Part 4 of 9 · 2 minThe Address

The label was on the underside of the lid, and it had been there the whole time.

Not printed. Scratched, with something sharp, into the steel — the way children carve names into desks. I only saw it because I was drying the box under the tube light at one in the morning and the angle was right.

A house number, a street, a locality on the north side of the city. Eleven characters. I had been eating out of that box for six weeks and washing it every night and I had never once turned the lid over.

I went on Saturday, which was a mistake I would make again.

The street was one of those that goes from cement to gravel to mud in the space of two hundred metres. Number 14 had a compound wall with a gate that did not lock, and behind the gate a house with one whole side gone black.

Not fallen. Burnt, and then lived in afterwards. Somebody had swept the ash into a corner of the yard and left it there in a heap, and the heap had gone hard in the rain and grown a weed out of the top of it.

There was washing on the line. Two saris and a shirt.

I stood at that gate for a long time. A woman came out of the back with a steel vessel under her arm and saw me and did not startle at all, which is the detail that comes back to me at night — she did not startle, she straightened, the way you do when a bus you have been waiting for finally comes around the corner.

I said I was sorry, I had the wrong house.

She said my name.

Not a question. She said my full name, both parts, the way it appears on a form, and then she said the name of the warehouse where I worked, and then she went back inside and left the gate open behind her.

I did not follow her in. I want credit for that, though I know it is not worth much, because I went home and I cooked, and on Monday I put the box in the pantry fridge like every other Monday.

But I knew the name on the gate by then. It was painted on the post, half burnt away, and I had read it standing there with my hand on the latch.

RAVI KUMAR.

I had signed that name. Four years ago. On a form.