The Homework That Sounded Like Nobody

The homework was one page about somebody on your road.

Miss Fernandes wrote it on the board on Tuesday and said it was due Thursday. Rehaan copied it into his diary. Then he did not think about it again until Wednesday, at ten past nine at night.

There was a man who mended shoes at the corner of their road. He had a wooden box and a low stool. He sat under the tree outside the medical shop, from about eight in the morning until it got dark. Rehaan had walked past him roughly four thousand times. Rehaan knew nothing about him at all.

At ten past nine on Wednesday, he opened his mother’s laptop and typed: one page about a shoe repairer on a city street, class 7 level, warm.

It took nine seconds.

It was good. That was the whole trouble. It had a line about hands that knew leather the way a musician’s hands know a string. It used the word myriad. It ended with the road being a tapestry of small lives.

Rehaan read it twice. Something went warm in his chest, the way it does when a thing you made turns out better than you expected.

He copied it into his notebook in his own handwriting. That took a great deal longer than nine seconds. Then he changed two words, so it would not look perfect.

On Friday, Miss Fernandes put a star on it.

On Monday, she read it out in assembly.

The hall had four fans and three of them worked. Two hundred and forty children sat on the floor with their legs crossed. Rehaan stood at the side of the stage with his shirt tucked in. Miss Fernandes read out a page about hands, and leather, and a tapestry. When she reached myriad, a chair scraped at the back. She waited for it to stop, and then said the word again.

They clapped. Not a lot — assembly clapping, the kind that starts and finishes at the same moment for everybody. But on the stairs afterwards, two boys from the other section said that was good, yaar. A girl he had never spoken to said the leather line was nice.

On the stairs somebody asked him the time and he said it without looking, the way he always did. Twenty-five to nine.

He said thanks. He said thanks three times that day.

Dadi’s eyes had been going for two years. She could still watch television if she sat close enough. She could still find a dropped earring on a whole floor. But print was finished. So in the evenings, somebody read to her. Headlines, mostly. Letters. Report cards, when they came.

That evening she wanted the famous essay.

“Read it,” she said. “Your mother has told me about it twice.”

She was on the floor with the beans, snapping the ends off and dropping them into a steel plate. Rehaan sat on the edge of the bed with his notebook open on his knees.

He read it out. His own handwriting, his own voice — and four lines in, he heard himself doing something odd. He was reading it the way you read out a notice. Flat and careful. He got to myriad and it came out of his mouth wrong, with the weight on the wrong part of the word. He had to go back and say it again.

Dadi snapped the end off a bean.

“What is myriad?”

“A lot,” said Rehaan. “Lots of something.”

“Hmn,” said Dadi.

He read the rest of it. The tapestry. The small lives. He shut the notebook and put it down on the bed.

Dadi worked through four more beans. The plate went ting, ting.

“What colour is his box?”

Rehaan opened his mouth. Then he sat there on the edge of the bed with his mouth open and the fan going round above him.

“Green,” he said. “I think it’s green.”

“You think.”

She reached over for another handful.

On Saturday he was sent to the medical shop with a hundred rupees in his pocket. He came back the long way. The shutter of the sweet shop was half up, the way it always was on Saturdays. A bicycle leaned against the tree with no lock on it, and never had one.

He stopped at the corner. It was twenty past four.

The box was green. The man’s name was Bashir, and he had been at that corner since 1991. The box was green because the man who sold it to him had happened to have green paint. On the pavement beside the stool there was a tin of nails, a brush worn down to a stub, and a coil of black thread.

Under the top tray of the box, Bashir kept a photograph of two girls, folded once down the middle. Both girls had finished school. One of them worked in an office in another city, in a building with a lift in it, which he mentioned twice.

He charged forty rupees for a heel. He did not charge for school shoes on Mondays. On Mondays every child’s shoes came back wrecked from the weekend, and that was hardly the child’s fault.

He said you could tell everything about a person from the left shoe. He would not say why the left one.

A dog slept under the stool and had slept there for six years. When Rehaan asked what the dog was called, Bashir looked genuinely surprised.

“Dog,” he said.

Rehaan sat on the kerb for forty minutes. He did not write anything down. He had nothing to write on.

He wrote the essay again on Sunday night. It took him two hours, and it came out shorter — three lines shorter than the one with the star. There was nothing in it about leather, and nothing about tapestries. There was a green box, and a folded photograph, and a dog called Dog, and Mondays.

On Monday he put it on Miss Fernandes’ desk and said it was the same homework, done again. She looked at him for a second longer than she needed to. She said all right, and put it under her register.

She gave it a tick.

The first one stayed up in the corridor outside the staff room, on green paper, with the star on it. It was there until the end of term, and he walked past it twice a day.

The second one went up on the classroom board with thirty others. It was down at the far end, near the window, where the sun got in and the tape kept giving up. Nobody stopped at it.

Going home he passed the corner. Bashir had a sandal upside down on his knee, and he was doing something to the sole of it with a small hammer. He did not look up, because he was working.