It wasn't like Bhandari sir's nosebleed.
His had been a single drop on the register in Room 603, so small that I was the only one who saw it. Mine came all at once, the way a tap comes on when the pressure's been building up in the pipe. I leaned forward on the edge of the bed and let it drip between my knees onto the floor of the sample room, drip, drip, drip, dark red on the clean grey tiles, and watched it make a little map of somewhere I'd never been.
The fever was very high by then. I knew it was high because the room had started doing things rooms don't do. The mountain on the poster kept getting closer. The split AC unit above the bed made a noise like breathing, which it couldn't have, because it was dead. And every time I shut my eyes, I was twelve years old, standing on the side of the highway at Power House with my mother's hand on my shoulder, looking up at my own face.
It was three metres high. They'd used my school photo, the one where my hair was too short. Underneath, in yellow letters on a red background, it said: BHILAI'S WONDER BOY. KABIR ANAND, CLASS 7. 100/100. And under that, smaller, the name of the coaching company, and a phone number for admissions.
"Look," my mother kept saying. "Kabir, look." As if I could look at anything else.
I opened my eyes. The tiles. The blood. The mountain.
Somebody knocked on the door.
· · ·
"Kabir."
Not a knock, really. One tap, with one knuckle, low down, the way you'd knock on the door of a hospital room.
I didn't say anything. I'd written If I talk, still don't, and I'd meant it, but I hadn't thought about what it would be like to be on this side of it.
"I found your page," said Ira, through the door.
Her voice was very close. She was sitting on the floor of the landing, I worked out, with her back against the wall beside the door. I could hear the paper move in her fingers.
"'If I knock, I'm dead,'" she read. "'If I talk, still don't.'" A pause. "You're not knocking. You're not talking either."
"Don't open the door."
"I'm not opening the door." Another pause. "I'm also not leaving."
"That isn't in the instructions."
"I know," said Ira. "I'm adding it."
The paper moved again.
"'Tara,'" she read. "'Tell her I was coming. Tell her I'd started.'"
She stopped.
"No," said Ira. "Tell her yourself."
· · ·
She'd waited forty minutes before she came up. She told me that much, flatly, as if she were reporting it to an officer. Ananya had needed the inhaler again at four. Simran had woken up and cried. And she'd sat on the third floor with my ten minutes going past on her phone, telling herself the scouting was taking longer than I'd said, because things always take longer than you say, until she couldn't tell herself that any more.
At the top of the stairs she'd found a locked door and, on the floor in front of it, a folded page from my Ledger with a key inside it.
"Bite or scratch?" she said.
"Bite."
"When?"
"One o'clock. At the grille."
"Left forearm. Below the elbow." She'd known. Of course she'd known. "You held it shut."
"It was the plan."
"The plan," said Ira, "was that nobody goes back. Nobody goes back. You said it in her kitchen. And then I went back, and Bunty went back, and you should have let go of that grille and run to us, that's what your plan said, and you didn't." Her voice didn't rise. It got quieter, and harder, like something being tightened. "Why didn't you let go?"
I opened my mouth to tell her about the sum. Twenty of them in the lane. Four of you in the field. A door with nobody holding it.
"Don't," said Ira. "Don't tell me it was arithmetic."
So I didn't say anything at all.
· · ·
After a while she said, in a completely different voice, her NCC voice: "Are you bleeding?"
"Nose."
"Lean forward. Pinch the soft part, below the bone, ten minutes. Breathe through your mouth."
I leaned forward and pinched. It didn't help. It wasn't that kind of nosebleed, and we both knew it, and I did it anyway, because she'd asked, and it was the first instruction anyone had given me in years that I'd actually followed.
I heard her write something down.
"What are you writing?"
"Your symptoms. Times." The pencil scratched. "Bite 1:00. Fever 2:30, or before, you hid it. Nosebleed when?"
"4:31." This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
Scratch. "If you die," said Ira, "somebody should at least learn something from it."
I laughed. It hurt my head. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to me all week.
· · ·
Bunty came up the stairs at five, carrying Ananya, with Simran holding on to the back of his shirt, and the bag over his other shoulder, and two of Sushila aunty's rotis in his mouth.
"Ira said we stay together," he said, round the rotis, when he'd put Ananya down and got his breath back. "Also, the stairs are very scary alone." Then he must have seen Ira's face, or the page in her hand, because he went completely quiet, which I had never in two years known him do on purpose.
I heard him read it. I heard him get to the end.
Then he sat down on the landing with his back against my door, so heavily that the door shook in its frame, and said, "Bhaiya, you idiot."
"Bunty—"
This copy was taken from the author's official page without permission. The place where the story is published supports its writer.
"You idiot. You wrote Bunty first." His voice was doing something terrible. "You never write Bunty first. In the book, Bunty is always last. Bunty owes five rupees. And now you write Bunty first, on this, on this page, you idiot, you stupid—"
He ran out of words. That had never happened before either.
Through the wood of the door, I could feel him breathing.
· · ·
"It's 5:20," said Ira, at some point.
She'd been telling me the time. Every ten minutes, from her phone, on airplane mode, in the same flat voice. I don't think she knew she was doing it. It was what they'd taught her: keep a log, report at intervals, keep the casualty talking.
"Don't," I said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't tell me the time."
She was quiet. Then: "Why?"
The fever had made the room very far away, and the door very close, and the inside of my head very clear, the way a room is clear when somebody has taken all the furniture out. I don't know if it was the fever. I've been told since that fever makes you honest the way alcohol makes other people honest. I think it's simpler than that. I think it was the first time in five years I'd had nothing left to protect.
"You asked me once," I said, "what happened when I was twelve."
· · ·
So I told her. Through a locked door, in an unfinished building at the edge of Kota, with my nose bleeding onto the floor and Bunty breathing against the other side of the wood.
I told her about the billboard. About the scholarship test the coaching company held across the whole state, the one meant for class 10 students, which I'd taken in class 7 because my maths teacher dared me, and got a hundred out of a hundred, and about how two weeks later there were men at our door with a box of sweets and a photographer. About how my face went up on the highway, and in the newspaper, and on the side of a bus. How people in the vegetable market stopped my mother to touch my head. How Papa, riding home off the night shift on his scooter, had to pass it every morning, and never once said anything about it, and never once didn't look.
I told her about Mumbai.
The coaching company entered me for the national final of a maths olympiad, the kind with sponsors and a live-stream, in the ballroom of a hotel in Mumbai with chandeliers. Two hundred children at two hundred little tables. A big digital clock on a screen at the front, counting down from three hours. At the back of the hall, a banner with the coaching company's name on it, and a camera on a tripod, pointed at me. Their boy. They'd paid for our train tickets and our hotel room. Papa had taken four days' leave, which he never took. He'd bought a new shirt.
Six problems. I'd read all six in the first five minutes, and by the end of the first hour I'd solved all six in my head and in my rough work, on the loose sheets they gave you, the ones with ROUGH WORK WILL NOT BE EVALUATED printed across the top in grey.
All I had to do was copy them out onto the answer sheet.
"And you didn't," said Ira, very quietly.
I didn't. I sat there with the answer sheet in front of me, white and clean, with my roll number on the top, and I picked up my pen, and my hand wouldn't move.
I've had five years to work out why. The best I can do is this. As long as it was in the rough work, it was mine. Nobody marks rough work. Nobody puts rough work on a billboard. The second I copied it onto that answer sheet, it would belong to them: to the camera and the banner and the men with the sweets and the people in the market, to everybody who had decided what I was for. And I'd be for that forever.
I don't think I thought that, then. I was twelve. I just sat there. And the clock on the screen counted down, two hours, one hour, and the invigilator walked up and down between the tables, and my hand lay on the answer sheet like something that belonged to somebody else, cold and stiff, like being plugged into a wall.
Then the invigilator said it. Loudly, to the whole ballroom, the way they always say it.
"Fifteen minutes remaining."
I handed in a blank answer sheet. My rough work went in the bin at the door, with everybody else's.
· · ·
"What did your father say?" said Ira.
"Nothing."
In the hotel car park, afterwards, the coaching company's regional head stood next to his car in a blazer, in the Mumbai heat, and talked into his phone and looked at me, and talked, and looked. I watched him do the sum. What is this boy worth now? I watched Papa watch him do it. Papa didn't shout. I'd have liked it better if he'd shouted. He just looked at me the way you look at a ticket you've bought for the wrong train.
We went home the next day. Most of a day and a night. At Nagpur he bought me a samosa and watched me not eat it.
Two weeks later my face came down off the highway, and a girl from Raipur went up in its place. I walked past her every morning on the way to school. She looked very confident. I hoped she was all right.
The next monsoon, my mother got dengue. She was in the hospital in Sector 9 for six days. Every morning they took her blood, and every morning Papa read the platelet count off the report and wrote it down in a little notebook, in his small, careful handwriting, the way he wrote everything. Every morning the number was smaller. On the seventh morning there wasn't a number.
After that, Papa didn't stop talking to me. That would have been easier. He talked about fees, and trains, and the electricity bill, and Dadi's sugar. He just stopped looking at me as if I were going to happen. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
When I was fifteen he took a loan against his provident fund and sent me to Kota. It was the only thing he'd asked me for in two years. So I went.
"And in Kota," said Ira slowly, "you made sure nobody would ever put you on a billboard again."
"Nobody puts rank 1,847 on a billboard."
She didn't say anything for a long time. On the other side of the door, I heard Bunty blow his nose on something, probably his own sleeve.
"I used to think you were lazy," Ira said at last.
"I am lazy."
"No. You're scared. You're the most scared person I've ever met."
"Not any more," I said. "I'm dying. It's very relaxing."
"That," said Ira Deshmukh, "is not funny."
But her voice cracked down the middle when she said it, like a slate.
· · ·
There was one more thing I could have told her, through that door. I didn't.
Even then, with my nose bleeding onto a stranger's floor, I hedged. There was a ten per cent chance I'd live. If I lived, I'd have to live with her knowing.
So I'll tell you instead.
Two years ago, in my first month in Kota, the night before my first Sunday test, I went down to Pintu's tapri at eleven o'clock at night and asked him for one of the blue ones.
"Only one?" he said. He was surprised. Toppers bought them in twos and threes.
"Only one."
"Topper's dose is two, Kabir babu."
"I'm not a topper," I said, and gave him three hundred rupees, and took it back to my room and swallowed it with tap water at two in the morning, sitting on my bunk, while Bunty snored and Shubham's alarm waited for half past four.
I wanted to know whether I'd freeze again. That's the truth. I wanted to know whether the hand would move, and I was too scared to find out on my own.
It moved.
That was the thing about Zenith. It didn't make you clever. It made you calm. It was like a hall when somebody switches off all the fans at once and you suddenly realise how loud they were. I sat that test the next morning in a silence so complete I could hear my own blood. I read the paper. I solved it. And then, in that silence, I found I could do something I'd never been able to do before. I could choose where to land. Exactly. Not just right or wrong: where. Which questions to get right, which to leave, which to get wrong on purpose, so the negative marks would take me down to precisely the place I'd picked.
I picked 1,850. Out of curiosity. To see if it could be done.
On Monday the app said 1,852.
I felt nothing. That was what made me throw up afterwards, on Monday night, when it wore off. Not the capsule. The calm. For one whole Sunday I'd been exactly what everyone had always wanted me to be, a machine that does sums, and I hadn't minded at all.
I never took another one.
But I kept the trick. It turned out I didn't need the capsule for that part. You can't freeze on a paper that doesn't matter. So I made sure none of them ever mattered again. Sixty-three Sunday tests. Every one of them between 1,800 and 1,870. My rank was dead, and as long as it stayed dead, nobody would ever look at me the way that man in the blazer looked at me, or the way Papa looked at me in the car park, ever again.
And that, if you want to know, was the dead rank. It wasn't a joke. It was a hiding place. I'd built it out of one blue capsule and three hundred rupees, and I'd lived in it for two years, and it had worked perfectly, right up until Sunday.
· · ·
It was getting dark in the room. I don't know if that was the evening or me.
I'd lain down on the bed at some point without deciding to. I could feel the plastic sheet under my cheek, sticky and warm. My hands had gone cold, very cold, colder than anything should be in Kota in May, and I couldn't remember when that had started.
"Kabir," said Ira, from very far away. "Kabir. Talk to me."
"Still here."
"Keep talking."
I tried. I don't know what I said. Something about Tara, I think, and the red notebook. Something about the insulin. The words came out slowly and in the wrong order, like people leaving a hall.
Then Bunty's voice, close to the wood, determined.
"Bhaiya. Bhaiya, listen. Listen to this one. Why did the dead man fail his JEE?"
"Bunty," said Ira, "not now—"
"Because," said Bunty, "he kept biting off more than he could chew."
There was a silence on the landing.
Then Ira laughed.
I'd known her six days, and I'd never heard her laugh. It was a terrible laugh. It came out of her like a goose being startled, a loud, helpless honk, completely unlike everything else about her, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to stop it, I could hear the hand, and she couldn't stop it, and it went on and on, a laugh with crying folded up inside it. And Bunty, enormously encouraged, said, "Wait, wait, I have another one, this one is even better—"
That was the last thing I heard.
Then the world went quiet, the way an exam hall goes quiet in the second after the invigilator says Begin.