Nothing moved.
That was the first thing. Pintu had shouted my name across a crossing full of the dead in a voice that could have called the whole of Talwandi to dinner, and not one dead head turned. The woman under the juice-shop tarpaulin went on swaying. The boys in the shade of the hoardings went on hanging their heads. The three men standing behind Pintu with sacks on their backs didn't even blink.
The six of us stood frozen in the sun in the middle of the road, the way rule six said, not breathing.
Pintu laughed. It was a high, cracked laugh with no sleep in it at all.
"Arre, they can't hear me, Kabir babu." He waved the paper cup. "Come, come. Chai is fresh. I made it on a gas cylinder from a rich man's kitchen in Talwandi. Very good gas."
Ira's fist was still up. She turned her head very slowly and looked at me.
I looked at Pintu. Then at the three men behind him. I could see them clearly now: three dead men in the shade of the bus shelter, all of them standing exactly where he'd parked them, with gunny sacks tied to their backs with rope. One sack had a gas cylinder in it. One had atta. One had something that clinked.
He's walking with them.
I raised my hand, palm forward, which isn't any of Ira's signals. It means wait in every language. Then I walked forward alone, out of the sun, into the shade of the bus shelter, and stood a metre from Pintu bhaiya, and a metre and a half from the nearest dead man.
The dead man didn't look at me. His eyes were on the road. His mouth was slightly open. There was a fly on his lip.
"Kabir babu," said Pintu happily, and held out the paper cup. "You've lost weight."
I took the chai. It seemed rude not to.
· · ·
Up close, Pintu looked terrible. He'd always been thin, but now he looked carved out of something. His eyes were the worst of it: red right through, the whites gone the colour of watermelon, the lids twitching. His hands shook when he poured. But he was smiling, all the time, a wide, delighted smile, as if he'd been let in on a joke that the rest of the world hadn't heard yet.
He pulled up the hem of his lungi to show me his calf. There was a bite there, a deep half-moon gone dark and puckered, like an old burn.
"Sunday night," he said. "Some boy from the PG behind my stall. Came out of nowhere. I got away from him, I went behind the stall, I lay down on my mat, and I thought, okay, Pintu, this is it, die like a gentleman." He laughed. "I had a fever. I bled from the nose like a tap. Then I went to sleep. Then I woke up." He tapped the side of his head. "And the whole city was humming."
"Humming."
"Like this—" He hummed, low and steady, through his closed mouth. "Like a thousand ceiling fans. Like Kota at two in the morning, when every hostel is studying and you can hear the whole city breathing. That's them. All of them, all the time. You can't turn it off." He leaned closer. His breath smelled of chai and something like metal. "And they can't hear me, Kabir babu. Not my voice. To them I'm just another one of them. I can sing. I can shout. I can make chai. They don't care."
"When did you last sleep?" I said.
"Sleep?" He thought about it, as if I'd asked him the capital of a country he'd once visited. "Sunday. Before." He laughed. "I took the blue ones for years to stay awake, Kabir babu. Now I can't stop. And every time I tell one of them something and get it wrong, the sleep goes further away. Like a train leaving the platform." He rubbed his red eyes with the heel of his hand. "The world is very bright now. Very, very bright."
Behind me, I could hear the others coming into the shade, very slowly. Bunty first, of course. Then Ira, with the girls behind her. Arjun last, as close to Bunty as it's possible to be without being inside his shirt.
"How do you move them?" I said. I nodded at the porters.
"Ah." He grinned wider. "Watch."
He looked across the road at a dead boy standing alone in the shade of a parked tempo. Just looked at him, the way you'd look at a question. For a second nothing happened. Then a thin line of blood ran out of Pintu's left nostril and over his lip, and on the other side of the road, the dead boy turned and took three steps sideways along the tempo, and stopped, and went still again.
Simran made a noise. Ira's hand found her arm.
"You tell them," he said. "That's how I think of it. You find the place in them where they're going, and you tell them to go somewhere else. Small things. A step. A turn. Stop. Big things, no. I'm only a chaiwala." He shrugged. "But small things are enough to run a business."
"What business?"
"Courier." He spread his hands, as proud as a man showing off a new shop. "Rich families in the colonies, Talwandi, Rajeev Gandhi Nagar. They're locked in their houses. They need atta, they need medicine, they need a cylinder. Nobody can walk the streets. Nobody except me." He jerked his thumb at the porters. "I walk. They carry. Five hundred a delivery. Dead courier service." He beamed. "First in India, Kabir babu. Maybe first in the world."
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Ira said, very quietly, from behind my shoulder: "What are you?"
Pintu looked at her and his eyes lit up even redder.
"Ira Deshmukh! Rank one! Real topper!" He clapped his hands together once, softly. "I saw you on everybody's phone. The girl who found the key." He glanced at me, a quick, sly, red glance, and back at her. "What am I? Betaal, madam. That's what they call us at the campus. The toppers. Like the Vikram-Betaal stories, you know? The ghost that rides on the dead." He laughed again. "Very literary, these toppers."
"The campus," I said. "Gurukul?"
"Where else? All your toppers who took my blue ones, the ones who got bitten and didn't die, they're all there now. Betaal, every one. And your Aditya Rathore, the poster boy, the one with his face on every hoarding in Kota? He's the biggest of them all." Pintu shook his head admiringly. "He can stop forty of them at once. Forty. He's made a rank list of the Betaal. Who can stop the most, who can stop them hardest. Rank Raj, they call it." He giggled. "Even dead, Kota needs a rank list."
· · ·
"Blue ones," said Ira.
She said it to me, not to him. She'd caught it the way she caught everything. All your toppers who took my blue ones.
Pintu opened his mouth.
"The capsules," I said, before he could. "He used to sell focus capsules out of a tin at the back of his stall. Zenith, they called them. Toppers took them before big tests. You must have heard."
"I heard," said Ira. "I never took one."
"Nobody thought you had." I turned back to Pintu. "So it's the capsules. People who took them, and got bitten, and lived."
"Lived, woke up, started humming." Pintu nodded. His red eyes slid sideways at me again, and the smile changed very slightly, became something more private. "You know, Kabir babu, of all the people in Kota, you should come to the campus and see what—"
"Two power banks," I said, "and two thousand rupees, cash, if you walk us across the crossing to the far side of Talwandi. Now. And you talk less."
Pintu looked at me. The private smile got wider.
"Silence costs extra," he said.
"Three thousand."
"Done." He held out his hand. I counted the notes from the Bournvita jar in my bag into it, and the two power banks, and he tucked the money into the waistband of his lungi and gave the power banks to one of the dead porters to carry, which I would have found funny on any other day.
Ira didn't say anything. I didn't look at her. I knew exactly what her face was doing, because I'd watched her do it in a hall on Sunday, reading the invigilator's chest. She was checking her working.
· · ·
While the others drank water in the shade, Pintu told me two more things, in a low voice, out of the side of his mouth, like a man selling tips at a racecourse.
"The blue ones," he said. "You want to know where they came from? A white Tempo. Every Thursday, eleven o'clock, behind the Tower, by the generator room. The Shikhar sticker on the door was scraped off, but you could still see where it was. A man gave me a box, I gave him money, I sold them, he came back next Thursday. That's all I know. I'm a chaiwala." He winked a red eye. "Ask Saxena sir where they came from. If you ever see him again."
His smile went away for the first time.
"Don't go to the camp at Nayapura," he said. "The Army camp. They take everybody in, it's very nice, food, water, doctors. They check everyone's blood. They look at everyone's bites." He touched his calf through the lungi. "The ones who got bitten and didn't die, they put in a separate truck. I saw it, from a roof. A truck with no windows. It went out towards the bypass." He shook his head. "Nobody I know who went in that truck has called anybody."
I wrote it in the Ledger later. At the time, I just nodded. And then, because he was the only person in Kota I could ask, and because I knew he'd never tell anyone I'd asked, I asked.
"Pintu bhaiya. One capsule. Just one. A long time ago. Is that enough? For somebody to—" I stopped. "To wake up. Instead of the other thing."
He looked at me for a long time with his terrible red eyes. I don't know what he saw.
"Who knows, Kabir babu?" he said at last, gently. "Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not a doctor." He patted my cheek, twice, with a hand that smelled of gas and chai. "I'm a chaiwala."
· · ·
We crossed at a quarter to three.
Pintu walked in front, swinging his kettle. His three dead porters walked around us, one on each side and one behind, slow and heavy, sacks swaying, like a wall that moved. We walked in the middle of them. That was the worst five minutes of my life up to then, and I'd been in Room 603 on Sunday. You could smell them. You could hear the little wet clicks in their throats. Bunty walked with his eyes shut and one hand on Arjun's shoulder.
Halfway across, Ananya started to wheeze.
It was the heat, and the fear, and the smell. Her breath went tight and high and loud, a thin whistle in the silence of the crossing, and in the shade of the bus shelter on the far corner, a dead woman in a green salwar suit lifted her head.
She came out of the shade into the sun. Slowly. Towards us. Towards the sound.
Ira had Ananya's inhaler out and at her mouth before I'd even turned. But the woman was still coming. Ten metres. Eight.
Pintu stopped walking. He looked at her, and his face went very still, and the blood ran out of his nose again, both nostrils this time. The woman stopped as though she'd walked into a wall. She stood there for a second, swaying. Then she turned round and walked back into the shade of the bus shelter, and stood, facing the wall.
And every other dead thing at the crossing lifted its head.
Not at us. At Pintu. All of them, in the shade of every shelter and hoarding and tarpaulin, turned their faces towards him at the same moment, the way a class turns to look at the student who's just dropped his geometry box.
"Chalo," said Pintu, through his teeth, not smiling at all now. "Move, move, move. Move."
We moved.
· · ·
On the far side of Talwandi, where the road bends south towards Jhalawar Road, Pintu stopped.
"This is as far as three thousand goes," he said. His nose had stopped bleeding. The dead around the crossing had gone back to standing in the shade, slowly, one by one, as if they'd forgotten what they'd been looking at. He looked exhausted, more exhausted than I'd ever seen a living man look.
"It's not even three o'clock," said Arjun. "We can make another kilometre—"
"With her?" Pintu nodded at Ananya, who was sitting on the kerb in the sun with her head between her knees, Ira kneeling beside her. "No. And it'll take you an hour to find shade that's safe, and by then it's five, and at five they start stretching their legs." He looked at the sky, the white sky with the sun sliding down it. "You have two hours. Find a roof."
He turned and pointed across the road with his kettle. On the corner, above a row of shuttered shops, there was a big blue board with white letters.
SARASWATI SELF-STUDY LIBRARY. 24x7. FULLY AC. Wi-Fi. SILENCE PLEASE.
"The library on the corner," said Pintu bhaiya, and grinned at me one last time with his red, sleepless eyes. "Open twenty-four hours. The sign says so."
Then he whistled to his porters, the way you'd whistle to cows, and walked off down a side lane with three dead men and two of my power banks behind him, and didn't look back.