Chapter 35 Tara

Tara

The Fever came to Bhilai on a train.

That was what Sahu bhaiya said, on Monday morning, standing at the bottom of the stairs with two packets of milk and his helmet still on. They'd been checking everyone at Durg station for a week, taking temperatures with a little gun at the gate, sending people with fevers away in a bus. And on Saturday night a man had come in on the train from the Nagpur side with a fever and a bandage on his hand under his shirt sleeve, and he'd taken two tablets of paracetamol in the toilet before the train pulled in, so the little gun said he was fine.

"Thirty-six point nine," said Sahu bhaiya. "That's what it said. My cousin was on duty at the gate. He let him through." He took his helmet off and turned it round and round in his hands. "By Sunday afternoon it was in the market at Power House. By Sunday night they were taking people to Sector 9 in auto-rickshaws."

Tara wrote it down. She wrote everything down now. Mon. Sahu bhaiya: Durg, train, Sat night. Power House Sun. Sector 9 hosp. She wrote it with the red notebook on her knee, standing in the doorway, and then she looked up and asked the only question that mattered.

"Is Annamma aunty back?"

Sahu bhaiya looked at the door of the quarter next door. It was shut. Annamma aunty had gone to the hospital at six o'clock on Sunday evening for a double shift, in her white sari with the blue border, with her tiffin and her umbrella, and she'd said back by nine tomorrow, molu, keep Merin's toothbrush in the cup. It was half past nine.

"The hospital's very full, beta," said Sahu bhaiya.

That wasn't an answer. Tara wrote it down anyway.

· · ·

At ten, Merin knocked.

Three small knocks, the way Tara had taught her. Always ask who it is. Tara asked, and a small voice on the other side of the door said "Merin", and Tara opened it.

Merin was eight. She was very small for eight, with two tight plaits and a school bag on her back, and she was holding her toothbrush in one hand and her mother's spare house key in the other. She'd been waiting at her own door since seven, she said. Her mother always came at nine. She'd waited till ten because sometimes the bus was late.

"Can I wait here?" said Merin. "Mummy said if she's late I should wait here."

"Of course you can," said Tara. "You can wait here as long as you want."

She put Merin's toothbrush in the cup in the bathroom, next to Dadi's and her own and Bhaiya's old one that nobody had thrown away in two years. She didn't say anything about the hospital. She didn't know what to say. She was thirteen. Bhaiya would have known what to say, she thought; Bhaiya always knew exactly the right thing to say, which was usually a lie.

Merin took off her school bag and sat down on the floor beside Dadi's bed and took out her holiday homework. It was an English reader with a picture of a rabbit on the cover. She opened it and began, very seriously, to read aloud.

"The rabbit," read Merin, "was very proud of his long ears."

Dadi turned her head on the pillow and looked at her. Dadi didn't know any English except thank you and no. But she listened to the whole story, all the way to the end, where the rabbit learns his lesson, and when Merin closed the book Dadi said "Shabaash, puttar" out of the good side of her mouth, and Merin smiled for the first time all morning.

Tara opened the red notebook and turned to the page called MERIN, which she'd only made on Tuesday, when Merin started sleeping over.

NEEDS: Mummy. Toothbrush (done). Holiday homework (she says it's due June 15). Someone to say "shabaash".

GIVES: Reads to Dadi. Dadi likes it.

She looked at it for a while. Then, under NEEDS, very small, she wrote Mummy again. She didn't know why. It was already there. It seemed important to write it twice.

· · ·

The power went at twelve, the way it went every day, and didn't come back at six.

It didn't come back at all. Rao uncle sat at the bottom of the stairs in the dark with his ear against his inverter, listening to it like a doctor, and at eight o'clock he came up one step at a time and stood at Tara's door with a torch.

"The battery is dying, beta," he said. "Two hours more. Maybe three. I'm sorry. It's old. Like me."

Two hours. The fridge was on the inverter wire. And in the fridge, in the butter compartment, in its box, was Dadi's insulin.

Tara stood very still.

Then she remembered.

Annamma aunty, on Sunday evening, at the door, with her tiffin and her umbrella, in a hurry. She'd turned back on the stairs and said it, almost as an afterthought, the way she said everything important. Molu. If the fridge dies, don't leave the insulin in the fridge. A dead fridge is an oven. Put it in a clay pot. Wet sand round it, wet cloth on top, in the shade, by the window where the air moves. Keep the sand wet. The water takes the heat away. In Kerala my grandmother kept milk like that.

On the NovelPhoenix site, the author publishes this chapter, yet this copy was made without approval; reading the source supports their work.

She'd said it and gone down the stairs. It was the last thing she'd said to Tara. Tara hadn't known that, at the time. You never know which thing is the last thing.

Tara went to the kitchen and got the matka, the big round clay pot they kept the drinking water in, and emptied it into every bottle she could find. She got the bigger pot from the cupboard under the stairs, the old one Dadi used to make curd in before the stroke. She went down to the strip of garden by the building, in the dark, with Rao uncle holding the torch, and filled a bucket with sand from the heap the plant's maintenance men had left there in April. She carried it up the stairs. Merin carried the torch.

She put the sand in the big pot, and the small pot inside it, and wet the sand all round, slowly, with water from a bottle, until it was dark and heavy. She took Dadi's insulin out of the dying fridge and put it in a steel dabba with the lid on, and put the dabba in the small pot, and laid a wet cotton dupatta over the top of everything. Then she carried the whole thing to the window in the bedroom, where the air moved, and put it on the floor in the shade under the sill.

She put her hand on the wet cloth. It was cool. Cooler than the room. It was working.

"What is it?" said Merin.

"It's a fridge," said Tara. "That my Annamma aunty taught me."

"My Annamma aunty," said Merin. "She's my mummy."

"Yes," said Tara. "She's your mummy."

She turned away to the window so Merin wouldn't see her face, and opened the red notebook, and wrote under GIVES on the page called ANNAMMA AUNTY, which was the longest page in the book: Taught me the clay pot. And then she couldn't write anything else for a while.

· · ·

It was forty-four degrees in the room that night with no fan. Tara wet a cloth in the bucket and wiped Dadi's face and arms every half an hour. She wet the sand in the pot every hour, by torchlight. Merin slept on the floor beside Dadi's bed with the English reader under her cheek. Mrs. Pillai from the third floor brought down rotis at nine, wrapped in a cloth, and stayed for a while in the dark, saying nothing, holding Merin's foot.

Outside, in the township, there were sounds. Tara had never heard the township at night like this. Usually there were scooters, and a TV through a window somewhere, and dogs, and the long hoot of the plant shift change. Now there were the dogs, and a long way off a woman screaming, and once, much closer, on the road below, something running.

She didn't go to the window. She sat by Dadi's bed in the dark with her phone face down in her lap, the screen off, the way Bhaiya had told her. Keep the phone dark. Light brings them. She didn't know how he knew that. She'd never asked him how he knew things. She'd just written them down, and then done the opposite.

But not that one. That one she did.

At two in the morning she opened the notebook by the faint light from the window and turned to his page. It was the very first page. It was the oldest page in the notebook, from when she was ten, and on it, in her ten-year-old handwriting, it said BHAIYA, and under it, NEEDS and GIVES, and under NEEDS, three years ago, she'd written Nobody (he says).

Under GIVES there was a list. It went back years. Helped with maths. Bought me the red notebook. Taught me "always ask who it is". Called on the 41st try.

And on Sunday, after the call, after he'd said you got lucky, she'd written, in very small letters, at the bottom: Nothing (yet).

She looked at that for a long time. Then she rubbed out Nothing with her thumb, carefully, so that it was just a smudge. She left (yet). You could still read it, if you knew where to look.

· · ·

At twenty to seven on Tuesday morning, Tara woke up.

She hadn't meant to sleep. She'd fallen asleep sitting up against the wall beside Dadi's bed, with the wet cloth in her hand, and she woke all at once, the way she'd woken every morning of her life at twenty to seven, and lay very still, and listened.

That was when he knocked. Every morning. Three times. Tara, utho. School ke liye late ho jayegi. Even in the holidays. Even the morning after Mummy's funeral.

There was no knock. There hadn't been a knock for nine days. She knew that. She lay there and listened for it anyway, the way you go on hearing a fan after it's been switched off.

And then her phone rang.

It buzzed in her lap, face down, and she grabbed it and turned it over and it was a number she didn't know, a landline, with the plant's code, and she pressed the green button so hard her thumb hurt.

"Hello? Hello?"

"Tara."

Papa's voice. Very far away and very close, the way voices are on bad lines. It sounded rough, as though he hadn't slept in a long time. Behind it, she could hear the plant: a deep, steady roar, like the sea in a shell, and men's voices, and something clanging.

"Papa—"

"Tara, utho," said Papa. And stopped, as if he'd surprised himself. Then, in a different voice, quickly, the way he talked when there wasn't much time: "Is Dadi all right? The insulin? Is the door locked?"

"Dadi's fine. The insulin's fine, it's in a clay pot, Annamma aunty taught me. The door's locked. Papa, Annamma aunty didn't come back from the hospital, and Merin's here with us, she's eight, and the power's gone, and—"

"Good," said Papa. "Good girl. Good." She could hear him breathing. "Kabir?"

She knew what he was asking. He was asking if Bhaiya had called, and what Bhaiya had said, and whether Bhaiya was alive, and whether Bhaiya was coming. He was asking all of it in one word, the way he always did, because Papa didn't like to use more words than he had to.

"He's coming," said Tara.

Silence on the line.

It went on for a long time. Long enough that she thought the line had cut. Long enough to hear the plant breathing behind him, the deep roar, the men's voices. And then she realised the line hadn't cut. Papa was just there, at the other end, at a phone in a shift office in the middle of a steel plant, not saying anything at all.

"Papa?"

"Tell him," said Papa. His voice had changed again. It had gone very low and rough, and it was doing something she'd never heard it do before, not even after the funeral. "Tara. Tell him—"

The line went dead.

Not the phone. The line. The little tone, three beeps, call failed. She stared at the screen. She called the number back. It rang and rang in the shift office of the steel plant, and nobody picked up. She called it eleven more times. On the twelfth, it didn't even ring.

She sat there with the phone in her lap.

· · ·

"Dadi," she said at last. "That was Papa."

Dadi turned her head on the pillow. Her good eye was open.

"He asked about Bhaiya," said Tara. "I said Bhaiya's coming. And then he said tell him, and the line cut. He didn't say what." She heard her own voice wobble and hated it. "Dadi, what was he going to say? What did he want me to tell him?"

Dadi looked at her for a long time. Then her good hand moved on the sheet, slowly, and found Tara's hand, and held it.

"Rabba," said Dadi, out of the good side of her mouth, very tired and very fond, the way she'd said it about Kabir for seventeen years. "Kabir hamesha der se aata hai."

Kabir always comes late.