Part 5 of 7 · 14 minThe Woman Who Knew Him

Now, you might think that a thing like him would keep away from the town that killed him. A ghost in a story does that, or else it comes back for the men who did it. He did neither. For fifty years Gannerulanka had simply been a place where the crowds were small, a ferry town of palmyras and a canal, and he went where the crowds were big. But once a year Gannerulanka was not small. On Sri Rama Navami, the birthday of Rama, the god is married to Sita all over again and then drawn round the town in his chariot, and every family from the canal villages comes to put a hand to the rope. The town had been normal for a long time. That was all he needed to know about it.

So after the wedding lights at Rayalagudem he turned the front wheel towards the delta, and in April he came.

On the road in he was thinner than breath on glass. Then the road filled, the crowd thickened at the temple gate, and he gathered. First the bell, tring-tring, small and clear under the great bell of the temple. Then the black bicycle, with the steel box tied to the carrier by its strip of cycle tube. Then his hands, last of all, on the grips of the handlebar.

They were bad hands that morning. There were brown spots across the backs of both, and the fingers had a shake in them that made the bell ring a little by itself. The cattle broker had been a man of fifty-two with a mended heart, and what he had left to give had not lasted the journey.

The chariot stood over the crowd as tall as a house. Its wooden wheels were higher than a man and blackened with old oil. It was hung with marigold and mango leaves, and it smelt of camphor and of coconut water drying on hot stone. Two coir ropes as thick as a wrist ran out in front of it down the street, with a hundred people on each.

"Sri Rama! Jaya Rama!" The ropes went taut, the wheels groaned, the god began to move. Suryam walked beside the rope, wheeling the bicycle.

Some of the old men on that rope had stood on the canal bund one Tuesday in 1976 with yoke poles in their hands. He did not look for them. He gave them the needle as he gave it to everyone else, the same swab and the same press of the thumb, and they felt nothing, and they lost nothing, and they pulled Rama on down the street. He had not come for them. He had not come for anyone. He had come because there were two hundred people on a rope.

Arm after arm. The steel box open on the carrier, the lid propped on its hinge. A touch of spirit on the cotton, the needle, the thumb. Nobody felt it. But the babies knew. One woke on its mother's shoulder and screamed as he went past, then the next, then a third, so that his path along the rope could have been drawn from the crying alone. The mothers jiggled them and blamed the drums. Behind him, for the space of a few steps, the air smelt of spirit, sharp and cold, the way a hospital corridor smells. Then the camphor closed over it again.

Listen now to how he chose, because he had no other way. He could not read a name on a shop board or a date on a vow card. He had eyes and ears, and fifty years.

At the corner by the rice mill the chariot halted so that the street could make its offering. A broad man let go of the rope and came forward with a gunny bag. He took out coconuts and broke them on the offering stone one after another, fast, with a driver's thick wrists, and the water ran down into the gutter. Suryam stopped the bicycle and watched the hands, and counted. The man had to stop at ten and wipe his face. Then eleven, twelve. Nineteen, and the bag was empty.

"Nineteen again, Sattibabu!" somebody called from the rope. "Still paying?"

"Every year till I go," the man called back. "Nineteen days I lay in that fever ward with my eyes rolled up, and my wife kept a lamp burning here for all nineteen. One coconut a day. I am a man born twice, I tell you. Three times, if you count the lorry."

"Tell it, tell it," said somebody else, laughing, because everybody on that street had heard it.

He told it. A night on the highway, a lorry of cement coming the other way with no lights, the cab folded round him like a paper cone. They cut him out. He pushed up his sleeve to show them, as he always did, and there was the lorry: a long operation scar from the elbow nearly to the wrist, with the stitch marks on either side of it like the sleepers of a railway line.

A prana-gandam is a danger to life written in a person's stars, which either takes them or is missed. This man had been missed twice, and made a yearly feast of it, and told it at the top of his voice at every corner of his own town.

Suryam wheeled the bicycle up behind the broad back. His fingers shook on the handlebar. He put his thumb on the bell.

Tring-tring.

Sattibabu turned, frowning, looking for a cycle in that crush.

And across the chariot ropes, another head turned too.

It was an old woman in a brown cotton sari, her grey hair in a small tight knot, with a girl of about four on her hip. The child had seen him before the bell. She made one small sound, pushed her face into the old woman's neck and would not bring it out again.

"Hush, Chinnu," the old woman said, without looking down. She was looking at him.

He knew the looks of the twice-spared. They looked at his face, puzzled, or at the khaki and the cycle clips, the way a calf looks at a new gate. This one did not look at his face. She looked at his hands. Her eyes went to the cotton, then to the bottle of spirit, then to the syringe, and waited there, on the steel ring of the plunger. She was waiting for the next step because she knew what the next step was. Nobody living knew it better. For eight years she had done every step of it herself, across a table, with his hands holding the arm.

Sattibabu looked him up and down and laughed. "Health department? Today also? You people don't take a holiday even for Rama."

"Hold out your arm," Suryam said. "It won't hurt."

Nineteen days in a ward teach a man to do as he is told. Sattibabu held out the arm with the scar on it.

The swab. The needle. "Cold," Sattibabu said, and frowned down at the place. Suryam hooked his finger in the ring and the barrel filled, not with blood but with something pale, the colour of lamp-light on ghee. It filled to the top: forty-five years and all the rest, all the night roads still to be driven and all the coconuts that would not now be broken. He pressed the cotton down for a slow count of three.

Then, in front of her, he turned his own left arm to the light, found the vein, and pushed the plunger home.

The spots went from the backs of his hands as a stain goes from cloth in the wash. The shake went out of his fingers. The bell on the handlebar was still.

"Suryam."

It was not said loudly. It was not Suryam garu, with the word of respect we put after a name. It was Suryam, flat, the way a nurse calls the attendant across a ward to bring the tray and be quick about it. She had called him so every working morning for eight years, with the steriliser coming to the boil between them. She had not said it since the Tuesday she came back across the canal and found the open box.

The women beside her looked where she was looking. They saw a mill step, an empty gunny bag and a heap of broken coconut. "Who, Annamma garu?" one of them asked.

Annamma did not answer her. She did not step back, and she did not put a hand to her mouth. She shifted the child higher on her hip, the way you move a load you mean to carry a long way.

Sattibabu yawned like a man at the end of a double trip. He sat down on the step of the rice mill and said the sun had got to him. After a while he got up and went home by the back lane, without waiting for the chariot to move.

And here is the turn, so listen. Suryam looked at her across the ropes.

She had turned at the bell. She was his. Every one who had turned in fifty years had held out an arm and gone home and died before dawn, and there was no rule in him that said otherwise for her. The syringe was empty and clean in his hand. The ropes were two steps away, and the crowd was thick enough to give him hands for the whole of the day.

He did not take her.

He put two fingers in his shirt pocket and held out a peppermint, green-striped in its twist of paper, across the rope, towards the child. Chinnu did not see it. Her face was in her grandmother's neck. Annamma saw it. She looked at the peppermint, and at the fingers that held it, and then she looked at his face at last, the pock marks on the left cheek, the neat moustache, twenty-nine years old and not one day more. Her mouth set.

Then the drums struck up, the ropes went taut, and the chariot carried the crowd on and the old woman with it. She did not look back. He knew she did not need to.

He did not go either. On any other festival night, when the crowd began to thin, he would have wheeled the bicycle out to the edge where the lights ended and gone thin on the road towards the next market. That evening the festival lights burned along the canal till midnight and he did not go out to meet the dark. He stood in the thick of the crowd at the temple courtyard, among the people queueing for panakam, the jaggery water with pepper and cardamom that is given out in Rama's name. Babies cried along the queue all evening, and the mothers blamed the fireworks.

He took the register off the carrier, the old one with the brown cloth cover and the red spine, and opened it on the bicycle seat. The pages were full of Annamma's handwriting, the names and ages and doses of 1976, in her straight upright hand. He could not read a word of it. He wet the pencil on his lip and drew one cross down the margin, beside a column of hers, for Sattibabu.

Sattibabu died in his sleep before dawn. His wife found him when she brought the coffee. He was lying on his back with his left arm outside the sheet, as if he had been about to show somebody something.

Now I will tell you what Annamma did that morning, and you may judge her as you like. She did not weep, because Sattibabu was not hers to weep for. She did not go to the temple, and she did not light a lamp. She bathed, put on a starched sari, gave Chinnu her breakfast and handed her to the neighbour, and at nine o'clock she walked to the Primary Health Centre the way she had walked to duty for thirty-six years, not fast and not slow.

It was the day of the children's needles, and the verandah was packed with mothers. Suryam stood among them beside the third pillar.

It was the same verandah. The steriliser was gone, and the cupboard with it. A girl in a green coat tore each syringe out of a paper packet, used it once and dropped it into a red bin. On that verandah every baby was crying already, so the crying around the third pillar told nobody anything. But the smell of spirit was stronger there than anywhere, and a mother standing next to him moved her child to her other shoulder without knowing why.

Annamma came up the step and saw him. She stopped for exactly as long as it takes to see a thing. Then she walked past the third pillar, close enough to touch it, and went in.

The death register lay in the office, a long green ledger. The clerk knew her; everybody over forty in Gannerulanka had been born into her hands. She asked for it, and he gave it to her because it did not occur to him not to. She took her spectacles out of her blouse, turned to the last filled page and ran her finger down to the line. Sattibabu, male, forty-five, lorry driver, died at home in sleep, cause heart failure, and the date, and the doctor's name. From her bag she took a thick notebook with a rexine cover, the case book she had kept in her working years, and copied the line into it, every column, in the same straight upright hand that filled the pages of the register on his carrier. Then she ruled a line under it.

Dr. Haritha was perhaps twenty-six. She was between two mothers when Annamma came to her door, and she gave the old woman the chair nearest the fan, because it was Annamma.

"The lorry driver, Sattibabu," Annamma said. "You signed him this morning."

"Yes, Annamma garu. His heart. He drove nights, he chewed tobacco, and he had that crash. It happens."

"When you examined him," Annamma said, "was there a mark on his left arm? The upper arm, over the vein. One puncture. No bruise."

The young doctor looked at her. "I did not look at his arm. There was no reason to look at his arm."

"No," Annamma said. "There was no reason." She stood up. "Next time there is one who dies in his sleep for no reason, look at the left arm. That is all. I am not asking you for anything else today."

She went out past the third pillar without turning her head.

She took the eleven o'clock bus to the district town with the case book in her bag. The bus was crowded, and she stood. At the collectorate she found the office that keeps the births and deaths, a long room of steel almirahs and ceiling fans and files tied with red tape, and she went to the counter.

"I want every death in sleep in the canal villages since January," she said. "Sudden. Adults. Heart failure, natural death, cause not known. Name, age, village, date."

The clerk had a pen behind his ear and a glass of tea going cold at his elbow. He looked at the old woman in the starched sari, and then at the clerk at the next table, and then he laughed, not unkindly, the way you laugh at a child who asks for the moon.

"Amma, do you know how many people die in their sleep in this district in a year? It is the commonest death there is. Every village has one a week. Who will sit and pull all that out for you?"

"Then give me the registers," said Annamma, "and I will pull it out."

"The registers don't leave the almirah. You need a letter."

"From whom?"

He told her. It was the name of an officer who was at a meeting, and would be at a meeting all afternoon, and very likely tomorrow.

Annamma looked at the bench along the wall, where three men were already waiting with papers in their hands. Then she took the case book out of her bag, sat down at the end of the bench, opened it on her knee at the page with Sattibabu's line, and folded her hands on it.

"I will wait," she said.

Outside the window the bus stand was filling for the afternoon buses, and somewhere down among the crowd, faint under the horns, a baby began to cry.