I'd forgotten what food was.
Not food you eat to stay alive, out of a packet, crushed, with the tastemaker sprinkled over it in the dark. Real food. Sushila aunty sat us on the floor of her kitchen on a long cotton mat, the way she must have sat forty hungry boys a hundred times, and put a steel thali in front of each of us, and filled it. Rice. Yellow dal with jeera and garlic floating on the top in a slick of ghee. Rotis straight off the tawa, so hot they puffed up and burned your fingers. Aloo with mustard seeds. A spoonful of mango pickle, red and oily, from a big jar on the shelf.
Bunty took one mouthful of dal and burst into tears.
He didn't stop eating. He cried and ate at the same time, steadily, the tears running down his face and dripping off his chin into the rice, and nobody said anything about it, because Simran was doing it too, and Ananya, and I wasn't sure about Ira because she'd turned her face to the wall.
Sushila aunty stood at the stove with her back to us and made more rotis, and didn't watch us cry. She'd fed boys for nine years. She knew what boys needed.
When Bunty's thali was empty, she filled it again without asking.
· · ·
She told us about herself while we ate, in short pieces, between rotis, the way some people tell you about the weather.
Her husband Rameshwar had gone out on Sunday morning to get milk from the dairy at the end of the colony. He'd done it every morning for thirty-one years. He hadn't come back. She'd waited all day by the gate. At night she'd heard what was happening in the colony and locked the gate and taken the dogs up to the roof, and the dogs had stayed up there ever since, because they barked when anything came near, and that was useful.
"Moti, Kalu, Bholu, Sheru and Chhotu," she said, pointing at each with her rolling pin. They were lying on the floor of the kitchen now, panting in a row, looking at our thalis with deep moral seriousness. "Street dogs. I fed them. Now they stay." She shrugged. "Everyone stays, if you feed them."
Her son Mohit was in Pune. He worked at an IT company in a glass building, she said, the way you'd say he worked in a palace. He'd called on Monday morning. Then the networks had gone bad, and he hadn't called again.
"He'll call," she said, slapping a roti onto the tawa. "He's a good boy. He always calls on Sundays. It's not Sunday yet."
And every day since Sunday she'd got up at five and cooked forty tiffins. The full order. Dal, sabzi, roti, rice. She'd packed them in the steel carriers with their name tags. Then she'd stood at the gate at eleven o'clock, the time the boy on the scooter came to collect them for the campus. He didn't come. So she put a few tiffins on top of the wall, for anyone alive who might pass, and fed the rest to the dogs.
"I don't know how to stop," she said. "Nine years. You can't just stop."
I looked at the tiffin carriers stacked on the verandah through the kitchen door, with their little name tags. Rohit, Room 12. Vivek (no chilli). I thought about the guard in the lobby of the Tower, waving the dead through. The petrol pump attendant with the nozzle in his hand. The boy in cubicle forty-one.
The living keep their habits too. I'd never thought about that.
· · ·
When we'd finished, I took out the Bournvita jar.
I counted out two thousand rupees on the mat, in hundreds, the way I'd counted the notes into Pintu's hand. Five people, two thalis each, the most I'd ever paid for a meal. It was worth more. I knew what it was worth. That was my job.
Sushila aunty looked at the money on the mat. Then she looked at me.
She laughed. It wasn't unkind. It was the laugh of a woman who has just been offered a bribe by a very small policeman.
"Put it away, beta."
"Aunty, it's for the food. It's only fair."
"Fair." She wiped her hands on the end of her sari. "I've fed forty boys from that campus every day for nine years. You know how many of them paid on time? Not one. Not once. Every month, aunty, next week, aunty, my father's money is coming, aunty, I'll pay double." She shook her head. "And I fed them. What will I do with money? Will the dogs eat it?"
I put two power banks on the mat beside the money. Fully charged.
She looked at those too, and laughed harder.
"Put them away," she said. "All of it. Before I get angry."
I put them away. My hands felt strange doing it. I didn't know what to do with them afterwards.
Later, while the others were washing their thalis at the tap in the courtyard, I opened the Ledger on my knee and tried to put her in it.
I tried OWES. Sushila aunty, Annapurna Tiffin — two meals x 5, Rs 2,000 (refused). I looked at it. It was wrong. You can't owe someone something they won't let you pay. I rubbed it out. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
I tried WANTS. What did she want? Her son to call. Her husband to come home with the milk. Neither of those was something I could sell her. I rubbed it out.
I turned to the back of the book, to the shortest page, the one headed UNKNOWN, where Malhotra sir and Tara lived, and, since Thursday night, one other person. My pencil stopped over it.
Every chapter of this story is posted on NovelPhoenix by its author. This site is reposting them without the author's okay.
I didn't write anything. I closed the book.
· · ·
"Malhotra sir?" Sushila aunty's face lit up. "Malhotra sir is alive?"
Ira switched on her phone, which we only did indoors now, and only for a few seconds, and showed her the message. She read it with her lips moving, holding the phone very far from her face, the way people do who need glasses and won't admit it.
"He takes my tiffin," she said. "Seven years. He sends the box back washed. Can you imagine? A man who washes the box." She handed the phone back, and her eyes were wet. "And he pays on time. The only one. Every month, on the first. Thank God. Thank God."
Then she sat down on the kitchen step and told us about the campus.
She'd been inside it a hundred times, delivering, in the early years, before she could afford the boy with the scooter. She knew the main gate, which was on the service road and which you'd never get near now, and she knew the back gate, which was on the other side of the field from her house, along a kachha track that ran beside the wall. The guards used to open it at eleven for the tiffins and the milk and the vegetables.
"And now?" said Ira.
Sushila aunty was quiet for a moment.
"Since Sunday," she said, "I go up on my roof every day and I look at that campus. I watch them." She didn't say who. She didn't have to. "Two thousand children lived in those hostels. And all the ones who came every day for class from the city. Now they're all in there, beta. Thousands. I tried to count them once. You can't. In the morning, they go to class. At one o'clock, they go to the mess. The bell doesn't ring any more, but they go anyway. One o'clock. I can set my clock by them." She wiped her eyes with her sari. "At night, they walk everywhere. All over the campus. Round and round the building in the middle, the one with the lights. That's where the people are. Malhotra sir and the others. They have a generator. I can hear it."
"The admin block," I said.
"At night it looks like a ship," she said. "A ship with its lights on, in the middle of the sea. And the sea is moving."
Nobody said anything for a while.
"So," said Sushila aunty, looking at me. "Why are you running towards it?"
"Buses," I said.
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she shook her head, slowly, the way you'd shake your head at a boy who's told you his father's money is coming next week.
· · ·
The plan took me an hour.
The problem was the lane. Between the back of Sushila aunty's house and the field there was a narrow lane, and a gap in the colony's boundary wall where somebody had broken out the bricks years ago and put a rusted iron grille across it, held on with wire, which you could swing open if you pulled hard. Through the grille: the field, three hundred metres of stubble, then the nala, which you could cross on a little concrete culvert where a farm track ran over it, then the track along the wall to the back gate.
I'd looked at all of it from Sushila aunty's roof for twenty minutes, with five dogs breathing on my ankles. There were two of them out in the field, a man and a woman in the clothes of farm workers, sitting in the shade of a babool tree in the middle of the stubble, a hundred metres to the left of the straight line. In the heat, at a hundred metres, five quiet people wouldn't wake them. We'd go wide.
In the lane, and in the lanes around it, there were the dead. Not many, now, in the heat. Twenty, maybe, in the colony as a whole. Standing in the shade of the houses. Sleeping on their feet. Some near the grille. And twenty dead people who hear the gate of a grille squeal on its hinges will turn round and come and look.
So I needed them looking somewhere else.
I found the answer in Sushila aunty's kitchen. On the shelf above the stove, among the dabbas, there was a pressure cooker the size of a bucket. Ten litres. The one she used for forty boys' dal. And every pressure cooker in India does exactly one thing on a schedule, more reliably than any clock: it whistles.
We tested it at twelve. A little water and a handful of chana in the bottom, the lid locked, the weight on, the gas on its lowest flame. Nine minutes later, at 12:09, it gave a long, piercing shriek that set off all five dogs. At 12:11 it did it again. Then 12:12. Then 12:14. About every ninety seconds, once it got going, a scream like a train coming into a station. I turned it off and wrote the numbers down. Nine minutes to the first whistle. I'd light it at 12:41. Visit novelping dot com for the full chapter.
The kitchen window opened onto the front lane, on the other side of the house from the field.
"They'll go to it," I said. "Every ninety seconds, a whistle on the front side. Everything in the colony that can hear it walks round to the front lane and stands under the window. Meanwhile we go out the back. Through the grille. Across the field. By the time the cooker runs dry, we're at the gate."
"And at one o'clock," said Ira slowly, "the ones inside the campus go to the mess."
"So the back of the campus is empty. And Malhotra sir's people open the gate."
She looked at me. I watched her check it. Every step. The way she'd checked the invigilator's chest.
"It's good," she said at last, as if it hurt her to say it.
"I know."
"Who goes where?"
"You lead. You know the signals and you can see further than me. Simran, then Ananya. Bunty with the heavy bag." Bunty nodded without being asked. "I go last. I hold the grille open while you go through, and I close it behind us, so nothing follows us into the field. And whatever happens out there, nobody stops. Nobody goes back. It's three hundred metres in a straight line, and at the end of it there's a gate that opens at one o'clock."
"And if somebody falls?" said Ira.
"Then they get up."
Ananya looked down at her hands. Ira looked at me for a long moment, and didn't say anything, which I took for agreement. I took a lot of things for agreement that week.
"And aunty?" said Simran.
We all looked at Sushila aunty.
"Come with us," said Ira. "Aunty. Please. There'll be room. There'll be food in there, and people, and—"
Sushila aunty was already shaking her head.
"My dogs," she said. "My husband's house. And if Mohit calls, he'll call on the landline. He knows the landline. It's in the hall." She smiled at Ira, very kindly. "I'll be on the roof, beta. Watching. With the dogs. Don't worry about me. Nothing comes up on my roof."
I felt it then, a small flat feeling at the bottom of my stomach, and I didn't like it, and I made myself look at it, because I always look at things. It was relief. One less person to get across a field. One less person to fit on a bus. Sushila aunty, who had refused my money and fed me twice, had just said she wasn't coming, and the first thing I'd felt was relief.
I wrote it down. I don't know why. I wrote it in the margin of the plan, very small: relieved she isn't coming. As if writing it down made it something that had happened to somebody else.
· · ·
At 12:40, Sushila aunty came out onto the verandah with a small two-tier tiffin carrier and held it out to Ananya.
"For later," she said. "Rotis. And a little aloo. In case they don't feed you properly in there."
She'd tied a name tag to the handle with string, like all the others. In careful Hindi letters it said Ananya (no chilli).
Ananya took it in both hands. She looked at the tag for a long time. Then, very suddenly, she put her arms round Sushila aunty's neck and held on, and Sushila aunty patted her back and said "Bas, bas, beta, enough, enough, go, go," and her eyes were wet again.
At 12:41, I lit the gas under the cooker, on its lowest flame, and went to the back door. We stood there in a line. Ira in front, her hand at her shoulder. Me at the back, my hand on the bolt.
At 12:50, on the other side of the house, the cooker screamed.
I heard the colony hear it. A sort of stir, in the heat. A dog on a roof three houses away started barking. Through a crack in the back door I watched a dead man in a vest, standing in the shade at the end of our lane by the grille, lift his head, and turn it towards the sound, and begin to walk slowly away up the lane, towards the front of the house.
It was the best plan I've ever made. Everything in it was correct.
It would have worked, too, if everybody in it had been as selfish as I'd assumed.