The trouble with being furniture is that furniture can't do anything.
I knelt on the concrete behind them and watched the nine walk towards the corner. They weren't in a hurry now. They didn't need to be. The corner was a corner. On two sides of it there was green net and five floors of air, and on the third side there was a low wall of cement bags, and behind the cement bags there were four people and a whistle.
Ira stood up behind the bags. I saw her do it. She stood up straight, the way she'd stood in Room 603 when she told forty people to leave their bags, and put herself in front of the others, and held out her empty hands a little way from her sides as if she could stop nine dead people by being in the way. Bunty stood up next to her with the iron rod. He was holding it like a cricket bat, the wrong way round.
The nearest of the nine was two metres from them. The bearded one, in the vest and lungi.
I turned his paper over.
· · ·
I want to tell you that I read it properly. I didn't.
I'd sat sixty-three Sunday tests without ever once answering a question before I'd read the whole paper. I'd sat them calm, because none of them mattered. This one mattered. Ira was two metres from a dead man's hands, and my body knew it, and my body did what it had done in a hotel ballroom in Mumbai when I was twelve. It panicked.
SECTION A. Which way?
Up. Down. Stop. Turn.
I didn't read the rest. I didn't look at how he was standing, at where his weight was, at what his legs were already doing. I looked at the four bright bubbles and I looked at Ira, and I wanted him to stop. I wanted it so much. So I filled in stop.
It was wrong.
I knew it was wrong in the same instant I did it, the way you know you've bubbled the wrong circle on an OMR sheet the moment the pencil leaves the paper. He'd already started to lunge. His weight was already forward, already going. You can't stop a thing that's already falling. You can only turn it. The answer had been printed right there on the paper, and if I'd read it I'd have seen it, and I hadn't.
−1.
And something was torn out of me.
That's the only way I can describe it. It made the same sound inside my head that the last page of the Ledger had made in the sample room at four o'clock: a long, tearing rip, like something that couldn't be mended. I felt it go. Not a thought, not a memory. Something underneath those. Something I'd been carrying around inside me my whole life without ever noticing it, the way you never notice your own tongue.
And in the place where it had been, there was calm.
I knelt there on the floor of the fifth floor of an unfinished building, and the cold hand that had been squeezing my stomach since the grille, since the windowsill, since a hotel ballroom in Mumbai five years ago, simply wasn't there any more. I looked for it. It was like putting your hand in your pocket for your phone and finding the pocket empty.
Then all nine of them turned round.
· · ·
I'd seen this happen once before, at the Talwandi crossing, when Pintu stopped the woman in the green salwar and every dead head at the crossing turned to look at him. I hadn't understood it then. Writing is loud. Not to the ears. To the Hum. The moment I'd filled in that bubble, I'd stopped being furniture. Every paper in the room had felt me do it, the way every head in an exam hall turns when someone's phone goes off.
They weren't walking towards the corner any more. They were walking towards me.
And I wasn't afraid.
I should have been. Nine of them, three metres away and coming, and me on my hands and knees on the floor with a nosebleed starting. I knew exactly how much danger I was in. I could have written it down to two decimal places. I just didn't feel it. It was like looking at a diagram of a boy about to be killed.
So I did what you do in a calm exam hall. I read the paper.
The bearded one again. He'd turned round. His weight was on his back foot, pivoting, his whole body in the middle of changing direction. Which way? I read the whole question this time. I read the way his shoulders were set, the way his knee was bent. There was only one answer that made sense, and it was so obvious, once you'd read it, that I nearly laughed.
Stop.
I filled it in.
He stopped.
Not slowly. Not like a person stopping. Like a video when somebody hits pause. One foot on the ground, one foot lifted, his hands half raised, his mouth open, perfectly still in the middle of the floor.
+3.
It cost something too. Not like the wrong answer. A right answer costs the way a hard sum costs: a heat behind the eyes, a pressure, a tightness in the back of the skull. And my nose, which had stopped bleeding hours ago, started again, warm and steady down my lip.
I didn't care. I was already reading the next paper.
· · · This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
The woman from under the babool tree. Second from the left. Moving forward, but slower than the others, as if she still didn't quite trust her legs. Her paper was easy. Stop. Done. She froze with her hand out.
This copy was taken without permission from the author's chapter. Their official page remains the place where they publish and receive support.
The third one was a boy, a student, from his clothes, a Shikhar ID card still round his neck on its lanyard. I didn't read the name. I read the paper. Stop. Done.
Three. Three of them standing frozen on the concrete in the orange dark like a game of statues at a children's party.
I reached for a fourth.
It slid out of my grip. I can't describe it any better than that. It was like trying to pick up a fourth glass with a hand already holding three: the paper turned over and I could read it, and I knew the answer, and when I tried to fill it in, there was nothing left to fill it in with. Three was all I could hold. Three was the whole of my hand.
Six of them were still coming.
"Ira!" I said. Out loud. Not a whisper. I didn't care any more. "The room! The key! Get them in the room!"
The six didn't even twitch at my voice. They were looking at me, all of them, coming at me, and they didn't hear a word. I didn't understand that then. I just saw it, and filed it, the way I file everything.
But Ira heard.
· · ·
What happened in the next ten seconds, I mostly saw out of the corner of my eye, because I was holding three papers shut in my head and they were trying to open.
Ira came over the cement bags. Not away from them, over them, towards the dead. She had nothing in her hands. She went straight for the one nearest the edge, a big man in a checked shirt whose back was to her because he was looking at me, and she put both her hands flat between his shoulder blades and shoved him with her whole body.
He went forward three steps into the green net. The net bellied out like a sail. For a second it held him. Then, with a long ripping sound, it didn't. He went through it and out into the dark, and there was nothing, and then, from a long way below, a sound I'm not going to describe.
Bunty swung the rod.
He swung it the way he'd been holding it, like a cricket bat, the wrong way round, with his eyes shut and his mouth open in a sort of silent scream, at the head of a dead man who had come round the end of the cement bags towards Simran. It hit. It made a sound like a coconut dropped on a road. The dead man fell down and didn't get up.
Bunty dropped the rod and stood there looking at his hands.
"Bunty!" Ira had Ananya by the arm. Simran had Ananya's other arm. "Bunty, move!"
The freezes broke.
I felt them go. Four seconds, maybe five. That was all I could hold them for. The papers tore out of my grip one after another, snap, snap, snap, and the bearded one finished his step, and the woman from the babool tree put her hand down, and the boy with the ID card lurched forward towards me as if somebody had pressed play.
Four of them were still coming, and three more who'd just woken up. Seven.
I couldn't hold seven. I could hold three. So I took the three in front, the three nearest to me, the ones who'd just woken: the bearded one, the boy with the ID card, the woman from the babool tree. I read the bearded one's paper again. It took me three seconds. Three seconds is a very long time when someone is walking towards you with their hands out. Stop. He stopped. The boy. Stop. The woman—
Ira was at the door of the sample room. She'd taken the others round behind the dead, all three of them, while every dead face in the place was turned towards me. I heard the key go in. I heard it turn.
"Kabir!"
The woman's paper turned over in my head, and I filled in stop, and she stopped. The three of them stood frozen in a line in front of me, a metre away, shoulder to shoulder, and the four behind walked straight into their backs and tangled there, arms and heads and hands, a knot of them shoving at three statues that wouldn't move.
I got up off my knees and ran.
I've never been a good runner. But I was going towards a door with Ira Deshmukh holding it open, and some things you can do even if you can't.
· · ·
I came through the door last, and Bunty slammed it behind me, and Ira and Bunty and I put our backs against it, and Simran dragged the bed across the floor, plastic sheet and all, and jammed it against the door with a screech, and then the study table on top of the bed, and then the chair, and then herself, sitting on the table with her feet braced against the wall, crying silently with her eyes wide open.
Something hit the door from the outside. Then something else. The whole frame jumped. Bunty grunted. Ira didn't make a sound.
They hit it for a long time. Five minutes, maybe. Then less. Then, one by one, they stopped, the way they'd stopped hunting the library after we went up the ladder. A door is a wall. If there's nothing to hear, after a while they forget about you.
We stayed where we were for a long time after the last one, our backs against the door, breathing.
Then Bunty turned his head and looked at me in the dark.
"Yes."
"You're alive." His voice was rising. "You were dead. Ira said you were still, she said like the invigilator, I heard you not breathing, I heard, and now you're—"
"Bunty. Quieter."
"Sorry." In a whisper so fierce it was nearly a shout: "You're alive."
Then he grabbed me round the neck with one arm, so hard that my head banged against his, and held on, and didn't say anything else at all.
· · ·
My nose was still bleeding. My head felt as though somebody had been tightening a belt round it all evening, notch by notch. My hands were so cold that when Bunty finally let go of me and took one of them in his, he flinched.
"Bhaiya. You're like ice."
"I know."
I got up. I went to the window.
It was still open, the way I'd left it an hour before when I'd climbed out. The hot night air came in, and the smell of cement, and the breathing of the net against the bamboo. I put my hands on the aluminium frame and leaned out, as far as I could, and looked down.
Five floors. The black square of the ground floor. The cement mixer. The plank I'd dropped, lying on the waste ground beside something dark that I knew was a man in a checked shirt.
An hour ago, on this same windowsill, I'd been more frightened than at any moment in my life. I remembered that. I remembered it perfectly: the cold hand in the stomach, the water in my legs, the wet palms on the bamboo. I could have described every detail of it.
I didn't feel any of it.
I leaned further out. I looked straight down, at the drop, the way you look at the drop in nightmares. I waited for the hand to close.
Nothing. It was like looking at a diagram of a fall.
I came back in and sat down on the floor under the window with my back to the wall.
I thought about Tara. On purpose, as a test, the way you press a bruise to see if it still hurts. Tara alone in the quarter in Bhilai with Dadi and eight doses of insulin and Papa locked inside the plant. I thought about the door of our quarter, and what might be on the other side of it tonight.
Worry came. I was glad of that. Worry is arithmetic, and I could still do arithmetic. Love came, the hot helpless kind that makes your throat ache. I was glad of that too.
But under them, in the place where fear had always been, there was nothing. A clean, blank page.
I'd answered one question wrong. And the paper had taken one mark off me. Not a mark. A page.
· · ·
Ira was sitting against the barricade with her knees drawn up and her arms round them. Simran had gone to sleep on the study table, the way people do sometimes after a fright, suddenly and completely. Ananya was asleep against Simran's legs, with Sushila aunty's tiffin carrier still in her arms.
Ira hadn't taken her eyes off me since we came through the door.
"They turned," she said. Very low. "When you did whatever you did. They were going to the corner, all of them, they were nearly at us, and then they all turned round at once and went to you. Like a class when the teacher walks in."
I didn't say anything.
"And then they stopped. Three of them. They just stopped, in the middle of moving, like someone had switched them off." Her voice was perfectly steady. Her hands round her knees were not. "And your nose was bleeding. And you weren't afraid. I watched your face. Nine of them, and you weren't afraid at all."
"No," I said.
She looked at me in the dark for a long time, the way she'd looked at Pintu at the Talwandi crossing.
"What are you?" said Ira.
I thought about it. I gave it the respect it deserved. Then I told her the truth.
"Rank 1,847," I said.