The thing nobody understood about Kabir, Bunty thought, was that he walked like he was reading.
They were going back to Gayatri through the lanes at noon, in heat so thick you could have spread it on a roti, and Kabir was a step in front, and every few metres he'd stop. Not because he'd seen anything. Bunty couldn't see anything. He'd just stop, and tilt his head a little, and look at a doorway or a parked car or the shadow under a stairwell, the way their Maths sir used to look at a question before he started writing on the board. Then he'd go on. Or he'd take a different turning, and twenty metres later Bunty would see what he'd seen: a dead boy standing very still in the shade of a water tank, or a woman sitting in a shop doorway with her head on her knees.
Kabir never said look. He never said careful. He just went round.
Bunty had known him two years. In two years he'd seen Kabir do maybe five things that nobody else in Gayatri Residency could have done, and each time Kabir had made it look like an accident, and each time everyone else had believed it. Bunty had stopped believing it in the first month, the night Kabir fixed the hostel's broken water pump by looking at it for ten seconds and then telling the plumber which valve to open. The plumber had been doing that job for twenty years. Kabir had just shrugged and said he'd read it on the internet.
Bunty had asked him about it once, much later. Bhaiya, why do you pretend?
Kabir had looked at him for a long moment and said, Pretend what? and gone back to counting Maggi.
So Bunty had stopped asking. He'd decided, at some point in the first year, that his job wasn't to understand Kabir. His job was to stand next to him. Somebody had to.
· · ·
They went in the back way, through the delivery alley and the mess. Bhanwar Singh stood at the gate in the full noon sun with his lathi across his chest and his black arm hanging. A crow sat on the gate above him. Neither of them moved.
Bunty did his salute as they went past. He'd started doing it on Monday, a quick touch of two fingers to the forehead, the way he'd seen soldiers do in films. Kabir had said nothing about it, which meant Kabir thought it was stupid and had decided not to say so, which was the most polite thing Kabir ever did.
Pranav was on the first-floor landing with a hockey stick, and when he saw them he made a noise like a kettle and grabbed Bunty by both arms.
"The trucks? Did you get on? Did they—what happened, where are the others, why are you back—"
Bunty told him. He didn't tell it well. He kept stopping. When he got to the part about the officer standing up in the jeep, Pranav sat down on the stairs.
"So I was right," he said, after a while. "To stay."
"Maybe," said Bunty.
"You're going again? Where?"
"South," said Kabir, from the stairs above. "Come if you want."
Pranav looked at the stairs going up, and the courtyard going down, and the warden at the gate. Then he shook his head, slowly. "I've taken enough chances with gates," he said, and Bunty understood that, so he didn't argue.
· · ·
Room 312 smelled of somebody else's socks and Kabir's Maggi. Kabir went up to the roof to look at something, the way he always did, and left Bunty to pack. That was normal too. Kabir planned; Bunty carried. It was the oldest arrangement in Gayatri Residency.
He packed the power banks first. Eight of them were left; the others were still rented out to boys who'd gone on the trucks or into the lanes, and Bunty had a feeling Kabir would never collect on those. Chargers. Cables. A first-aid box that Kabir had bought from a boy whose mother was a pharmacist, full of things in strips. A torch. Two packets of candles. The big blue suitcase full of Maggi, which Bunty emptied into two backpacks because you couldn't run with a suitcase. A Bournvita jar full of folded notes, which Bunty didn't open, because it was Kabir's, and because he'd once seen Kabir count it, and he'd had to go and lie down afterwards.
Under the Bournvita jar, at the bottom of Kabir's cardboard box of papers, was a plastic folder with a press stud.
Bunty wasn't going to open it. He was only going to move it to the backpack. But the press stud had come undone, and when he lifted the folder the papers slid half out, and the top one was a receipt, and he saw the name on it before he could stop himself.
JAI AMBE CATERERS — GAYATRI RESIDENCY MESSReceived from: K. AnandTowards: mess charges of SHUBHAM RAWAT, Room 304Month: August. Amount: Rs 3,200/-
Bunty sat down on the bed.
He went through the folder slowly. September. October. November. Every month, the same. Every month since the August before last, when Shubham had arrived in Gayatri Residency with one suitcase and a scholarship letter from Shikhar that paid for his classes and not his food, and had started skipping dinner and telling everyone he wasn't hungry. Bunty remembered that. Bunty remembered thinking it was strange, a boy that thin not being hungry. And then, sometime in the first month, Shubham had started eating again, and told everyone, smiling, that some well-wisher had paid his mess bill. Some rich idiot, Kabir had said.
The last receipt was for June. Paid in advance. Paid on the Friday before the test, two days before everything.
Received from: K. Anand.
Bunty sat on the bed with the receipts in his lap for a long time.
He thought about Sunday night on the stairs. You did a good thing, bhaiya. And Kabir: I did a profitable thing. Nine people owe us. He thought about Kabir charging four hundred rupees a day for a power bank while the world ended, and writing it down in his little book, and Bunty looking at him as if he'd kicked a puppy. He thought about the forty rupees from March. Bunty had paid thirty-five. Kabir had reminded him about the other five maybe a hundred times since, and written it in his book, and never once actually taken it.
He thought about Kabir in the godown last night, sitting in the dark with his phone, after the message came. Bunty hadn't seen what it said. He'd seen Kabir's face in the light of the screen, for about two seconds, before he turned it off. He'd never seen that face on Kabir before. He hadn't known Kabir had that face.
What do you write in that book, bhaiya?
Everything that matters.
Is Shubham in it?
Bunty put the receipts back in the folder very carefully, all of them in order, and closed the press stud. Then he put the folder in his own backpack, not Kabir's, at the very bottom, under his spare underwear, where nobody would ever look.
He wasn't going to say anything. Kabir didn't want anybody to know, that was obvious, and Bunty had decided a long time ago that his job wasn't to understand Kabir. But there was something he was going to do. He didn't know what yet. Something with the receipts. Someday. When it mattered.
· · ·
Before they left, he went down to the third floor on his own.
Room 304 looked the same as always. Shubham's physics book was still on the desk, open at rotational mechanics, with a pencil in it to mark the page. The trunk and the suitcase and the chair were still against the bathroom door. Everything was very quiet.
Bunty stood with his hand flat on the plywood of the bathroom door, the way he had yesterday.
"Oye, Shubham," he said, very softly. "Guess who paid your mess bill."
Nothing.
"Every month, yaar. Since August. The Kabaadi. Our Kabaadi." His voice wobbled. He made it stop. "He charges me forty rupees for a charger and he paid three thousand two hundred every month for you, and he never told anyone. Can you believe it? Bunty didn't believe it. Bunty had to read it four times."
On the other side of the door, something shifted. Weight, moving, the way a person shifts in a seat.
Then, very gently, a push.
Bunty stood there with his hand on the door until he could breathe again. Then he went upstairs and picked up both backpacks, the heavy ones, because Kabir couldn't carry anything heavier than a notebook without complaining, and went to find him.
· · ·
His phone buzzed at two, in the window they'd agreed, and it was Papa.
"Bunty? Bunty?"
"Papa."
His father's voice sounded the way it did at the garage when a customer was shouting, very calm and very loud. Indore was under curfew, he said. Everyone at home was fine. Mummy was fine. Pinky and Gudiya were fine and fighting over the TV remote. The garage was shut. There were police at the crossing. They were saying on TV it was in Indore now, in a few places, near the station.
"Where are you, beta? Still at the hostel?"
"Near it." Bunty looked at Kabir, who was pretending not to listen and failing, because Kabir always heard everything. "Papa, I'm going with a friend. To his place. His sister is alone." Find the original chapter at g.com.
"Which friend?"
Bunty thought about it.
"The one who's always right," he said.
There was a silence on the line. When his father spoke again, his voice was different. Quieter.
"Then why do you sound scared?"
"Because he's always right, Papa."
His father laughed. It wasn't much of a laugh, but it was the one he did when he was proud and didn't want to say so, the one he'd done the night of the ring road and the school bus, at two in the morning, when Bunty had brought it back to the yard without a scratch.
"Then listen to him," his father said. "And Bunty. If there's driving to do, you drive. You hear me? Don't let anyone else drive. You're better than me. You always were."
"Papa—"
But the two minutes were up, and the line had gone dead, and Bunty stood in the stairwell of Gayatri Residency with the phone against his ear and his eyes stinging.
Kabir didn't say anything. He just took one of the backpacks off Bunty's shoulder, the lighter one, and put it on his own back, and started down the stairs. Bunty knew what that meant, from Kabir. It was practically a hug.
· · ·
They got back to the godown at four. The heat was going out of the day. Ira had made a list of everything in the godown by category, and Simran was reading it out loud to Ananya to keep her breathing slow, and Arjun was asleep on a bed of flattened cartons with a chocolate wafer on his chest.
Kabir went straight to Ira with the Ledger, and they sat on two cartons with their heads close together over a map Ira had drawn of the coaching belt from memory, arguing in low voices. Bunty watched them for a while. Ira kept tapping the map with her pen and saying no. Kabir kept saying yes, but. It was the most either of them had talked to anybody in three days.
Bunty decided not to say anything about that either. He was getting good at it.
At seven, when the light went orange, he took the first watch at the front shutter. There was a gap at the bottom, a few centimetres, where the steel had bent, and if you lay flat on the floor you could see out into the market lane.
The lane was filling up. That was what happened at seven now. They came out of everywhere at once, and they moved fast and low, and they went wherever the sounds were. Bunty lay very still with his cheek on the cold floor and watched their feet go past. Chappals. Bare feet. School shoes. A pair of very expensive trainers with one lace undone.
Then, in the middle of all of it, a pair of feet that were walking.
Not hunting. Walking. Slowly, like a man going home from work, flip-flops slapping. And beside them, swinging, the bottom of a dented steel kettle.
Bunty pressed his eye to the gap.
There was a man walking down the middle of the market lane, among the dead. A thin man in a vest and a checked lungi, with a kettle in one hand and a stack of paper cups in the other, and behind him, in a neat line, three dead men with sacks on their backs, following him like porters. The dead in the lane went past him on both sides, fast and hungry, and not one of them so much as turned its head.
The man stopped right outside the godown and looked down at the gap under the shutter, at Bunty's eye, as if he knew exactly where it was.
He had red eyes. Terrible eyes, like a man who hadn't slept for a week.
He raised the kettle a little, in greeting. Then he walked on, and his porters went after him, and the dead went round them like water round stones.
Bunty rolled onto his back on the floor of Goyal Traders and stared at the ceiling.
"Bhaiya," he whispered, into the dark. "Bhaiya."
"What?" said Kabir, from somewhere near the Maggi.
"Pintu bhaiya," said Bunty. "He's walking with them."