Part Two — The Slip · Chapter 11 of 40

Nikhil

Nikhil Wagh was thirteen in 2004 and was in the flat every day of it except eleven, and this is the complete record of what his father observed about him that year.

That he had got tall in the way that happens between March and September, and that his school trousers were let down twice by the tailor at the corner and that Jagdish paid for it without being asked twice, which he considered, at the time, to be a form of attention.

That he had stopped eating coriander at some point and had then started again, and that nobody in the house could say when.

That he was, according to a report card signed in the office above the bank at eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning because it had been in the bag since Friday, doing well in mathematics and badly in Marathi, which struck Jagdish as an odd shape for a boy in that house to have, and which he intended to ask about.

That he had a friend called Omkar who came on Saturdays and whose mother telephoned once about a cricket bat.

That when Aditi argued at the table — and Aditi argued at the table across the whole of 2004, about displacement in April, about a road-widening in July, about whether her father’s trade was a trade or an appetite in a bad exchange in October that Meera stopped — Nikhil ate, and looked at whoever was speaking, and did not join, and left the table when it ended.

Jagdish read this as agreement with him.

It is the single most consequential misreading of his life and it did not feel like a reading at all. It felt like weather. A house contains a person who argues and a person who does not, and the one who does not is understood, by everybody including himself, to be the easy one.

There was one evening in that year, in November, when it nearly came apart.

Jagdish came home at half past ten from the site and found Nikhil at the dining table with the maths and the tube light on, working, at an hour when a thirteen-year-old should not have been.

“What’s this?”

“Test.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Thursday.”

Jagdish sat down opposite him — actually sat down, took off his watch and put it on the table, which was the thing he did when he intended to stay — and pulled the book round and looked at the problem, and it was mensuration, and he had spent the whole of that day standing on a slab arguing about a lift shaft.

“This one’s wrong.”

“I know it’s wrong.”

“You’ve taken the diameter for the radius.” He turned the book back. “Do it again.”

Nikhil did it again. It came out right. He wrote it down without any particular expression and went to the next one, and Jagdish sat and watched him do three more, and it was, in a way that Jagdish could not have explained and never mentioned to anybody, the best twenty minutes of 2004.

At the end of it Nikhil said: “Are you going to be finished by next Diwali?”

Jagdish’s hand stopped on the table.

“Why?”

“Aditi said there’s a lady who wants to do her rangoli.”

“Who told Aditi?”

“You did.” Nikhil was already closing the book. “In June sometime. At dinner.”

Jagdish had no memory of saying it. He had said it, evidently, at his own table, in June, when it was still recoverable, and one child had kept it and the other had passed it on.

“It’ll be a bit after that,” he said.

“Okay,” said Nikhil, and picked up his book and went to bed.

That is the whole of it.

It would be a kindness to the man to record that he lay awake afterwards, or that the exchange about the rangoli lodged the way the sentence about the lakh and a half had lodged in April.

It did not. He got up at six the next morning and was on site by seven because the lift shaft argument was unresolved, and the November of 2004 continued, and the test on Thursday went well or did not, and no one in the house has any idea now which.

What is worth setting down — and it can only be set down here, in the middle, where it belongs and where nobody would look for it — is that in the whole of 2004 Jagdish Wagh did not have a single conversation with his son that was not about a thing: a trouser, a report card, a cricket bat, a problem in mensuration.

He would have said, if asked at the end of that year, that he and Nikhil got on well. He would have been telling the truth as he had it. They did not argue. The boy was easy. The house had one difficult child and one easy one and Jagdish had privately, and with a father’s ordinary unfairness, been grateful for the easy one all year, because the difficult one required attention and he had none spare, and the easy one appeared not to.

Five years later, in a room in this book that has not happened yet, Jagdish will try to reconstruct 2004 in order to answer a question, and he will find that he has the trousers, the coriander, the report card, Omkar’s mother, and twenty minutes of mensuration in November.

And he will find that it is not enough to build anything out of, and that it was, at the time, everything he had noticed, and that these two facts are the same fact.