I want to be precise about this part, because Ira wrote it down, and I've read her notes, and I don't want there to be two versions.
At about 6:30 p.m., the sounds behind the door stopped. That's what she wrote: 6:31. No sound. Called his name x 3. Nothing. Then a line across the page, and under it, in smaller writing: Still. Like B. sir in 603.
Bhandari sir had been still for seventeen minutes. Shubham, behind the bathroom door, for about an hour and a half.
I was still for two and a half hours.
· · ·
There's no time inside the stillness. I can't tell you what it was like to wait, because I didn't wait. There was no me there to do the waiting.
There was static. That's the first thing I remember. The grey hiss of an old television between channels, the kind Dadi still has, the kind where you used to have to go up on the roof and twist the antenna while somebody shouted wait, wait, go back. It filled everything. It wasn't loud. It was just everywhere, the way air is everywhere.
And then, under the static, slowly, something else.
Pintu had told me about it at the Talwandi crossing. Like a thousand ceiling fans, he'd said. Kota at two in the morning. He was right, and he was wrong, and I didn't understand how he could be both until much later. It isn't one sound. It's the shape every sound takes when there are enough of them. A thousand fans turning, all slightly out of time, until you can't hear the separate fans any more, only the turning. A city of transformers humming in the heat. And under all of that, the sound I'd heard every Sunday morning of my life since I was eleven: the sound an exam hall makes in the first minute, when eight hundred people breathe in at once and uncap their pens.
The Hum.
It wasn't outside me. It wasn't inside me either. It was the floor I was lying on. And I realised, slowly, the way you realise you've been hearing rain for some time without noticing, that I was listening to it.
Which meant there was somebody there to listen.
· · ·
I came back the way you come back from a very deep sleep on the first day of the holidays. Not all at once. In pieces.
Breath. That was the first piece. Air going in, slow and cold, and coming out again. My own. I lay there with my cheek stuck to the plastic sheet and listened to myself breathe, and it was the most interesting thing I'd ever heard.
Heartbeat. Slow. Much too slow. Thump. A long gap. Thump. Like someone knocking on a door and waiting politely to be let in.
Cold. My hands were so cold they felt like they belonged to a statue of me. I tried to move my fingers and they moved, a long way off, like someone else's fingers obeying me out of courtesy.
Then the rest of it came back, all together, in a rush, the way a hall fills when they open the doors.
I did the only thing I could think of. I checked.
Name, I thought. Kabir Anand. Roll number 2406183. Batch: Sabarmati. Rank last Sunday: 1,847 of 1,903. I owe: Sushila aunty, can't pay. Owed to me: nine boys from Sai Kripa, Bunty five rupees, Arjun Patel—and there I stopped, because Arjun Patel had been crossed out.
I lay in the dark and thought about the line through his name, and something in my chest hurt, a plain, ordinary, human hurt, and I have never been so glad of anything in my life.
I was still me. I was still a person who knew what everybody owed. That had to count for something.
I sat up.
· · ·
The room was dark. Not completely: a little light came through the window from the sky, the dirty orange of a city's glow on low dust, and in it I could see the shape of the study table and the chair and the poster on the wall, the mountain at sunrise, YOUR SUCCESS STARTS HERE. There was blood on my shirt, a lot of it, stiff and dry. There was blood on the floor.
And there was the Hum.
It hadn't gone away when I woke up. It had just gone underneath, the way the sound of the fan goes underneath when you're studying. If I listened for it, it was there. If I didn't, it waited.
I listened.
And then I noticed that I wasn't alone.
I don't know how else to say this, so I'll just say it the way it was. All around me in the dark, close and far, in every direction, there were question papers.
I know how that sounds. Pintu heard ceiling fans. Other people hear other things; I found out later that Aditya Rathore sees something like a spreadsheet, and a girl from Ganga batch hears a tanpura. I see question papers, because that's what my brain is made of. Five years of Sunday tests. They're how I understand the world.
They lay face down in the dark, the way papers lie on the desks in the minute before Begin. Some were close, very close, somewhere below me and to the left. Some were further away, scattered out across the fields, a few, and then, much further away, over there, beyond a wall, more of them than I could count. Thousands. A hall the size of a city.
The close ones were moving.
I picked one. I don't know how. It was like turning over a paper with your mind. I thought about it, and it turned over.
· · ·
The author's story is published on the NovelPhoenix site, yet this passage was copied without permission. Reading it there supports their writing.
It was an exam paper. It was the most ordinary exam paper I'd ever seen.
At the top, where the instructions always are, it said, in that dead grey type every coaching institute in India uses:
SECTION A. This section contains questions with ONE correct option. Marking: +3 for correct. −1 for incorrect.
And under it there was a question. Not in words, exactly. More like the shape of a question, the way you know what a problem is asking before you've finished reading it. Which way? And four options, bright and simple, like bubbles on an OMR sheet: up, down, stop, turn. That was what it was about to do. Which way its legs were about to take it. It was a question I could answer. I could feel that. If I chose one of those bubbles and filled it in, the thing on the stairs would do it.
I didn't fill anything in. I've sat sixty-three Sunday tests and I've never once answered a question before I'd read the whole paper.
SECTION B. This section contains questions with ONE OR MORE correct options.
Slower. Heavier. What does it want? And the options weren't legs any more. They were deeper than that. Sound. Light. Warmth. Movement. Meat. More than one could be right. Some were already shaded, faintly, as if someone had pencilled them in and not pressed hard. Sound. Movement. It was hunting. I could see it hunting, on the paper, the way you can see a student panicking from the way they've filled in their bubbles.
And under Section B, at the very bottom of the paper, there was a third section.
It was printed so faintly I could barely read it. Grey on grey, like the words across the top of the rough sheets in Mumbai. SECTION C. MATRIX MATCH. Match each entry in Column I with the correct entries in Column II and Column III.
Three columns. Times. Places. Actions. I couldn't read most of it. I could make out one line, maybe, very faint. 1:00 — field — sit under the tree.
I knew whose paper that was, then. It was the farm worker. The woman. Every afternoon for her whole life, she'd sat under that babool tree after her lunch.
I put the paper back, face down. My hands were shaking. It wasn't the cold.
· · ·
That was when I heard them on the landing.
With my ears, I mean. Real sounds, outside the door. Very soft. A shuffle of bare feet on concrete. The tiny metal chink of something being put down very carefully. Breathing: four people trying not to breathe, and one of them failing, a thin high whistle on every breath in.
Ananya.
And under them, coming up the stairs, other feet.
I didn't need my ears for those. I could feel them. The papers below me and to the left were moving, coming up, nine of them, and I could see their Section Bs without even turning them over, all shaded the same way, dark and certain now. Sound. Movement. Night had come while I was still. They weren't slow any more.
On the landing outside my door, a whisper, so faint I would never have heard it before the fever. Ira's voice.
"Corner. Now. Quiet."
Feet, moving away from my door. Across the floor, away from the stairs. Four people, going as far as the building would let them, which on the fifth floor of a half-built hostel is not very far.
The nine came up onto the landing.
I heard them arrive. The soft, fast slap of feet on concrete. They passed my door, very close, close enough that I heard one of them brush against the wood. None of them stopped. There was nothing for them behind my door, only a dead boy, and they knew it. They spread out across the open floor beyond, towards the far corner, towards the whistle of Ananya's breathing.
I got up and went to the door and put my hand on the handle.
Locked. Of course it was locked. I'd locked it myself, five hours and a lifetime ago, and slid the key underneath it, so that whatever got up off that bed couldn't walk out.
The key was in Ira's pocket. In the corner. With nine of them walking towards her.
· · ·
The window.
It was a real window, the only real window in the building, with an aluminium frame and a sticker on the glass that said SAMPLE ROOM. I slid it open. Hot night air came in, and the smell of cement, and the sound of the green safety net breathing in and out against the scaffolding like a sail.
The scaffolding was bamboo. Long poles of it, lashed together at the joints with coir rope, the way they build scaffolds all over India, the way they've built them for a thousand years. Planks laid across the horizontal poles. And on the outside of all of it, the net.
I looked down.
Five floors. In the orange dark I could see the ground floor, a black square of nothing, and a cement mixer, and the strip of waste ground, and a long way off the pale line of the campus wall.
I've always been afraid of heights. Not in any interesting way. The ordinary way everyone is, a small cold hand that closes in your stomach when you look over a balcony. It closed now. It closed so hard I nearly sat down on the floor.
My body was terrified. I want to be clear about that, because of what happened later. That night, on the windowsill of the sample room, I was more frightened than I'd ever been in my life, more than at the grille, more than in Room 603. My legs were water. My cold hands were wet. Every part of me that had ever been alive was telling me to sit down on the floor of that room and stay there.
Out on the floor beyond the wall, Ananya's breathing went whee, whee, whee.
I climbed out.
· · ·
I'll tell you how you climb along a bamboo scaffold five floors up in the dark, in case you ever need to. You don't look down. You keep three things touching the bamboo at all times: two hands and a foot, or two feet and a hand. You move one thing at a time. You don't think about the rope at the joints, which is old, and coir, and has been out in the Kota sun for who knows how many summers, and creaks every time you put your weight on it. You think about the next pole. Only the next pole.
And you say things to yourself. I said my roll number. Over and over, under my breath, the way some people pray. Two-four-zero-six-one-eight-three. Two-four-zero-six-one-eight-three.
It was four metres from the window of the sample room to the place where the wall of the room ended and the open floor began. Four metres. I've walked further to the fridge. It took me what felt like about a week.
Halfway, a plank tipped under my foot. I grabbed the upright pole with both arms and hung on to it like Bunty hangs on to the last packet of Maggi, with my face pressed against the bamboo, and the plank fell. I heard it go. It fell for a very long time, turning, and hit something on the ground floor with a crack like a gunshot.
On the open floor, through the net, nine heads turned towards the sound.
Then away again. Back to the corner. Back to the whistling.
I let go of the pole. I took the next step.
At the end of the wall, where the open floor began, the net was torn, a long slit in the green mesh where somebody had cut it to get the cement bags in. I could see through it. The bare grey floor, the columns going away in rows into the dark, the stacked cement. And in the far corner, against the net on the other side, behind a low wall of cement bags, four shapes, very small, pressed together. Ira in front. Something long and thin in Bunty's hands, a rod of iron from the construction, held up like a cricket bat.
And between them and me, spread out across the floor in a loose, hunting line, moving forward step by step with their heads tilted, listening, the nine.
I went through the slit in the net. I didn't do it well. I'm not a person who does that kind of thing well. My foot caught in the mesh, and I came through it half falling, and landed on the concrete floor on my hands and knees with a thump that went right through the building.
Nine faces turned round and looked at me.
The nearest was three metres away. A man, young, in a vest and lungi, with a wet dark beard of something that wasn't his. Behind him, the woman from under the babool tree. Others. Their eyes, in the orange dark. All nine of them, looking straight at me, the boy on his hands and knees on the floor.
I didn't breathe. Rule six. If one of them turns towards you, don't run.
They looked at me for one long second, the way you look at a sound you can't place.
Then they looked away.
Not slowly. Not as if they'd decided anything. They just stopped looking, the way your eyes slide off a chair in a room, or a pillar, or a coat on a hook. Back to the corner. Back to the whistle. As if there was nothing on the floor behind them at all.
I knelt there on the concrete with my cold hands flat on the floor and understood, all at once, what I was.
I was furniture.