Ash on the Rice
Ask who farms the ground, and you have asked everything.
Every family keeps a calendar it never writes down. In this one there is the year of the big flood, when the lane went under to the height of a man's knee. The year of the car. Before your grandmother's operation and after your grandmother's operation, which between them account for most of the nineteen-seventies. And running beneath all of it, holding the whole arrangement up the way the beam you cannot see holds up a ceiling: before, and after. Not before what. Just before - said easily, at the table, over rice, by people passing each other the sambal, everyone in the room knowing exactly where the line falls and nobody, in sixty years, once putting a number on it.
Ratri puts a number on it.
Because two dates set side by side on her own table turn out to be eleven days apart: the week her family's land changed hands, and the week six men from the next village stopped being anywhere at all.
Her grandfather was a clerk. Thirty-one years in the same office, a good man by every account anyone in that district will give you, a man who paid a neighbour's school fees for eleven years and went somewhere every Thursday and never said where. He was four steps from the gate on his way home, at ten past six on a warm evening in November, when he was asked a question. If he had left eleven minutes earlier, none of the rest of it would have had anything to do with him. He has done that arithmetic several hundred times, at four in the morning.
Forty kilometres away an eighty-five-year-old woman has been carrying six names in her head - in order, with the personal details attached - since before Ratri's father was born. There is no document anywhere in the country that lists them together. Nobody has ever come and asked.
Now somebody has - and the question is no longer what happened, but what a granddaughter is actually required to do about a house, a certificate, and a grave with no marker on it.
It is easy to be sure what you would have done in 1965. It is much harder to say what you would do now - holding the certificate, in a good house, with your father asleep down the hall.