By three o'clock on the first afternoon of the end of the world, a power bank cost four hundred rupees a day to rent.
That was my price. I'd set it at one o'clock, at two hundred, and by two the queue outside room 304 had told me I was being sentimental. Maggi was sixty a packet. A phone charger was three hundred, or a hundred and fifty if you returned it by midnight. I had eleven power banks, nine chargers, two hundred and forty packets of Maggi between my trunk and the duffel bag, and every boy in Gayatri Residency suddenly needed to talk to his mother.
"Bhaiya," said Bunty, from the doorway, in the voice of a man witnessing a crime. "Today? Today you're doing business?"
"Today especially."
"People are dying."
"Which is why they want to call home. Which is why they need power. Which is why power costs four hundred rupees." I wrote Room 118, Sahil, one bank, 400, due 9 a.m. in the Ledger. "Things are worth what people need them for, Bunty. I didn't make that rule. I just didn't pretend it wasn't there."
He looked at me as if I'd kicked a puppy. He'd been looking at me like that for two years, on and off, and it had never yet cost me anything.
"Everybody's a transaction," I said. "The only question is whether you're the one keeping the books."
· · ·
Gayatri Residency is four floors of small rooms around a staircase that smells of phenyl, with a mess on the ground floor, a warden's room beside the gate and a flat roof full of black plastic water tanks. Sixty-four boys lived there on a normal day. Fifty-eight were there that afternoon; the rest had gone home for a cousin's wedding or a fever or a final look at their mothers before the exam, and had never been so lucky in their lives.
All fifty-eight of us were in the common room at two, staring at the television bolted to the wall.
The news channels were shouting. They always shout, but that afternoon they shouted as if someone had told them shouting would help. A red banner ran across the bottom of the screen: KOTA MEIN RAHASYAMAY BIMARI, mysterious illness in Kota. An anchor in a shiny suit kept saying rabies-like symptoms and violent patients and do not panic, while behind him the same four videos played in a loop: the hospital ward, a man chasing a woman across a petrol pump, a crowd outside a medical college, and smoke over rooftops that could have been anywhere.
"Section 144 has been imposed," said the anchor.
"It's 163 now," said Shubham, from the back of the room, without looking up from the physics book in his lap. "They changed all the numbers with the new criminal laws."
Nobody answered him. Shubham was like that: you could be in the middle of the apocalypse and he'd correct the section number. He was the third bed in room 304, a scholarship boy from a village in the hills above Almora, and he studied fourteen hours a day with a pair of foam earplugs and the expression of a man who'd been promised that if he worked hard enough, something would happen. He was the only person I knew who'd read the entire Shikhar rulebook voluntarily.
All coaching institutes closed until further orders, said the banner.
"Finally," said someone. "A holiday."
Nobody laughed.
Residents are advised to stay indoors. Avoid contact with persons showing symptoms. Helpline numbers are— and the numbers scrolled past, and fifty-eight boys tried to call them at once and got nothing.
· · ·
Our warden was a retired Army subedar called Bhanwar Singh, sixty-one years old, with a moustache like two handlebars and a voice that could drill a regiment from the other end of a parade ground. He was from a village near Bundi, he called everybody jawan, and whenever anything went wrong, from a blocked toilet to a fuse, he'd say, "In 'ninety-nine, I saw worse."
At four, he lined us up in the courtyard and counted us. Then he gave a speech.
"The gate is locked," he said, "and the gate stays locked. Nobody opens it without my order. Not for your friend. Not for your friend's friend. Not for the police, unless I see the police myself." He looked along the line. "In 'ninety-nine, in Kargil, we held a post for nine days on cold rations. This is a hostel with a full kitchen. You will survive."
He handed out the weapons: six cricket bats, two hockey sticks, a broom handle and his own lathi, which he kept. Bunty got a bat. I got the broom handle, which I thought was fair.
Then I went to see him in his room, which smelled of mustard oil and Old Monk, with a photograph of a younger him in uniform on the wall.
"Sir," I said. "One suggestion."
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"Speak, jawan."
"Phones. They go to sound and light. I watched one this morning in our exam hall, he turned to every noise in the room. If fifty-eight phones start ringing at night with the windows open, every one of them out there will know we're here." I held up my own phone. "Airplane mode, except when you're actually making a call. Screens off at night. No lights on the lane side."
He looked at me for a long moment, the way an old soldier looks at a young one who has said something sensible by accident.
"Discipline," he said. "Good. Very good." He stood up. "What's your name?"
"Kabir, sir. Room 304."
"The Kabaadi."
"Yes, sir."
He made the announcement himself at dinner, in his parade-ground voice, as if it had been his idea. I didn't mind. Things work better when they're somebody else's idea. Most of the boys switched to airplane mode. A few didn't. I wrote their names down.
· · ·
At three o'clock, before any of that, I went up to the roof.
The heat up there was a physical thing, a hand pressed down on the top of your head. The concrete burned through my chappals. The water tanks ticked as they expanded. The weather app had said forty-five before the internet started choking, and it felt worse. I crouched in the narrow strip of shade behind the tanks, and Bunty crouched beside me with his cricket bat, and we looked down into the lane.
There were seven of them that I could see.
A delivery boy sat on the seat of his parked scooter in the shade of a neem tree, his helmet still on, his hands on the handlebars, as if waiting for a signal to change. A girl in a hostel T-shirt stood under the stairwell of the building opposite. An aunty in a printed nightie stood beside a parked Alto, one hand resting on its roof. Two boys sat on the step of the shuttered cycle shop. A man in a vest stood in the doorway of the photocopy shop. An old man lay on his side on the bench outside the temple, and I couldn't tell if he was one of them or just dead in the ordinary way.
None of them moved. Or not much. Every so often one would sway, the way you sway when you've been standing in a queue for a long time. The delivery boy's head drooped forward until the helmet visor touched the speedometer, and stayed there.
A crow landed on the girl's shoulder. She didn't react. It pecked at her ear. She didn't react to that either. After a while the crow got bored and flew off.
"They're sleeping?" Bunty whispered.
"They're cooking," I said. "Forty-five degrees. Look where they are."
Every single one of them was in shade. Not one of them was standing in the sun.
I opened the Ledger on my knee and turned to a fresh page and wrote PATTERNS across the top in capitals. Then I wrote:
1. Sound: they turn to it. (Hall. Whiteboard. Phone.)
2. Light: probably. (Unconfirmed.)
3. Heat: slow. Very slow. They find shade and stand in it.
4. The guard in the lobby was still doing his job. ???
I looked at number four for a long time. A dead man waving students through a metal detector. An invigilator announcing the time. I didn't know what it meant yet. I put three question marks after it, which in my Ledger is the highest level of alarm.
"Bhaiya," said Bunty. "What do you write in that thing?"
"Everything that matters."
"Am I in it?"
"You owe me forty rupees from March."
"I gave you that!"
"You gave me thirty-five."
He opened his mouth to argue, and then a strange thing happened to his face. It crumpled, just for a second, and he put the back of his wrist against his eyes.
"My mummy called," he said. "Finally. She's crying. Papa's at the garage. Indore has Section, also, they're saying it's spreading. Pinky's asking when I'm coming home." He wiped his face hard with the bottom of his T-shirt. "I told her I'm fine. Bunty's fine, Bunty's always fine."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't a column for it.
After a while he said, in a smaller voice, "Have you called your sister?"
"Busy tone," I said. "All afternoon."
· · ·
At ten past seven, the sun dropped behind the next building and the lane changed.
I was back on the roof by then. I'd wanted to see it. I watched the shade line of the building opposite slide off the road and the colour drain out of the sky, and then, as if somebody had flipped a switch on the wall of the world, they all lifted their heads.
The delivery boy got off his scooter. The aunty took her hand off the Alto. The girl came out from under the stairwell. They didn't look around the way people do. They didn't check for traffic. They simply turned, all of them, to the far end of the lane, where a stray dog had started barking at nothing, and they went.
Fast. That was what I hadn't expected. Not running exactly, but a loose, low, ground-eating walk, like dogs moving in a pack, and the dog's bark went up into a yelp, and then it stopped.
A minute later a man came round the corner on a motorcycle with his headlight on, going much too fast, and the lane closed round him the way water closes round a stone.
I sat behind the water tanks for a long time after that, with my hands pressed between my knees to stop them shaking.
Then I opened the Ledger and corrected item three.
3. Heat: slow in the afternoon. After sunset: fast. Very fast. Hunting.
Underneath it, Bunty, who had come up behind me without my noticing, leaned over my shoulder and said what every boy in Kota would be saying by morning.
"Dopahar safe hai," he whispered. "Raat is death."
I wrote that down too.
· · ·
At nine o'clock exactly, Shubham sat on his bed in room 304 and called his mother.
He did it every night at nine, for three minutes, because that was what his calling plan allowed without extra charge, and because his mother sat by the phone in their village from 8:55 onwards, every night, waiting. He had told me this once, in the first week, apologising for the noise. Tonight it took him eleven tries to get through. When he did, he turned to face the wall and spoke very quietly in Kumaoni, a language I didn't understand, and at the end of three minutes he said something gentle and hung up, exactly on time.
He saw me watching and gave me a tired smile.
"The mess manager told me something strange today," he said. "My mess bill is paid till June. Again. He says some well-wisher pays it every month. He won't tell me who." He shook his head. "Who would do that?"
"Some rich idiot," I said.
"Must be."
He put his earplugs back in and opened his physics book. Bunty, on the top bunk, was asleep with his mouth open and his cricket bat in his arms like a teddy bear.
At 9:25, someone started hammering on the hostel gate.
It wasn't a knock. It was fists, many fists, and voices, boys' voices, high and cracking: "Kholo! Gate kholo! Please! PLEASE!" And under the voices, coming up the lane from the dark, another sound. Feet. A great many feet, moving fast.
I was still sitting up on my bed, working out what it meant, when I realised that the top bunk was empty and the door of room 304 was swinging, and Bunty was already halfway down the stairs.