I took the phone out of Arjun's hands and pressed the red button.
It was easy. It was the easiest thing I'd done all week. His mother's smiling face in the yellow sari vanished, and the devotional song stopped in the middle of a line, and the screen went dark, and in the sudden silence I heard them on the stairs.
Not one. Many. Coming up fast, the way they came up the lane on Sunday night.
"Back," I said. Not a whisper any more. There was no point whispering now. "Everyone. Up. Now."
The almirah jumped. Something had hit the glass door behind it, hard, and the whole steel cupboard rocked on its blanket and banged against the wall. Then it was hit again. The glass behind it cracked with a sound like ice on a river.
Bunty was already on his feet, dragging Simran and Ananya up off the floor. Ira was up. Arjun was still kneeling where I'd left him, staring at his empty hands.
"Arjun."
He looked at me. His face was completely white.
"Up," I said.
He got up.
· · ·
There was only one way out of that library that didn't go down those stairs, and I'd found it at half past three, the way I always find the way out before I sit down anywhere. In the storeroom at the far end of the reading hall, behind the cubicles, an iron ladder was bolted to the wall, going up to a hatch in the ceiling. The library's water tank was on the roof, and its air-conditioning units, and somebody had to be able to get up there to fix them.
The storeroom was at the far end of the reading hall. The reading hall was the room we'd locked.
With a boy in it.
"Through the hall," I said. "Past him. To the storeroom. There's a ladder to the roof."
"Past him?" said Simran.
"He's revising," I said. "He won't stop for us."
The almirah went over behind us. It hit the floor of the front room with a crash that shook the building, and the glass door came down on top of it in a waterfall, and the first of them came through the gap.
Ira had the bolt of the reading-hall door open before I'd finished the sentence. We went through.
· · ·
I've thought about that reading hall a lot.
Eighty wooden cubicles in rows, their lamps dark, their partitions shoulder-high, the blinds glowing faintly orange from the streetlights outside. The smell of books. The rules on the wall in big black letters: SILENCE PLEASE. NO TALKING. NO SLEEPING. And in the middle of it, in cubicle forty-one, the boy, swaying forward over his book and back, in perfect concentration, while six of us ran past him down the aisle between the cubicles, and behind us the door we'd just come through burst open and the dead came in.
They came in hunting. Fast and low, crashing into the partitions, knocking over chairs, filling the aisles. They came past cubicle forty-one on both sides, around it, a flood of them going after the noise of our feet.
He didn't look up.
He went on revising. I saw it over my shoulder as I ran, and I've never been able to stop seeing it. A whole library full of hunting dead pouring past him, and the boy in cubicle forty-one, leaning forward over his book, and back, the way he must have done every night of his life since the day his parents dropped him off in Kota. His habit was stronger than his hunger. Stronger than all of theirs.
I'd written a question in the Ledger three hours before. Strong habit greater than hunger? Now I knew the answer. I'd have given a great deal not to.
· · ·
The storeroom was small and dark and full of broken chairs and cartons of paper. The ladder was where I'd left it, iron, painted green, bolted to the wall, going up three metres to a square wooden hatch in the ceiling. New chapters come out on novelping(.)com first.
Bunty went up it like a squirrel. At the top he threw his shoulder against the hatch, and it didn't move. "Bolted," he gasped. "Rusted—" I heard him grunt, and something metal squealed, and then the hatch flew up and open and a square of night sky appeared, with stars in it.
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"Simran! Up!"
Simran went up. Ananya went up, wheezing, with Bunty reaching down to haul her by the wrists. Ira went up and turned round at the top and reached down.
"Arjun," I said. "Go."
"You go."
"Arjun."
"You're slower than me, Kabaadi." He actually smiled. It was a terrible smile, but it was his. "Everyone knows. Go."
So I went. I'm not proud of that. I went up the ladder with Ira's hand on my collar, and came out onto the roof into the hot night air, and turned round on my knees beside the hatch to pull Arjun up after me.
He was halfway up the ladder when they came into the storeroom.
I saw them come in below him, into the dark, shapes crashing through the broken chairs, two, three, four. Arjun climbed faster. He was nearly at the top. He was close enough that I had his wrist in my hand, and Bunty had his other arm, and we were pulling.
"Just for a second," Arjun said. He was looking up at me, his face very close to mine, white in the starlight. "I just wanted to see if she'd messaged. She always messages at nine-thirty, Kabaadi. Always. Every day."
Then something below him took hold of his ankle, and pulled.
He came off the rung. All his weight went onto our hands at once. Bunty was shouting. I held on. Below Arjun, in the square of darkness, I could see them, a crowd at the bottom of the ladder now, and the first of them already climbing, one hand on the rungs and one hand on Arjun's leg, coming up him like a ladder of his own.
I did the sum. I don't know how long it took. Less than a second, probably. It felt like the whole three hours of a paper.
If we held on, they'd climb him. They'd climb him to the top of the ladder and out of the hatch and onto the roof, where there was nowhere to go. All of us. Simran, Ananya, Bunty, Ira, me, and Arjun as well, because he was already gone; I'd seen where the hand on his leg had been and what it had done there.
If we let go, the hatch could close.
"Bunty," I said. "Let go."
"No!"
"Let go of him."
"NO, bhaiya, no, we can—"
Arjun looked up at me. I'll remember his face for the rest of my life, however long that turns out to be. He didn't look angry. He looked surprised, a little, the way he'd looked in the common room on Monday night when the JEE line went across the screen. As if the paper had turned out to have a question on it that nobody had told him about.
"Tell her," he said.
I let go.
Bunty didn't. Ira did it for him. She took Bunty's wrist in both hands and broke his grip, the way they teach you to break a grip in NCC, and Arjun went down into the dark, and I slammed the hatch.
· · ·
It didn't have a bolt on the top side. Of course it didn't. Nobody locks a hatch from the roof. So Bunty sat on it.
He sat on it all night. Some of the night they hit it from underneath, and it bucked under him, and he put his hands flat on the roof on either side and held on and didn't make a sound. Later we dragged a broken air-conditioning unit across from beside the water tank and put it on the hatch next to him, and he still wouldn't get off. He sat there with his back to me, facing the city, and didn't say a word.
The roof was flat and hot and smelled of tar. There was a water tank and four dead air-conditioning units and a low parapet round the edge. The girls lay down in the shadow of the tank. Simran was shaking. Ananya wasn't doing anything at all, which was worse. Ira sat between them with an arm round each and her face turned away from me. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
From the roof you could see a long way. Kota at night, with the power gone in most places, was a dark sea with islands of light in it: hospitals running on generators, the Tower's red band far away to the north, something burning to the east with a dull orange glow that lit up the bottoms of the clouds. Every so often, very far off, there was gunfire. Short bursts. The Army, maybe, somewhere on the edge of the city. Dogs barked across the whole of Kota, a long relay of barking from street to street, that went on until dawn.
Under our feet, in the library, they hunted for a long time, and then, slowly, stopped.
I opened the Ledger in the starlight. I couldn't really see the page. I didn't need to. I knew where everything was in that book.
OWES. Third line from the bottom. Arjun Patel — half a Bourbon.
I took out my pencil and drew a line through it. One straight line, the way I'd drawn through the debts of boys who'd left the hostel. Paid in full. Closed.
When I looked up, Bunty had turned his head and was watching me do it.
He looked at me for a very long time. Then he turned back to the city.
· · ·
At dawn, Ira came and sat down beside me with her back against the water tank.
"You were right," she said. She said it flatly, looking straight ahead. "If we'd held on, they'd have come up him. All of them. We'd all be dead."
"I know."
"I hate that you were right."
"So do I."
She turned her head. Her eyes were red and dry and her braid had come completely apart.
"Do you?" she said. "Really? Or is that just what you say?"
I didn't answer. I didn't know.
Bunty got up off the hatch when the sky went grey. He walked across the roof to us, very stiffly, the way a man walks who has been sitting on a hatch with the dead under it all night, and he stood in front of me and looked down.
"Bhaiya," he said. "If it was me on that ladder. You'd have let go of me too?"
"Yes," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. And then something happened to his face that I didn't understand at the time. I understand it now. It wasn't anger. It was something much more tired than that, and much kinder.
"Liar," said Bunty.
He went and sat down by the parapet with his back to all of us, and put his face on his knees.
I didn't know, then, about the folder at the bottom of his bag. I didn't know what he'd read, sitting on the bed in room 312. I thought he was just saying it, the way people say things when they're grieving. I thought I'd read him right.
The sun came up over the eastern edge of Kota, red and huge in the smoke. From the roof of the Saraswati Self-Study Library, if you looked south, over the rooftops and the water tanks and the half-built hostels of Talwandi, you could see, a long way off, a white water tower standing up out of a dark mass of trees, with letters painted round its tank in blue. I couldn't read them from there. I didn't need to.
SHIKHAR.
Below us, at 6:55, the doors of the lane began to open, and the dead came out to go to class.