In Kota, your rank is your name.
People will pretend otherwise. Your hostel warden calls you by your room number. The mess cook knows you by how many rotis you take. Your parents call every night at nine and say beta in the voice people use for things that are costing them money. But Kota knows you by your rank. It sits under your photo on the institute app. It follows you into the mess. It's the first thing anyone asks and the only thing anyone remembers.
Mine was 1,847 out of 1,903.
In Kota slang, that's a dead rank. A rank so far down the list that no college will ever call, no parent will ever boast and no teacher will ever learn your name. You don't come back from a dead rank. Nobody even looks for you down there.
I'd worked very hard for mine.
· · ·
"Bhaiya. One formula sheet. Fast."
It was 8:40 on a Sunday morning in the lobby of Shikhar Tower. Major Test 14 started in twenty minutes and JEE Advanced in twenty-one days. I was doing what I did every Sunday at 8:40, which was business.
The boy in front of me was from Ganga batch, the toppers' batch, and he had the face of someone who'd revised all night and remembered none of it. He wasn't buying a formula sheet. He was buying something to hold.
"Twenty," I said. "Thirty laminated."
"Laminated for what? I can't take it inside."
"Then twenty."
He paid. He'd read it twice in the queue, panic, and drop it in the dustbin by the lift at 8:58, like everyone else. Ramkesh, the sixth-floor peon, would fish it out for me by Monday, and next Sunday I'd sell it again. I owned forty formula sheets and I'd sold them maybe nine hundred times. Recycling is a moral duty.
The lobby of Shikhar Tower is built to make you feel small. It's three storeys of glass and white marble, with a wall of steel phone lockers down one side, six hundred of them. Each key hangs on a red elastic band that you wear on your wrist into the exam, so you sit there for three hours with a key and no phone, like a prisoner trusted with his own cell. Outside, across the top of the building, an LED band runs Shikhar's slogan in letters a metre high, all day and all night:
RANK IS A HABIT.
On the opposite wall is what Shikhar calls the Inspiration Wall and everyone else calls the Wall of Selections: a hundred and thirty-eight framed photographs of last year's IIT selections, all smiling the way people smile when the photographer charges by the hour. A few years ago the Rajasthan government decided that glorifying toppers and publishing rank lists was bad for students' mental health, which it is. So Shikhar stopped publishing rank lists. Now your rank comes to you privately, as a notification on the Shikhar app, and everyone screenshots it and forwards it to every group in Kota within ninety seconds. Privacy, Kota style. The toppers' photos stayed up. They're not glorified. They're inspiring. There's a difference, and it's whatever the lawyer said it was.
The government also said batches should be alphabetical, so nobody could tell which was the toppers' batch. Shikhar agreed and named its batches after rivers. Nobody can tell which is the toppers' batch, unless they know that Ganga is the biggest river in India. I was in Sabarmati, the batch they made last.
"Kabaadi." A hand slapped a packet onto my palm. "Settled."
Arjun Patel from Surat, room 211 in my hostel, was my best customer. He owed me three packets of Maggi, and he was paying in Bourbon biscuits at the agreed rate of one Maggi to one and a half Bourbons, fractions carried forward.
"This is four Bourbons," I said.
"Four and a half is a crime against biscuits."
"Then you owe me half a Bourbon."
"Write it in your book, Kabaadi. Write it in your famous book."
I did. Everyone in the hostel called me Kabaadi, the junk dealer, because I'd buy or sell anything: Maggi, chargers, power banks, photocopied notes, a seat near the cooler in the mess, the warden's good mood. And everything went in the book. It was a fat long notebook in a brown-paper cover, held shut with two rubber bands, and across the front I'd written HISAAB in block capitals, which means accounts, and which nobody had ever read except me. Owes, wants, fears, assets. Most of the hostel was in there somewhere. Half a Bourbon is still half a Bourbon.
A girl from my batch hovered at my elbow, chewing her lip.
"Lucky pencil," I said, before she could ask.
"You have lucky pencils?"
"Fifty rupees."
She bought one. It was an ordinary HB pencil from a box of ten that had cost me forty. She wasn't buying a pencil, either. She was buying the feeling of having done something. That's most of what anyone buys, if you watch them long enough. People are question papers. Read them properly, all the way to the end before you answer, and they're rarely as hard as they look.
"BHAIYA!"
Bunty Chaurasia arrived the way he arrived everywhere, loudly and from the wrong direction. He was short and round and wore his Shikhar ID card around his neck like a medal he'd won for something. He'd been my roommate for two years, and in two years he had never once entered a room at a normal volume.
Psst... this chapter was scraped from NovelPhoenix, and the author would much rather you read it there.
"Bhaiya, you have to see this." He shoved his phone in my face. "Last night. Nine-fourteen. Some hospital in Kota. My cousin's friend's group."
The video was shaky and dark, a hospital ward with yellow tube lights. A man in a pale green gown had a ward boy pinned against a bed rail and was biting into his shoulder. Not hitting. Biting, the way a dog bites, and not letting go. Someone screamed. Someone else shouted pakdo, pakdo. Then the phone fell and showed the ceiling and the video ended.
"Zombie," Bunty whispered, with enormous satisfaction.
"Fake," I said. "Or drugs."
"It's real, bhaiya. My cousin's friend—"
"Your cousin's friend sent you a video of a dancing horse last month and said it was Indore."
"That horse was in Indore."
I gave him back his phone. But I'd noticed the hospital's name printed on the gown, and the time stamp, and the way the ward boy had stopped struggling a little too early. I filed it, the way I file everything, under things that are probably nothing.
On my way to the Tower that morning, I'd passed Pintu bhaiya's tea stall under the neem tree at the corner of our lane. Pintu had raised a glass of chai at me and smiled the smile of a man who knows one thing about you that you'd pay a lot to keep quiet. There are exactly two people in Kota who know something about me I don't want known. Pintu is the one who smiles about it. He also makes the worst chai in Rajasthan. I avoid both whenever I can.
At 8:47, Ira Deshmukh walked into the lobby.
Ira was the most predictable person in Kota. She arrived at 8:47 every Sunday. She always used locker 112. She read her own notes in the queue, never anyone else's, and she had never once bought anything from me, which made her the only person in the building I found relaxing. She was tall, with a braid so tight it looked like a rule, steel-rimmed glasses, and the posture of an NCC cadet, which she'd been in school in Pune and had apparently never stopped being. She had been rank one for fourteen straight weeks.
She watched the lucky-pencil girl walk away, and then she looked at me.
"You sold her a pencil for fifty rupees."
"I sold her confidence," I said. "The pencil was free."
"You're a parasite."
"I'm a service provider."
"Is there a difference?"
"About fifty rupees."
She didn't laugh. Ira didn't laugh at things she disapproved of, which was most things, and certainly me. She put her phone in locker 112 and slid the red band onto her wrist.
"You know you could just study," she said. "Then you wouldn't need to sell pencils."
"My rank is dead, Deshmukh. That's what keeps me alive."
"That doesn't mean anything."
"Not to rank one, no."
She looked at me for a second longer than she needed to, as if I were a question with a typo in it. Then she walked to the lift.
I didn't mind. This week, the computer that makes Shikhar's seating plan had put me beside her. Shikhar seats the top of the rank list beside the bottom of it, on the theory that nobody copies downward. The theory is correct.
· · ·
The sixth floor of Shikhar Tower has one corridor with ten exam halls off it and a collapsible iron gate at the lift end. On test days, Ramkesh pulls the gate shut at 8:59 and padlocks it, and it stays padlocked for the first two hours, so nobody can slip out early and phone the answers to a friend. Nobody gets in and nobody gets out. It's the safest place in Kota, if what you're afraid of is cheating.
Ramkesh was at the gate with the padlock in one hand and a mouthful of paan. He gave me a nod you could only see if you knew to look for it. I nodded back.
At the back of Room 603, behind the last row of desks, there's a fire door. It leads to the fire stairs, and it's kept chained and padlocked, because fire safety in Kota is a chain, a padlock and a prayer, and Shikhar had stopped bothering with the prayer. I had a copy of the key. It had cost me five hundred rupees and four packets of Maggi a month in rent, paid to Ramkesh, because the landing behind that door was the best godown in Indra Vihar. Nobody ever opens a fire door. That's what makes it a good place to keep things.
Room 603 held forty desks in eight rows, an air conditioner set to eighteen degrees, a wall clock with a tick you could hear from the corridor, and a whiteboard that said MAJOR TEST 14 — PAPER 1 — 9:00 TO 12:00 — NO ONE LEAVES BEFORE 11:00. I sat in row four, by the window. Ira sat down beside me and moved her chair two centimetres away from mine, which was fair. Bunty was in row six, beside a Ganga boy who'd never looked at him once.
At 8:56, the invigilator came in.
Mr. Bhandari worked in Shikhar's accounts department and did invigilation on Sundays for extra money. He was in his fifties, with a grey moustache and the kind of voice that said Kota is becoming Delhi about everything from parking to the price of onions. This morning he was holding his left hand against his chest like it was hot. It was wrapped in a crepe bandage, and there was a spot of something rust-coloured soaking through on the back.
"Some madman bit me," he announced, to nobody and everybody. "At the riverfront, six-thirty this morning, on my walk. Came out of the bushes and bit me. Like a dog. Then ran off." He shook his head. "Kota is becoming Delhi."
Half the room laughed. Bunty, two rows back, leaned forward and whispered, much too loudly, "Bhaiya. Zombie."
"Shut up," I said.
I didn't laugh. Mr. Bhandari's forehead was shining. The room was at eighteen degrees and he was sweating like a man who'd climbed six floors, which he had, but he'd also had time to stop. Beside me, Ira glanced at the bandage too, a quick, measuring look, and then went back to her pencils. NCC teaches first aid. I'd forgotten that.
At 9:00 exactly, the papers came round.
There's an art to failing well. A blank answer sheet is suspicious; it gets you a meeting with a counsellor. Random answers are dangerous, because random answers can get lucky, and luck gets you noticed. What you want is a precise, believable, forgettable score. I pick a number. I answer the questions I'm certain of, some of them right and some of them wrong in ways a confused boy might plausibly get wrong, and I leave the rest blank, and I land within two marks of my target every single time. This week my target was 23 out of 180, which would hold me somewhere around 1,850.
It took me twenty-two minutes. Then I had two hours and thirty-eight minutes with nothing to do but watch.
So I watched.
Ira worked like a surgeon, fast and clean, never going back. Bunty chewed his pen and sighed at the ceiling as if the ceiling owed him money. A boy in row one muttered integrals under his breath. And Mr. Bhandari sat at the front desk with the attendance register open in front of him and sweated.
At 9:15, the phone on his desk vibrated. He looked at the screen and declined the call. At 9:45 it vibrated again, and he declined it again. At 10:15, again. Every thirty minutes, to the minute. Mrs. Bhandari, I decided, was a punctual woman, and she was worried about something.
He was shivering now. He'd taken off his glasses and was wiping his face with a handkerchief, and then he unwrapped the bandage, looked at whatever was under it, and wrapped it again more tightly. His good hand wasn't steady. He kept looking at the wall clock as if it were going to tell him something.
At 10:20, a single drop of blood fell from his nose onto the attendance register.
It landed on the A's. Right on top of my name.
He didn't notice. He was staring at the clock.
I've thought about that moment a lot since. The first sign of the end of the world was a nosebleed in Room 603, and I was the only one there with nothing better to do than notice.