For a while, nothing happened, which is what most emergencies look like from the inside.
Mr. Bhandari noticed the blood at 10:22, when the second drop hit his wrist. He looked at it, surprised, as if someone else had put it there. Then he pressed his handkerchief to his nose and tilted his head back, which is the wrong thing to do with a nosebleed, and sat like that, staring at the ceiling, while the handkerchief turned red.
A few people glanced up. Then they went back to their papers. A man could bleed to death at the front of a Kota exam hall, and the only question anyone would ask afterwards was whether the lost time would be compensated.
At 10:31, he stopped dabbing.
His hand came down to the desk and stayed there. He straightened up in his chair, head tilted a little to the left, and looked at the wall clock. Just looked at it. His mouth was slightly open. The blood on his upper lip had started to dry.
I counted. Thirty seconds without a blink. Forty-five. A minute.
The air conditioner hummed. Pens scratched. Somebody's stomach made a noise that would normally have been the funniest thing to happen in Room 603 all morning.
His shirt was white, with a thin blue stripe, and it was tucked very neatly into his trousers, and the stripe across his chest didn't move. Not up. Not down.
I thought about the video. The green gown. The ward boy who'd stopped struggling too early. Some madman bit me at six-thirty this morning. It was 10:32 now. Four hours. Sweating, then shivering, then bleeding, then still. If I'd been writing the question, those would have been the steps.
I'd like to say I was brave. What I was, mostly, was busy. When I'm frightened I do maths, and I was very frightened, so I did a lot of it.
Option A. Stand up and shout. Forty students hear the word dead, run for the front door and find a corridor with a padlocked iron gate at the end of it. Ramkesh, who has the key, is on the ground floor drinking his ten-thirty chai, as he does every day at ten-thirty. Forty people crushed against a locked gate, with whatever Mr. Bhandari was about to become behind them. I'd seen what happens in a Kota mess when the paneer runs out. I didn't want to see that.
Option B. Do nothing. Maybe he'd had a stroke. Maybe he'd wake up and be embarrassed. Maybe at twelve we'd all hand in our papers and go home. Option B had one big advantage, which was that it was what everyone else was already doing.
Option C. The fire door. I had the key. It was on my left wrist, threaded onto the locker band, because where else do you keep a key nobody's supposed to know you have? Twenty seconds to open, and a staircase down six floors to the alley at the side of the building.
But a boy from Sabarmati batch, rank 1,847, Kabaadi of Gayatri Residency, unlocking a chained fire door with his own key in front of forty witnesses? That boy would get questions. Why do you have a key? What's on the landing? Ramkesh loses his job. My godown goes. And worse, much worse, people start wondering what else I've got that I shouldn't. Invisible people don't have keys. That's the whole point of them.
So: Option C. Done by somebody else.
First I needed to be sure. I took my geometry box, the old steel one, and let it slide off the edge of the desk.
It hit the floor like a car crash. Compass, protractor and two pencils went skittering under the chairs. Every head in the room came up, thirty-nine annoyed faces at once.
Every head except his.
Mr. Bhandari went on looking at the clock.
"Stop," Ira hissed, beside me. "Some of us are writing."
I picked up the box. Then I tore a strip from the margin of my question paper, wrote on it in block capitals and slid it across the gap between our desks.
LOOK AT HIS CHEST.
She read it with the patience of a person reading graffiti on a wall she has to clean. Then, because she was Ira Deshmukh and couldn't stand an unanswered question, she looked.
She looked for a long time. I watched her face change. It was very slight. She stopped holding her pencil and started gripping it.
"He's not breathing," she whispered. "That's a cardiac arrest. Someone has to start CPR in the next—"
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She was already pushing her chair back. I caught her wrist, the one with the red band.
"Don't."
"He'll die."
"I think he already did."
"That's not how it works. If someone starts compressions within—"
"Look at his hand," I said. "Bitten at six-thirty. There was a video last night from a hospital in this city, a patient biting a ward boy and not letting go. Now he's sweating at eighteen degrees, bleeding from the nose and sitting up straight with no air going in."
"You believe a WhatsApp video?"
"I believe what I'm looking at. So do you. That's why you're whispering."
She pulled her wrist free, but she didn't stand up.
"If you're wrong," she said, "he dies because we sat here."
"And if I'm right and you go up there to pump his chest, the next person they find sitting up straight with no air going in is you."
She stared at me. I could see the two halves of her fighting. One half was a girl from Pune who'd done two years of NCC and knew, the way you know your own phone number, that you go to the casualty. The other half had read his chest and done the same arithmetic I had.
Ira Deshmukh, I'd always thought, ran on procedures. Give her a correct procedure and she'll follow it into a fire. So I gave her one.
"Do both," I said. "Get them out first. Then come back and help him, if he still needs help. Evacuate, then treat. That's the order, isn't it?"
It was a guess. I'd never done NCC. But her jaw moved, and I knew I'd read the question right.
"The gate's locked," she said. "Ramkesh has the key."
"Not that way." I worked the fire-door key off the locker band on my wrist, pressed it into her palm and closed her fingers over it. "Fire door at the back. This key. You found it on the floor. Back rows first, quietly. No bags, no papers, nothing. Down the fire stairs."
She looked at the key. Then at me.
"Why do you have a key to the fire door?"
"I found it on the floor."
"You just told me I found it on the floor."
"It's a very lucky row."
"Why don't you do it yourself?"
"Because they'll listen to rank one," I said. "Nobody listens to eighteen-forty-seven."
That was true. It wasn't the whole truth, but nothing I said to anyone ever was, and that morning there wasn't time to start.
She stood up.
She did it beautifully. She walked down the aisle to the back the way you walk to ask an invigilator for a rough sheet, unhurried, slightly bored, and only people who knew there was no invigilator back there could have found it strange. Unfortunately, that was everyone. Heads turned. A boy in row seven opened his mouth, and she gave him a look that closed it.
The fire door was grey steel with a push bar. A chain went twice through the bar and round an iron hook somebody had screwed into the wall beside it, and met in a brass padlock the size of a fist. She knelt, fitted the key and turned it.
The padlock opened with a click like a gunshot.
Nothing at the front of the room moved.
She began to draw the chain out of the bar, one link at a time, lowering it to the floor as though it were made of glass. I watched her hands. They were completely steady, and I knew exactly how much that was costing her.
At 10:45, the phone on Mr. Bhandari's desk began to vibrate.
Mrs. Bhandari, right on time. The phone buzzed against the wood, a hard rattling sound in the quiet, and crept a centimetre towards the edge of the desk.
Mr. Bhandari's head turned towards it.
Slowly. Not the way a man turns to look at his phone. The way a sunflower turns, if you could watch a sunflower in fast motion. It was the first time he'd moved in fourteen minutes.
That was the moment I stopped hoping I was wrong.
The phone stopped. His head stayed where it was, aimed at the phone, waiting.
At the back, Ira had the chain on the floor. She leaned over to the two boys in the last row and whispered something. They stared at her. She whispered again, and one of them actually got up, then the other, and they slid out of their chairs, pushed the bar of the fire door very slowly and slipped through the gap into the stairwell.
Row seven was next. Two of them went. Three didn't.
In row six, Bunty was already on his feet. He hadn't heard a word. He'd simply looked at my face across three rows, and whatever he saw there made him stand. That's the thing about Bunty that I'd never written in my book, because I'd never known which column to put it in.
Beside him, the Ganga boy didn't move.
"Chal," Bunty whispered. "Come on."
"I have twelve questions left," the boy whispered back, without looking up.
"Bhai, your life has questions left."
"It's negative marking. If I leave now I lose—"
Bunty took hold of the back of his collar.
The scrape of the boy's chair was loud. Not very loud. Just louder than anything had been for the last fifteen minutes. Half the front of the room turned round to see what was going on at the back. And in row one, a girl called Nandini, a Ganga girl with a big pink water bottle and a reputation for reporting things, looked from the empty back rows to the invigilator's desk, and did what a good student does. She raised her hand.
"Sir," she said, "are they allowed to—"
She saw his face then. The open eyes, the dried blood.
"Sir?" A different voice. Concerned. Kind. "Sir, your nose. Sir, are you okay?"
She got up and went to him. Of course she did. She was the kind of person who goes to the casualty, too.
Mr. Bhandari stood up. His chair scraped back across the floor. He was facing the room, and his head was still tilted a little to the left, and his eyes moved across all of us without stopping on anyone, the way an invigilator's eyes do on a long Sunday morning.
"Fifteen minutes remaining," he said.
It was his ordinary voice. Flat, a little bored, exactly the voice in which he'd said it a thousand times in a thousand halls. Every head in the room snapped up. Every hand stopped. Because that's what those words do to you, in Kota. You stop breathing and you look at the clock.
The clock said 10:47. There were seventy-three minutes remaining. Nobody said so. Nobody corrects an invigilator.
I'd heard those words once before in another hall, a long time ago, and I'd frozen. I felt it start again in my hands, that old cold stiffness, like being plugged into a wall.
Then Mr. Bhandari turned, quite slowly, towards Nandini, who was standing a metre away from him holding out a packet of tissues. And he went for her.
The first scream wasn't hers. It was the boy behind her. Hers came a second later.