Romance · 7 minTwo Days’ Notice

It was a Friday in September, and Pramod came home early the way he always did on a Friday, and Lasya had the tea ready the way she always did, and that should have been the whole of it. But he came in with an envelope in his hand instead of the usual packet of banana chips, and he did not sit down.

"What is it, andi? You look like the GST department has sent you a notice."

"They have," he said, and gave it to her.

Audit camp. The islands. Three weeks. Ship from Kochi, Monday morning. Report to the office at Kochi on Sunday night. Two names on the order and his was the second one.

Lasya read it twice. "Monday. This Monday."

"Twenty-one days." He had already counted. He had been counting since two in the afternoon, which was why the 1 p.m. call had been short, and she had noticed, and thought it was work, and it was.

She put the order on the table. "You cannot say no?"

"It is an order, Lasya. Junior staff go. Sajith sir went two years ago. He says it is all sea and files."

"Then why do you look like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you have already gone."

He sat down then, finally, and drank the tea, and said, "Talk you tonight," and she threw the tea strainer at him.

That night they made the list. It was Lasya's list, because Pramod's lists had three things on them and hers had thirty. Six shirts, two trousers, the good chappals and the bad chappals, the tablets for his stomach, a torch, a towel, the small steel dabba of her mother's podi, because rice there would be rice but podi would be home. She wrote it in the recipe notebook on a fresh page, and at the bottom she wrote "1 p.m." and looked at it and crossed it out.

"What was that?"

"Nothing. One thing I cannot pack."

He understood. He always understood the small things; it was the big ones that took him time. "There is no signal at the camp," he said. "Sajith sir told me. No mobile. Nothing. There is one phone at the camp office, a satellite one. You get ten minutes a day. You stand in a line and when your turn comes you get ten minutes and a clerk sits next to you with a watch."

"Ten minutes."

"Ten."

"At what time?"

"That is the thing. You do not choose. The line is the line. It might be morning, it might be eleven at night."

Lasya looked at the landline on the small table by the door, under its cloth cover, the phone that rang only when her mother wanted a recipe back. Now it was going to be the only road between Anthoor and the sea.

"Then the landline is yours," she said. "For twenty-one days."

She took a pen and took his arm and wrote the number on the inside of his forearm, the way schoolboys write answers, and he let her, and did not say that he knew the number, because he did know it and that was not the point.

"It will wash off in the bath," he said.

"Then do not bath."

"Twenty-one days."

"Then write it again."

On Sunday he said, "Beach," and she said, "You will see more sea in three weeks than in your whole life," and he said, "Not this sea," and so they went. Mattool, half an hour on the bike. He swam far out and back, and she walked the shore with her chappals in her hand and kept the whole shells and put the broken ones back. When he came out dripping she showed him the day's shells on her palm.

"The island will have better ones," he said. "Big white ones. Sajith sir brought one for Ammu."

"Then bring me one."

"One?"

"One is enough. One good one."

He said he would. They sat on the sand until the sun went into the water, and neither of them said anything about Monday, and that was how they said it.

Monday was dark when Sajith's small car came at four, because Sajith was that kind of man, and he stood by the car and looked at the sky while the two of them stood on the step. The podi dabba was on top of the bag.

"Eat," she said.

"You eat," he said. "You will not, when I am not here. You will drink tea and say you ate."

"I will eat."

"Talk you tonight."

"There is no tonight for twenty-one days, andi."

"Then I will owe you twenty-one."

He went down the step with the bag and got into Sajith's car and put his hand up at the window, and she put hers up on the step, and the car went to the corner and turned, and she stood there with her hand up for a while after there was nothing to hold it up for.

Then she went inside and shut the door and the house was the size of a stadium.

She cleaned it. It was already clean. She cleaned it anyway, and then she put one of the two cups on the rack away in the cupboard so that it would not look at her. At eleven she called her mother from the window where the signal was good and told her he had gone, and her mother said, "Three weeks, how will you manage," and Lasya said, "I am a married woman, amma, I will manage."

At one o'clock she looked at the phone out of habit. It did not ring. It was not going to ring. She made rice and ate half of it and covered the other half with a plate.

That night she lay on her side of the cot with the landline visible through the door and the rain starting and stopping on the roof. At eleven she gave up and switched off the light.

At 11:40 the landline rang.

It rang the way the old landlines ring, loud, like a bell in a school. She was out of the cot before she was awake and her foot found the chair in the dark and she went over it, chair and all, and crawled the last metre and got the receiver off the hook on the fourth ring.

"Hello? Hello, andi?"

There was a hiss, and under the hiss the sound of a room with a fan in it, far away, and a man's voice she did not know saying, bored, "Nine minutes left."

Then Pramod. "Lasya."

"Andi. Andi, you reached?"

"I reached. Fourteen hours by ship. Lasya, it is all sea. Every side. The camp is a small island with coconut trees and the office is a shed with a tin roof. The food is rice and fish curry, I ate the podi. The man here says nine minutes. There is a line behind me. Did you eat?"

"I ate."

"You did not."

"I ate half."

He laughed, and the laugh came across the sea with the hiss around it, and she sat on the floor with the chair on its side next to her and held the receiver with both hands.

"Lasya, listen. The time will be different every day. If it rings at three in the morning it only means my turn came at three. And if I do not call one day it means the line was long or the phone was down, nothing else. You understand?"

"I understand."

"And the number washed off in the ship. Say it once."

She said it, laughing, and he said it back, and the bored voice said "one minute", and Pramod started to say something about a shell, a big one, white, that he had already seen, and that he would.

The line went dead at ten minutes exactly, in the middle of the sentence, and the hiss stopped, and the room was only the room.

Lasya sat on the kitchen floor in the dark with the receiver in both hands and the dial tone going, and she was laughing, and she did not put it down for a long time.