Part 5 of 5 · 7 minWho Lights the Stove

At four in the morning on the fifth day the back kitchen in Manubolu was dark and cold and had somebody in it who did not belong there.

Lasya had set the alarm for half past three and put the phone under her pillow and got up without waking Sravani. She had washed her face at the tap in the dark. She had the brown notebook under her arm, three coconut husks from the basket, the matchbox, and a decision. She was going to light that stove before her mother-in-law came, or she was going to die on her knees in front of it.

She knelt. She put a husk in the mouth of the stove, the way she had seen it done, and struck a match. The husk blackened and smoked. The smoke came into her eyes. She struck another match and held it to the top of the husk, because the top was where the fibre was, and the fibre caught and flared and went out, and the smoke came out in a cloud and she coughed into her elbow so that the house would not hear.

The second husk. The third match. Nothing. Her eyes were running and her fingers were black and the stove was as dark as the room.

Then a hand came over her shoulder, with one husk in it.

Lakshmamma did not say anything. She had been standing in the door for some time in her everyday sari; Lasya did not know how long. She knelt beside her daughter-in-law, put the husk low in the mouth of the stove, right down at the bottom where the ash was, put a match to the underside of it, and blew once, short, from the side. The husk caught. The flame went up the tin pipe, and the smoke went with it, and the stove was lit.

Neither of them said anything about the night. Neither of them ever would.

"Hold the husk lower," Lakshmamma said. "You hold it high, like a torch. The fire goes up, not down. Put it at the bottom and it climbs. Everything in this house goes up, not down."

"Yes, atta."

"Again. Put it out and do it again."

Lasya put it out with the back of a ladle and did it again, lower, and it caught, and the smoke went up the pipe. She sat back on her heels. Lakshmamma was already putting the milk on.

Now listen to how they cooked that morning, because it was badly and then well.

Lakshmamma showed and Lasya did. The pappu, which Lasya knew, but not on a fire with no low; Lakshmamma showed her how to pull the burning husk half out to make it low, and Lasya opened the brown notebook on her knee and wrote it down, under her mother's pappu, in her own handwriting: pull the husk half out for low. Lakshmamma saw the notebook. She stopped with the ladle in her hand and looked at it, the pages of podis and pickles in a girl's neat hand, with underlines, and the chicken biryani over two pages, and she went quiet in a way that was not her usual quiet.

Then she said, "Write that I said hold it lower."

Lasya wrote it. Hold the husk lower. Atta.

They made the pachadi, and Lasya burned the first tempering because the oil was hotter than gas, and Lakshmamma threw it out without a word and gave her more oil, and the second one was right. They made the coffee. The cook in Hyderabad was not mentioned. It was never mentioned again by either of them, in that house or any other, as long as they lived.

Pramod woke to the smell of it. He came to the kitchen door with his hair standing up and found his mother and his wife at the stove, side by side, Lasya with the notebook on her knee and smoke on her face and his mother saying "lower" like a schoolteacher, and his sister asleep on the mat, and his father on the back step with his coffee, watching the field. He stood in the door and did not say anything.

Lasya looked up and saw him there, and for once she read his silence right. It was not agreement with anybody. It was a man looking at the two people he loved most in one room, and not wanting to breathe in case they noticed him.

They left that afternoon, for the bus to Nellore and the train to Kannur. Subbaiah borrowed the neighbour's bike to take them to the bus stop, and because the bike could not take three and a suitcase he went ahead with the suitcase and they walked, Pramod and Lasya, down the second street past the pump, alone for the first time in five days.

"I said we had a cook," Lasya said. "To Sravani. On the first day."

"I know."

"You know everything."

"My mother told me last night. On the back step. She thought you were asleep."

"I was not asleep."

He stopped walking. "You heard."

"All of it, andi. Through the wall. The wall is one brick."

He started walking again, slower. "Then you heard me say it."

"I heard you say I was more than you. Which is nonsense. I cannot light a stove."

"You lit one this morning."

"Your mother lit it."

"Lasya. She says that stove thing about herself. A stove tells you who a woman is. She said it to herself for a year after she married my father. She could not light it. My grandmother had to. My father lit it for her every morning for a year, before he went to the field, so that my grandmother would not see. She told me when I was ten."

Lasya stopped in the middle of the street.

"Then why did you not tell me that on the first day?"

He smiled, the one that was not an ordinary smile. "Talk you tonight."

She hit him on the arm, hard, with the brown notebook, in the middle of the second street, in front of the pump, and a neighbour on a verandah laughed, and she did not care.

At the bus stop Lakshmamma was waiting with a steel dabba. In it was her own podi, the one Lasya had watched her grind, and on top of it, wrapped in newspaper, one coconut husk, dry and brown.

"For your gas stove," Lakshmamma said. "So that you remember."

"I will remember, atta."

"Hm." Then, to the bus and not to Lasya, "Come at Ugadi."

Sravani cried. Sravani cried the way she did everything, completely, with her face in Lasya's shoulder, and said she would come to Kerala in the summer and Lasya said yes and meant it. Subbaiah took the suitcase to the bus door and put it on the step and said nothing. Then, as the conductor rang the bell, he said, "Ugadi," and went to return the bike.

Anthoor was the same. The quarters, the bike from under Sajith's tarpaulin, the one bar of BSNL, the gas stove with its knob that said high and low. Lasya put the dabba of podi on the shelf, and beside it, on its newspaper, the coconut husk. It looked foolish there, a piece of a village on a city shelf. She left it.

That night she lit the gas stove with a match, the way she always had, and because of the husk on the shelf she held the match low, at the bottom of the burner, where the flame would climb. The gas caught with its small blue sound.

Pramod was behind her. She had not heard him come in. He said, into her hair, "A stove tells you who a woman is."

She turned round with the match still burning in her fingers. "And what does it say?"

He took the match out of her hand, blew it out, and reached past her for the light switch.