Ravi Mehta-Kumar got sick on a Tuesday evening in late February. He was eight years old. He had a fever of 39.4 by ten o'clock. His mother gave him paracetamol and a cold cloth and read the back of the bottle twice, the way every tired parent reads the back of a bottle.
By Wednesday morning the fever had not broken. The pediatrician at the small clinic on Cunningham Road in Bengaluru saw him at nine. She diagnosed a viral illness and said it would last four to six days.
Ravi was missing school. His mother was missing work. There was no possibility of doing either thing well, and the next five days had the particular flat shape of a sick week at home with a child too unwell to play but not unwell enough to sleep all day.
On Wednesday afternoon, Ravi asked his mother to read to him. He had not been read to nightly in about a year. He preferred, at eight, to read to himself. He liked it that way and so did his mother, who missed the reading aloud but understood the change.
She asked what he wanted. He said: Something long. She went to the bookshelf in the hall and pulled down Heidi, in the Puffin Classics edition she had owned as a child, with the inscription from her aunt in Pune on the inside flap.
She had been waiting for a moment to read Heidi to him. She had not been waiting for a sick week. But the sick week was what came, and the book was what was on the shelf, and the two met that Wednesday at three in the afternoon.
She started on the couch in the front room, with Ravi under a thin cotton blanket. She read for forty minutes. He fell asleep in the middle of chapter two and she stopped where he stopped, with her thumb still in the page.
On Wednesday evening she read another chapter. Ravi was awake this time. He asked, when she finished, whether Heidi was going to be all right. His mother said: I think so. Let us find out tomorrow.
On Thursday the fever was still 38.6. Ravi did not eat breakfast. He drank a little weak chai. He asked, before lunch, if his mother would read more. She read three chapters. The Alm-Uncle had begun to soften.
Ravi liked the Alm-Uncle. He liked grumpy grandfathers in books, the way he liked the grumpy uncle in James and the Giant Peach, which they had read aloud together when he was six. There is a kind of child who is drawn to the grumpy and unkind in books because the books make them safe.
Thursday evening brought the part of Heidi where she goes to Frankfurt. Ravi did not like Frankfurt. He did not like Fräulein Rottenmeier. He asked, twice, if Heidi could go home now.
His mother said: Not yet. But soon. She read on. Ravi sweated through his fever. The blanket was changed once. The reading continued.
On Friday the fever broke in the morning and came back in the afternoon. Ravi ate a little khichdi at lunch. He asked for more reading. They read in his bed, with the fan on low.
Friday's reading was the part of Heidi where she begins to sleepwalk. This unnerved Ravi a little. His mother explained, gently, what was happening. They talked, while she was reading, about whether being homesick could make a person physically ill.
Ravi said he had been homesick at his grandmother's house in Hyderabad the previous summer, for one night, and had had a stomach ache. His mother said: That is the same thing. Heidi has it more. But it is the same thing.
Saturday the fever was gone. Ravi was tired but better. He could sit up. He asked for more Heidi. They read for two hours that afternoon, in two long sessions with a snack between them.
Heidi went home to the mountain. Peter the goat-boy was there. The Alm-Uncle came down the hill to meet her. Ravi made a small sound when this happened, somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, and his mother did not look at him because she did not want him to notice that she had heard it.
They finished the book on Sunday morning, in his bed, with the door open. Clara walked. The goats came back up the mountain. The book ended.
Ravi closed the book himself. He said: That was a good book. His mother said: It was. Then he asked if they could read the next book that night. She said yes. They read the first chapter of The Children of Green Knowe, by Lucy M. Boston, at bedtime.
The sick week had been five days. They had read 312 pages aloud. Ravi went back to school on Monday morning, a little thin, a little subdued, but a long book on the inside of him that had not been there the Tuesday before.
A sick week is not a gift. No one wants their child sick. The pediatrician was right that the illness would last four to six days, and the days were long, and the work of being the parent of a sick child is not a writerly experience.
But within the week there was a small private thing, which was the reading. The reading made the days into something other than the days they would have been. It put a book between them and the illness.
Ravi has not yet asked for Heidi again. He may not. The book has done its work in this house. It sits back on the shelf in the hall, with the inscription from the aunt in Pune still on the flap, and now also a small flat memory of a viral fever in late February when his mother read it to him.
