In Kota there are libraries that aren't libraries.
They don't lend books. You can't borrow anything. What they sell is a desk: a wooden cubicle with partitions on three sides so you can't see your neighbour, a lamp, a charging point, air conditioning and silence, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for two thousand rupees a month. You bring your own books. You bring your own fear. Students who can't study in their hostels because of the noise, or their roommates, or the fan that's too close to the ceiling, go and sit in a self-study library until two in the morning, and come out blinking into the dark with their eyes full of formulas.
The Saraswati Self-Study Library was on the second floor above a row of shuttered shops, up a narrow staircase at the side of the building. The door at the top of the stairs was glass, with three notices taped to it.
SILENCE PLEASE.PHONES ON SILENT.NO FOOD IN READING HALL.
"We're going to break every single rule," Arjun whispered, reading them. "It's like being home."
The door wasn't locked. Somebody had left in a hurry on Sunday morning, and the key was still in it on the inside, on a ring with a plastic tag that said OFFICE.
· · ·
We went in very slowly, Ira first.
Inside there was a small front room with a desk and a register and a steel almirah, a little office behind a partition, and a long reading hall beyond a second glass door. The reading hall had eighty cubicles in rows, each with its lamp and its socket and its partitions, and at the far end, a storeroom and a washroom. The blinds on the big front windows were half down. Without the air conditioning, the room was an oven, and it smelled of old books and old feet.
In cubicle forty-one, in the middle of the reading hall, a boy was sitting at his desk.
Ira's fist went up. We stopped.
He was sitting the way you sit when you've been sitting for a very long time: hunched forward, one elbow on the desk, his head propped on his hand. A book lay open in front of him. As we watched, he swayed very slightly forward, towards the page, and then back. Forward. Back. Like someone reading the same line again and again, trying to make it go in.
"He's revising," I whispered.
Ira turned her head and looked at me as if I'd made a joke at a funeral, which I suppose I had.
"Leave him," I said. "He's doing his habit. As long as we don't disturb him, he'll go on doing it."
"And if you're wrong?"
"Then we'll find out."
"That's not a plan, Kabir."
"It's a hypothesis."
She looked at the boy in cubicle forty-one, swaying over his book. Then she looked at the glass door between the front room and the reading hall. It had a bolt at the top, the kind libraries use to lock their halls at night when they aren't twenty-four hours.
"We lock him in," she said. "And we stay out here."
That was better than my plan. I didn't say so. She knew.
So we locked a dead boy into a reading hall in the middle of his revision, which is something I'd once have paid money to do to half the students in Kota. Bunty slid the bolt very slowly, a millimetre at a time, and it went home without a sound, and in cubicle forty-one the boy swayed forward to his book, and back.
Then we pushed the steel almirah across the glass door at the top of the stairs, very carefully, on a folded blanket so it wouldn't scrape, and closed the blinds all the way down, and sat on the floor of the front room in the heat and the dimness, and nobody said anything for a long time.
· · ·
Ananya's breathing came back slowly. Ira sat beside her with the inhaler in one hand and her notebook in the other, writing something down.
"How many?" I asked.
"Forty-one," said Ananya, very quietly. It was nearly the first thing she'd ever said to me. "Doses. I counted on Sunday night, like didi said. It was eighty-two."
Forty-one doses, and she'd used forty-one in four days. I didn't say anything. I didn't have to. Ira's pen stopped moving for a second, and then went on.
At five, I gave out the food. Dry Maggi, crushed in the packet, with the tastemaker. Two glucose biscuits each. A bottle of water between two. Bunty ate his Maggi with an expression of deep spiritual suffering.
"In Indore," he said, "at this time, my mummy would be making pohe for tomorrow morning. With sev on top. And jalebi from the corner."
"Bunty."
"And in the night, Sarafa. You've never been to Sarafa, bhaiya. It's a jewellery market in the day, and at night all the jewellers close and the whole street becomes food. Bhutte ka kees. Garadu. Malpua." His eyes were closed. "Bunty is going to take all of you to Sarafa one day. All of you. Bunty's treat."
"You can't afford Sarafa," I said.
"For you, bhaiya, Bunty will take a loan."
At ten past seven, the sun went down, and outside the blinds, the road below began to fill.
We heard it more than saw it. The soft, fast patter of feet. Something brushing along the shutters of the shops downstairs. A dog, a long way off, barking until it stopped. Simran crawled to the window and lifted a corner of the blind with one finger, and looked, and let it fall, and crawled back, and didn't talk for the rest of the evening, which was how I knew exactly what she'd seen.
In the reading hall, behind the glass, the boy in cubicle forty-one swayed forward over his book, and back.
He didn't get up. Night had come, and the dead downstairs were hunting, and this one sat at his desk, revising. The library said twenty-four hours, and he believed it.
I opened the Ledger and wrote, under PATTERNS:
8. Some habits beat the night. (Library boy. Warden's rounds.) Strong habit > hunger? Find out which.
· · ·
At nine, everyone was asleep except Ira and me.
Or everyone was pretending. Bunty lay on his back on the floor with his arms crossed over his chest like a dead king, breathing loudly through his nose. Simran and Ananya slept curled up together under the desk. Arjun was sitting against the wall with his phone in his hands, turning it over and over without switching it on, which I noticed and didn't think enough about. I'll always know that. I noticed it, and I didn't think enough about it.
Ira was sitting by the window with her back against the wall, her knees drawn up. I went and sat on the other side of the window. Between us, the blind glowed faintly orange from the streetlights, the ones that were still working.
For a long time neither of us said anything. Then she said, without looking at me:
"Why do you do it?"
"Do what?"
"Hide." She said it very simply, the way she'd said NCC, two years. "I looked you up. Sunday night. Sixty-three tests and you've never once been above eighteen hundred or below eighteen-seventy. Nobody's that consistent by accident. I'm not that consistent, and I'm trying."
I'd known she'd looked. I'd known since the hall, really. I'd still hoped she'd find something else to be curious about.
"Maybe I'm just very consistently bad," I said.
"You filled your answer sheet in twenty minutes and then watched an invigilator die."
"I'm very consistently bad very quickly."
She waited. She didn't push. That was the thing about Ira I hadn't expected. She could wait like a parade ground waits.
"When you're good at something," I said at last, "people decide what you're for."
The orange light lay between us on the floor.
"I was good at something once," I said. "When I was twelve. A coaching company in Bhilai found out. They put my face on a billboard on the highway, three metres high. Everyone decided what I was for. My family. My teachers. Strangers in the market." I shrugged. "It turned out I wasn't for that."
"What happened?"
"I'll tell you another time."
"Will you?"
"Probably not." This chapter is updated first at g.com.
She was quiet for a while. Then she said, in a smaller voice than I'd ever heard her use:
"I don't know what I'd be. Without the list."
I looked at her.
"Rank one," she said. "NCC. My mother's daughter. Ganga batch. Every week since I was eleven, there's been a list, and I've been on it, and I've known exactly where. It's—" She stopped. "On Sunday I put six of my girls on a truck and I don't know where it went. On Monday my mother told me not to wait for permission. And all day today I've been walking through the city behind a boy who sells lucky pencils, because he knows things I don't, and he's right more often than I am." Her voice didn't shake. Her hands, round her knees, were very tight. "Take away the list, and I don't know what's left. Maybe nothing."
I could have said something kind. I've watched people say kind things my whole life. I know which words go where.
"You put six of your girls on that truck and stayed for the other five," I said. "There wasn't a list for that."
She turned her head and looked at me in the orange light for a long moment.
Then she reached into the pocket of her kurta and took something out and held it up between two fingers. A small brass key.
"I still have your key," she said.
"Keep it."
"Why?"
"You found it on the floor."
She almost smiled. I'm fairly sure she almost smiled. Then she put the key back in her pocket and said, "What was Pintu going to say? This afternoon. Of all the people in Kota, you should—what?"
"He thinks I'm his best customer," I said. "I'm not. I'm his worst."
That was true. Every word of it. It's the best way to lie.
She looked at me for a while longer. Then she nodded, slowly, the way she'd nodded in the godown, and wrote something in her notebook, and closed it.
"Kabir," she said.
It was the third time she'd ever said my name. The first time had been on the fire stairs, when I went up instead of down. The second had been on top of a wall.
"What?"
But she didn't say anything else. She'd only wanted to say it, I think. To check it was the right answer.
· · ·
At 9:47, Arjun turned on his phone.
I didn't see him do it. I saw the light. A rectangle of white suddenly glowing on the far side of the room, by the glass door at the top of the stairs, where he'd crawled so as not to wake anyone. He was hunched over it, his face lit up blue-white. Just for a second, he told me later, on the ladder, in the worst minute of his life. Just to see if she'd messaged. She always messages at nine-thirty.
She had. Four days of messages came in at once. The phone buzzed and buzzed and buzzed in his hands, a rattling, endless vibration, and the screen lit up the glass door and the gap under the almirah and the blinds beside it, flash, flash, flash, with every new message.
Then it started to ring.
Mummy calling, it said, in big white letters, with a photo of a smiling woman in a yellow sari. The ringtone was a Gujarati devotional song, the kind every mother in Surat sets for her son, very loud and very cheerful, playing at full volume in a silent library in a dead city at night.
Arjun stared at it.
He didn't decline it. That's the thing I'll always understand, even though I'll never forgive myself for not getting there faster. He couldn't. It was his mother, calling for the first time in four days, and his thumb hovered over the red button and couldn't press it.
I was halfway across the room when I heard it. Under the ringtone. On the other side of the glass door, at the bottom of the stairs.
Feet.