At six o'clock on Monday morning, the internet died.
It didn't go down the way it goes down in a storm, slowly, with one bar and then none. It simply stopped. The WhatsApp ticks froze on every phone in the hostel at once, single grey ticks that never turned into two. Pages wouldn't load. The news app showed a spinning circle and then a little cartoon of a broken cable. On the common-room television, a new line joined the red banner at the bottom of the screen: MOBILE INTERNET SUSPENDED IN KOTA DISTRICT TILL FURTHER ORDERS.
"Why would they do that?" said someone. "Now?"
Rumours, Shubham would have said, without looking up from his book. That's what he'd have said. Rajasthan switches off the internet the way other states switch off streetlights. Exams, protests, festivals, a fight in the wrong neighbourhood. It stops rumours. It also stops everything else.
Calls still worked, in theory. In practice, every number in India was busy. I dialled Tara's number forty times between six and seven and got the same recorded woman each time, politely regretting that all lines were busy. I dialled Papa's and got a different recorded woman, who said his phone was switched off.
I haven't told you about Bhilai yet. There isn't much to tell. It's a steel town in Chhattisgarh, nine hundred and fifty kilometres from Kota by road. My father works shifts at a blast furnace in the plant. My grandmother had a stroke two years ago and hasn't left her bed since. My sister Tara is thirteen. That's the whole family now, since my mother died. It isn't a big family. It fits in a two-room quarter and one phone call.
Except that morning it didn't fit in a phone call at all.
· · ·
Bunty and I went up to the roof at half past six, because the roof was the only place where you could see what was coming.
The lane was empty. The crowd that had hammered our gate all night had drifted away before dawn, and the lane looked almost normal, if you didn't look at the Scorpio. Its windscreen was smashed in, both side mirrors were gone, and there were handprints all over the white paint, dark brown ones, hundreds of them, as if a school had been told to decorate it.
Down in our courtyard, Bhanwar Singh was standing at the gate.
He'd come out of his room at six, the way he did every morning, and taken up his position inside the gate with his lathi held across his body. He stood there at attention, facing the lane, exactly where he'd stood every morning for years to check the boys going out to class. His back was to the hostel. His bitten arm hung black and swollen at his side, and his head was tilted, and he didn't move.
"Bhaiya," Bunty whispered. "He's guarding us."
"He's guarding the gate," I said. "It's not the same thing."
At 6:55, the hostels opened.
I heard it before I saw it: doors, all over the neighbourhood, opening at once. Then they came out of the buildings. Out of Sai Kripa, out of the girls' PG across the lane, out of every hostel on our street and the next street and the street after that. Hundreds of them. Students, in hostel T-shirts and track pants and coaching-institute polo shirts, some barefoot, some in chappals, some still carrying their backpacks over one shoulder the way you do when you're late. They came out into the morning light, slow and stiff, and they turned, all of them, in the same direction.
Towards Shikhar Tower.
You can see the Tower from our roof. It's two lanes over, eleven floors of blue glass, the tallest thing in Indra Vihar. Somebody had left its generator running, and across the top of it the LED band was still scrolling in letters a metre high, red on black, just as it had every morning of my life in Kota:
RANK IS A HABIT. RANK IS A HABIT. RANK IS A HABIT.
They walked to it. Down our lane, round the corner, along the main road, a river of them, a slow shuffling river of Kota's dead going to their seven o'clock class. Nobody pushed. Nobody hurried. A girl with a pink backpack walked beside a boy with one shoe, and neither of them looked at the other, the way students never do at seven in the morning. At the front of the Tower, beside the glass doors, there's a hoarding six metres high with the faces of last year's toppers on it, AIR this and AIR that, and the crowd moved past it in a long slow line, and some of them stopped in front of it and stood there with their heads tilted, looking up.
Hello from the author's actual platform, NovelPhoenix: this chapter was copied onto this site without permission.
The way we all used to stand there on Monday mornings, before the government made the ranks private. Looking for our names.
"Even the dead," said Bunty, in a strange high voice, "are checking their rank."
"Relax," I said. "Now they all share one." The source of this chapter is g.com.
I don't know why I said it. It just came out, the way things do when you've been awake for twenty-six hours and the world has stopped making sense. Bunty looked at me, and I looked at him, and then he made a sound that could have been a laugh or something else, and put his face in his hands.
Through the glass doors, I could see the security guard in the lobby. He was still at his post beside the metal detector, and as the first of them reached the doors he lifted his right hand, palm out, and waved them through.
For the first time in his career, everyone he waved through was dead.
· · ·
"Droppers," said Bunty, a while later. He'd stopped shaking. "That's what we should call them. Droppers."
In Kota, a dropper is a student who drops a year after school to try the exam again. It's not an insult, exactly. It's a category. Half of Kota is droppers.
"Because they dropped dead," Bunty explained, in case I'd missed it.
"Technically," I said, "they're repeaters."
"What's the difference?"
"A dropper takes a year off. A repeater does the same thing over and over." I nodded at the river going into the Tower. "Look at them."
He looked at them. "Droppers is funnier," he said.
It stuck. By lunchtime the whole hostel was calling them droppers. By the end of the week, so was half of Kota. That's the thing about Bunty. He's always been better at naming things than me.
I sat behind the water tanks and opened the Ledger and wrote:
6. They keep their timetable. 6:55, out of the hostels. 7:00, to class. The guard is still at his post. The warden is at the gate at 6, rounds at 10 and 1.
7. If they keep a timetable, so can we.
That second line was the most important thing I'd written in two years, and I didn't know it yet.
· · ·
By ten o'clock, I was running Gayatri Residency, and nobody had noticed, which is the only way to run anything.
It wasn't hard. Fifty-seven boys and nine guests, and none of them had ever had to feed themselves. The cook, Ramprasad, had gone home to his family on Sunday afternoon and hadn't come back. The warden was standing at the gate with his back to us. Somebody had to know where the atta was.
I knew where the atta was. I knew where everything in that building was, because for two years I'd bought and sold most of it.
So I made lists. I gave the nine Sai Kripa boys jobs, because they owed us: filling buckets, cleaning, rolling rotis, which none of them could do and all of them learned. I put a boy called Harsh on the roof as a lookout, with a whistle and strict instructions not to use it. I counted the food. Forty kilos of atta, thirty of rice, a sack of potatoes, two tins of oil, dal, salt, and in the back of the mess store, a crate of Frooti that Ramprasad had been selling on the side and had never told the warden about. I added the Frooti to my assets. I didn't tell anyone about that either.
"He won't do anything," I said. "He's at his post. He's facing the gate. We walk behind him, quietly, we get what we need from the store, we walk back. As long as nobody makes a sound."
The boys looked at me. Sixty-odd faces in the stairwell, and I could see every one of them thinking you first.
"Bunty goes," said Bunty, standing up.
"Sit down."
"Bhaiya, Bunty is volunteering—"
"I know what you're doing. Sit down." I'd written the rule. I'd read the warden at three in the morning, through a louvre, from a metre away. If I was wrong about him, I didn't want to have been wrong with somebody else's legs. "I'll go."
Bunty came anyway. I'd known he would.
We went down the last flight of stairs in our socks. The courtyard was full of morning light and the smell of last night, a sour, sweet smell like a mess bin in summer. Bhanwar Singh stood at the gate with his back to us, lathi across his chest, as straight as a flagpole. We walked behind him. Two metres away. One and a half. I could see the grey roots in his dyed black hair, and the place where his vest had torn at the shoulder, and a fly crawling on the back of his neck that he didn't brush away.
He didn't turn round.
We went into the mess store, and filled two bags with atta and dal and potatoes, and came back out, past him again, and up the stairs. I counted my steps, all forty-one of them, from the store to the bottom stair. Then I sat down on the first-floor landing and found that I couldn't feel my hands.
"See," said Bunty brightly, sitting down beside me. "Easy."
He was shaking so hard that the bag of potatoes in his lap was rustling.
· · ·
At eleven, I went back to the roof with my phone and tried Tara again.
Busy. Busy. Busy. I tried Papa. Switched off. I tried the landline at the quarter, which nobody had used in years, and it rang and rang in an empty kind of way, and then cut off.
At the corner of the lane, under the neem tree, Pintu bhaiya's tea stall had its shutter pulled halfway down. I'd turned off his gas the day before. Nobody had come back to turn it on again.
I was standing up to go back down when my phone buzzed in my hand.
One SMS. It had taken the long way round the jammed network, I suppose, the way they did in the old days, and it had a time stamp from nearly an hour before. It was from Tara's number. My sister had always typed in Hindi with English letters, all lowercase, no punctuation, like a person shouting from the next room.
bhaiya call karo. papa phone nahi utha rahe
Call me, bhaiya. Papa isn't picking up.