Part 1 of 5 · 12 minThe Line of Stones

If you have ever driven from Hyderabad to Vijayawada at night, you have passed this place. It is on the highway past Kodad, on the left if you are going towards Vijayawada. A lorry dhaba with a tin roof, a water tap, and behind it a peepal tree so big that its branches come over the roof and touch the road. The board says Sri Lakshmi Dhaba. Drivers call it Veeraiah's.

Fifty or sixty lorries stop there every night. But there is one thing about Veeraiah's that every man who has driven that road for more than a year knows, and no new driver knows until somebody tells him. They do not park under the tree. They do not sleep under the tree. Not after midnight. There is a row of whitewashed stones on the ground, about the size of coconuts, going in a curve from the back wall of the dhaba to the edge of the road, and nothing with a man in it goes past those stones at night. Ask any driver why. Most will say nothing. The old ones call it the Question Tree.

This is what happened to Kiran in 2023.

Kiran Kumar Bellamkonda was twenty-six that year. He had done his B.Com in Khammam and then gone to Hyderabad and worked in a mobile shop in Ameerpet. His father was Bellamkonda Veeraiah, the man who ran the dhaba. In February 2023 Veeraiah sat down on the bench near the counter one evening, said his chest was tight, and was gone before the auto came from Kodad. Heart, the doctor said. He was fifty-eight.

Kiran came home for the funeral and did not go back. His mother Padma was fifty-two and could not run a lorry dhaba on a highway alone, and there was a man from Kodad already asking what she would take for the land. So in March Kiran gave up the room in Ameerpet and came and sat at the counter where his father had sat, and that is how it started.

He did not know the place. His father had sent him to a hostel in Khammam in sixth class, and nobody had told him anything. A dhaba at night is a different thing from a dhaba in the day. Lorries coming in with their lights on at one in the morning, drivers washing their faces at the tap, the smell of diesel and onions. Kiran sat at the counter with the cash box and watched it the way a man watches a film.

The cook was Sambaiah. He was sixty-seven and had cooked at that dhaba since Veeraiah opened it in 1996. He was a thin man with a towel always on his shoulder, and he spoke maybe twenty words in a day. He slept inside, on a mat in the kitchen. There was a boy also, Chanti, fourteen, Sambaiah's grandnephew, who washed the plates and swept and slept on the cot nearest the kitchen door. And there was Padma at the counter in the day, and Kiran at the counter at night.

Kiran's first idea about the dhaba was the tree. The sun on that highway is like a slap, and the only shade in the whole place was under the peepal. The tree was enormous. Its trunk was wider than a lorry. There were two cots under it, old iron cots with rope, that nobody used. The ground under it was swept and cool even at two in the afternoon. Kiran stood there one morning with his hands on his hips and said to his mother, "Amma, we will put four tables here. Drivers will sit here in the day instead of inside where the fan does not work. Why is this whole place empty?"

Padma said, "Ask Sambaiah."

He did not ask Sambaiah. He went and got a table from inside and carried it out to the tree himself. To get the table flat he had to move one of the whitewashed stones, which was in the way, so he kicked it aside with his foot and put the table down.

When he came back from the kitchen with a chair, the stone was back in its place and the table was pushed to the other side of it.

He looked around. Sambaiah was at the stove, with his back to him. Kiran moved the stone again, with his hand this time, and put it near the wall, and put the table where he wanted it, and went inside to get a second chair. When he came out the stone was back. Exactly where it had been.

He went into the kitchen. "Sambaiah. Did you move that stone?"

Sambaiah did not turn around. "Yes."

"Why?"

Sambaiah stirred the dal. After a while he said, "It goes there."

That was the whole conversation. Kiran was not going to fight a sixty-seven-year-old cook about a stone. He left the table on the inside of the line, and it stayed there for the rest of the story, and nobody ever sat at it.

The man who told him was Mastan.

Mastan was fifty-eight and drove a ten-wheeler between Hyderabad and Vizag, and he had been stopping at Veeraiah's since before it had a board. He came in around one in the morning that week, parked on the far side of the stones with his wheels two feet from the line, and sat on the bench by the counter with his tea.

"You are Veeraiah's boy."

"Yes anna."

"He was a good man. Strict. The best dal on this road." Mastan drank his tea. Then he looked out at the tree, at the cots under it, at the table Kiran had put there, and he said, "You want to put tables under that tree."

"In the day. It is the only shade."

"In the day it is fine." Mastan put his glass down. "Listen to me now. I am going to tell you what your father should have told you, and I am going to tell it only once, because men do not like to say it twice."

Now listen to what Mastan said, because everything that happened afterwards comes from it.

"That row of stones. You do not cross it after the dhaba lights go off. Not you, not a lorry, not a dog. On this side of the stones you can do what you want. Past the stones there is nothing of yours. That is one.

"Two. The bulb on the back wall. The one over the tap. It burns all night. Every night. It has burned every night for twenty-seven years, since your father put it there. If that bulb is burning, nothing happens. If that bulb goes off, do not be under that tree. Ask Sambaiah why he checks it twice every evening.

"Three. If you are under that tree in the dark, after the light, something will speak to you. One time. It will ask you a question. I do not know what kind of question, because the men who heard it are not here to tell me, except one, and he will not say. It asks once. It does not ask again.

"Four. If you answer it right, nothing. If you answer it wrong, or you do not answer, then in the morning we will find you in the tree. Hanging. From your own lungi, or your own towel, whatever you have. And your mouth will be open. Like this." He opened his mouth a little, as if he was about to say a word, and held it, and then closed it. "Every one of them. Mouth open. No marks. Nobody hears anything. A man sleeps on the next cot and hears nothing. I have seen it four times in thirty years. Four times is enough."

Kiran laughed. He could not help it. He said, "Anna, this is 2023."

Mastan did not laugh. He said, "Your father knew. He laid those stones with his own hands. Ask Sambaiah why the bulb burns." Then he went to his cab and slept, two feet on the right side of the line.

Kiran did what a young man does when an old man tells him something like that. He decided to prove it was nothing.

He waited two nights, until a night with few lorries, and at two in the morning, when the last driver had gone to his cab and the counter was closed, he took a torch and a bottle of water and went and sat on one of the cots under the tree. The back bulb was burning over the tap. He sat with his back to the trunk and his feet on the cot and waited.

It was a hot night. There was a little wind in the top of the tree, and the leaves of a peepal make a sound like rain when the wind goes through them. Bats went in and out of the branches. The tree had a green smell, like the inside of a temple. A dog was walking around behind the dhaba and would not come under the tree, and he noticed that, and thought nothing of it. At three he was bored. At three thirty he was asleep sitting up, and he woke at four with the sky going grey, and nothing had spoken to him. He went inside and slept till nine, sure of himself.

Remember this detail. The bulb was on.

In the morning he counted the night's takings at the counter, as he did every day now, and while he was counting he looked up at the back wall, at the bulb over the tap, and for the first time he looked at the switch. It was an old switch, the big black kind, on a wooden board under the eave. It was painted over so many times that the switch and the board were one lump of white paint. He went over and put his thumb on it. It did not move. He pressed hard. Nothing. He looked closer and saw that somebody, under all that paint, had put glue, or something, in the gap, so that the switch could never again be pushed down.

His father had done that. His father, who laughed at everything, who called the pujari a thief, had glued a switch in his own dhaba and painted it over so that nobody, not even himself, could ever turn that bulb off from inside.

Kiran stood there a while. Then he went into the kitchen and said, "Sambaiah. The switch for the back bulb."

"Yes."

"Nanna did that?"

"Yes."

"When?"

Sambaiah thought. "Ninety-six. The second month." He went on cutting onions. "After the first one."

Kiran did not ask what the first one was. He found that he did not want to. He went back to the counter and finished counting, and his hands were not quite steady.

That same night a new lorry came in late, around eleven. A new driver, young, from Guntur side, in a hurry. He swung the lorry around to the back where there was room and parked it with the front wheels past the stones and the cab under the first branches, and climbed down to eat.

Mastan was there that night. He was sitting at the counter with his tea when the lorry came in, and he watched it park, and he put his glass down and went out.

Kiran heard it from the counter. Mastan's voice, not loud at first, then loud. "Orey. Orey. Whose lorry is this? Move it. Move it now."

The young driver came back from the tap with water on his face. "What, anna? What is the problem? There is space."

"Move it past the stones."

"What stones?"

Mastan pointed at the ground. "Those stones. Your wheels are over them. Move it."

The driver looked at the row of whitewashed stones and laughed. "Anna, it is eleven thirty. I have been driving since Nellore. I am not moving a lorry for stones."

Mastan took him by the shirt. Kiran had never seen the old man touch anybody. He took the boy by the shirt and pulled him close and said something in his ear, Kiran did not hear what, and the driver's face changed, not to fear, to anger, the way a young man's face goes when he is frightened in front of people and does not want to show it. He pulled himself free and said, "Mad old man," and got into his cab and reversed the lorry eight feet, until the front wheels were on the right side of the stones. Then he ate at the far end of the bench without looking at anybody, and slept in his cab with the windows up.

Kiran watched all of it from the counter. He did not go out. And he noticed, standing there behind the cash box with the tube light over his head, that his hands were cold. It was April on a highway. His shirt was stuck to his back. And his hands were cold, and he could not have told you why.

Chanti swept under the tree every morning at dawn, before the sun came over the road. That was his job. He swept it well because Sambaiah checked, and anything that fell there, a leaf, a cigarette end, a bottle cap, Chanti saw it.

The morning after the lorry, he came to the counter with something in his hand.

"Anna. This was in the roots."

It was a slate pencil. The old kind, the thin grey stick that children used to write on slates with, worn down to the length of a finger, with the end rounded from use. It was clean, not dusty, only worn, the way a pencil is worn by a hand that has used it for a long time. Kiran had not seen one since he was six years old.

"Where?"

"In the roots. Near the cot. On the swept part, anna. It was not there yesterday. I swept there yesterday."

Kiran turned it over in his fingers. It was a small thing. It was nothing. A slate pencil, in 2023, under a peepal tree on a highway where there was no school and no child except Chanti, who had never in his life written on a slate.

He did not hear Sambaiah come out of the kitchen. He felt the pencil taken out of his hand. The old man took it the way you take a knife from a child, fast and firm, and walked straight into the kitchen with it and threw it into the fire under the big pot, and stood there and watched it until it was in the flames.

Then he turned around. Kiran had known Sambaiah his whole life, and in his whole life, and in the twenty-seven years before that which the drivers remembered, nobody had heard the man raise his voice.

He raised it now.

"Do not pick up anything from under that tree."