The gray woolen cap with the white line around its edge had been in the second drawer of the dresser since March of the year before, since Kanchana's mother had put it into her hand saying that a thing like this is prepared in advance, prepared when it is not needed yet, because a grandmother who waits has the right to work while she waits; and Kanchana had taken it, had thanked her, had put it away at the back of the drawer under the good sheets that were never used, in that place where one keeps the things one guards not because they are needed but because they name a time that is still to come, and from then on every time she opened the drawer to take a pillowcase she saw it, small, closed in on itself like a fist, and every time she left it where it was.

Now, this morning, Kanchana held the cap on her open palm and looked at it in the light that came in slantwise through the bedroom window, in Katugastota, where she lived with her husband in two rented rooms above the hardware shop, and she was thinking — or rather, she was not thinking, she was doing that thing which is neither thinking nor remembering but is holding two times within the same moment — she was thinking of the weight that cap would have on a head that was not there yet, the small warm damp head of a child who in two thousand twenty-four had not been born, nor in two thousand twenty-five, and whom now, while the month's budget would not balance and the Pallekele factory had cut the night shift and rice cost what it cost, she could no longer place in any year, in any precise month, in any of the boxes of the calendar hanging in the kitchen beside the stove.

At the factory, where Kanchana sewed collars twelve hours a day and now sewed eight because they had closed the night shift in May without saying so, only by taking the names off the list posted on the glass of the porter's lodge, the forewoman Malani had said the week before, in front of everyone, in the voice of someone who believes she is giving good advice, that these days a child is a luxury bought on installments for twenty years, and that sensible girls wait; and Kanchana had nodded along with the others, because it was true, because Malani said nothing that was not true, and precisely for that reason the sentence had stayed on her the way there stays on you not a lie, which you shake off, but a truth you cannot carry.

Downstairs, beyond the thin wall, you could hear Nadeeka. Nadeeka was the hardware man's wife, she was twenty-eight like her, and for four months she had been carrying a belly that by now was changing the way she sat, stood up, rested her hands on her hips while she talked; and the evening before, on the stairs, with that naturalness of women who do not know they are wounding, Nadeeka had asked her whether by any chance she had something woolen for a baby, something small, since she would not have the time to make it and to buy new, these days, with what they were asking.

(The room downstairs Kanchana knew without ever having seen it well: she had glimpsed it once through the half-open door, a big bed, a television kept on with no sound, a calendar of the temples with the pages of the months gone by not torn off but folded backward, as if Nadeeka did not throw time away but kept it turned over, and on the windowsill a row of empty tin cans, washed, lined up, waiting to hold something that there was nothing yet to put inside.)

And so the question was simple, the question was a single one, namely whether to go down the stairs with the cap in her hand and give it to Nadeeka, let it enter a house where a child would arrive for certain, in October, with the date marked down, or to put it back in the drawer under the good sheets and keep it another year, one more only, the way one keeps a train ticket that perhaps will not leave but that, as long as you do not tear it, remains a train.

Because to give it away meant a thing the words did not have the courage to say aloud, and the thing was this: that the cap was no longer waiting, it was late; that her mother had knitted for a head that had stopped drawing nearer and had begun, without anyone deciding it on a precise day, to draw back; that the statistic she had heard about on the radio, the one hundred and twenty thousand that were missing, the children who in the whole country had not been born in a decade, was not a distant piece of news but was exactly this gesture here, multiplied, this going or not going down the stairs with a cap in her hand, repeated in one hundred thousand kitchens, above one hundred thousand shops, in one hundred thousand mornings slanting like this one.

Kanchana ran her thumb over the white line of the edge. The wool was still good. Her mother had knitted tight, the needles thin, the stitches close, because a loose cap lets the cold through and a tight cap does not, and the grandmother who waits knits tight for the cold that is not there yet.

She heard Nadeeka move a chair, downstairs. She heard the water from the tap.

She stood up. She stayed on her feet in the middle of the room with the cap on her palm, and for a moment, a single moment, the small warm head was there, she felt it, the exact weight, and then it was there no longer.

She opened the drawer.