When I was fourteen, every phone in India screamed at once.
I remember it because I was in a maths tuition class in Bhilai, and in the middle of a quadratic equation thirty phones went off together in thirty schoolbags, a horrible flat electronic shriek that went on and on and wouldn't stop when you pressed the buttons. Everyone pulled their phones out. On every screen were the same words: Emergency Alert: Severe. Then, underneath, in smaller letters, SAMPLE TESTING MESSAGE. No action is required. The government was testing a system to warn everyone at once about earthquakes and floods. It worked through the towers, not the internet. It went to every phone in range, on every network, whether you wanted it or not. It ignored silent mode.
Our tuition teacher said it was the end of privacy. Somebody's mother called the school to ask if there'd been a nuclear war.
On Tuesday morning, lying in room 312 listening to the warden do his one o'clock rounds, I remembered that sound. And I remembered what the woman on the television had said. Details of assembly points will be communicated through official alerts on all mobile phones. Students are advised to keep their phones switched on.
Every phone in Kota. On every network. At the same moment. Whether you wanted it or not.
· · ·
"We need our phones on," said Siddharth, at breakfast. "They said. On the news. How else do we get the details?"
There were nods all round the common room. It was half past seven, and we were eating rotis that the Sai Kripa boys had rolled into shapes that resembled several Indian states, none of them round. Out in the courtyard, Bhanwar Singh stood at the gate with his back to us.
"You'll get the details," I said. "I'll get them. One phone. Mine." I held it up. "Everybody else stays in airplane mode."
"Why should you get them?"
"Because when that alert comes, it'll come to every phone in this city at exactly the same second. It'll be loud. It'll ignore silent. And every one of them out there will hear it." I pointed through the wall towards the lane. "One phone in this hostel, wrapped up in my room on the far side of the building, is one phone. Sixty phones is a dinner bell."
Silence. Somebody put down his roti.
"You don't know it'll be loud," said Siddharth.
"I do, actually. So do you. You were in school when they tested it."
I watched his face as he remembered. I watched it go round the room, the same memory, thirty phones in thirty schoolbags, the shriek that wouldn't stop.
"Airplane mode," said Bunty firmly, as if it had been his idea. "Bhaiya is right. Bhaiya is always right. It's very irritating."
So that was how we did it. At ten, I wrapped my phone in two quilts and shut it in my trunk in 312, on the far side of the building from the lane, and sat beside it. Everyone else in Gayatri Residency put their phones in airplane mode, and I went round the rooms and checked, and wrote down the four who argued.
I didn't check Bunty's. That was my mistake. I'd never once had to check Bunty.
· · ·
At 11:00 exactly, Kota screamed.
I heard it before I heard my own phone. It came from outside first, from every direction, a rising flat electronic wail from hundreds of buildings at once, from open windows and parked cars and the pockets of people lying in the road, a sound so big it didn't seem to come from anywhere in particular. It was the sound of the whole city having the same idea at the same time. Then my trunk joined in, muffled by two quilts, a buzzing shriek through the steel.
And then, from the second-floor landing, much louder, from Bunty's shorts:
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
He'd turned off airplane mode at half past ten because his father always called at eleven. Every day. Eleven o'clock on the dot, from the garage, on his tea break. Bunty had been sitting on the landing waiting for it with his phone in his pocket, and instead the Government of India had called.
By the time I got down the stairs he was pressing every button on it at once, and it was screaming in his hands, and his face was the colour of chalk.
"It won't stop, bhaiya, it won't—"
There was a sack of rice on the landing, the twenty-five-kilo one we'd carried up from the mess store the evening before. I took the phone out of his hands, opened the top of the sack and pushed it in, all the way down, elbow-deep in rice, and held it there.
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Muffled. Much quieter. Not quiet enough. Bunty threw himself across the top of the sack like a man throwing himself on a grenade.
Then we listened.
· · ·
Outside, the sound was dying away too, building by building, phone by phone, people finally finding the right buttons. And underneath it was a new sound.
I went up to the roof. Harsh was lying flat behind the water tanks with his whistle in his fist, staring down into the lane.
Reading on an aggregator? This story was pulled from NovelPhoenix and republished without permission.
Sai Kripa, the hostel next door, had a broken gate and, as far as we knew, maybe twenty boys still inside it, locked in their rooms since Sunday night, too frightened to come out. They'd kept their phones switched on, the way the television had told them to. All twenty phones had gone off at once, at full volume, through open windows.
Every dead thing in our lane was moving towards it.
It was morning, so they were slow. Stiff. But they came out of the doorways and out from under the stairwells and off the steps of the cycle shop, all of them turning to Sai Kripa like iron filings to a magnet. And it wasn't only our lane. From the corner, from the main road, from the direction of the Tower, more of them were coming. Out of class. Out of everywhere. The whole neighbourhood was answering the bell.
They went in through Sai Kripa's broken gate in a slow, thick stream, and up its stairs.
I'm not going to describe the next ten minutes. Harsh and I lay behind the water tanks and listened to them, and that's all I'm going to say about it.
When it was over, I went back down and found my phone in my trunk and unwrapped it from its quilts and read the message that had cost Sai Kripa its last twenty boys.
Emergency Alert: Extremely Severe
KOTA DISTRICT: Curfew in force. Coaching students: Army evacuation at 5 PM TODAY from designated assembly points. Indra Vihar / Rajeev Gandhi Nagar / Talwandi: Govt. School Ground, Main Road. Carry ID. Move in groups. Do not travel otherwise. — District Administration, Kota
Below it, the same thing again in Hindi.
It was a good message. Clear, specific, helpful. Whoever had written it had done their job properly. Somewhere in an office, I thought, a tired official had pressed a button at eleven o'clock to save as many children as possible, and had no idea at all what he'd just done.
That's the thing nobody tells you about the end of the world. Most of the damage is done by people doing their jobs properly.
· · ·
By noon, every boy in Gayatri Residency wanted to go.
I understood. An Army evacuation. Trucks, soldiers, an end to it. Even the Sai Kripa boys, who'd just listened to their hostel die, wanted to go, maybe especially them, because after the last hour, staying in a building with the dead on the other side of a wall had stopped feeling like safety.
I sat on the roof in the shade behind the tanks with the Ledger and did the sum.
Evacuation at 5 p.m. Sunset 7:10. They speed up from about 6:30. That left a window of an hour and a half, if the trucks were on time.
Trucks will not be on time. They'd be coming into a city where every road was full of abandoned vehicles and every crossing was jammed. The flag march on television had been moving at walking pace.
Trucks are loud. Two thousand students in one ground are loud. Louder than a hostel full of phones. Louder than anything.
How many trucks? Ten? Twenty? Thirty students to a truck? Do the maths. They couldn't take everyone. Not in one trip. Not before dark.
So what happens when it gets dark and the trucks are half full and the dead start coming?
I knew what happens. I'd seen it on Sunday night at our gate, in Bhanwar Singh's face. If I open it, we all die. You think I like this arithmetic? Somebody would do the arithmetic. Somebody always does.
I wrote at the bottom of the page: It will fail.
Then I sat and looked at those words for a long time.
Because the other side of the sum was this. The food in the mess would last us ten days. The water would last as long as the power, and the power was failing every few hours. A dead man stood between us and our own kitchen, and another one stood behind a bathroom door on the third floor, and Sai Kripa had just shown us what a wall was worth. And nine hundred and fifty kilometres away, in a two-room quarter with a fridge that kept switching off, my sister had six doses of insulin and a neighbour I didn't trust.
Staying was also a way to fail. Just slower. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
So I did what I always do when both answers are wrong. I stopped looking for the right answer, and started looking for the exit.
· · ·
The government school ground on the main road is a big dusty rectangle with a boundary wall, a cement stage for Independence Day speeches and six neem trees along one side. I'd walked past it a thousand times. Behind its back wall, along the market lane, is a row of wholesale godowns, and one of those godowns belongs to Goyal Traders, where for two years I'd bought my Maggi by the carton at a price I would never tell you.
Goyal Traders is a concrete box with a rolling shutter at the front, onto the market lane, and a second rolling shutter at the back, onto a service alley. The back shutter is never locked from the inside, because old Goyal's son goes out through it every evening to smoke where his father can't see him. I knew that because I'd sold the son his cigarettes.
The godown's side wall is the back wall of the school ground. If you were standing in the right corner of the ground, you'd be about three metres from a door that nobody else in Kota knew was open.
"That's where we stand," I told Bunty. "Back right corner. Behind the stage. Whatever happens."
"What's going to happen?"
"Probably nothing."
He looked at me for a long moment. "You're doing the face, bhaiya."
"What face?"
"The one you do when you've already done the paper and you're just waiting for everyone else to finish."
· · ·
We left at three, when the heat was at its worst and the dead were at their slowest. Not through the front. Through the mess and out of the back door into the delivery alley, past Bhanwar Singh standing at the gate in the sun with a fly on his neck. Forty of us. Some boys stayed: Pranav, who said he'd taken enough chances with gates, and three others who wouldn't leave their rooms. I didn't argue with them. I left them the rest of the rice.
Before we went, Bunty climbed to the third floor on his own. I followed him as far as the landing and stopped. He stood outside 304 with his hand flat on the plywood, the way you'd put your hand on the shoulder of someone sitting down.
"We're going, Shubham," he said. "Sorry, yaar. We'll come back. Bunty promises."
Nothing. Then, from somewhere behind the door, very soft, a single gentle push against the trunk. The way you'd push a door you expected to open.
Bunty came down the stairs without looking at me.
· · ·
There were already more than a thousand people at the ground when we got there. By four there were two thousand. Students mostly, in groups, from every hostel in the coaching belt, with bags and suitcases and, in one case, a cooler. Some local families with children. A few old people on plastic chairs someone had carried from home. Three police constables with lathis and a loudspeaker who very clearly did not know what was going to happen any more than we did.
I found the back right corner, behind the stage. We put our bags against the wall. I stood with my back to it and felt, through the hot brick, Goyal Traders on the other side.
At half past four I saw Ira.
She was near the front of the ground with a block of girls from her hostel, eleven of them, sitting on their bags in neat rows as though they were waiting for a bus to an NCC camp. Simran was talking. A smaller girl with a blue inhaler was not. Nandini was sitting on a suitcase with her strapped ankle stuck out in front of her. Ira was standing at the end of the row with her clipboard, counting.
She looked up and saw me. Across two thousand people, she saw me, as if she'd known exactly where I'd be.
She didn't wave. She looked at where I was standing, in the corner behind the stage, with my back to the wall. Then she looked at the wall. Then she looked at me again, for a long moment, as if she were checking her working.
Then she went back to counting.
Five o'clock came. No trucks. The constables' loudspeaker said please be patient. Five-thirty. The shadows of the neem trees stretched across the dust and people moved into them. Six. A boy near us started crying and couldn't stop. Somebody said the trucks were stuck at Talwandi. Somebody else said they'd turned back. The sun went orange, then red, and slid down behind the godowns, and the sky went the colour of a bruise.
At 6:25, in the lane behind the ground, a dog began to bark.
At 6:40, the trucks came.
So did everything else.