The Edges of Time

by Farahad Zama

  Ramana stared at the plate like a dog stares at the carcasses hanging in a butcher shop. He stayed on his knees letting the noise of the crowd wash over him. He glanced behind him and saw that Nagesh and the servant were busy holding the line again and they seemed to have forgotten him. He looked slowly around, not making any sudden movements, and nobody appeared to notice him. They were all busy. He slowly crawled forward and to his right, like one of the crabs that he sometimes saw on the riverbank.

  Ramana had already decided that a direct approach to the sweets would leave him too visible, so he aimed for a pillar and reached it with no trouble. He sat up with his back to the pillar and cautiously looked over his left shoulder. His target was now less than two feet away, and more importantly, nobody was looking in this direction. He got on his hands and knees again and crept to the little table. He reached it with no trouble and put a hand out for the Mysore pak. This was a cuboid stick, about an inch square on the side and two inches long, a pale coarse yellow for most of its length and a darker smoother yellow at one end. His hand closed on the sweet and he smacked his lips in anticipation. 'Success!' he thought triumphantly.

  A sudden shout almost made him drop the sweet. 'Donga...' Thief...

  Ramana jerked his head over the table and looked straight into the eyes of Nagesh's daughter. Sudha, that was her name, he remembered. She was pointing straight at him. 'Thief,' she shouted again. 'Thaatha, he's stealing your sweets.'

  Her grandfather looked to where she was pointing and his smile disappeared. 'You scoundrel,' he said loudly, his face turning puce with anger. He picked up a walking stick from the floor next to his chair and it whistled as it swished through the air and came landing hard on Ramana's wrist.

  'Owww!' wailed Ramana and his hand jerked, pulling the silver plate to the floor with a musical clang. Sweets and savoury mixture scattered everywhere and water spread like a stain on the floor. Nagesh abandoned his line and came rushing to his father's aid. Ramana jumped to his feet and stood for a moment, half crouched, like an animal at bay. Then he turned and ran with Nagesh behind him. Unfortunately, Ramana ran straight towards the closed door of the house. He turned and stood with his back to the door, his knees bent in an alert crouch ready to jump in any direction – he was not a champion 'It' player for nothing. Nagesh spread his hands to cover as much territory as he could and walked slowly forwards.

  'Thief!' said Nagesh. 'How dare you lay your unclean hands on food meant for my father? I'll thrash you and teach you a lesson that you won't forget in a hurry.'

  Ramana backed right up against the door but it was bolted and did not budge. He was trapped! He had no doubt that Nagesh meant what he said. Ramana was in for a beating. He threw the stick of Mysore Pak in his hand at Nagesh. The young man brushed it away, and continued forward cautiously. The noise behind Nagesh rose and Ramana pointed behind Nagesh and said, 'Look.'

  Nagesh shook his head with a smile. 'I was not born yesterday,' he said. 'I won't fall for such an elementary trick.'

  But Ramana had not been playing a trick. Despite Nagesh's remonstrations, it was clear that there were not enough clothes for everybody who had turned up and some people would have to go without. The servant had been fighting a losing battle to hold the line against the crowd and the end when it came was swift. The man was forced to take one step back and before he could push forward again, he was overwhelmed. There was a stampede towards the pile of clothes in a free-for-all. Sudha screamed. Nagesh turned and was horrified to see the crowd rushing towards his daughter and father. He ran to them, beating a path through the maelstrom. Ramana tried to escape but was pinned against the door by the crush of the mob.

  Several minutes later, Nagesh managed to rescue his family members – his father's crisp white dhoti was torn and his daughter had a bruise on her forehead and was crying hysterically. He looked up to see Ramana running through the yard to the street. 'Catch the bastard,' he shouted, and ran after the boy.

  Ramana dodged a few people who responded to Nagesh's shout and ran on to the street, barely ahead of Nagesh and his men. He turned towards the river, the safety of his home. He heard somebody shout, 'That's Ramana, the cowherd's boy.'

  Ramana stumbled but recovered in time to continue running. He couldn't go home now. He ran straight to the river and splashed his way through the ford. The villagers stopped half-way in the river. Ramana's last view of the village he had been born in was of Nagesh shaking his fist and shouting, 'If you ever come back, I'll skin you alive, you thieving son-of-a-bitch.'

  Early the next morning, he reached the railway station, hungry and tired. He had spent a restless night under a tree, terrified of ghosts and snakes, and early in the morning, a kindly farmer going to the market gave him a lift. If the farmer had been less kindly, Ramana might have been found by his parents who reached the spot where he had slept just half an hour later, but of course, he wasn't to know that. At the station, there were two trains – one going to Vizag and the other to the state capital, Hyderabad. As he got on to platform one with the intention of begging some coins and buying a meal, he saw a policeman walking towards him and he quailed. Had the policeman heard that he was a thief? He hesitated for a moment and then ran away from the policeman, knocking down an old woman. 'Hey!' shouted the policeman and Ramana doubled his speed. At the end of the platform, there was an overbridge to the other platform and he ran up the stairs. He ran over the tracks and down on the other side to platform two. At that moment, the train standing there gave a long hoot and started moving. Some boys standing in the doorway scooped him up from the platform and dragged him into the train. 'You were lucky,' said the leader of the boys, a short, wiry teenager. 'If it was not for us, you'd have missed your train.'

  'But I didn't want to get on the train,' Ramana said, when he got his breath back.

  'Oh!' the boys said, and all of them, including Ramana, looked out of the window. It was too late. The train had picked up speed and had left the station well behind. A dusty brown plain, dotted with trees and fields stretched away from the south.

  Ramana started crying. 'I want to go back home,' he said, wiping the snot from his nose with the back of his wrist. The train sped through villages with a short whistle. A travelling ticket examiner walked past the boys, nodding to them.

  'That's the TTE,' said the leader of the boys. 'Do you have a ticket?'

  Ramana shook his head. The leader said, 'We paid him twenty rupees so he didn't say anything. Otherwise he'll catch you and hand you over to the police.'

  'Oh,' said Ramana, his eyes opening wide. 'I don't want to be handed over to the police.'

  'Don't look so scared!' said the boys, laughing. 'As long as you are with us, you are safe.'

  The train was a passenger service – a slow train that stopped at every small town, picking up and dropping customers. Ramana had decided to take the boys' advice and had stuck with them. As the day advanced, the train travelled through the fertile plains of the Coromandel Coast, where rivers and streams abounded and villages were plentiful. As the sun started setting, the train left the plains and entered the Deccan plateau, formed millions of years ago by extensive lava flows. Here, the land was drier, habitations more infrequent and they picked up speed. Ramana found that he loved the rhythmic rattle of the train, the haunting hoots, the busy-ness of railway stations – each different, but also all the same. Many things could have gone wrong for Ramana. The boys could have been Fagins who sent runaway kids out begging, maiming them if necessary to attract more sympathy and alms. The police or the TTE could have caught him to meet some target. He could have taken a different train and ended up in some small town where he would have been lucky to grow up being a cycle mechanic or a porter, but destiny had the young boy in her grip now, and took him safely to historic Hyderabad – the capital city of the State and famed for its blend of Muslim and Hindu cultures, a city that murdered both Urdu and Telugu languages to come up with a unique patois, for its biryani and for its anarchic road sense
– which is saying something in India.

  Ramana was disgorged into the maelstrom of a big city along with the rest of the train and lost track of the other boys just outside the station. He stayed in the vicinity of the station for a couple of days, begging for food and coins until the local beggars kicked him out. He then ventured further into the city – with no money in his pocket and no education. His only skill was herding cows which wasn't much use in this urban environment. After a whole day without anything to eat and feeling faint and dizzy with hunger, he came across a woman running a roadside tea stall. She reminded him vaguely of his mother he and asked her for some food. 'Do you have any money?' she said, keeping one eye on the customers.

  He shook his head.

  'Do I look like a charity to you?' she said. The tea stall was a small wooden table with two kerosene stoves for cooking and a longer table with benches on either side for the customers. Both tables were on the footpath. Besides tea, she served tiffins like idlis and samosas. Two men walked off the street and sat on the bench and she rushed over to them. 'What would you like, sirs?' she asked them.

  'One by two,' said one of the men. She smiled and served them with one tea, divided into two glasses.

  'You still standing here?' she said to Ramana after a few minutes.

  'You look like my mother,' the boy said.

  Neelima had been married to an alcoholic, abusive man who had beaten her almost every day for five years. One day her husband had drunk adulterated alcohol that had destroyed his liver and they sold his half-acre of land and made their way to Hyderabad for his treatment. The next few months were a round of doctors, hospitals and pharmacies and watching their nest egg dwindle to almost nothing before her husband, drunk one evening to the gills despite the doctor's warnings, had done the decent thing and stepped into the path of a car. Neelima did not want to go back to the village where she now had nothing, and so with the last of her savings and the small amount of money that the police – doing something good for once – had made the car driver give her as compensation, she had opened the tea stall. She would have loved to have children but she didn't want another husband – one man was more than enough for one lifetime, she felt – so she was resigned to the fact that she would be childless forever. But she wasn't a sentimental fool. A year running a business on the streets had cured her of any sentiments that she might have had left over after her husband's treatment of her. 'Po, po', she said. Go, go. She waved her hand as if swatting a fly away.

  Ramana didn't leave. The smell of the food and the aroma of boiling milk – that was one thing that had never been in short supply in their house in the village – made his mouth water and his stomach tighten. He just stood there, shuffling from foot to foot.

  Neelima kept an eye on him, making sure he didn't come so close that he could steal something from her. Suddenly there was a loud wail from the other end of the street. Everybody looked that way and a man came running awkwardly down the road struggling with an oversized canvas bag over one shoulder. 'Police!' he gasped, as he passed them.

  'Aiyyo,' wailed Neelima and started switching off the stove. Despite the help they had provided at the time of her husband's death, she hated the police more than anything else in her life. They swaggered down the street drinking her tea and eating her food without offering any payment. They knew that she was a single woman and flirted with her, making crude suggestions, and she was forced to smile and be polite to them. They collected a haftha, a weekly payment, from her, as well as from all the other businesses along the footpath. And every so often, whenever they needed to hit their targets, the police raided the street, clearing the footpath, wantonly throwing stock on the road and arresting the poor people trying to make their living as best they could on the streets. She gathered all the food into one big aluminium dish. She had to get away. If she didn't, she could easily lose a month's profits in damages and bribes.

  On hearing the word police, her customers gulped their teas and vanished without paying. None of them wanted to get entangled in any trouble. Ramana's knees shook when he heard that the police were coming and he almost ran away, but he saw the desperation on Neelima's face and stopped. He hadn't just said that she reminded him of his mother because he was hoping for food – though that had been one of his motivations. The woman really did make him think of his mother – something about the way she wore her sari and the way she bent her head to one side felt very familiar to him. He rushed to the bench and collected the two plates and all the glasses, pouring away the dregs of the leftover tea on to the road and brought them to Neelima. She took them from him silently and stuffed them all into a bag. She took the kerosene stove and the bag carrying tea powder, sugar and batter – her most capital-intensive items and started hurrying towards a small side street. Ramana followed her with the bags of clean and dirty dishes, plates and glasses. They shoved the stove and bags in the gap between a telephone switchbox and a wall, then came back for the table and benches. He helped her put the table over the bench. By this time, the noise of the police and the wailing peddlers was much louder and closer. They had no more than a few minutes to escape. They each held one end of the bench and raised it off the ground, lifting the table along with the bench. Ramana's arms almost came off his shoulders as he carried the heavy weight. A hundred yards along the road, there was a permanent kiosk on stilts selling cigarettes and lottery tickets. Neelima nodded to the shopkeeper in the kiosk and turning the bench and table ninety degrees, she pushed them all the way under the floor of the kiosk. That's where she stored the furniture overnight and paid the shopkeeper a weekly rent. 'Come,' she said to Ramana, and they walked away from the street so as not to get caught in the dragnet. 'What's your name?' she asked.

  Late that night, fed and feeling secure for the first time in days, he remembered his dad and his mom and his friends back in the village and before he realised it, he was crying. Neelima, sleeping next to him, woke up at the noise and wordlessly hugged him, until his sobs slowly died away. 'I want to go back home,' he said to her.

  'Where is home?' she asked.

  'In my village,' he said.

  'Which village?'

  'My village,' he said, and only then he realised that he didn't know where he had come from, just that it lay between the river and a mountain with a temple at its peak. He started crying again.

  'Shh...,' Neelima said. 'Don't cry now, that's a good boy. You can stay with me. I'll look after you.'

  By the time Ramana was sixteen, he and Neelima had graduated to a proper café on a side road near Gatchibowli. The shop was small and dingy and it was on the outskirts of the city, so the rent was cheap. They weren't rich by any means but neither of them was extravagant and they got by. They had taken the milk distributorship in the area and their day stretched from four in the morning when they got up to take delivery of the milk from the dairy vans and distributed milk packets to the houses in the area. Poorer customers who couldn't afford to buy the one-litre packets were sold loose milk from the twenty-five litre cans that the dairy sent them.

  At six they fired up the kitchen in the café and started making tea, coffee and breakfasts – idlis, puris, vadas, even toast for some strange people who were so inclined. Neelima was a good cook and they had a regular contingent of customers. By ten, breakfasts tailed off and they had a small respite in which they ate some food. By eleven, they started making lunch and at noon Ramana hung out a board saying, Lunch Reddy. The message was repeated with no mistake in Telugu. Lunches and teas carried them through to seven at which point dinner started. They rarely went to bed before eleven at night, exhausted. The schedule was relentless but no different to what everybody around went through and they were happy. The one break in the routine was Sunday, when they closed after lunch and took the evening off. He and Neelima would sometimes go to see one of the many sights in Hyderabad – the four-turreted Charminar in the old city where Neelima would occasionally buy glass and lac bangles, Hussain Sagar Lake with the massiv
e statue of Buddha in the middle, Golkonda fort, Salar Jung museum. But most Sundays they went to see a movie. Ramana liked action-packed films and Neelima liked romances; Telugu movies usually have heavy doses of both so they usually found something that satisfied them both. Ramana occasionally remembered his village and his parents but the memories had faded over the years and he now regarded Neelima as his mother – though he called her akka, elder sister. For her part, Neelima was fond of Ramana and found life easier with him around – she wasn't a single woman on her own anymore, but a mother, and that made it easier to fend off unwanted advances from men. Besides, he was a big help in the business. They trusted each other implicitly and together they were able to achieve much more than either could have done on their own. This particular Sunday, they had seen a movie and decided to eat in the latest foreign restaurant that had just opened – something that sold chicken pakodis – battered chicken pieces that were deep-fried and served with potato fries that were as slim and long as cigarettes. The place was brightly lit and filled with affluent families and college students. Neelima felt shy about visiting such a place – it was out of her social league, she felt - but Ramana insisted. He had a teenager's bolshie attitude to class and considered himself no less than any of the other young men in the city even if they were better educated than him and had more money to flash around. They found a place and both sat down. Several minutes later, nobody came to serve them and Ramana started drumming his fingers on the table. In their café, one of them rushed to a customer within a minute of their arrival, ready to take the order. Finally a cleaner arrived and Ramana asked him, 'Can you send the waiter to us?'