Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [153]
“I expect to see you back in the kitchen, helping Almaz. And from now on, in the daytime, the door and window to your quarters stay open. Let some light and air in there.”
If Rosina was going to make claims on her daughter, this was the moment.
We held our breath.
She didn't say a word. She made a curt bow, and left.
WE FELL BACK into our school routine: loads of homework, then Hemawork, which included penmanship, current affairs discussions, vocabulary, and book reports. Cricket for me and Shiva, and dance for Shiva and Genet. Many an evening Gosh bowled to us on a makeshift pitch on our front lawn. For a large man he had a delicate touch with the bat and taught us how to sweep, to drive, and to square-cut.
Shiva was, as of that year, exempt from school assignments, the result of Hema and Ghosh negotiating with his teachers at Loomis Town & Country. Both sides were relieved. Shiva didn't have to write an essay on the battle of Hastings if he saw no point to it. Loomis Town & Country would collect Shiva's fees and let him attend class, since he wasn't disruptive. Shiva didn't mind the ritual of school. The teachers knew us and they understood Shiva as well as one could understand Shiva. But just like Mr. Bailey, newly arrived from Bristol, some teachers had to discover Shiva for themselves. Bailey was the only teacher in LT&C's history to have a degree, and therefore he felt obliged to set a very high standard. Two-thirds of us failed the first math test. “One of you scored a perfect one hundred. But he or she didn't write a name on the paper. The rest of you were miserable. Sixty-six percent of you failed,” he exclaimed. “What do you think about that number? Sixty-six!”
For Shiva, rhetorical questions were a trap. He never asked a question to which he knew the answer. Shiva raised his hand. I cringed in my seat. Mr. Bailey's eyebrow went up, as if a chair in the corner which he'd managed to ignore for a few months had suddenly developed delusions that it was alive.
“You have something to say?”
“Sixty-six is my second-favorite number,” Shiva said.
“Pray, why is it your second favorite?” said Bailey.
“Because if you take the numbers you can divide into sixty-six, including sixty-six, and add them up, what you have is a square.”
Mr. Bailey couldn't resist. He wrote down 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 22, 33, and 66—all the numbers that went into 66—and then he totaled. What he got was 144, at which point both he and Shiva said, “Twelve squared!”
“That's what makes sixty-six special,” Shiva said. “It's also true of three, twenty-two, sixty-six, seventy—their divisors add up to a square.”
“Pray, tell us what's your favorite number,” Bailey said, no sarcasm in his voice anymore, “since sixty-six is your second favorite?”
Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote: 10,213,223.
Bailey studied this for a long while, turning a bit red. Then he threw up his hands in a gesture that struck me as very ladylike. “And pray, why would this number interest us?”
“The first four numbers are your license plate.” From Mr. Bailey's expression, I didn't think he was aware of this. “That's a coincidence,” Shiva went on. “This number,” Shiva said, tapping on the board with the chalk, getting as excited as Shiva allowed himself to get, “is the only number that describes itself when you read it. ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, and two threes!” Then my brother laughed in delight, a sound so rare that our class was stunned. He brushed chalk off his hands, sat down, and he was done.
It was the only bit of mathematics that stayed with me from that year. As for the student who scored one hundred percent?—whoever it was had drawn a picture of Veronica on the test paper in lieu of a name.
I mulled over our fates, especially the good fortune that let him skip homework. I suppose I understood. Since Shiva couldn't do or wouldn't do what was required of him, he