What They Were Talking About at Night

Aman got up for water at about eleven, and the kitchen light was on. The line of it lay across the floor of the hall, under the door, all the way to the mat.

He stopped in the hall, three steps short of the door, because of the way they were talking.

Not loud. That was the thing. Both voices were low and very careful, the way you carry something full to the top of a cup. He heard his father say a number. He heard his mother say the word February. He heard the tap go on and then off again, and a chair move.

He went back to bed without the water, past the shoes at the door and the bag on the floor.

Aman was eleven. He did not understand the number, and he did not know what happened in February. But he knew that way of talking.

After that, he stopped asking.

He did not decide it in one go. It was more that a list started in his head, of things not to bring up. The list grew quietly, the way dust grows on the top of a door.

His shoes came apart at the toe, the left one. He did it with a rubber band round the front, under the sock, where it did not show. It held perfectly well for two months.

The extra science class started in July and eight boys from his class joined it. Aman said it clashed with football. It did not clash with football.

At the shop he started saying he was not hungry. Nobody believed him. He said it anyway, twice.

He was, in his own opinion, being extremely good.

The trip form came home in the last week of August.

Three days at the hill camp in October. Fifteen hundred rupees, and the bus, and a list of things to bring. A torch. A water bottle. Two pairs of socks. A plate and a spoon and a mug with your name on the bottom. It was the trip everybody had been talking about since Class 5. Aman had a place on the bus and a name on the list.

He put the form flat at the bottom of his bag, under the books, and he left it there.

Eleven days later his mother found it.

She was emptying the bag onto the kitchen table, because his lunchbox had leaked into everything. Out came the form, with a stain on one corner and no signature on it.

She read it. She looked at the date on it, which had gone by four days earlier.

“Aman.”

He came and stood at the end of the table, with his bag still open on it and the wet books out in a row.

“Why is this in the bottom of your bag?”

And he said the thing he had been saying for months, which was that he did not really want to go.

His mother put the form down.

She did not shout at all. She sat down on the kitchen chair and was quiet for a while. Then she asked him what else he had not asked for.

He did not answer that.

So she asked him about the shoes. He took them off and showed her the rubber band. His mother looked at that rubber band for a long time and did not say anything at all.

Then she said, “Get your father.”

They sat at the table, all three, at ten o’clock at night.

His father did not say very much. He asked when Aman had heard them, and Aman said the night the light was on. His father nodded slowly, as if he were fitting something into place that had been the wrong way round for a while.

“That was our thing to sort out,” he said. “Not yours.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t know. That’s fine.”

Then his mother said, “Say the thing you want. Out loud. Once.”

And it turned out to be one of the hardest sentences Aman had ever had to build. It came out badly and in the wrong order and he looked at the table for all of it.

“I want to go on the trip.”

“Okay,” said his mother.

They rang the school on the Monday. There was a fuss about the date and one teacher was annoyed. In the end he got a place, because two boys had dropped out.

It cost something. That is true and nobody in the house pretended otherwise. The fridge had been making its noise since June. The man came in November instead of September. For those two months the milk had to be finished the same day.

Aman knew that. Nobody told him and nobody hid it either.

On the last night of August his mother signed the form at the kitchen table, with the pen from the drawer that mostly works. She left it lying there flat, so the ink would dry.

Then they went to bed and left the kitchen light on over it. The form, the pen, the table, the chairs, and one cup nobody had put in the sink.