There were nine of them.
I counted from the stairs, because counting is what I do instead of panicking. Nine boys from Sai Kripa, the hostel next door, crushed against our gate in the dark with their arms through the bars, faces white in the light from our reception. Some of them still had cricket bats. One had a frying pan. One was barefoot and bleeding from the feet. And behind them, coming up the lane from the far end where the motorcycle had gone down, were the others.
I couldn't count those. It was too dark. I could hear them, though: a soft, fast pattering, like rain beginning on a tin roof.
"Kholo! Uncle, please, kholo, our gate broke, our warden, he—"
"Sir! Sir!"
Bhanwar Singh stood two metres back from the gate with his lathi in one hand and his big bunch of keys in the other, and he didn't move.
"Nobody opens the gate," he said.
"Sir." Bunty had his hands pressed together like he was praying. He was still holding his cricket bat between his palms, which made it look like he was praying to the bat. "Sir, please, they'll die."
"If I open it, jawan, we all die." The warden's voice was steady. His face wasn't. "Fifty-eight boys inside. Nine outside. You think I like this arithmetic?"
"Sir, Bunty will personally guarantee—"
"Guarantee what?"
Half the hostel was on the stairs behind me now, in their vests and shorts, holding their bats and hockey sticks and not knowing what to do with them. Someone was crying. The pattering in the lane was getting louder.
I've thought a lot, since, about what I was thinking in those few seconds. I'd like to tell you it was about the nine boys. It wasn't, exactly. It was about the arithmetic. The warden was right: if we opened the gate with that crowd ten metres behind them, they'd pour in with the boys and we'd lose the whole hostel. But the warden was only right because he'd only done half the sum. He'd assumed the crowd would keep coming. I'd watched them for an afternoon. I knew they didn't go where they were going. They went where the noise was.
I put my hand in my pocket and closed it round the key ring.
The hostel belonged to an Agrawal ji who lived in Jaipur and came down once a month to shout about the electricity bill. He left his white Scorpio parked in our lane, twenty metres up from the gate, between us and the corner, and twice that year he'd paid me to take it in for servicing. I'd never quite got round to returning the spare key. It was on my ring, beside my room key and my trunk key. You never know when an asset will be useful.
The Scorpio was parked between the gate and whatever was coming up the lane.
"Sir," I said. "Give me thirty seconds."
The warden turned. He saw the key fob in my hand, the black plastic one with the red button, and I saw him understand it faster than I'd ever seen an adult understand anything. Army men think in terms of ground.
"When it goes," he said, "the small gate. One at a time." He was already pulling the key ring off his belt. "Bunty. You and you. Pull them through. Don't stop for anything. Then bolt it."
"Yes sir," said Bunty, who had never in his life said yes sir to anyone.
I pressed the red button.
The Scorpio went off like the end of the world. Horn blaring, hazard lights blinking orange up and down the lane, that stupid two-tone wail that every car alarm in India makes and every Indian ignores. In the orange flashes I saw them for the first time. Twenty, maybe twenty-five. Students, mostly, in hostel shorts and T-shirts, and a few older people, and a woman in a sari, all moving fast and low up the middle of the lane towards our gate.
Their heads turned together, like a class when a teacher walks in. Then they swung off the line towards the gate and threw themselves at the Scorpio. I heard hands hitting metal. I heard glass. The car rocked on its springs.
"Now," said the warden.
The wicket gate is a small door cut into the big iron one, just wide enough for one person at a time. The warden had it unlocked in two seconds. He pulled it open, and the first Sai Kripa boy fell through it onto his knees, and Bunty dragged him clear by the collar, and the second came through, and the third.
This book's chapters are posted by the author on their official page (this copy is not one of them).
I stood on the bottom stair with my thumb on the fob and counted.
Four. Five. The barefoot one, limping, and Bunty actually picked him up and carried him. Six. Seven.
The alarm stopped.
It didn't fade. It just stopped, the way cheap alarms do after thirty seconds, and the orange lights went on blinking for a second in silence and then went dark. And in that silence I heard the crowd at the Scorpio go still, and then I heard them turn.
I pressed the button again. Nothing. I pressed it again and held it. The fob's little red light glowed and the car did nothing at all. The battery was older than I was. I'd never replaced it, because it had never been worth replacing.
Two boys were still outside.
One of them was Rohan Sethi. I knew him the way everyone knew him: Ganga batch, rank twelve that week, a boy who walked to class with his eyes half closed as if he'd already solved the day. Now his eyes were very wide. He was half through the wicket gate when the boy behind him screamed, and Rohan turned back to look, and stopped. Just stopped, in the gap, the way you stop when you see something your body doesn't believe.
The warden stepped out past him into the lane.
He did it the way you'd step out of a door to check the weather. He had his lathi up, and he shoved Rohan backwards through the gap with his free hand, so hard that Rohan went down flat on our side, and then he turned to the last boy, a thin kid called Pranav with a frying pan, and reached for him.
Shubham was at the gate. I don't know when he'd come down. He'd reached through the bars beside the wicket gate and caught Pranav by the sleeve, and between him and the warden they hauled him towards the gap, and the crowd came out of the dark and hit the gate like a wave hitting a wall.
The whole gate shook. Arms came through the bars. Shubham yelled and snatched his hand back. Pranav came through the gap on his face. And the warden, in the lane, swung his lathi once, hard, into the head of the first one to reach him, and the second one caught his forearm in both hands and bit it.
He didn't scream. I'll remember that. He made a sound like a man lifting something heavy. Then he hit that one too, and stepped backwards through the wicket gate, and Bunty slammed it shut behind him and threw the bolt and leaned on it with his whole weight while the warden snapped the padlock closed with his good hand.
Then we all backed away from the gate and stood in the light of our reception and watched them on the other side of the bars, reaching.
· · ·
Nobody said anything for a long time. Twenty-five dead people pressed against an iron gate make surprisingly little noise. A sort of shuffling. A sort of breathing that isn't. Fingers moving on metal.
Bhanwar Singh looked at his forearm under the tube light.
The bite was on the inside, below the elbow, a ragged half-moon of torn skin that was already filling up dark. He looked at it the way he looked at blocked toilets and blown fuses, as a problem in front of him that needed handling. Then he looked at us. Fifty-eight boys on a staircase, and nine more on the floor of his courtyard, and every one of them looking at his arm.
"The TV said the bite," he said. "I know what this is."
He held out his big bunch of keys to Bunty. After a moment, Bunty took them.
"Gate keys. Mess keys. Store keys. Roof." He pointed with his chin at each one. "The red one is the master. You hold them now. Understood, jawan?"
"Sir," Bunty said. His voice had gone very thin. "Sir, maybe it's—"
"I'm going to my room. I will lock it from inside. Whatever you hear tonight, nobody opens my door. Nobody. That's an order." He looked along the stairs, at all our faces, and he straightened up, and for a second he wasn't a hostel warden in a vest at all. "In 'ninety-nine," he said, "we held that post for nine days. You hold this one."
He walked into his room beside the gate and shut the door, and we heard his key turn in the lock from the inside, twice.
· · ·
I counted the Sai Kripa boys again in the common room. Nine. Nine boys who should have been dead and weren't, sitting on our floor with steel glasses of water that the mess boy had brought them, shaking in the heat. Someone was bandaging the barefoot boy's feet with a T-shirt. Pranav was staring at his frying pan as if he'd never seen one before.
I took out the Ledger and went round the room asking their names. They gave them to me one by one, I think because it felt like attendance, and attendance felt normal. Rohan Sethi. Pranav Joshi. Imran Qureshi. Aman, Deepak, Harsh, Vivek, Siddharth, Tushar. I wrote all nine under OWES.
Rohan watched me do it. He'd got up off the courtyard floor and dusted himself off and now stood against the wall with his arms folded, very upright, as if being saved was something that had happened to him in poor taste. When I got to him he gave me his name and then looked at my hand, the one with the key ring. He looked at it for exactly one second too long.
"Thanks," he said, to the warden's closed door. Not to me.
That was fine. That was better than fine.
Bunty sat down beside me on the stairs. He was still holding the warden's keys. He hadn't let go of them once.
"You did a good thing, bhaiya," he said.
"I did a profitable thing." I showed him the page. "Nine people owe us."
He looked at the page. Then he looked at me. He had a face that showed everything, Bunty, and I watched it decide not to say whatever it had been going to say.
"Okay, bhaiya," he said. "Okay."
· · ·
At half past eleven, I went up to the third-floor bathroom to brush my teeth, because the world had ended but my mother had raised me, and found Shubham at the basin.
He was washing his right hand. He'd been washing it, from the look of the floor, for a long time. The water was running pink. When he saw me in the mirror, he turned off the tap and pulled the hand against his chest, the way the invigilator had held his that morning.
"From the gate," he said. "When they came through the bars. It's just a scratch, yaar."
I didn't say anything. I looked at his face in the mirror. People are question papers, and you read them all the way to the end. His forehead was shining under the tube light, and it was not that hot on the third floor, and the hand pressed against his chest was trembling very slightly, and his eyes did a thing that I had seen a thousand times across a thousand exam desks.
He'd written down an answer he didn't believe.