Part Four — The Ground · Chapter 38 of 40

Sumati

She went into hospital on the ninth of July 2009 with her chest, for the fourth time in five years, and everybody in the family behaved as they had behaved on the previous three occasions for about thirty hours, and then the doctor said a sentence with a different shape in it and they stopped.

She was seventy-five. She had taught at that school from 1959 to 1992 and had gone on marking papers for it, unpaid and unasked, until 2007, when her eyes made it impossible and she had handed the last set back with a note about the standard of the Marathi.

She was conscious most of the four days and was, in her son’s account, entirely herself, which meant that she corrected a nurse’s grammar on the second day and apologised for it on the third.

Aditi came from Pune on the tenth. Nikhil came from two days’ travel away and arrived on the morning of the twelfth, having sat up two nights, and she knew him, and said his name, and asked him whether the food there was any good.

She died at about six in the evening on the thirteenth of July.

The corridor was on the second night.

Jagdish had been sent out for tea he did not want by a nurse who wanted the bed moved, and he was standing against the wall by the window at the end when Meera came out and stood next to him.

It had been fourteen months since a car outside Kalyan.

He did not plan it. He would have said, afterwards, that a man in a corridor at two in the morning with his mother dying in a room behind him asks whatever question he has left, and that this is neither a good reason nor a bad one, it is simply what happens.

“April 2005,” he said. “You told me to ask another time.”

“I did.”

“Is this another time?”

Meera Wagh looked down the corridor for a while.

Then she told him.

What she said is not in this book.

It is not withheld for effect, and it is not withheld because it does not exist. She told one person, once, in a corridor, at two o’clock in the morning on the eleventh of July 2009, having chosen both the person and the hour across four years and three months. It took about four minutes. At the end of it he put his hand over his eyes for a moment and then took it down and said, “All right.”

Then a nurse came out and said they could go back in.

Whatever it was, it did not change anything visible. He was in the ward at ten past two. He was at the funeral. He founded a trust in September. He built on the creek plot for three years and handed it over in 2012 and it is standing and the tank works.

He never told Aditi. He never told Nikhil. He never told Rege in the three years Rege had left, or Kelkar, or Athavale, or Salvi, or anybody at all, and neither did she, and both of them lived another twenty-odd years.

Two people knew. That is the whole disposition of it. A novel is not entitled to be the third, and this one is declining to be.

The funeral was on the fourteenth.

They had expected about eighty people and they stopped counting somewhere past three hundred.

They came from the school, obviously — nine current staff and perhaps twenty former, including a woman of ninety-one who had shared a staff room with her in 1961 and who had to be carried the last part. But that was the smallest group.

The rest were her students. Forty years of them, from men of sixty-two to a boy of twenty-four, and they came in a way that nobody in that family was remotely prepared for, all afternoon, in ones and twos and in one case in a hired bus from Ambernath organised by a batch that had left in 1978.

Bhalerao came, and his wife, who had been taught by her in 1953 and who cried in a way that embarrassed her. Gokhale came with two of his sons; his father had died in 2008 in a flat he had never learned. The elder Deshpande came, and the younger, separately. Mrs. Joshi came with her son, who was twenty-two and had changed school twice and who shook Jagdish’s hand and said nothing about it. Sanjay Ranade came with his mother, whose knees were the same as they would have been anywhere.

Phatak came, who had never met her, because he was the secretary and it was proper.

Sanjay Kanetkar drove from Mulund.

Salvi came with his wife and stood at the back and did not come forward, and Jagdish saw him from forty feet away across a courtyard full of people and raised a hand, and Salvi raised one back.

Kelkar the tailor closed the shop, which he did not do, and came and sat for four hours and told three separate people about a boy who used to wait on a step.

Athavale came. Ketkar came. Pallavi came at nine in the morning and left at nine at night and organised everything without once being asked and without once being thanked, which she would have hated.

Ghaisas came, with the hip, and did not speak to anybody except to give his name.

Somewhere in the middle of that afternoon a man of about fifty-five whom nobody in the family recognised took Jagdish by both hands and said that Sumati teacher had kept him in the school in 1970 when his father wanted to put him in a workshop, and had gone to the house twice, and that he had four children and all of them had degrees.

He said it and moved on and did not give his name and was never identified.

Jagdish stood in the courtyard of the crematorium and looked at three hundred people, of whom he could put a name to perhaps sixty, and understood, in a completely different register from the one in which he had understood it on the floor of a front room in November 2006 with nine notebooks around him, what his father had meant by capital.

Vasant Wagh had written down who would sell and who decided and whose wedding was in May, and had been very good at it, and had died in 1994 with about ninety people at his funeral, most of them from the trade.

His wife had taught Marathi to a town for thirty-three years and had never written anything down except in red in the margins of other people’s work, and three hundred people came, and one of them said a sentence about 1970 and then went home.

He did not speak. The family had agreed that Aditi would speak, and she did, for four minutes, and she was very good, and afterwards she went and stood on her own by the gate for a while and Nikhil went and stood with her, and the two of them stayed there together saying almost nothing until it was time to go.

Their father watched them from the other side of the courtyard.

It is the last image of his children together in this book, and he could not hear a word of what they said, and he did not go over.