."

She did not know why she said it. Her mother had cooked every meal of her life. But Sravani's eyes went wide and round with admiration, the way the college girls' eyes used to go, and for a second Lasya was the city girl again, on a step in a village, with a cook.

Inside, in the back kitchen, Lakshmamma was grinding chillies on the stone for tomorrow. She heard nothing. Not yet.