He had her by the wrist.
Nandini was pulling away with her whole body, tissues spilling out of the packet, and Mr. Bhandari was drawing her hand towards his face the way you'd lift a roti to your mouth. Patiently. As if he had all the time in the world and knew exactly what he was going to do with it. The boy behind her, still screaming, swung his steel water bottle into the side of Mr. Bhandari's head with a sound like a temple bell.
Mr. Bhandari didn't even blink.
Then the whole room stood up at once.
Forty chairs scraped back. Somebody knocked over a desk. Papers went everywhere, two hours of integration fluttering to the floor like the world's most expensive confetti. And the front rows did what front rows do in an emergency: they ran for the front door, the door right beside the invigilator's desk, the door that led to a corridor with a padlocked gate at the end of it.
"BACK DOOR!"
It came from the back of the room, and it didn't sound like a girl. It sounded like a parade ground.
"THIS WAY. LEAVE EVERYTHING. MOVE."
Ira Deshmukh was standing beside the open fire door with one arm out, pointing, and her voice did something to the room that no amount of shouting from me could have done. Thirty-odd people who had spent two years being told exactly what to do by the person at the top of the list turned round as one and did it. That's what rank one buys you, in Kota. Not a better college. Obedience.
That still left Nandini.
She'd twisted free, leaving him with a fistful of her dupatta, and she'd gone down hard between the first desk and the wall. She was trying to crawl under the desks, and he was turning to follow her, and the boy with the water bottle had dropped it and was simply standing there with his hands up, the way you might stand in front of a bull.
I had my geometry box in my hand. I didn't remember picking it up.
I threw it at the whiteboard.
It hit just behind Mr. Bhandari's head, a flat steel crash that made everyone flinch, and he turned to the sound. Not to me, who'd thrown it. To the place where it landed. He took a step towards the whiteboard, his head tilted, listening.
Sound, I thought. He goes to sound. Even then I was taking notes.
I threw my water bottle at the window. He turned to that. I threw Ira's pencil box, which I hadn't asked to borrow, at the far corner, and he turned to that too, and by then Bunty had come down the aisle like an auto-rickshaw in Indore traffic, scooped Nandini out from under the desk by her armpits and swung her up onto his back. Her ankle was bent wrong. She was crying. Bunty was saying, "Hold on, hold on, didi, I've got you, Bunty's got you," over and over, and running for the back.
The Ganga boy who'd had twelve questions left had gone past me some time earlier at a speed that suggested he'd found a reason to leave after all.
Then there was just me in the room, and him.
He'd lost interest in the window. He was looking at me now. Not at my face, exactly. At the movement. I was backing down the aisle between the desks, and his head followed me the way a cat's follows a string, and the blood on his lip had cracked when he opened his mouth.
"Fifteen minutes remaining," he said again, and came after me.
He wasn't fast. Not then. He walked like a man who'd been sitting too long, knees stiff, feet dragging a little. But he didn't slow down for desks. He went through them. A chair went flying. A desk tipped. I'm a terrible runner; I've been a terrible runner since I was six. I turned and ran anyway.
On the way past the fire door, I scooped the chain up off the floor with the padlock still hanging open on it. I don't know why. I think some part of me was already doing the next problem.
Then I was through, onto the landing, and the door was swinging shut behind me, and he hit it from the other side.
The fire door opened outwards. That's how fire doors work: you push the bar and fall out to safety. Which meant that the only thing stopping a dead accountant from falling out to safety right behind me was me. I put my back against the door. It jolted. It jolted again. Through the small wired-glass panel at head height, his face appeared, and pressed against the glass, and slid, leaving a smear.
"Give me the chain," said Ira.
She was standing on the stairs below me. She hadn't gone down with the others. I'd find out later that she'd been waiting, with her NCC procedure, to go back in and treat the casualty. Now she looked at the face in the glass for one long second, and then she didn't look at it again.
I gave her the chain. There was a pull handle on the stair side of the door, a cheap steel D, and an iron railing a metre away. She looped the chain through the handle and twice round the railing and pulled it tight while I leaned on the door, and when the next jolt came the chain took it and rang like a bell. She snapped the padlock shut.
The door shuddered. Held.
"You still have the key," I said.
"I found it on the floor," she said. "I'll keep it."
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We stood there breathing. On the other side of the glass, Mr. Bhandari was looking at us with his head on one side, waiting, the way he must have waited at the front of a thousand exam halls for the bell. Somewhere behind him a phone began to vibrate on a desk. Eleven-fifteen, I thought. Mrs. Bhandari, right on time.
"Okay," Ira said, very quietly. "Okay."
"Wait here," I said, and went up the stairs instead of down.
"Kabir—"
The landing between six and seven was my godown. Twelve cartons of Maggi, a crate of power banks, cables, chargers, photocopied notes in plastic sleeves, and a black duffel bag that I kept packed for emergencies, though I had never known what kind of emergency I meant. Now I knew. I slung the duffel over my shoulder and came back down.
Ira stared at me.
"Are you serious?"
"Assets," I said.
· · ·
We went down six floors fast. On every floor the fire door was grey and chained, from the inside, exactly like ours. Nobody gets out. Nobody gets in.
On the fourth floor, someone was pounding on the door.
Ira stopped so suddenly I walked into her. The pounding was frantic, two fists, and with it a voice, a boy's voice, muffled through the steel: "Kholo! Kholo! Open the door!" Behind the voice there was other noise. Chairs. Screaming.
Ira grabbed the handle and pulled. The door rattled against its chain, on the other side, out of reach.
"It's locked from inside," I said. "Like ours. They'd need the key from their own invigilator."
"There are people in there."
"I know."
"Ramkesh has the gate key. If someone gets to the ground floor and—"
"Ira."
The pounding stopped. Not slowed. Stopped, in the middle of a beat, as if somebody had pulled a plug. We stood on the fourth-floor landing listening to nothing at all.
She let go of the handle. We went down.
The door at the bottom was bolted on our side. Shikhar had been worried about people getting in, not people getting out. It was the only thing in the building designed for us. I slid the bolt and pushed, and the heat of a Kota May came in like an open oven, and we stepped out into the alley at the side of Shikhar Tower.
The rest of Room 603 was there, packed against the wall in the shade, white-faced. Bunty had Nandini sitting on an upturned crate with her ankle out in front of her. He was fanning her with his ID card.
"Count off," Ira said. Her parade-ground voice was back. "From the left. Now."
They counted off. Thirty-nine. Ira looked at me. Forty.
Then someone said, "Oh God," and we all turned to look at the road.
· · ·
We'd been in a locked room for two hours. In two hours, the world had sat a different exam.
The main road in front of Shikhar Tower is, on a normal Sunday, four lanes of autos, e-rickshaws, students and cows, with a horn going every three seconds. Now there was a scooter lying on its side in the middle of it with the engine still running and the back wheel spinning in the air. A delivery boy's insulated bag lay beside it, burst open, two pizza boxes sliding out. A police jeep was parked across the median with both doors open and its siren going and nobody in it. Further down, outside a hostel, a man was kneeling over another man in the road, bent close, as if trying to tell him a secret. The street dogs were going mad at him from a safe distance.
From somewhere towards Talwandi, a column of black smoke stood straight up into a white sky.
People were running. Not towards anything. Just running, in the way people run in a dream, with their arms not quite in time with their legs. A woman on a first-floor balcony was screaming a name over and over.
"What—" said the Ganga boy. "What is—"
"Phones," I said.
Ira turned on me. "What?"
"Our phones are in the lockers. In about ten minutes, everybody in this city is going to be calling everybody else, and anyone without a phone won't know which way to run." That was the reason I gave. The other reason was in locker 487 with my phone: a brown notebook held shut with two rubber bands. My whole life was in that locker.
There's a service door at the side of the Tower that leads to the pantry behind the lobby. Ramkesh uses it to bring my cartons in. I went in that way, with Bunty behind me and Ira behind him, because she wasn't going to let me do anything else that morning without watching.
The lobby was cold and bright and very quiet. The glass doors at the front were shut. There were people outside them, a few, standing very still in the sun with their heads tilted. And inside, by the metal detector frame, stood the security guard.
He was in his grey uniform with his cap on. He was standing exactly where he always stood, beside the frame, with his back to us. As we watched, he lifted his right hand a little, palm out, and lowered it again. The way he did a thousand times every morning, waving students through.
There was nobody to wave through. He did it anyway.
"Bhaiya," Bunty breathed.
"He's doing his job," I whispered. "Don't interrupt him."
We crossed to the lockers along the side wall, keeping our backs to the steel. Locker 487. My key on its red band. The door opened with a scrape of metal that sounded, in that marble silence, like a scream. The guard's head turned a fraction. Stopped. Turned back to the doors.
Phone. Notebook. I put them inside my shirt. Bunty got his. Ira opened locker 112, took her phone, then went to two more lockers and opened them too, with keys I hadn't seen her take. Nandini's. And the boy with the water bottle's. She'd thought to take their bands off their wrists in the alley. I added that to the things I knew about Ira Deshmukh.
The guard lifted his hand again. Waved nobody through.
We went out the way we'd come.
· · ·
Room 603 scattered in groups, back to the hostels, phones finally in their hands, everyone calling home at once and getting nothing but busy tones. Ira was taking the girls back to her hostel in Indra Vihar, with Nandini between two of them, an arm over each shoulder. Before they left, Ira caught my arm.
"You had a key to a chained fire door," she said.
"Found it."
"You knew he was dead before he moved."
"I sit at the back. I notice things."
"You didn't sit at the back. You sat next to me."
"Then you should have noticed too."
She let go of my arm. She didn't look angry. She looked like someone who has found a mistake in a printed answer key and is deciding who to report it to.
"I'm going to find out what you are," she said, and walked away.
Gayatri Residency is two lanes from the Tower. Bunty and I ran the whole way, which for me was a personal record. At the corner of our lane, Pintu bhaiya's tea stall stood empty under the neem tree. The kettle was still on the gas, boiling over, chai hissing down the sides and blackening on the burner. In two years I had never once seen Pintu leave a pot of chai unattended. I reached over the counter and turned off the gas. I don't know why. Habit.
The warden was at our gate with a lathi. He let us in and locked it behind us.
By two o'clock, the internet was full of it. The Shikhar WhatsApp groups, the Kota student pages, somebody's cousin's Instagram: IRA DESHMUKH SAVED ROOM 603. Found a key on the floor and got 40 students out!! Rank 1 in marks AND in life. Somebody had made a graphic with her app photo and the words REAL TOPPER in gold. It had been forwarded four hundred times by the time I saw it.
My name wasn't anywhere. I checked.
I lay on my bunk in room 304 with the Ledger open on my chest and read the messages, and I felt, for a little while, almost calm.
Forty people walked out of Room 603 alive. By two o'clock, all forty of them knew who had saved them, and not one of them knew it was me. That was the plan. It had worked exactly the way I'd written it.
It was the last plan of mine that ever did.