The ferry across the backwater cost two rupees when I was a girl, and Kuttan chettan the boatman never had change. If you gave him five, he waved you on and said, Next time. Next time you gave two and he waved you on again. In this way the whole village owed him money, or he owed the whole village, and no ledger existed that could tell you which.
I moved to Bangalore for work. Cards, apps, the exact fare tapped from a phone. I did not think about Kuttan chettan for eleven years until my father called to say the old ferry was closing — a bridge now, concrete, four lanes, no boatman.
I went home for the last crossing. Half the village was there. Kuttan chettan was eighty and could no longer row; his grandson worked the engine. But the old man sat at the prow in a folded white mundu, taking fares out of habit, his palm open like a leaf.
I gave him five hundred. All I had.
I have no change, he said, the old refrain, and for a moment his eyes did not know me.
Next time, I told him.
Something cleared behind his face. He laughed — a wheeze, a whole life in it. Ah, he said. You are the one who owes me two rupees from before you went away. I remember. I never forget a debt I am glad to carry.
He had not forgotten. Across eleven years and ten thousand crossings, he had kept my two rupees somewhere, not as money but as a reason I would have to come back.
The bridge is beautiful. It saves forty minutes. I have driven across it many times and felt nothing, which is exactly what a bridge is for. But I still owe two rupees to a river, and I have decided never to pay it, so that the debt stays open, so that some part of me is always expected on the far bank, so that someone somewhere is still saying, of me, next time.