Bhanwar Singh did his rounds twice a night. Ten o'clock and one o'clock, every night for the two years I'd lived in Gayatri Residency. Ten was attendance. One was what he called checking the sentries, a habit from the Army that nobody had ever been able to talk him out of. You'd be asleep, and you'd hear his chappals on the stairs, and his knock, three hard raps, and his voice, which could have woken a regiment.
At ten that night, for the first time in two years, there was no attendance.
I'd put the Sai Kripa boys in the empty beds on the second floor. I hadn't charged them anything, which Bunty pointed out was a first, and which I pointed out was an investment. Then I went back to 304 and sat on my bed in the dark and listened.
Outside, the crowd at the gate had thinned. Some of them had drifted off down the lane after a dog. Some were still there. Every now and then the gate rattled softly, like someone trying a door they'd forgotten was locked.
Shubham was lying on his bed with his physics book open on his chest. He wasn't reading it. He'd taken two paracetamol at eleven, and he was sweating through his vest anyway, and every few minutes a shiver went through him from his shoulders to his feet, as if somebody had walked over his grave.
"It's just a fever," he said, to the ceiling. "Everyone's had a fever. It's May."
"Sure," said Bunty, from the top bunk. He was still holding the warden's keys. He hadn't let go of them since the gate.
"If it's the other thing," Shubham said, in the same reasonable voice, "I'll know. The TV said the nosebleed comes first. So I'll know before anything happens. I'll tell you." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me. "I'll tell you, Kabir. You don't have to watch me like that."
I stopped watching him like that. I watched the door instead.
· · ·
At ten to one, downstairs, a key turned in a lock.
It turned twice. The way it had turned at half past nine, but the other way.
Bunty sat up so fast he hit his head on the ceiling. I put my hand up, quiet, and we listened. A door opening on the ground floor. Chappals on concrete. Slow, heavy, a little uneven. Coming to the bottom of the stairs.
Coming up.
I stood on my bed. Above the door of every room in Gayatri Residency there's a ventilator, a little window of glass louvres that never closes properly. If you stand on the bed you can see out into the corridor through the gap. I'd used it a hundred times to check whether the warden was coming before taking a delivery. I used it now.
The corridor light was on, a single tube at the end by the stairs. The chappals reached the first floor and stopped. Three knocks, hard, on a door I couldn't see.
"One-oh-one!" A voice I'd heard every night for two years. Flat. Loud. Bored. "Attendance!"
A pause. Five seconds, maybe. Then the chappals moved on.
Three knocks.
"One-oh-two! Attendance!"
Bunty had climbed down and was standing beside my bed with his hand over his own mouth. Shubham was lying very still. Somewhere below us, on the first floor, fifteen rooms of boys were lying in the dark listening to a dead man knock on their doors, and not one of them said a word.
One-oh-three. One-oh-four. All the way down the corridor. Then the stairs again, and the second floor, where the Sai Kripa boys were. I held my breath when he got there. They didn't know about the rounds. They didn't know anything about our hostel.
Two-oh-one! Attendance!
Silence. Five seconds. The chappals moved on.
He wasn't trying the handles. I realised it on the second floor, listening to him knock and wait and move on, knock and wait and move on, and it was the most important thing I'd learned all day. There were boys on the other side of every one of those doors, alive and warm and terrified, eight centimetres of plywood away, and he wasn't trying to get in. He was taking attendance. He'd come up those stairs to take attendance and he was going to take it, and as far as I could tell, he was going to do nothing else at all until he'd finished.
Search "NovelPhoenix" plus the story's title to find the original; this copy was posted without permission.
He was still in his vest, the one he'd been bitten in. The arm was black down to the wrist. His head was tilted to one side, like the invigilator's, and his eyes were open and fixed on the doors, and his moustache was stiff with something dark. He walked to 301 and knocked three times.
"Three-oh-one! Attendance!"
Five seconds. On.
I watched him come down the corridor towards us. Three-oh-two. Three-oh-three. He passed under the ventilator of 303 and I could have reached out through the gap and touched the top of his head.
Three knocks on our door. Right under my feet.
"Three-oh-four! Attendance!"
And from the bed behind me, in the clear, polite, half-asleep voice of a boy who had answered that knock every single night for two years, Shubham said:
"Present, sir."
Bunty made a sound into his hand. I didn't breathe.
On the other side of the door, Bhanwar Singh waited. Five seconds. I could hear him there, a sort of wet, slow breathing that wasn't breathing, right against the plywood. Ten seconds. Longer than he'd waited anywhere else. I stood on the bed with my fingers on the louvres and I thought, this is it, this is where we find out what the rule really is.
Then the chappals moved on.
Three-oh-five! Attendance!
· · ·
He finished the third floor and went up to the fourth, and finished that, and came all the way back down, and we heard his door shut and his key turn, twice, on the ground floor.
I got off the bed and sat on it, because my legs had stopped working. Then I opened the Ledger to PATTERNS and wrote, with a hand I couldn't keep steady:
5. When they're doing their habit, they don't hunt. Warden did full rounds, knocked on 60 doors, tried none. A door between you and a habit is a wall. (Don't open it.)
I looked at it for a long time. I underlined Don't open it twice.
When I looked up, Shubham was sitting on the edge of his bed with his hand under his nose, looking at his fingers.
They were red.
· · ·
He didn't make a fuss. That was the worst of it. He looked at the blood for a while, and then he wiped his fingers carefully on a tissue and folded the tissue and put it in the dustbin, because Shubham had never in his life left a mess for someone else to clean.
"Okay," he said. "So it's the other thing."
"Shubham—" Bunty's voice cracked down the middle.
"It's okay, Bunty. I said I'd tell you, I'm telling you." He looked at me. His face was wet with sweat and very calm. "Kabir. You'll have to lock me in. The bathroom is best. The door opens outwards, so if you put the trunks against it—"
"I know how a door works," I said. It came out harder than I meant.
"Sorry. Of course you do." He almost smiled. "I just want to call my mother first. Is that okay? I'll be quick."
It was half past one in the morning. He dialled, and she picked up on the first ring, and I understood that she had been sitting by the phone in a village in the hills with the light on, waiting, because her son was in the city on the news and she had nothing else she could do. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
He turned to face the wall and spoke to her in Kumaoni. I didn't understand the words. I understood the voice. It was the voice of a boy telling his mother that everything is fine: light, a bit bored, a bit embarrassed to be called at this hour. Once he laughed. Once he said a word in English, integration, and I realised he was telling her about a question he'd solved that day. Then something about a tree. I heard the word for tree, or what I thought was the word for tree, two or three times. I found out later there was an apricot tree outside their house that his grandfather had planted, and he'd been promising her for two years that the summer after the exam he'd come home and sit under it and do nothing at all.
At the end of three minutes exactly, he said something gentle and ended the call.
He'd timed his whole life in three-minute calls.
He put the phone down on his desk, face down, beside his physics book. Then he walked into the bathroom on his own and turned round in the doorway.
"Will you tell her something?" he said. "Later. When the networks are better. Something good. You're good at that, Kabir. Everyone says you can sell anything."
"Shubham."
"Something good," he said, and pulled the door shut himself.
Bunty and I pushed my steel trunk against it, and Bunty's suitcase on top of that, and the study chair wedged under the handle. Then Bunty sat on the floor with his back against the trunk and cried, the way only Bunty can cry, with his whole body and no shame about it at all.
I didn't cry. I sat on my bed and opened the Ledger. I don't know what I thought I was going to write.
· · ·
At 2:20 he stopped answering us.
At 3:40 something moved behind the door. Not a knock. Just weight, shifting, the way a person shifts on a seat.
At 4:30, the alarm on his phone went off.
It was the same alarm it had been every morning for two years: a cheap, cheerful little tune, from the desk where he'd left it, face down beside his physics book. Every morning at 4:30 it went off, and every morning Shubham got up without a word, washed his face, sat down at his desk and studied until it was time for class. He was the only boy in the hostel who'd never once hit snooze.
Behind the bathroom door, something got up.
We heard the tap come on. The water ran into the basin, steady and ordinary, the sound of a boy washing his face at half past four in the morning. It ran for a long time.
Then the bathroom door pushed against the trunk. Gently, at first. The way you push a door you expect to open. Then again, harder.
Bunty scrambled back from it on his hands. I crossed the room, found the phone on the desk and turned off the alarm.
The pushing stopped.
The tap went on running.
We sat there, the two of us, and listened to it until the window turned grey. Neither of us went to turn it off. There was no way to do that without opening the door.
When it was fully light, Bunty wiped his face with both hands and looked at me across the room, at the Ledger on my knees.
"What do you write in that book, bhaiya?" he said. "Really?"
"Everything that matters."
"Is Shubham in it?"
I looked down at the page. I didn't answer him.