At ten to one, Sushila Sharma stood on her roof with one hand on Moti's head and watched her neighbours come to lunch.
The cooker had screamed at 12:50, exactly when the boy said it would, and the colony had heard it. She'd felt it before she saw it, a sort of stir in the heat, the way a hostel mess stirs when the first plates come out. Then they'd come out of the shade.
Kamla from the pink house, in the nightie she'd been wearing since Sunday. The two Sharma boys from Sharma Sadan, no relation, who used to fly kites off their roof every Sankranti and cut everybody's string. The watchman from the school on the main road, still in his khaki, still with his whistle on a cord round his neck. Old Gupta ji, who had fixed her gas stove for free three times and never once let her forget it. They came slowly, the way people come out of their houses on a hot afternoon, and they walked up the front lane and stood under her kitchen window with their faces turned up, waiting for the next whistle.
Twenty-two of them. She counted.
She'd never counted anything in her life she didn't have to. Rotis, yes. Tiffins, rupees, the boys at the gate. But she'd spent one morning with that boy and now she was counting dead people.
Phweeeee, went the cooker, and twenty-two faces lifted a little higher.
They looked like her boys at eleven o'clock, she thought, waiting at the campus gate for the scooter with the tiffins. Exactly like that. Patient. Hungry. Sure that something was coming.
· · ·
She went across the roof to the back parapet, bent low, the way the boy had shown her, and the dogs came with her in a soft rush of paws. "Chup," she breathed, and they lay down along the parapet with their chins on their paws, and didn't make a sound. Good dogs. Street dogs are the best dogs. They know what quiet is for.
Below her, the back door opened.
They came out one after another into the narrow lane behind her house, the way he'd said they would. The tall girl first, the one who stood like a policewoman, with her hand at her shoulder. Then the one who talked, who had talked all through lunch about Chandigarh and her cousin's wedding until the tall one touched her wrist and she stopped. Then the little one, the one who breathed like a kettle on a low flame, holding the tiffin carrier against her chest in both arms the way you'd hold a baby. Then the round boy with the big bag, the one who'd cried into his dal and eaten three thalis and told her it was the best dal in Rajasthan, which was a bigger compliment than it sounded, because he'd spent half of lunch telling her about the food in Indore.
And last, the boy who counted everything.
He pulled the grille open for them. It squealed, only a little, under the whistle. He held it while they went through into the field, one, two, three, four. Then he went through himself, and pulled it shut behind him, and began to twist the old wire round the bars with both hands, fast, his head bent over it, like a boy doing up his shoelaces at the gate with the bus already moving.
She'd watched him all morning.
He'd counted the tiffins on her verandah when he thought nobody was looking. She'd seen his lips move. He'd counted the money out on her mat. He'd stood in her kitchen with his eyes on the clock from the gas agency and counted the seconds between the whistles, and written them down. He hadn't eaten a single mouthful until the round boy's second thali was full, and then he'd eaten fast, with his left arm round his plate, the way boys eat in a hostel mess when they've learned that food is something other people take.
He'd offered her two thousand rupees for ten plates. Her boys paid forty rupees a plate, when they paid. She'd nearly taken it, just to teach him something about the market rate.
And when she said she wasn't coming, she'd seen his face. Just for a second. Something loosened in it, and then he was ashamed of it, and then he picked up his pencil and wrote something very small in the margin of his plan. She couldn't read his English from across the kitchen. She didn't need to. She'd seen that face before, every month for thirty-one years, on Rameshwar, at the kitchen table, doing the household accounts. It was the face of a man whose sum has come out right, and who hates the answer.
Phweeeee, went the cooker.
In the field, they were walking.
· · ·
They went in a line across the stubble, fast and low, the tall girl in front. They went wide to the right, the way the boy had planned it, so as to pass a long way from the babool tree in the middle of the field, where the two farm workers sat in the shade with their backs against the trunk and their heads on their chests, like labourers asleep after their lunch.
Sushila had watched those two every afternoon since Monday. A man and a woman. Husband and wife, she thought, from the way they sat. They'd come into the shade on Monday and they hadn't left it since, except at night.
One hundred metres. The boy had said one hundred metres was enough, in the heat.
The line went on. Fifty metres from the grille. A hundred. The little one was slower than the others now. The gap between her and the one who talked had opened to ten steps, then twenty, and the round boy had slowed down behind her to stay close. The yellow dust rose round their feet in little puffs and hung in the air behind them, because there wasn't a breath of wind. It was one of those days when the heat sits on the whole of Rajasthan like a lid on a pot.
The little one began to cough.
Sushila heard it from the roof, faint and dry, the kind of cough that has dust in it. The little one stumbled. She caught herself. She was still holding the tiffin carrier in both arms. She let go of it with one hand, and fumbled in her pocket, and brought out something small and blue, and something about the way she was holding everything was wrong, and the small blue thing fell out of her hand into the stubble.
She stopped.
The little one didn't leave the tiffin. She went down on her knees in the stubble with the carrier still held against her chest in one arm and felt about on the ground with the other hand, coughing, coughing, a terrible big cough now, the kind that bends you in half.
To the reader, this chapter was copied from NovelPhoenix.com without permission. The author's NovelPhoenix page supports their work.
The round boy stopped behind her.
Under the babool tree, the woman lifted her head.
· · ·
Everything happened at once after that, the way it does in a kitchen when the milk boils over and the phone rings and somebody's at the gate.
The man under the tree lifted his head too. They both got up, slowly, the way old people get up off a floor, one hand on the trunk. They turned their faces towards the coughing.
At the front of the line, the tall girl turned round. Sushila saw her see it. She saw her look at the far side of the field, where the nala was, and the culvert, and the track to the gate, and then back at the little one on her knees. It took her less than a second. Then she was running. Not towards the gate. Back.
The one who talked stood frozen in the stubble where she'd stopped, with both hands over her mouth.
The round boy had dropped the big bag. He was down on his knees beside the little one, pawing at the stubble with his big hands, both of them searching, and the girl was coughing, and the man and the woman from under the babool tree were walking towards them through the yellow field, not fast, in the heat, but steadily, the way you walk to a meal you know will still be there when you arrive.
And at the grille, the boy who counted everything had stopped twisting the wire.
He was looking at the field. At all of it. Sushila could see him doing the sum. She could practically see the numbers going past behind his eyes.
Then something else happened, and it was the thing she would have given anything not to see.
Under her kitchen window, the cooker screamed again. Phweeeee. And this time nobody's face lifted.
The twenty-two in the front lane had turned their heads. Not towards the cooker. Away from it. Towards the back of the house, towards the field, towards the coughing and the tall girl's running feet and the round boy saying "Mil gaya? Mil gaya?" in a voice that wasn't nearly as quiet as he thought it was. A whistle is only a whistle. Children are children.
They began to move. Round the side of her house, along the wall where her tulsi plant was, into the narrow lane at the back. Gupta ji. Kamla. The watchman with his whistle bouncing on its cord. The man in the vest from the Agarwal house, who'd been standing by the grille that morning, first of all. They were going to the grille. Behind the grille there was a field, and in the field there were five children.
The boy at the grille saw them coming.
She watched him see them. She watched him look at the dead coming down the lane towards him, and then back at the field, and then down at the old wire in his hands, which wasn't finished. A grille that isn't wired shut is a door. He could let go and run. He'd be in the field in two steps, and away. The man in the vest and the others would find the grille, and push it, and it would swing open, and they'd follow him into the field.
He didn't let go.
He put both his hands flat on the bars, and leaned his whole thin weight against them, and held it shut.
He was holding a door, Sushila thought, for four children who weren't his, against her whole colony. The boy who'd counted out two thousand rupees on her mat so that nobody could ever say he owed her a thing.
Oh, beta, she thought. Oh, you foolish boy. You've got your sum wrong after all.
· · ·
She went down the stairs faster than her knees had let her go in ten years.
In the kitchen, the cooker was whistling at nobody. She turned off the gas. She did it without thinking. Thirty-one years of Rameshwar saying Sushila, the gas, every single time she left a room, and her hand went out and turned the knob by itself, and then she stood there for a second and laughed out loud, because she knew she wasn't coming back to turn it off, and she'd turned it off anyway. You don't leave gas on. Not even at the end of the world.
She'd watched the campus from her roof for five days. Every morning they went to class. Every evening they walked round the lit building. And every afternoon, at one o'clock, all of them, every single one, went to the mess. No bell rang. Nobody called them. They went anyway, because they'd gone at one o'clock every day of their lives, and whatever was left of them still knew what one o'clock was for.
The clock from the gas agency said 12:58.
On the shelf over the stove stood the two big steel patilas she cooked forty boys' rice in every morning, and on top of each one sat its lid, wide as a steering wheel and heavy as a sin. She took them down. One in each hand.
In the hall, she stopped by the phone. She hadn't meant to. She picked up the receiver and held it to her ear, and the dial tone hummed at her, steady and stupid and alive. The line was working. Good. If Mohit called on Sunday it would ring. Let it ring. Let him think the line was bad. Boys always think the line is bad.
She put it back very gently, the way you'd put a hand on a sleeping child.
On the verandah, the forty tiffins stood in their columns where she'd packed them at nine that morning, full and warm and tagged. Rohit, Room 12. Vivek (no chilli). Ankit B. Forty boys. Nine years. And not one of them had ever paid on time, and she'd fed every one of them anyway, because that is what food is for.
Forty boys, nine years. What was one more plate?
She opened the gate, and stepped out into the lane, and lifted the lids, and brought them together with all her strength.
The sound went up the lane and down the lane and over the roofs and out across the field like a temple bell. Steel on steel. She did it again. And again. And then she filled her lungs the way she'd filled them at her gate every morning for nine years when the scooter came, and every afternoon for thirty-one years when the dal was ready, and she called.
"Khana!" called Sushila aunty. "Khana lag gaya!"
Lunch is served.
· · ·
They came.
From the back lane first, back round the side of her house, past the tulsi, the watchman and Kamla and the Sharma boys, and Gupta ji, and the man in the vest last of all, slow and sure. Then from the shade under the neem trees. Then from the doorways further down the colony, people she hadn't even counted, people she hadn't known were still there. They came out of the shade into the white light of one o'clock and turned towards her, all of them, and came, the way her boys had come running to the gate when they heard the lids, the way Mohit had come in from cricket, the way everyone in the world comes when somebody bangs a plate and calls their name.
She didn't look back at the field. She didn't need to. If they were coming to her, they weren't going to the grille.
She walked down the lane towards the main road, banging the lids. Not fast. You only hurry when you're afraid of being late. The dogs came down the stairs and out of the gate and fell in round her, Moti and Kalu in front, Bholu and Sheru and little Chhotu at her heels, barking and barking at the dead, and she let them. Everyone stays, she'd told the children, if you feed them. It wasn't quite right. Everyone comes, if you call them to eat.
At the end of the colony there was the dairy, with its tin roof and its wooden counter and its big steel cans. And in the shade of the tin roof, where he stood every day after he'd fetched the milk, holding his empty can, was Rameshwar.
She hadn't told the children about him. Some things you don't put on a plate for guests.
Every morning since Monday, at six, she'd gone up on her roof and watched her husband walk to the dairy with his can, the way he'd walked to it every morning for thirty-one years. Every morning she'd watched him stand at the counter, and wait, and come away with nothing, and go and stand in the shade. And every morning she'd come down, and cooked forty tiffins, because she didn't know how to stop.
He turned his head at the sound of the lids.
Thirty-one years. He'd always come when she called him for lunch. From the shop, from the neighbours, from the cricket on the television in the very last over. He'd always come.
Sushila stopped walking. Behind her, the whole colony came down the lane to lunch. In front of her, her husband put down his can.
"Khana lag gaya," she told him, the way she'd told him every day of their lives, and she brought the lids together one last time.
One of them rolled away from her afterwards, the way lids do. It went down the lane on its edge, a long way, much further than you'd think, past the dairy and the last of the houses and out into the white glare of Jhalawar Road, ringing faintly to itself the whole way, until at last it wobbled, and slowed, and fell over in the sun.