Ira Deshmukh had a rule for every situation, and by noon she had run out of them.
She'd walked the girls of Room 603 home through Indra Vihar in a tight line, the way they'd taught her at NCC camp: one in front, one at the back, eyes on the corners. Nandini had hopped between two of them with her arms over their shoulders. Nobody had talked. On the main road a bus had been standing at a stop with its doors open and its engine running and every seat empty, and a man in a white kurta had been walking slowly round and round it, touching it with one hand, like someone looking for a way in. They'd crossed on the other side.
Meera Girls Residency was a pink four-storey building with a name board in curly gold letters and a gate that could be padlocked. Rekha ma'am, the warden, had padlocked it behind them, then stood in the courtyard with the key in her fist, saying, "Kya ho raha hai, what is happening, what is happening," as if one of them might know.
Ira had put Nandini on the reception sofa, found two plastic rulers and a cotton dupatta, and splinted the ankle. Immobilise the joint above and below. That one, at least, still worked.
Then she'd turned on her phone.
Forty-seven missed calls from Aai. Eleven from Baba. Three from her brother Neel, who was ten and was not allowed to make calls without permission. She tried to call back and got the busy tone, and tried again, and got the busy tone, and on the ninth try, at 12:40, her mother picked up in the middle of a sentence to somebody else.
"—no, the second ward, tell them the second— Ira? Ira. Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Are you lying?"
"No, Aai."
Her mother was a doctor at a government hospital in Pune. Ira could hear it behind her, the particular noise of a casualty ward, trolley wheels and too many voices. On the television, her mother said, they were showing Kota. They were saying rabies-like. They were saying violent patients. Her mother said those words the way doctors say words they don't believe.
"I'm at the hostel," Ira said. "We're inside. The gate's locked. There was a man in our exam hall, an invigilator, he—" She stopped. She didn't know how to say what he had done. "I got everyone out. Forty people. Everyone got out."
There was a short silence on the line.
"Good," her mother said. "Good girl. Now listen to me. Are you listening?"
"Yes."
"Don't wait for anyone. Not for the institute. Not for the police. Not for me. Nobody is going to come and get you in the next few days, do you understand? So you do whatever keeps you alive. Whatever it is. You don't ask permission."
"Aai—"
"You saved forty people. Now save one more. You."
Then someone shouted Doctor Deshmukh in the background, and her mother said "I love you, I have to go," in a single breath, and the line went dead.
Ira sat on the stairs for a while with the phone in her lap.
You don't ask permission. Her mother had never in her life said anything like that.
· · ·
By two o'clock, she was a hero.
It started in the Shikhar groups and spread from there. IRA DESHMUKH SAVED ROOM 603. Someone had made a graphic. Someone else had made a better one, with a gold border. The girls on the second floor had found it and were passing their phones round, and when Ira came up the stairs with the water roster, three of them actually applauded.
"Real topper," said Simran Kaur, beaming. "Real topper, didi, you're famous, you're on four hundred stories, my cousin in Chandigarh saw it, she said—"
"Simran."
"—she said is that your hostel, and I said yes, she's literally my didi, she's my buddy, the warden assigned her, and—"
"Simran. Water."
Simran was sixteen and from Chandigarh and talked when she was frightened, which meant that since eleven o'clock she had not stopped talking once. Behind her, in the doorway of their room, stood Ananya Mishra, also sixteen, from Lucknow, who did the opposite. Ananya went quiet when she was frightened, and her breathing went tight and small, and she held her blue inhaler in her fist like a rosary. Rekha ma'am had assigned both of them to Ira in April, when they'd arrived for the new session, because Ira was rank one and therefore, apparently, responsible.
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"Fill every bucket on your floor," Ira said. "Every bottle. The overhead tank won't last if the power goes. Ananya, how many puffs have you taken today?"
"Two," Ananya whispered.
"How many doses are left in that?"
Ananya looked at the inhaler as if it had never occurred to her that it could end.
"Count them tonight," Ira said. "Write it down. Show me."
She went down the corridor with her clipboard. She had made a list of the hostel's thirty-one girls, their rooms, their home cities and their phone numbers. She had made a list of what was in the mess kitchen, because the cook hadn't come in: forty kilos of rice, eighteen of atta, dal, oil, potatoes, onions, enough for a week if they were careful. She'd made a duty roster for the gate, two girls at a time, two-hour shifts, and she'd put herself on the night ones. Lists were good. Lists held things still.
What she didn't put on any list was the message she'd typed at 2:15.
It wasn't me. Kabir Anand from Sabarmati batch had a key to the fire door and told me what to do.
She'd typed it in the Shikhar group, where everyone would see it. She'd read it four times. It was true, it was correct and it was what a person with any honour would send. You write your own name on your own paper. That rule was older than NCC and older than Kota.
She'd deleted it.
She still didn't entirely know why. Partly it was the look on his face when he'd pressed the key into her palm. They'll listen to rank one. He'd said it as if he were offering her something. As if she'd be doing him a favour by taking it. And partly it was something simpler. She didn't know what he was. You don't report an answer until you've checked the working.
· · ·
She went over the working all afternoon.
She'd been sitting beside him in that hall. She'd seen the same invigilator, the same bandage, the same sweat. She'd even noticed the bandage. And then she'd gone back to her paper, because the paper was what mattered, because that's what she'd been trained to do for two years: ignore everything that isn't on the paper.
He hadn't ignored it. He'd sat there with his answer sheet face down, filled in twenty minutes before anyone else, and he'd watched. He'd known the invigilator's wife called every thirty minutes. He'd known the phone would buzz at 10:45 before it buzzed. He'd known which door. He'd known which key.
And he'd known exactly what to say to her.
That was the part that made her skin prickle. Evacuate, then treat. That's the order, isn't it? He'd never done NCC. He'd said so. He'd simply looked at her and worked out which words would make her stand up, the way you'd work out which formula fits a question. And it had worked. She had stood up.
Nobody had ever read her that easily. Not her teachers. Not Aai.
She did not like it.
· · ·
At six, Rekha ma'am left.
She had two children in Nayapura and a husband who wasn't answering, and she stood at the gate with her handbag over her shoulder and the padlock key in her hand and looked at the thirty-one of them with a face that Ira would remember for a long time.
"I'll come back," she said. "Tomorrow morning. First thing."
She gave the key to Ira. Of course she did.
Ira locked the gate behind her and watched her walk down the lane, very fast, almost running, until she turned the corner. Then she went up to the terrace, because from the terrace you could see the whole lane, and seeing things was something.
The heat was coming off the concrete in waves. Over the rooftops, the sun was a dull orange coin sinking into dust. In the lane below, all afternoon, there had been a few of them standing in the shade of the buildings: a boy in a hostel T-shirt under a stairwell, a woman in a nightie by a parked car, an old man in the doorway of the cycle shop. They'd stood the way people stand at a bus stop in May, heads down, hardly moving, as though the heat had pressed them flat. Simran had decided they were "just in shock". Ira had decided not to argue.
At ten past seven, the sun went behind the water tanks on the next building, and the lane changed.
It wasn't one thing. It was all of them at once. The boy under the stairwell lifted his head. The woman by the car straightened up. The old man stepped out of the cycle-shop doorway into the lane and turned his face up and to the side, the way a dog does when it hears its name. And then they were moving. Not shuffling. Moving, quick and loose-limbed, all in the same direction, towards the end of the lane where a man had just come round the corner on a cycle, ringing his bell.
The bell stopped.
A street dog started barking somewhere below and then yelped, a high short sound, and was quiet.
"Inside," said Ira. Simran and two others were at the parapet beside her, their phones up, filming. "Inside. Now. Phones down. No lights on this side of the building. Go."
For once, nobody argued with her.
· · ·
She took the first night shift at the gate herself, sitting on a plastic chair in the dark of the reception with the padlock key on a string round her neck and Nandini asleep on the sofa behind her. Outside, the lane was full of soft sounds. Footsteps that didn't stop. Something brushing along the shutters of the shops. Once, very close, on the other side of the gate, somebody breathing in a way that wasn't breathing at all.
She didn't move. She'd been trained to sit still for an hour on a parade ground in the Pune sun. She could sit still for this.
At midnight, to keep her hands from shaking, she opened the Shikhar app.
She'd never looked him up before. Why would she? He was a boy in Sabarmati batch who sold pencils. His profile photo was the standard one from admission day, a thin face with a careful haircut, looking slightly to the left of the camera, as if he'd noticed something behind the photographer. Kabir Anand. Bhilai. Sabarmati. Last week's rank: 1,847.
She scrolled down to his history.
1,812. 1,861. 1,839. 1,850. 1,844. 1,857. 1,833. Sixty-three Sunday tests, going back to his first month in Kota. She checked every one. Not a single rank above 1,800. Not a single rank below 1,870. A score that never once fell off a cliff, never once got lucky, never once moved more than thirty places in either direction, week after week, through easy papers and impossible ones.
Ira had been rank one for fourteen weeks. Before that she'd been second, and before that fourth, and once, on a paper with a misprinted question, nineteenth. She was the most consistent student in the institute, and even she wasn't that consistent.
Nobody was that consistent by accident.
She sat in the dark with the breathing on the other side of the gate and looked at the photograph for a long time. Then she took out the small notebook she kept her lists in and turned to a fresh page, and wrote his name at the top of it.
Under it, after a while, she wrote one word.
Why?