I was on the stairs when it rang, coming up from the mess store with a bag of rice on my shoulder and Bunty behind me with the dal, past the warden at his gate for the second time that day. I answered without looking. I thought it was one of the boys on the roof, ringing to say something was coming.
"Tara?"
"Bhaiya." Her voice cracked on it, the way it used to when she was small and had been trying not to cry for a long time and had finally got permission. Then, instantly, she was furious. "Where were you? I called forty-one times! Forty-one! I counted!"
"The network—"
"I know the network! Everybody knows the network! You could have sent a message! You know how to send a message, you send a hundred messages a day, you're always selling something to someone—"
"Tara."
"—Dadi's been watching the TV since four in the morning, Bhaiya, four, and every time they show Kota she says your name—"
"Tara. I'm okay."
She stopped. I heard her breathe. Behind her, faintly, I could hear a ceiling fan and a television and a small girl's voice asking a question about a peacock.
"You're okay?"
"I'm okay. Bunty's okay. We're in the hostel. The gate's locked. We've got food." I sat down on the second-floor landing with the rice in my lap. Bunty went past me up the stairs with the dal, very quietly, and didn't look back, which was the most tactful thing I'd ever seen him do. "Tell me everything. Slowly. In order."
She told me in order. She'd always been able to do that; it's the one thing she got from me. Papa hadn't come home. The plant had gone in-plant, whatever that meant, fourteen days, gates sealed, mobiles taken. He'd called her from the shift office at five past seven and asked about Dadi's insulin and then, she said, in a very careful voice, he'd asked if I'd called.
"What did you tell him?"
"That the network was jammed."
"Good."
She went on. Six doses of insulin left after tonight. The chemist had none, people had bought it all at eight in the morning. The power had gone at noon and come back at six, and the fridge had been off for six hours. And then she said the thing I'd been waiting for without knowing I was waiting for it.
"Annamma aunty's getting a box from the hospital pharmacy. Tomorrow morning. She's on night duty. I gave her Papa's medical card."
I closed my eyes.
"What does she want?"
"What?"
"Annamma aunty. In return. What does she want?"
"Nothing, Bhaiya. She's Annamma aunty."
"Then she wants something you haven't figured out yet."
There was a silence on the line. I could hear her not understanding me, and I could hear her deciding to understand me anyway, because I was her brother and I was in Kota on the television, and that gave me a kind of authority I didn't deserve.
"Listen to me," I said. "I'm serious. Lock the door. Don't open it for anyone. Anyone. Ask who it is, every time, and if you can't see them, don't open it. Don't owe anybody anything, if you can help it. When people do you favours, they're buying something. Everyone's a transaction, Tara. Nice people most of all."
"Why most of all?"
"Because they make you forget to count."
Another silence. The source of this chapter is g.com.
"Okay, Bhaiya," she said, in a small voice.
I didn't know then what she was doing while I said it. I found out later. She was writing it down. She had a notebook too, a red one, and she wrote down everything I said that night, word for word, on a page headed MONDAY, under a list of things that the people in our building needed. And then she did the exact opposite of every single word of it.
Hello from the author's actual platform, NovelPhoenix: this chapter was copied onto this site without permission.
But I didn't know that then. I thought I'd read her right. I thought I was protecting her.
· · ·
I gave her a list. I'm good at lists.
Two calls a day, at two in the afternoon and nine at night, two minutes each. The rest of the time, the phone in airplane mode, to save the battery. Fill every bucket, every bottle, the moment the power came on, because the pumps would stop when it went. Keep the insulin in the coolest place in the house, away from the window, wrapped in a wet cloth if the fridge was off for long. Don't go out after dark. Keep the curtains closed at night and no lights on the road side. Keep the phone screen dark.
"Why the screen?" she said.
"Because they go to light."
"Who goes to light? Bhaiya, there's nothing here. It's in Kota. It's in Kota on the TV."
"It's on the trains," I said. "It'll be in Bhopal by tonight. It's probably in Jaipur already. Just keep the screen dark."
I heard her swallow.
"Okay," she said again.
Then there was a rustle and a bump and a different breathing on the line, slow and heavy, and a voice that came out soft and slurred at the edges and went straight through me like a needle.
"Kabir? Puttar?"
"Dadi."
"Roti kha raha hai?" Are you eating?
I looked at the bag of rice in my lap. I'd had a packet of dry Maggi at lunch, crushed up and eaten from the packet with the tastemaker sprinkled on it, because the mess gas was in the kitchen behind the warden and nobody wanted to light a stove two metres from a dead man.
"Yes, Dadi. Proper food. Dal, roti, everything."
"Jhooth," said Dadi immediately. Liar. "You never could lie to me, puttar. Even when you were small. Your ears go red."
"You can't see my ears, Dadi."
"I don't need to see them."
Then she said something I didn't catch, and Tara was back.
"Bhaiya." Very quietly now. "Are you coming home?"
I'd known it was coming. I still wasn't ready.
"Kota's under curfew," I said. "Section 163. The trains have stopped. Nobody's allowed in or out. I'll come when—"
I stopped, because I didn't know how that sentence ended.
"When?" said Tara.
"Bhaiya—"
"Lock the door."
I ended the call. I sat on the stairs and looked at the phone for a long time, at her name on the screen and the duration under it. Nine minutes and twelve seconds. More than four times what I'd told her she could have. If anyone else in the hostel had done that I'd have lectured them about battery discipline.
· · ·
The television in the common room had moved on from the four videos. Now it had maps.
There was a map of India with red dots on it. A big red blot on Kota. Smaller dots on Jaipur, Bhopal, Indore, Nagpur, Delhi, spreading out from Kota along thin grey lines that I recognised after a moment as railway tracks. Fever cases reported along rail routes, said the banner. A man from the Health Ministry stood behind a lectern and used the words national health emergency and containment and do not travel. Then there was a clip, filmed from a building somewhere on our side of the city, of a line of Army trucks moving slowly down Jhalawar Road with soldiers standing in the backs, rifles held across their chests. ARMY CALLED IN AID OF CIVIL AUTHORITY, said the banner. FLAG MARCH IN KOTA.
The boys in the common room cheered at the trucks. I didn't. I watched which direction they were going.
Bunty sat down beside me on the bench and pointed at the red dot on Indore with his chin, and didn't say anything. I didn't either.
Then the banner changed again, and the common room went completely silent.
JEE ADVANCED POSTPONED INDEFINITELY: IITs.
Nobody moved. Sixty-odd boys who had spent two years of their lives, and in some cases three or four, and their parents' savings and their grandparents' gold and their own sleep and friendships and health, all pointed at one Sunday in twenty days, sat on the benches of the Gayatri Residency common room and watched that line scroll past on the bottom of the screen. Then it scrolled past again.
At the back, someone started to laugh. It was Arjun Patel, from Surat, room 211, my best customer. He laughed and laughed with his hands over his face, until it turned into something else.
Kota had finally found something worse than JEE Advanced. It had taken the dead to do it.
· · ·
That night I moved my things out of 304. We couldn't stay in there with the bathroom door and what was behind it. Bunty had already shut the valve on the third-floor water line up by the roof tanks, at noon, when he'd noticed the tank level dropping. Mechanic's son. He knew where every valve in the building was, the way I knew where every packet of Maggi was. The tap in 304 had stopped running then. I don't know which of us it was worse for, the hearing it or the not hearing it.
We took room 312, which had belonged to a boy who'd gone home to Gorakhpur on Friday for his cousin's wedding and was probably, at that moment, the luckiest person in India.
At ten, the warden came up the stairs and did attendance. We lay in the dark and didn't answer.
I opened the Ledger by the light of the window and turned to a page near the back that I didn't look at often. It was headed UNKNOWN. It was the shortest page in the book. For two years, it had held a single entry.
MALHOTRA SIR (physics). Saw my rough work. Never told anyone. Why?
I'd never been able to answer that one. It sat there on its own page, the only person in Kota whose price I didn't know.
Under it, after a while, I wrote:
TARA. Can't read her through a phone.
I looked at the two names together. Then I closed the book and lay down and listened to Bunty pretend to be asleep.
At eleven the television in the common room was still on, playing to an empty room, and the sound came up the stairwell, tinny and far away. I almost didn't listen. Then a new voice cut in, a woman's, reading something official in Hindi and then in English, and the word students made me sit up.
—special arrangements for the evacuation of coaching students from Kota will begin tomorrow. Details of assembly points will be communicated through official alerts on all mobile phones. Students are advised to keep their phones switched on.
Keep their phones switched on.
I lay back down in the dark, and I thought about every phone in Kota switched on at the same moment, and I didn't sleep at all.