At 6:55 in the morning, they went to class.
We heard them go. Twenty-two people sitting in the dark of Goyal Traders among towers of Maggi, listening to the dead in the alley outside stop hunting, all at once, as if a bell had rung that only they could hear. Then the patter of feet, going away. All of them in the same direction. Towards the Tower.
By a quarter past seven, the alley was silent.
Bunty and Imran rolled the back shutter up thirty centimetres, and I lay on my stomach on the loading step and looked out. Empty. The light was grey and already hot. A single chappal lay on its side in the middle of the alley.
I'm not going to describe the school ground. We didn't go back into it. We could see over the wall from the godown's loading step, and once was enough.
· · ·
By eight we'd taken stock. There was no stove and no gas, but there was water: four cartons of bottled water that old Goyal kept for his workers, and a tap in the alley that still ran when you turned it. There was food. There was more food than any of us would ever be able to eat, if you counted dry Maggi as food, which by then we did. There were also eleven cartons of glucose biscuits, three of namkeen and one of a brand of chocolate wafer so cheap that Bunty said eating it was a crime against wafers.
I wrote it all down. Then I sat with my back against a carton of Maggi and looked at the page.
At half past eight, a vehicle came slowly down the main road on the other side of the ground with a loudspeaker on the roof. We couldn't see it, but we could hear it, a man's voice, tired and official, repeating the same words over and over in Hindi and English.
Those not evacuated: proceed to the relief camp at Nayapura stadium. Food, water and medical checks are available. Buses will collect from the main road at one p.m. Those not evacuated...
Then it was gone, and the voice went on further down the road, getting smaller.
"Relief camp," said Harsh. He was a thin boy from Sai Kripa who had spent two days on our roof with a whistle and had not used it once, which made him the most disciplined person I knew. "That's something. That's somewhere."
"Medical checks," I said.
"So?"
"So they'll check you. And then they'll decide things about you." I shrugged. "A camp is a pen in the middle of a city. It doesn't take you anywhere. It keeps you."
"It keeps you alive."
"Sometimes."
He looked at me the way people had started looking at me since Sunday: as if they didn't like what I said, and didn't like that I'd been right.
· · ·
Ira came and sat down on the next carton at nine. She'd slept for about an hour against a shelf with Ananya's head in her lap. Her braid had come half undone. She didn't seem to have noticed, which told me more about how bad things were than anything else she could have said.
She held out her phone.
"This came at 11:52 last night," she said. "I didn't see it till the morning. I had airplane mode on." She paused. "Your rule."
It was an SMS from a number saved as Malhotra Sir (Physics).
Campus admin block holding. Food, water. Come by day. Back gate, 1 pm only. Ask for me. — AM
I read it twice.
Malhotra sir.
He taught physics to Ganga batch and to half of Sabarmati, and he was the only teacher at Shikhar who still used chalk. He refused to use the smart board. He said a smart board was a television that thought it was a teacher. He was also the only person in Kota who had ever seen what I could do, and the only name on the UNKNOWN page of the Ledger before Tara's.
"He sent it to his whole Ganga list," Ira said. "I asked one of the other girls. They all got it."
"The Gurukul campus," I said slowly.
"Yes."
Shikhar has two buildings in Kota that matter. One is the Tower in Indra Vihar, eleven floors of glass with a dead guard in the lobby. The other is the Gurukul campus, out on the southern edge of the city off Jhalawar Road, near the bypass: twenty-two acres of academic blocks, hostels, a main hall the size of a cricket ground and the director's office, where they put the residential students whose parents could afford to have their children watched twenty-four hours a day.
And a transport yard.
I knew the transport yard. Shikhar's buses ran between the Tower and the Gurukul campus all day, yellow school buses with SHIKHAR — RANK IS A HABIT painted down the sides and grilles over every window, the way the Supreme Court says school buses have to have grilles. Twenty-four of them. The drivers used to buy my Maggi by the carton for their night runs, and they'd sit on the steps of the Tower eating it dry out of the packet and complaining about the diesel accounts. Mr. Saxena, the director, didn't trust petrol pumps, or people. So the Gurukul campus had its own diesel tank, buried in the transport yard, for the buses and the generators. Twenty thousand litres, the drivers said. They said it the way people talk about a famous temple.
Twenty-four buses with grilles on the windows. A tank of diesel buried in the ground.
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I started to laugh.
"What?" said Ira. "What is it?"
"Nothing." I stopped. "Something. Give me a minute."
· · ·
It took more than a minute. I'll tell you how it went, because it's the only way you'll understand what happened afterwards.
Kota was sealed. The trains had stopped. The roads out were closed, or would be soon; the Army doesn't do flag marches for fun. There was no taxi, no bus, no lorry that was going to drive me nine hundred and fifty kilometres through Madhya Pradesh to Bhilai. And even if there were, I couldn't walk to it. You don't walk anywhere in a city where it's death after sunset and the morning rush hour is the dead going to class.
But a bus is a different kind of thing. A bus is a steel box with grilles on the windows. The dead can't climb in through a grille. A bus can carry fifty people and a month's food. A bus can push a car out of the way. And with diesel, a bus can do six or seven hundred kilometres on a single tank, and you can carry more in cans.
A bus wasn't transport. A bus was a fort with wheels.
There were twenty-four of them, seven kilometres south of where I was sitting, and the only adult left in Kota who'd ever been kind to me was holding the gate.
That was the first half of the sum. The second half was the problem.
I couldn't drive a bus. I can barely ride a cycle. I couldn't navigate either, not properly; I know the coaching belt like the inside of my own trunk, but past Talwandi the city might as well have been the moon, and past the bypass it would be the roads of two states that I'd only ever seen from a train window. I couldn't get into the campus by myself either. Ask for me, the message said. Malhotra sir hadn't sent it to me. He'd sent it to Ganga.
So I needed three things I didn't have. A driver. A navigator. A name the gate would open for.
I looked across the godown at Bunty, who was sitting on the floor stacking chocolate wafers into a tower to make Simran laugh. Mechanic's son. Chaurasia Auto Works, Indore. He'd told me a hundred times about his father's garage, how he'd driven customers' trucks round the yard since he was twelve, how one night last Diwali his father had let him take a school bus out on the ring road at two in the morning. I'd never once believed him.
Then I looked at Ira. Rank one. NCC. Map reading was part of NCC; I knew that much. Malhotra sir's favourite student, on Malhotra sir's list.
I'd spent two years making sure I never needed anybody. Now I needed exactly two people, and they were both in this godown, and I had nothing that either of them wanted.
· · ·
"Bunty," I said. "Come here."
He came. He brought a wafer.
"Can you drive a bus?"
"Bhaiya." He looked offended. "Bunty can drive anything."
"Can you really?"
"Bus, truck, tractor, JCB once, for ten minutes, the uncle didn't know. Anything with wheels and a key." He thought. "And without a key, if you give me ten minutes."
"Except a conversation with a girl," said Simran, from behind him.
Bunty turned purple. Ira, I noticed, almost smiled.
"Ira," I said. "Can you read a map? A real one, not a phone?"
"NCC," she said. "Two years. Grid references, contours, bearings, service protractor. I was the best in my unit at map reading." She said it without any pride at all, the way you'd tell someone your blood group. "Why?"
So I told them. Not all of it. I never tell anyone all of it. But the buses and the diesel and the grilles and the fort with wheels, and what I needed, and what they'd get.
"You need to get your girls somewhere safe," I said to Ira. "So does Malhotra sir, or he wouldn't have sent that message. The campus is safer than this. But you can't get five girls seven kilometres across Kota alone. I can. I know how they move, when they move, where they stand. I've got food and water and power banks. I know the back doors of half the hostels in Kota. I'll get you there." I tapped the Ledger. "In return, when we get there, I need a bus, Bunty to drive it, and you to navigate it out. And everyone on the bus goes where the bus goes."
"Which is where?"
"Bhilai."
"Bhilai?" She stared at me. "That's the other side of India. Pune is the other direction."
"South is the same direction for both of us for the first five hundred kilometres. Out of Rajasthan. Out of Kota. After that, we'll talk." I spread my hands. "It's a good deal. You know it's a good deal." This chapter is updated first at novelping(.)com.
"I'm not for sale," said Ira.
"Everyone's for sale. You just haven't heard your price yet."
She looked at me for a long time with her half-undone braid and her steel glasses and her clipboard face. Then she said, quite calmly:
"Then here's my price. Stop lying to me about the key."
I hadn't expected that. I don't often not expect things. I sat there with my mouth slightly open, and Bunty looked from her to me and back again, like a man watching a cricket match he's put money on.
"Fine," I said at last. "I had a key."
"Why?"
"I keep stock on the landing behind that fire door. I rent it from the peon. Five hundred rupees and four packets of Maggi a month."
"How long?"
"Eighteen months."
"And the invigilator. You knew."
"I watched him. Nobody else was watching. That's all. That's the whole secret." That was a lie, or at least it wasn't the whole secret, but it was a better lie than I found it on the floor, and I watched her decide to accept it for now. Not because she believed it. Because it was more truth than she'd had before, and she was a person who would always take partial marks over none.
"All right," she said. "Deal."
"And you, Bunty? Your price?"
Bunty looked at me as if I'd asked him the price of his own mother.
"Apan free mein aa rahe hain, bhaiya," he said. I'm coming for free. "What do you think? You think Bunty's going to let you go alone? You can't even ride a cycle."
So that was the deal. I needed exactly two people in the whole of Kota, and I couldn't buy either of them. One of them had made me pay with the truth. The other wouldn't take anything at all.
It was the worst deal I'd ever made. That's probably why I couldn't stop thinking about it.
· · ·
Most of the others went to the relief camp. Harsh led them out at half past twelve, thirteen boys and three of Ira's girls, to meet the buses on the main road. Ira let the girls go. I watched her do it. She asked each one three times if she was sure, and wrote their names and their phone numbers in her notebook, and hugged them, which I'd never imagined Ira Deshmukh doing, and then she stood at the shutter and watched them go down the alley in the heat until they turned the corner.
Arjun stayed.
"Kabaadi always knows the back door," he said, with a shrug, as if that settled it. "I'll go where the back door is."
That made six. Me, Bunty, Ira, Simran, Ananya and Arjun. Seven kilometres. In my head, I worked it out the way I'd work out a paper. Four safe hours a day, between noon and four, when the dead stood in the shade. Six people, one with asthma, one who couldn't stop talking, one who couldn't stop eating. A city full of the dead and a hundred dead ends. And we couldn't leave today: the message said one o'clock at the back gate, and nobody walks seven kilometres in Kota in an hour, not any more.
Two days. Tomorrow at noon we'd set out. We'd shelter somewhere on the way when the sun went down. We'd be at the back gate on Friday at one.
"First," I said, "I need my trunk. It's at Gayatri. Everything I own is in that trunk, and half of it is power banks."
"I'll come," said Bunty.
"Of course you will."
Ira was still standing at the shutter, looking down the empty alley where her girls had gone. When she turned round, she didn't look at the map or the Maggi or the Ledger. She looked at me.
"One question," she said. "Then I won't ask any more today."
"Go on."
"Why do you need to leave Kota so badly? Everyone else just wants to be safe. You want to drive nine hundred and fifty kilometres through a country full of the dead. Why?"
I thought about lying. It would have been easy. It always is.
"My sister," I said.
Something changed in Ira's face. It wasn't much. It was the face of someone looking at a printed answer, and finding that the answer was right, and that she'd got the question wrong all along.
She didn't say anything else. She just nodded, once, and went back to Ananya.