The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [41]
The house, however, was empty. Ranjit debated the propriety of going inside when no one was at home, but he couldn’t just drop the food on the ground. He knocked on the unlocked door, called a greeting, and then entered.
The first room he came to was the kitchen—propane stove; sink with no faucets but a drain and a large plastic water jug, nearly empty; table and chairs; not much else. Just off it was a smaller room, evidently a bedroom for someone because of the couch with the pillows and the pile of folded sheets at one end of it. And the third room was the largest yet, but also the most crowded: two cribs, two cots, three or four chests of drawers, a couple of chairs…
And something else.
Something was different from the way it had been when Ranjit had been there as a boy. Then he saw that in the corner of the children’s room there was a trace of something on the wall, and when he looked more carefully, he saw that it was a nearly obliterated religious poster, written in Sanskrit.
Well, of course! This was the house’s northeast corner, and this had once been the home’s puja corner, the sacrosanct space for devotion and prayer that every gods-fearing Hindu household possessed. But what had become of it now? Where was the idol of Shiva—of any one of the gods, anyway—on its little stand? Where was the incense container or the plate to hold flowers for the offering or any other of the ritual necessities for worship? There was nothing! It had been a good many years since Ranjit had thought of himself as in any sense religious, but when he looked on the heap of washed but unfolded children’s clothing in what had once been the home’s immaculate and holy puja space, he did feel a sense of, well, almost revulsion. It just wasn’t the way a proper Hindu family, atheist or not, should conduct itself.
When he heard voices approaching from outside and went out to introduce himself, he became less sure that this was a proper Hindu family. Its head, the wife of Kirthis Kanakaratnam, did not dress like a proper Hindu woman. She was wearing men’s overalls and a pair of men’s boots, and she was pulling a child’s coaster wagon that held, along with some smaller items, two of those big plastic jugs of water and one small female child. There were three more children, a ten-or twelve-year-old girl bearing another girl, the tiniest one yet, on her back and a boy, gamely shouldering a canvas sack of something. “Hello,” Ranjit said in general to them all. “I’m Ranjit Subramanian, Ganesh Subramanian’s son, and he sent me down with some stuff for you. It’s inside on the table. You must be Mrs. Kanakaratnam.”
The woman didn’t deny the charge. She dropped the handle of the cart and cast a glance at the sleeping passenger to make sure she was still sleeping. Then she held out her hand to be shaken. “I am Kanakaratnam’s wife,” she agreed. “Thanks. Your father has been very good to us. Can I offer you a drink of water? We don’t have any ice, but you must be thirsty after carrying that stuff all the way down here.”
He was, and gratefully drank the tumblerful she poured him out of one of the jugs. (All of their drinking water, she explained, had to be portaged in. The long-ago Boxing Day tsunami had flooded their well water with salt from the bay, and it had never recovered. It was all right for washing and for some kinds of cooking, but not to quench thirst.)
Mrs. Kanakaratnam, he observed, was a woman in her thirties, apparently healthy, not unattractive, not particularly stupid, either, but seriously at odds with a world that had turned against her. Another thing about Mrs. Kanakaratnam was that she didn’t especially like to be called Mrs. Kanakaratnam. She explained that both she and her husband really had not liked being stuck in this tropical nowhere that was called Sri Lanka. They wanted to be where things were happening—which was to say, probably America. But they had had to settle for another country because the American embassy had turned down their request for visas. They had