We came down off the roof at eight, when the dead had gone to class.
Bunty went first through the hatch, and I went after him, because I'd let go of Arjun's wrist and I wasn't going to let anyone else go down that ladder ahead of me. The storeroom was empty. The broken chairs were more broken. There was a dark smear on the bottom rungs of the ladder that none of us looked at.
The reading hall was a wreck. Half the partitions were down. Chairs lay on their backs like dead insects. The rules on the wall said SILENCE PLEASE over a floor covered in paper and glass.
In cubicle forty-one, the boy was still revising.
He was exactly where we'd left him, leaning forward over his book, and back. His desk was the only one in the hall that hadn't been touched. All night the hunting dead had poured round him like a river round a rock, and he'd gone on reading the same line.
We walked past him in single file. Simran held Ananya's hand. Nobody looked at him except me.
I'm not sure why I did what I did next. I stopped beside his cubicle, and looked at the book on his desk. It was a physics book, a thick one, the kind every Kota student owns. It was open at a chapter on rotational mechanics. The same chapter Shubham had been reading on Sunday night, with a pencil in it to mark the page.
I left him there. What else was there to do? He had an exam to pass.
· · ·
At the bottom of the stairs, Ira's fist went up.
The street outside was nearly empty. The dead who'd hunted the library all night had gone. But at the far end of the road, going north, there was a straggling line of them, the last of the morning rush, walking slowly towards the Tower to be in class by seven, an hour late.
At the back of the line there was a boy walking with a limp. One leg of his track pants was dark and stiff from the knee down. He was wearing a white T-shirt with a red heart on the back and the word SURAT under it, and he was walking, slowly and patiently, on a leg that should not have held him, towards a class he had complained about every single day for two years.
Bunty made a sound beside me. I put my hand on his arm without looking at him. He didn't shake it off.
We stood in the doorway of the Saraswati Self-Study Library and watched Arjun Patel go to class until he turned the corner and was gone.
"Better attendance than me," Bunty said, in a voice that broke in half on the last word.
None of us said anything after that for a long time.
· · ·
The plan had been to move only in the afternoon. Twelve to four. Rule one. But the message said one o'clock at the back gate, and we had three kilometres to go to the edge of the city and then the last kilometre across open ground, and the arithmetic didn't work. You can't do four kilometres in an hour in Kota now, not carrying bags, not with Ananya's chest.
So I'd changed the rule. I'd done it on the roof at dawn, watching them come out to go to class. I'd realised something I should have seen days before.
In the morning, the dead are in school.
From seven till lunch, they're inside. In the coaching buildings, the classrooms, the libraries, the Tower. The streets between the buildings are emptier than they are at any other time of day. Morning is dangerous if you walk past a coaching centre. But if you know where the coaching centres are, and you go round them, the morning is a gift.
And I knew where every coaching centre in Kota was. I'd sold notes in most of them.
"Rule one is cancelled," I told the others, on the stairs. "New rule. Between eight and twelve, we stay away from anywhere anyone ever taught anything. Ira, you lead, but I'll tell you where."
Ira looked at me for a long moment. I thought she was going to argue. Then she just nodded, very tired.
"Tell me where," she said.
· · ·
We went south. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Past Talwandi the coaching belt thins out, and the city becomes a different kind of city: shops and showrooms and small factories, workshops with their shutters down, a marble dealer's yard full of slabs of grey Kota stone leaning against each other like dominoes. I took us down the service lanes behind the main road, away from the two coaching centres I knew were on that stretch. Ira walked in front with her hand at her shoulder. Bunty walked behind me, carrying both heavy bags, saying nothing at all, which from Bunty was louder than shouting.
Jhalawar Road, when we came out onto it, was the widest road I'd ever seen empty.
This is a copied chapter. Its author posts it on their own site, and that's where your reading actually helps them.
Six lanes, a median with dead bougainvillea, and the whole of it a car park of the abandoned. Cars at every angle with their doors open. A tempo on its side, with sacks of onions spilling out and rotting in the sun. A city bus that had burned on Sunday, nothing left of it but a black skeleton with its windows melted. Shoes. There were always shoes. I never got used to the shoes.
We walked down the middle of it, past the cars, in the morning sun, as fast as Ananya could go.
There was a petrol pump on the left, with a board out front that someone had written on in red paint: NO PETROL NO DIESEL. And standing at the second pump, in his blue uniform shirt with the company logo on the pocket, was the attendant. He was holding the nozzle in his hand, raised, waiting, the way he must have held it ten thousand times, for a car that would pull up and ask for five hundred rupees of petrol.
He didn't look at us. He was waiting for a customer.
"Bhaiya," Bunty whispered, the first thing he'd said since the library. "Even the dead have better customer service than Indore."
It was nearly a joke. I took it as a good sign.
In the dust at the edge of the road there were tracks, deep ones, the wide ridged tyre marks of heavy trucks. Army trucks, going south. Further down, where Jhalawar Road ran up to the big concrete bridge of the bypass, I could see sandbags, and coils of wire across the lanes, and floodlights on tall poles, switched off in the daylight. Something moved behind the sandbags. A helmet, maybe.
"Checkpoint," said Ira quietly, beside me. "At the bypass."
"I see it."
"They'll stop us."
"They won't see us. We're not going that far."
She looked at the bridge for a long time. I knew what she was thinking, because I was thinking it too. Behind those sandbags were soldiers. Soldiers are the people you're supposed to go to. Every rule Ira had ever been taught said go to the soldiers.
"The girls I put on the truck," she said. "That's where they went. Isn't it? Through there. Out."
"Maybe."
"And they'd have checked them."
"Probably."
She didn't say anything else. But she turned away from the bridge first.
· · ·
At a little after ten, we turned west off Jhalawar Road into the last colony before the city ends.
It was the kind of colony that every Indian city grows at its edges like a fringe: rows of small houses, one storey and two, each one different, built by people who'd saved for twenty years and then built exactly what they wanted. A pink one with a blue gate. A yellow one with a little temple on the roof. Bougainvillea over the walls in purple and orange, black water tanks on every terrace, neem trees, a dead scooter under every one. Names on the gates in Hindi and English. Shanti Niwas. Ganpati Kripa. Sharma Sadan. It was very quiet. The dead, I guessed, were mostly asleep in the shade by now, or at the coaching centres up the road, or gone. The colony felt like a house where everyone has gone out and left the fan on.
And beyond the last row of houses, where the colony stopped, the city stopped too.
There was a field there, dry and brown, the stubble of a harvested crop cut short and baked yellow. On the far side of the field there was a ditch, a long nala running along the edge of it with a trickle of black water at the bottom. And beyond the nala, maybe three hundred metres from where we stood, there was a wall. A high, pale wall, ten feet at least, with coils of razor wire along the top glinting in the sun. It ran away to the left and right for what looked like a kilometre. Behind it were trees, and the tops of tall buildings, and a white water tower with blue letters painted round its tank. This chapter was copied from novelping . com without permission.
SHIKHAR.
"There," I said.
Nobody answered. We just stood at the end of a lane in the last colony in Kota and looked at it.
Then the dogs started barking.
They were above us, on the flat roof of the last house in the lane, five of them, street dogs, ribs showing, lined up along the parapet like a row of guards, barking their heads off down at us. Simran screamed. Ira's fist went up. Every one of us froze, rule six, not breathing, while five dogs announced us to the whole colony.
"Chup!" A woman's voice, sharp, from the same roof. "Moti! Chup! Kalu, chup kar! Quiet, all of you!"
The dogs stopped as if a tap had been turned off.
A woman stood up behind the parapet. She was in her fifties, short and solid, with a cotton sari tucked in at the waist the way women tuck their saris when they're working, and her grey hair in a bun, and a steel ladle in one hand. She looked down at the five of us standing in the lane, at our bags and our dirt and our faces, and her face did several things very quickly.
"Idhar," she said, not loud, but in a voice that expected to be obeyed. "Here. Come here. Come inside, quickly. The gate is open. Jaldi!"
We looked at each other.
"Rule six says don't trust strangers," said Simran faintly.
"Rule six is about the dead," I said.
"Then what's the rule about strangers?"
I looked up at the woman with the ladle. I tried to read her, the way I'd read everyone in Kota for two years. I couldn't. She was a question in a language I'd never studied.
"I don't have one," I said.
The gate of the last house was green iron, and it was already open a crack. Beside it, on the wall, there was a painted board with a picture of a steaming three-tier tiffin carrier, a little faded from the sun.
ANNAPURNA TIFFIN SERVICE. HOME FOOD FOR STUDENTS. 40 TIFFINS DAILY. NO ONION-GARLIC ON TUESDAYS.
· · ·
Inside the gate there was a small verandah, cool and shaded and swept, and stacked against the wall of the verandah, in columns as tall as I was, there were tiffin carriers. Dozens of them. Steel, three-tier, four-tier, each with a little name tag tied to the handle with string. Rohit, Room 12. Vivek (no chilli). Ankit B. Forty of them. I counted.
The woman came down the stairs from the roof with the ladle still in her hand and the dogs flowing round her feet, and shut the gate behind us, and bolted it. Then she turned round and looked at us properly.
She looked at Ananya's grey lips. At Simran's shaking hands. At Bunty's eyes, which were still red from the library. At Ira's braid, which had come undone again. At me.
She looked at me longest. I don't know what she saw.
"My name is Sushila," she said. "You can call me aunty. Everyone does." She pointed with the ladle at a door into the house, through which came a smell that hit me in the stomach so hard I nearly sat down. Dal. Hot dal, with jeera and garlic and ghee. Real food, cooked on a real stove. I hadn't smelled anything like it in five days.
"I've fed forty boys from that campus every day for nine years," said Sushila aunty. "Five days now, nobody has come for a tiffin. I keep cooking. I don't know how to stop." She nodded at the door. "Eat first."
Then she looked past us, at the wall, at the water tower over the field.
"Then you can tell me," she said, "why you're running towards that campus, when everyone else in this city has been running away from it."