The man in the vest had very good teeth.
I noticed that, the way you notice the stupid details in the worst seconds of your life. Very white, very even teeth. Somebody had paid for those teeth. He'd been a man who looked after himself, who walked to the dairy every morning and did his pranayam on the roof and flossed. And now he had his hand round my left forearm through the bars of a rusted grille at the back of a colony in Kota, and he was pulling my arm towards his face like a man pulling a rope to ring a bell, and I couldn't stop him.
I want to tell you how I came to be there, holding that grille, because I've thought about it a great deal.
· · ·
Everybody in my plan did something stupid and generous.
Ananya dropped her inhaler and wouldn't let go of a tiffin to pick it up. Bunty stopped beside her, because Bunty has never in his life walked past a person on the ground. Ira was forty metres ahead with a clear run to the culvert and the gate, and she turned round and ran back, which was against everything she'd ever been taught, and against the plan, and against me. Simran stood in the middle of the field with her hands over her mouth, which wasn't generous, exactly, but wasn't running either.
And the two farm workers under the babool tree got up, and turned their faces towards the coughing, and started to walk.
I saw all of it from the grille. I'd just pulled it shut behind me and started on the wire. I stopped. I stood with the rusty wire in my fingers and did the sum, the way I always do. Ananya on her knees, a hundred and twenty metres out. Two of them, walking, maybe ninety metres from her, slow in the heat. Ira running. Bunty searching. The gate a long way off. It was a bad sum, but it wasn't a hopeless one. If they found the inhaler in the next minute, and if Ira could get her up, they had a chance.
Then I heard feet in the lane behind me.
The whistle had stopped working. I don't know exactly when. A pressure cooker is a wonderful thing, but it's only a pressure cooker. Coughing is food. Running is food. Bunty whispering "Mil gaya? Mil gaya?" at the top of his lungs, which he believed was a whisper, was food. And the colony had heard it, over the roofs, in the dead still air, and turned away from the cooker, and was coming round the side of Sushila aunty's house into the back lane to find out what was for lunch.
The man in the vest was first. Then an old man in a kurta. Then a woman in a nightie. Then more.
The grille wasn't wired. It was a door. And on my side of the door there was a field, and in the field there were four people who had all, in the last thirty seconds, done the opposite of what I'd told them to do.
I put my hands flat on the bars and leaned my weight on them.
I'd like to say I thought about it. I didn't. There wasn't time to think about it, and anyway it was the plan. I go last. I hold the grille. I'd said it myself, at Sushila aunty's kitchen step, with a mouthful of her dal. Everyone else in that plan had changed their minds. I was the only one who did exactly what I'd said I'd do.
That's the part I keep coming back to. I held the grille. And I was the one who got bitten.
There's a lesson in that somewhere. I've never been sure what it is.
· · ·
He came up against the bars with a soft thump. The grille bulged towards me and I pushed it back. His face was a few centimetres from mine through the rusty iron, grey and patient, and his eyes didn't look at me so much as through me, at the field, at the coughing. His hands came through the bars, looking for something.
They found my arm.
He was very strong. They're always stronger than you think. He pulled my left forearm in against the bars and bent his head to it as if he were going to read my watch, and I pulled back with everything I had, and it made no difference at all. I felt his teeth go through the sleeve of my shirt. I'd worn full sleeves because Ira said full sleeves in the sun. They were cotton. They didn't help.
It didn't hurt. That surprised me. It felt like being shut in a door, a huge dull pressure, and then heat.
And then, on the other side of the house, someone hit two pieces of steel together as hard as the world allows.
The sound went over the roofs like a bell. Clang. And again. Clang. And then a voice I knew, a voice that had told me to put my money away before she got angry, filling the whole colony from one end to the other.
"Khana! Khana lag gaya!"
The man in the vest lifted his head.
He let go of my arm. He took his teeth out of me the way a man puts down his cup of tea when the doorbell rings, without any hurry, without even looking. He turned round. All down the back lane, the others were turning too, the woman in the nightie, the old man in the kurta, all of them, their faces lifting towards the sound the way the dogs' faces had lifted towards the cooker. Clang. "Khana lag gaya!" And they went. Back up the lane. Round the side of the house. Slowly, and then not so slowly, the way people go when they hear that lunch is on the table.
It was one o'clock.
I stood at the grille and watched them go, and the lids went on ringing, further and further away down the front lane, towards the main road, with five dogs barking round them like a band at a wedding.
· · ·
I finished the wire. I don't know why. Habit. I twisted it round the bars three times, tight, and tucked the end in so nobody would scratch themselves on it, and then I looked at my arm.
There's a thing that happens when you get a result you've been afraid of. In Kota you see it every Sunday at four o'clock, when the ranks come out. A boy looks at his phone and his face goes completely calm. Not happy. Not sad. Calm, the way water goes calm at the bottom of a well. That's what happened to my face. I could feel it happen.
Two curved rows of marks, through the torn cotton, on the inside of my forearm below the elbow. Exactly where the warden's had been. Like a pair of brackets. Blood coming up in them, slow and dark, soaking into the sleeve.
Two to six hours. Fever. Nosebleed. Stillness. Then the other thing.
One capsule, two years ago. Who knows, Kabir babu. Maybe. Maybe not. I'm a chaiwala.
I pulled the sleeve down over the marks and buttoned the cuff. Then I turned round and ran into the field.
· · ·
Bunty found the inhaler. Of course he did. He found it the way he finds everything, by putting his face so close to the ground that he couldn't possibly miss it, and he held it up over his head in his fist like a cricket ball he'd caught on the boundary and shouted "MIL GAYA!" in a voice they must have heard in Jhalawar.
Ira took it from him and pushed it into Ananya's mouth. Two puffs. Ananya's whole body unlocked.
The farm workers were forty metres away, walking.
"Up," said Ira. "Up, up, up." She got Ananya under one arm. Bunty got her under the other. Ananya still had the tiffin carrier in her arms, the stupid wonderful tiffin carrier with her name on it, and she still wouldn't let go of it, and nobody asked her to any more.
Bunty's bag was lying in the stubble where he'd dropped it. It had the water in it, and most of the Maggi, and the first-aid box. I picked it up. It weighed about as much as Bunty.
"Bhaiya, I'll—"
"Go."
I'd never carried the heavy bag in my life. I'd always said it was a question of comparative advantage. But it seemed like the right thing to do, on what was probably my last afternoon, and there's something very freeing about not having to save your strength for later.
We ran. Ira and Bunty with Ananya between them, Simran ahead, me behind with the bag banging on my back, across the last of the field and over the little concrete culvert above the black water of the nala and onto the track along the wall. The wall was enormous up close, pale and blind and ten feet high, with coils of razor wire on top shining like tinsel. We ran along it. The back gate came up on our left: a big steel gate, painted green, shut, with a small square hatch at head height.
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Ira hit it with her fist. "Malhotra sir! Malhotra sir! We're from the Tower, we got Malhotra sir's message, please—"
The eyes looked at Ira. Then past her, down the track, the way we'd come.
I turned round. The farm workers were coming along the track by the wall, thirty metres back, side by side, the woman a little in front, slow in the heat and absolutely certain.
"Not with them behind you!" the guard said. His voice was shaking. "Not with them behind you! I can't! Tomorrow! One o'clock! Tomorrow!"
"Please, uncle, we've got a girl who can't breathe—"
"Tomorrow!"
The hatch slammed.
Ira raised her fist to hit the gate again. I caught her wrist. She turned on me with a face like a knife, and I shook my head, and pointed back down the track with my other hand. Every time she hit that gate, the two of them came faster.
I'll say this for Ira Deshmukh. She understood a reason faster than anyone I've ever met. Her fist opened. She looked at the gate, and at the dead coming down the track, and at me, and then at the building on the other side of the track, a hundred metres away across a strip of waste ground, which I'd been looking at since the hatch slid open.
"There," I said.
· · ·
Kota has been building hostels faster than it can fill them for years. Everyone in the city knows it. You see them on every road out of town: concrete skeletons with their floors stacked up like biscuits, rusty rods sticking out of the tops of the columns, waiting for money or students or a monsoon to come and finish them off.
This one was five storeys high. It had been wrapped from top to bottom in a sun-faded green safety net, and on the net, two storeys up, there was a banner of printed plastic with a picture of a smiling boy in a graduation hat.
LUXURY AC ROOMS FOR IIT/NEET ASPIRANTS — BOOKING OPEN.
We went in through a slit in the net and up the stairs. There were no railings, only bare concrete steps going up round a hollow middle, and a smell of cement and pigeon droppings. Nobody said a word. Ananya's breathing was a thin whistle. Bunty carried her the last two flights on his back. We stopped on the third floor, because Ananya couldn't go any higher and Bunty couldn't carry her any higher, and we sat down on the bare floor between the columns, behind a stack of cement bags, in the green underwater light that came through the net, and held our breath.
Below us, after a long time, we heard feet. On the bare concrete of the ground floor. Shuffling round. Stopping. Shuffling again.
Then nothing. They'd lost us. In the heat, with nothing to hear, they'd stood still in the shade between the columns and forgotten what they'd come for. Rule six. If you're nothing, after a while they forget about you.
I'd always thought it was one of my better rules.
· · ·
Ira counted us. Out loud, in a whisper, touching each of us on the shoulder. "One. Two. Three. Four." She touched me last. "Five."
Then she looked at my sleeve.
The blood had come through the cotton in a dark patch the size of my palm. In the green light it looked almost black.
"What happened to your arm?"
"Scraped it on the grille." I held it up, so she could see the cuff, buttoned. "Rusty. I'll need a tetanus shot. Put it on the list."
"Show me."
"It's a scrape."
"Then show me a scrape."
"Later," I said.
She looked at me. She looked at me the way she'd looked at Bhandari sir's chest in Room 603, a long, flat, careful look, checking her working. I looked back. I'd been looked at by teachers and wardens and policemen and Pintu and my father. I'm very good at being looked at.
She looked away first. She said, "Later," as if she were writing it down.
Then she got up, and went across to Ananya, and sat down on the floor between Ananya and me. She did it very casually, the way you'd move out of a patch of sun. She didn't look at me while she did it.
I noticed. I'd have done exactly the same.
· · ·
Nobody said anything for a long time after that. Simran fell asleep sitting up. Bunty lay on his back on the concrete and stared at the underside of the fourth floor. A little before three, Ananya, who was sitting with her back against a column with Sushila aunty's tiffin carrier in her lap, looked down at it.
"That was aunty," she said. "Wasn't it? The lids. She came down."
"Yes," I said.
"Where did she go?"
I knew exactly when the lids had stopped. I notice things like that; I can't help it. It was just as we reached the culvert, running, with the dead behind us. One last clang, a long way off, at the end of the colony. Then nothing. Then, for a little while, the dogs, barking in a different way, high and frantic. Then not the dogs either.
"I don't know," I said.
That was a lie. Ira knew it was a lie. I saw her know it. She didn't say anything. She just put her arm round Ananya, and Ananya opened the tiffin carrier with shaking hands, and inside, in the top tier, there were eight rotis wrapped in a cloth, and in the bottom tier there was aloo with mustard seeds, still very slightly warm, and nobody could eat any of it for a long time, and then everybody did, except me.
"Bhaiya," said Bunty, holding out a roti. "Eat."
"I'm not hungry."
Bunty stared at me. He lowered the roti slowly.
"Bhaiya," he said, "in two years, I have never once seen you refuse free food."
"You're sick." He leaned closer and peered at me. "You look terrible."
"I always look terrible."
"Worse than always. Like a photocopy of always."
By then I'd been sweating for twenty minutes, and it wasn't the same sweat as before. It had started at half past two: a heat behind my eyes, a heat that came from the inside instead of the outside, as if somebody had lit a small gas ring under my brain on its lowest flame. My skin had gone tight. The green light hurt.
I'll tell you the one good thing about getting the Fever in Kota in the middle of May. Everybody's sweating anyway. Nobody notices.
"It's forty-five degrees, Bunty," I said. "I'm a delicate person."
He looked at me for a while longer with his round, worried face. Then he gave my roti to Simran.
· · ·
I did the sum properly at three, sitting with my back against a column and my hands under my thighs so nobody would see them shake.
One capsule, two years ago. Pintu had taken them for years. Rohan Sethi, who'd been bitten at the convoy, used to buy them from Pintu every Saturday night before the tests; I'd watched him do it from my window. Aditya Rathore, if Pintu was telling the truth, had taken them like vitamins. If there was a dose that was enough, I'd have bet a great deal of money that it wasn't one. I gave myself ten per cent. I'm generous with other people's chances and stingy with my own.
So I assumed I was dead. It's the only safe assumption. You plan for the worst case, and if the worst case doesn't happen, the plan costs you nothing but a little embarrassment.
The worst case was this: some time before dark, I'd stop breathing, and some time after that, I'd get up again, in a building with four people in it who had all, today, proved that they would not leave a person behind on the ground.
So I had to leave first.
I didn't tell them. I've thought about that too. I've had a lot of time to think, since. I could tell you I didn't tell them because Ira would have stayed with me, and Bunty would have refused to go to the gate tomorrow without me, and one o'clock tomorrow was the only door into that campus there was. All of that was true. But the real reason was smaller and stupider. I didn't want to see their faces. I didn't want to watch them do the sum about me. I'd watched people do that sum about me once before, in a car park in Mumbai, and I'd decided I would arrange my life so it never happened again.
At a quarter to four, I stood up.
"I'm going to scout from the top," I said. "I want to see over the wall. Where the dead are, where the gate is from inside, what the guards do. If we're going in tomorrow, I want to know what we're walking into."
Ira was on her feet at once. "I'll come."
"Two people make twice the noise. Stay with them." I nodded at Ananya, at Simran asleep against the cement bags with her mouth open. "You're better at it than me."
She stood there. I could see two things fighting in her face, and I could see which one was going to win, and I knew it wasn't the one she wanted, and I knew she'd hate herself for it later. She had four people to look after. She couldn't look after all of them and watch me.
"Ten minutes," she said.
"Ten minutes."
Bunty, flat on his back on the concrete with his eyes shut, raised one hand in the air. "Bhaiya. Don't fall off. Apan can't drive the bus and do the planning."
"I'll try."
"And leave the Maggi."
"You've eaten my Maggi every day for two years."
"That was business," said Bunty, with dignity.
I went up the stairs.
· · ·
The builder had finished exactly one room.
It was on the fifth floor, at the end, where the stairs came out: a real room, with real plaster walls painted cream, and a real door with a brass handle and a lock with the key in it, and a sticker on the window that said SAMPLE ROOM. They must have brought the parents up here. Look, aunty. Look, uncle. This is where your son will become an engineer. There was a single bed with the plastic still on the mattress, and a study table, and a wooden chair, and a split AC unit on the wall above the bed with its little green light dark, and a poster on the wall of a mountain at sunrise with the words YOUR SUCCESS STARTS HERE.
A luxury AC room with a dead AC. I nearly laughed. I think I would have, on another day.
I sat down at the study table, and opened the Ledger, and turned to the last page.
I'd always kept the last page blank. Every Ledger I'd ever had, since I was eleven. I never knew what it was for. I think I'd just liked knowing that there was one page in the book that didn't belong to anybody yet.
I wrote small, so it would all fit. My hand shook. It was the first time in my life my handwriting had ever looked like somebody else's.
Bunty, Ira —
I wasn't scraped. You knew. Sorry.
Tomorrow, 1 p.m., back gate. Ira does the talking. Ask for Malhotra sir. Don't mention me.
Find out who has the bus keys before you ask for a bus. Never ask for a thing until you know who's holding it.
Don't open this door before morning. If I knock, I'm dead. If I talk, still don't. After seven, open it and stand back. I'll probably want to go to class. Let me. It'll be the first time I've ever gone willingly.
Bhilai: the steel plant township. Papa is Rajesh Anand, blast furnace, ask anyone at the plant gate. And under it the address, and Tara's number, all ten digits, twice, in case one smudged.
Tara: tell her I was coming. Tell her I'd started.
Owes: Sushila aunty — can't pay.
I looked at that last line for a long time. In every Ledger I'd ever kept, the names in that column were people who owed me. It was the first time I'd ever written down someone I owed. Then I tore the page out.
I'd never torn a page out of a Ledger in my life. It made a terrible sound in that quiet room, like something ripping that couldn't be mended. I folded it twice, round the key, and went to the door, and locked it from the inside, and took the key out of the lock, and knelt down and slid the key and the folded page through the gap under the door onto the landing.
The warden had turned his key at one in the morning, because for twenty years he'd turned it every night. I'd locked doors behind me my whole life. I wasn't going to give myself the chance.
Then I sat down on the plastic-covered bed, under the dead AC and the mountain at sunrise, and waited for my success to start.
At 4:31 p.m., my nose began to bleed.