One Anna

They took the train north the next morning, then a bus, and then, because the telegram had asked it, the ferry.

Bhola was the ferryman now. He was twenty, broad-shouldered, and he poled the boat across the Rupnala the way Haren had taught him, with long unhurried strokes. When he saw who was waiting on the far bank he dropped the pole into the water and had to fish it out, and then he said nothing at all for the whole crossing, only wept quietly and steered.

Shonapur had shrunk. That was how it seemed to Meghla, climbing the thirty-one steps for the first time in five years. The market was smaller, the banyan lower, the river narrower than the one in her memory. The yellow house still stood above the bank, but its paint had faded to the colour of old turmeric, and two of the green shutters hung by a single hinge. The motor car was gone. Most of the servants were gone. The new government was passing laws to break up the great landed estates, and everyone knew that within a few years the Lahiri fields would belong to the families who farmed them. It was just, Ishan said quietly as they walked. It was long overdue. But it was strange to watch the house learning it.

Ishan's father met them in the courtyard. Bhabanath Lahiri had been a tall, loud man once, the kind who filled a room before he entered it. Now he was an old one. He looked at Meghla for a long moment, and then, to her astonishment, he pressed his palms together and bowed his head, the greeting you give an equal.

"She is awake," he said. "She has been waiting for you since yesterday. She will not let us send for the priest until you come."

Sarojini Lahiri lay in a high carved bed in a room that smelled of camphor and marigolds. She had become very small, a little heap of white cloth and silver hair on the big pillows. Her eyes were the same, though. Grey-brown, sharp, missing nothing.

"Leave us," she told her son and grandson. And when they hesitated: "I am dying, not deaf. Go."

The door closed. The old woman studied Meghla in silence.

"You cut your hair," she said at last.

"No. I only plait it now. A teacher can't have it in her eyes."

"A teacher." Sarojini closed her eyes briefly. "Good. I hoped so. Come closer. I have something of yours."

With great effort she drew a hand from beneath the blanket. Her fingers were curled around a small knot of white cloth, the corner of a sari, tied tight in the way women in Bengal have always kept their coins. She held it out. Meghla took it and untied it, and on her palm lay a single copper coin, worn nearly smooth.

One anna.

"I have kept it tied in my sari every day for five years," the old woman said. "Every single day. I could not bring myself to give it to Bhola, or the temple, or the river. It was not theirs. It was your father's fare."

Meghla's hand closed over the coin. She could not speak.

"Now listen, and do not interrupt, because I am not strong enough to say this twice." Sarojini took a slow breath. "I watched you both for seven years, from the window of the prayer room, which looks over the orchard. Every morning I saw that boy go down to the boathouse, and every morning I saw you run up from the ghat. I could have stopped it any day I chose. I didn't. Do you know why?"

Meghla shook her head.

"Because I had never seen him happy. Not once since he was born. He was a frightened, careful, lonely child in this big frightened house. And then he wasn't." The old woman's mouth twisted. "So I let it go on. And when it became real, when he wanted to marry you, I was afraid. Not of you. Of what people would say. Of what it would cost the name. Pride is a fine house, child. It keeps out the weather. It keeps out everything else, too. I lived in it all my life, and I did not notice until the river took your father instead of me that it had no doors."

Her voice was fading. She reached out again, blindly, and Meghla took her hand.

"I was wrong to ask you to go," Sarojini whispered. "No. You were right to listen. But it was wrong of me to be the one who asked. Do you understand the difference?"

"Yes," Meghla said, barely a breath. "I think I do."

"Then I would like to cross your river properly, once. With my fare paid. Did you bring it? The ledger?"

She had. Ishan had given it to her on the train without a word. She opened it to the page of the flood and laid it on the blanket, then uncapped the green pen, placed it in the old woman's fingers, and held the book steady.

Beneath the line that read Sarojini Lahiri. Fare: one anna. Unpaid, in a shaky, careful, educated hand, Ishan's grandmother wrote a single word.

Paid.

Then she let the pen fall and lay back on the pillows and closed her eyes. "Now call my grandson," she said. "And tell him he is a fool if he lets you get on that ferry alone."

She died a little before dawn, with her son and grandson beside her and Meghla at the foot of the bed, holding a copper coin so tightly that it left a mark on her palm for a day.

They cremated her on the riverbank, on the same stretch of sand where Haren had been given to the river five years before. Meghla never learned who chose the place. She suspected Sarojini herself.

That evening, after the mourners had gone, Bhabanath found Meghla on the ghat steps. He sat down beside her awkwardly, an old man unused to sitting on stone, and handed her a folded document with the estate seal.

"The ferry lease," he said. "The last thing on this river that still belongs to us. My mother had it transferred to your name a month ago. She said the ferry had always been a Majhi's, and the estate had only been borrowing it."

Meghla looked at the paper for a long time. Then she folded it, put it in her cloth bag beside the ledger, and stood.

"Tell Ishan I'm taking the first crossing in the morning," she said. "Back to the city. The girls have examinations in three weeks."

Bhabanath stared at her. "Will you not tell him yourself?"

"He knows where the ghat is," she said. "He has known since he was eleven."