Chapter 4 : The Chair and the Boy

Ramesh's House

The leather creaked the way it always creaked. The lamp on the desk cast its small yellow circle and the rest of the room was the rest of the room — books in stacks, books on shelves, the fan above moving with its lazy weight.

Jayesh settled into the chair across the desk. He set a cream-coloured card down between them — embossed, heavy stock — and laid his hand on it. He did not slide it across.

He did not say anything for a moment. He looked at Ravi the way he had looked at him since the boy was small. Not warmly. Carefully. As if he were taking a measurement only he had a use for.

The melody from the morning came back in Ravi's head. Bells. The catch of a woman's breath. He did not hum it. He kept his fingers still on the chair's arms.

The leather under his palms — already, on his arrival, the leather under his palms had changed for a moment. He had not known what the change meant. He had let the chair settle around him and hoped the change would let him go.

It did not let him go.

The change deepened.

Behind Jayesh's silver hair the bookshelves swam, slightly, the way the world swam when his eye refused to focus. The lamp's circle widened. The fan's blades stopped having edges.

He was no longer twenty-four. He was no longer in this room.

He was in this room in another year. He was sixteen. He had blood under his fingernails.

October 2017. 

The rain had been steady all afternoon. He had walked back from the college library with his backpack over one shoulder and his thermodynamics textbook against his chest because the strap had finally surrendered and he had not had the time or the money to fix it. The Monday exam was four days away. He had wanted to read past the chapter on entropy before he slept.

The lane was the lane, in the rain. Plastic sheets unfurled between the houses where there had been gaps. The drains ran. The dogs had gone to wherever dogs go in rain. He moved through it with his head down and his sandals slapping.

Their door was open.

He stopped.

The latch was broken. The wood around it splintered, fresh. White splinters in the rain.

He went up the steps without thinking. He pushed the door wider with his shoulder. The fluorescent tube was on. The single bar of light fell across the floor, across the mat, across the things on the mat that should not have been there.

Lakshmi was on the floor.

A man was on her.

His mother's mouth was covered with the man's hand. Her eyes were open. Her body was making a movement that was not the movement she made when she was alive in her usual way. He saw all of this in the time it takes for a sentence to begin and not finish. He saw the knife in the man's other hand.

The rod was by the door. He had put it there himself. The latch was the latch and an iron rod against the doorframe was Lakshmi's idea of a second lock and his hands had drilled the bracket to hold it three years ago.

His hand went to the rod.

His mind did not catch up.

He swung the rod the way he had swung it once at a stray dog when the dog had come at his ankles, the way the body remembers a swing without being asked. The rod connected. The man turned. The man's hand came off Lakshmi's mouth. Lakshmi made a sound that was not a word.

The man came at him.

The knife was between them.

He had no memory, later, of the next thirty seconds. He had memory of his hand and the man's hand on the same handle. He had memory of his arm twisting in a way arms are not meant to twist. He had memory of his own shirt cuff going dark in a place where it had been white. He had memory of falling. He had memory of the man's weight on top of him and the knife somewhere — between them, above them, in someone — and the man's eyes very close to his own. The man's eyes were brown and bloodshot and the man had been drinking. He could smell the drink.

The man's eyes stopped tracking.

The weight became weight only.

He pushed.

The body rolled away.

He sat up on the wet floor.

His hands were red. His shirt was red in places. The knife was on the floor near his foot, still wet.

His mother was crawling. She was making a sound. He had never heard a person make that sound before.

He reached for her.

She reached for him.

Her hand was on his face and his hand was on her shoulder and they sat like that on the wet floor next to a body for a long time without saying anything. The fluorescent tube buzzed. The rain went on outside. Somewhere down the street a dog began to bark and was joined by another dog and the barking moved away.

A neighbour at the door: *Lakshmi-amma? Are you—* and then a small breath that was not a word, and then the neighbour again, close to the floor: *Don't move, child. Don't move. Don't touch anything else. Don't.* And then she was gone and the door was open and the rain was coming in and Ravi was looking at his hands, which had become hands he did not recognise.

He did not remember Jayesh arriving.

He remembered being in the chair.

This chair. Years earlier, but this chair. Same leather. Same arms. Same lamp. The yellow circle on the desk.

His hands were on his knees. There was rust under his fingernails. The skin along his knuckles was split. There was blood on the cuff of his school uniform's shirt, thick, beginning to dry into the cotton.

From the hall came his mother's crying. Not the wail neighbours heard. The animal noise. The noise that came when there were no neighbours left to hear.

Jayesh sat opposite him. Tie crooked, as if he had straightened it with one hand while running. Hair shorter than it would be later. Less silver. The lines at the corners of his eyes deeper than the room's lamplight could explain.

"Tell me what happened."

Ravi opened his mouth.

The words did not come.

He looked at his hands instead.

"Take your time."

The animal sound kept on through the wall.

"I came home from the library." His voice sounded thin, as if it had been stretched. "The door was open. The latch was broken. The light was on. I went in. He was on her. With a knife. I — there's a rod. By the door. I hit him. He came at me. The knife — we — and then he stopped."

He stopped.

He looked up.

"I killed him."

Flat.

Jayesh did not look away. His hand moved to Ravi's shoulder. The hand was warm. The grip was firm.

"You stopped him from killing her."

Ravi's eyes fell again. The hand stayed on his shoulder.

Through the frosted glass of the front door, the first faint flash of red and blue began to bleed into the hall. Tyres on wet road. Doors slamming. Voices.

"Listen."

Jayesh's grip tightened, briefly.

"You came home. The door was open. You went in. You saw him. There was a rod by the door. You picked it up. He came at you. There was a knife. You fought him for it."

A pause.

"That is what you tell them. The knife went where it went. You do not know how. Let them write the rest."

A breath.

"You are not alone in this."

That was all he said.

The hand stayed on his shoulder.

The frosted glass flashed red. Flashed blue. Flashed red.

His eyes drifted past Jayesh, past the desk, to the bookshelves behind. The lamp's edge did not quite reach them. They rose into shadow. On the lowest shelf, behind a leaning stack of something he could not name, something pale caught the light briefly — a small carved shape, foreign, rounded. He could not see it clearly. His vision was wet. He did not know what the shape was. He looked away.

The voices outside the door were louder.

Jayesh's hand was still on his shoulder.

The chair released him.

It released him into himself, into the chair he was sitting in now, twenty-four years old, in a study that smelled of paper and coffee and old wood. The lamp on the desk was the same lamp. The leather was the same leather, older. Jayesh had stood from his own chair, on the other side of the desk, and was watching him.

Ravi did not know how long he had been gone. Seconds, maybe. The cream-coloured card was still on the desk. Jayesh's hand was no longer on it.

His own hands were shaking.

He had not made a sound. He was almost certain he had not made a sound. But Jayesh was looking at him in a way the old man rarely looked at him, and the looking was a kind of seeing.

He could not stop the shaking.

He turned his face away. He put the heel of his hand to his eye.

The animal sound from years ago came up through his chest in a register that did not let it out. It stayed in him. It made his ribs hurt.

Jayesh did not say anything.

Jayesh stood up from his chair. His knees made the sound old men's knees make. He crossed the small distance between his chair and Ravi's. He did not crouch. He simply stopped in front of the boy and stood there for a moment, his loose kurta close enough that Ravi could smell the soap his mother used in his clothes. Then his hand came up.

His hand went to the back of Ravi's head.

He drew the boy forward.

Ravi's forehead met the loose cotton of the kurta and the warmth of the chest behind it, and the warmth did not flinch from him, and the hand at the back of his head did not lift, and the second hand came around his shoulders, and he was held the way he had not been held in years.

The body holding him knew exactly what it was doing.

The room, if anyone had been watching the room, would have noted this. The lamp on the desk threw its small yellow circle. The fan above turned with its lazy weight. On the lowest shelf, behind a leaning stack of books, the small wooden bear sat in its half-shadow.

The arms holding the boy had not done this in a long time. They had once been very good at it.

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