There were fourteen of them.
Army trucks, olive green, with canvas covers over the back, coming up the main road in a line with their headlights on, slow and enormous, pushing abandoned scooters out of the way with their bumpers. A jeep in front with a whip aerial and a young officer standing up in it holding a megaphone. When the first truck turned in through the gate of the school ground, two thousand people made a sound I'd never heard a crowd make before. It wasn't a cheer. It was more like a sob.
Then everybody moved forward at once.
Soldiers jumped down from the trucks before they'd stopped. They were very young, most of them, not much older than us, with rifles held across their chests, and they formed a line in front of the trucks and pushed the crowd back with the rifles held flat, like a fence.
"Line banao!" The officer's megaphone cracked and whined. "Make a line! Girls first! Medical cases first! Stay in your groups!"
Nobody made a line. Two thousand people pushed towards fourteen trucks.
I stayed in my corner behind the stage with my back to the wall and did the only thing I could do, which was count. Fourteen trucks. Thirty in each, maybe thirty-five if they stood and held on. Four hundred and fifty seats. Two thousand people. The diesel engines were idling, a huge throbbing rumble that you felt in your teeth, and the megaphone was shrieking, and two thousand people were shouting the names of their friends, and the sun had been down for twenty minutes.
I looked at the lanes.
There are five lanes that run into the main road around the school ground, and I could see the mouths of three of them from my corner. In the dusk they were full of movement. Not people coming to be evacuated. The other kind. They came out of the lanes at that loose, low, ground-eating walk, all at once, as if the noise had been a whistle and they'd been waiting for it.
"Bunty," I said quietly. "Get our boys against this wall. Now."
· · ·
The first screams came from the east side of the ground, near the gate.
Then the shooting started. Single shots at first, crack, crack, and then many at once, a soldier yelling something, and the crowd heaved away from the gate like water sloshing in a bucket. Every shot was a bell. I watched the lanes fill faster.
The soldiers were loading girls into the first trucks. They were throwing them up over the tailgates, pulling them by the arms, whole groups at a time. Near the front, I saw Ira.
She had her block of girls at the second truck. She'd got them there somehow, in rows, through all that. She was lifting them up one by one to the soldier in the back. Nandini with her strapped ankle. Two more. Three. Six. The soldier shouted something and held up his hand: full. Ira looked at the five girls still behind her, and at the truck, and I saw her decide. She stepped back. She let a girl from another hostel climb up in her place, and took the hands of the two closest to her, and stayed.
Somewhere close to the trucks, I saw Rohan Sethi push a crying girl up over a tailgate, and then jerk sideways as something caught his shoulder from behind. He spun, hit at it with his elbow, broke loose, and ran into the crowd with one hand clamped to his shoulder, and I lost him.
At 7:05, the officer stood up in his jeep.
I was watching his face. I don't know why. Maybe because I'd been watching faces all my life and it was the only thing I knew how to do. He was young, a captain maybe, with a moustache he was too young for, and he was looking at the east side of the ground, where the crowd was breaking apart, and then at his trucks, six full and eight half full, and I watched him do the sum. I watched him get the answer. I watched him hate it.
"Mount up!" The megaphone screamed. "Mount up! Move! Move!"
The engines roared. The soldiers in the fence-line turned and ran for the trucks and swung themselves up, and the trucks began to move while people were still climbing, and people fell off, and people clung to the tailgates and were pulled up, and people clung to the tailgates and weren't. The line of headlights swung round in the ground and headed for the gate, slowly, through the crowd, through everything.
He wasn't a villain, that officer. I've thought about him a lot. He was doing maths, under fire, in the dark. If he'd stayed, he'd have lost all fourteen trucks and everyone on them. I recognised the expression on his face. I'd seen it in the mirror.
· · ·
"Bhaiya. Bhaiya. Look."
Bunty had my arm. He was pointing along the back wall.
Thirty metres from us, between the stage and the neem trees, Ira and her five girls were pressed against the wall where the crowd had shoved them when the trucks pulled away. Simran was screaming. The small girl with the inhaler was on her knees, not moving, not breathing properly. And between them and the gate, across the open middle of the ground, the dead were coming in from the east, fast, through what was left of the crowd.
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"Godown," I said. "Now. Go over the wall at the corner. The back shutter's three metres to your right. Take them." I pointed at what was left of our boys, most of whom were already scrambling up onto the stage. Half of them had run for the trucks. "Go."
Bunty looked at me. Then he looked at Ira. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
"Bunty," I said.
He was already running.
I'd like to tell you I went after him because it was the right thing. I went after him because he was Bunty, and Bunty was going to get himself killed, and I'd never in two years worked out what column he belonged in, and apparently I wasn't going to find out by watching. And because Ira Deshmukh was rank one and could organise people, and rank one is a useful asset to have in a godown full of frightened boys. I told myself that the whole way. It was a good argument. I'm good at arguments.
At the foot of the stage, one of the constables had dropped the loudspeaker. A cheap battery megaphone, white and red, with a strap, the kind every police station in India owns. I picked it up on the run. Most of those megaphones have a siren button. This one did.
I pressed it, and threw the megaphone as hard as I could into the middle of the ground.
It landed in the dust and lay there wailing, a thin, rising, falling police siren, wee-oo wee-oo wee-oo, and every dead thing in the school ground turned towards it.
Not all of them reached it. There were people in the way.
I didn't look.
· · ·
Bunty got to Ira first. I got there seven seconds later, out of breath, my chest on fire. Ira was down on her knees beside the inhaler girl, holding the inhaler to her mouth.
"Ananya. Breathe. Breathe with me. In—"
"The stage," I said. "That way. It touches the wall. Over the wall, there's an alley. Turn right. Thirty metres. A shutter. It's open."
Ira looked up at me. For maybe half a second I saw her do the same thing I'd seen the officer do. Then she stood up, and pulled Ananya up with her, and became a parade ground.
"Stage. Wall. Over. Go."
They went. Simran first, still screaming, but running. Then two others. Bunty grabbed Ananya round the waist and practically carried her. On the stage he knelt with his hands cupped and boosted the girls up onto the top of the wall one by one, and they dropped into the dark on the other side. Ira went last of the girls. She stopped on top of the wall, astride it, and reached down for my hand.
I was looking back at the ground.
The megaphone had stopped. Its battery, probably. In the sudden quiet I could hear the trucks' engines fading down the main road, and the screaming, much less screaming now, and close behind us, the patter.
"Kabir," said Ira. "Hand."
I gave her my hand. She pulled me up with a strength I didn't know she had, and we dropped together into the alley, and ran.
The back shutter of Goyal Traders was exactly where it always was, a metre up off the ground on a loading step, half rolled up, with our boys crowding through the gap. We pushed the girls in, and Bunty, and then I was inside in the dark and the smell of cardboard and masala, and Bunty and Harsh hauled the shutter down behind me with a crash that I felt in my spine, and Imran shot the bolts at the bottom.
Something hit the shutter from outside. Then something else. The steel boomed like a drum.
Then, after a while, it didn't.
· · ·
There were twenty-two of us in the end. We counted in the dark. Fourteen of our boys had got in through the shutter, and Bunty, and me, and Ira and her five girls. The rest of our forty were somewhere else: on the trucks, in the lanes, somewhere. Arjun was with us. Harsh was with us. Siddharth wasn't.
When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see shapes. Shelves. Towers of cardboard to the ceiling. The faint glow of a phone screen, which I made somebody turn off.
Bunty, sitting on the floor beside me, reached out and touched the nearest tower, and read the label by feel.
"Bhaiya," he whispered, in a voice full of wonder. "It's all Maggi. Apan heaven mein hai." We're in heaven.
Nobody laughed. But somebody made a sound that was nearly a laugh, and somebody else did, and for a moment, in the dark, it helped.
Outside, they hunted all night. You could hear them in the alley, and on the roof once, and at the shutters. Nobody slept. Ananya's breathing evened out slowly, with Ira's hand on her back. Simran finally stopped talking. At some point Ira came and sat down on a carton beside me in the dark, close enough that I could hear her breathing too. Get faster updates on novelping.com.
"You knew it would fail," she whispered.
"I hoped it wouldn't."
"You don't hope. You calculate."
"Hope is just calculation with bad data."
She was quiet for a while.
"I put six of my girls on that truck," she said. "Nandini. Meera. Shruti—" She stopped. "Where were they going? The trucks. Do you know?"
"No."
"Will they be all right?"
I could have said yes. It's what you say. I'm good at saying what people want to hear.
"I don't know," I said.
She didn't say anything for a long time. Then she said, "How did you know about the back door?"
"I sold Goyal's son his cigarettes."
There was a short sound in the dark that could have been her laughing, if Ira Deshmukh laughed. Then she got up and went back to Ananya.
· · ·
At two o'clock in the morning, according to my own rule, I took my phone out and switched off airplane mode for two minutes, to check.
Nothing from Tara. She'd be asleep, I told myself. Two o'clock.
Then, at 2:04, the phone buzzed in my hand.
One SMS. From a number I didn't know, with a Chhattisgarh code. Whoever sent it must have borrowed somebody's phone, because his own had been taken away by plant security two days before. Which meant that whoever sent it knew my number by heart. I hadn't known that.
It was three words long.
Your sister. Please.
That was all. No name. He didn't need one. My father texted the way he talked: in English, short, formal, as if every message were a memo on the notice board at the plant. The last message he'd sent me, in January, had said Fees deposited. The one before that, in October, had said Happy birthday. In between there had been nothing. There'd been nothing, really, for five years.
Your sister. Please.
I sat in the dark among the Maggi with the phone in my hand until it went back to sleep. Then I turned airplane mode back on, because that was the rule.
Then I opened the Ledger on my knee, and in the dark, by feel, on a fresh page, I wrote:
HOME.
And under it:
950 km.
I'd spent five years making sure nobody needed me. It took my father three words to undo it.