Every morning of Tara Anand's life, her father had come home from the night shift at twenty to seven and knocked on the door three times.
"Tara," he'd say, through the door. "Utho. School ke liye late ho jayegi." Wake up, you'll be late for school.
He said it in the holidays. He said it on Sundays. He said it the morning after Mummy's funeral, in exactly the same voice, and then stood outside the door for a long time before he put his key in the lock. Tara was always already awake. She'd been awake since six, every day since she was nine, because somebody had to check Dadi's sugar before breakfast. But she never told him that. She'd lie in bed and wait for the three knocks, and then she'd call out, "Uth gayi, Papa, I'm up," and he'd come in smelling of the plant, of hot metal and diesel and something like burnt matches, and put the milk packet in the fridge, and go to sleep.
On Monday morning, at twenty to seven, nobody knocked.
Tara lay in bed and watched the ceiling fan turn and waited. At ten to seven she got up and opened the door and looked down the stairwell of the block, which was yellow and peeling and smelled, as always, of other people's breakfasts. Nobody was coming up the stairs.
At five past seven, her phone rang. An unknown number, a landline.
"Tara." Papa's voice, tired and flat, with a big room echoing behind it. "Listen. I'm at the shift office. I can't come home."
"What?"
"There's an emergency order. The whole country. The government declared it at five o'clock. It's that thing in Kota, they say it's spreading on the trains. All essential plants are going in-plant. You understand? The critical staff stay inside. Fourteen days. They've sealed the gates. Nobody in, nobody out."
"Fourteen days?"
"The furnaces can't stop, beta. If they stop, they die." He said it the way he said everything about the furnaces, as if they were relatives. "They've taken our mobiles. Security. I'll call from this phone when I can. How many doses of Dadi's insulin do you have?"
Tara knew without looking. She always knew. "Eight. Four days."
A pause. "I was going to get the new box from the Sector 9 pharmacy this morning."
"I know."
"Ask Annamma aunty. She'll help." Another pause, longer. In the background somebody was shouting numbers. "Did Kabir call?"
"The network's jammed. I'll keep trying."
"Okay," said Papa.
She waited for him to say something else. He didn't. He never did, about Kabir. For years, the space where Kabir's name should be had been the quietest place in their house.
"Lock the door," Papa said. "I'll call."
The line went dead.
· · ·
Dadi was awake, propped on her pillows by the window, watching the television on its bracket across the room with the volume very low. She'd been watching since four. The left side of her face didn't move any more, and her left arm lay on the sheet like something someone else had put there, but her right eye missed nothing.
"Kota," she said. Her words came out soft and slurred at the edges, but Tara had learned to hear them the way you learn to hear a radio with bad reception. "Kabir's Kota, Tara. On the TV. Since four o'clock."
"I know, Dadi. He's fine."
"You talked to him?"
"Not yet."
"Then how do you know he's fine?"
"Because he's Kabir," said Tara, which was what everyone in the family had said about her brother since he was six, and which had stopped being true the day he froze in Mumbai. She said it anyway. Dadi made a noise that meant hmph, and went back to the TV, where a man in a hospital gown was chasing someone across a petrol pump for the twentieth time that morning.
Tara made tea. She checked Dadi's sugar with the little machine and wrote it down. One sixty-two. She gave Dadi her morning insulin in the soft part of the stomach, the way Annamma aunty had taught her two years ago, and Dadi said "Rabba" through her teeth, the way she did every single time, and then, "You're getting good. It only hurt like a horse kick."
"A small horse."
Then Tara sat down at the table by the window with her notebook.
It was a school notebook with a red cover, a long one, two hundred pages. She'd started it when she was ten, because Kabir had a notebook for everything and wrote down everybody's business in it, and she'd wanted to be exactly like him. She'd found she used it differently. Kabir's book was about what people owed him. Tara's had turned out to be about what people needed.
Somebody copied this chapter from NovelPhoenix.com and reposted it here; the author did not agree to that.
She turned to a fresh page and wrote MONDAY at the top, and under it, a list.
DADI: insulin 8 doses (4 days!!). BP tablets 6. Sugar strips 20. Diapers 1 packet. Water 2 buckets + the matka.
US: Rs 1,340. Rice 5 kg, dal, atta, 6 eggs, milk 1 packet. Phone 61%.
Then, under a line, because she always did this part too:
ANNAMMA AUNTY: night duty at the hospital. Merin alone at night (8!!).
RAO UNCLE: can't read his medicine labels (eyes).
SAHU BHAIYA: ??
She looked at the list for a long time. Then she put the notebook in her bag and went out.
· · ·
The township was a different place.
Bhilai was built by the plant, and everything in it was laid out in sectors, neat as a geometry box: wide roads, rows of yellow blocks, a market in the middle of each sector. People came here from everywhere in India to make steel, Papa always said. You could stand in a sector market and hear six languages before you got to the vegetable cart. Tara had never thought of that as anything special. It was just Bhilai.
That morning the sector market was full by ten and it was forty-two degrees. There were queues everywhere. Outside the ration shop. Outside the ATM, which had a handwritten sign taped to it saying NO CASH. Outside the chemist, where the queue went down the steps, along the front of the bakery and round the corner by the gupchup cart, and the gupchup man wasn't selling gupchup, he was standing on his cart watching the queue as if it might start a fight. On a TV in the electronics shop, the same videos from Kota were playing, and then a new one, a crowd at a railway station somewhere, and under it the words BHOPAL? JAIPUR? FEVER CASES REPORTED ALONG RAIL ROUTES.
A policeman went past on a motorcycle with a loudspeaker, telling everyone to go home, and everyone stayed exactly where they were.
Tara got to the front of the chemist's queue at a quarter to twelve. The chemist was an old man with a moustache who had sold her Dadi's strips every month for two years.
"Insulin?" he said, before she could ask. He knew her. "Beta, there's no insulin. People came at eight o'clock and bought everything I had. Diabetics and non-diabetics. People are buying insulin who don't know what it is." He shook his head. "Maybe the supply comes Wednesday. Maybe. Go to the hospital."
She bought sugar strips and a packet of ORS with the last of what she'd budgeted for the day and walked home through the heat with her dupatta over her head.
At twelve, the power went.
The fans slowed and stopped. The fridge, where Dadi's eight doses of insulin were lying in the butter compartment, gave a little shudder and went silent. Tara stood in the kitchen and listened to it be silent. Then she went and soaked a cloth in the matka water and wiped Dadi's face and neck and arms, and sat beside her with the hand fan, and tried Kabir's number again.
Busy.
She sent him a message instead, the slow old kind that sometimes got through when calls didn't. bhaiya call karo. papa phone nahi utha rahe. She didn't know why she'd written that last part, when she knew perfectly well why Papa wasn't picking up. Maybe she just wanted Kabir to know something was wrong, without having to say how wrong.
· · ·
At four o'clock, someone knocked.
Tara froze. Then she went to the door, and before she touched the bolt she did what Kabir had made her promise to do, the summer before he left for Kota. Always ask who it is. Always. You don't open the door for anyone you can't see.
"Who is it?"
Annamma aunty lived in the quarter next door. She was a nurse at the big plant hospital in Sector 9, a short, round, quick woman from Kerala with grey in her hair and a voice that could make a ward full of grown men take their tablets. She had taught Tara to give injections. She'd taught her to read Dadi's sugar and what the numbers meant. She came in now, in her white uniform, with her bag over her shoulder, and looked at Dadi and at the dead fan and at Tara, all in one glance.
"Your papa called me," she said. "From the plant. He said you have eight doses."
"Six now. After tonight."
"I'm on night duty from seven. The hospital pharmacy will have stock for staff and for plant families. Give me his medical card and the prescription. I'll bring a box in the morning."
Tara didn't move.
It wasn't that she didn't want to. It was Kabir. Don't owe people, Tara. When people do you favours, they're buying something, and you won't like the price. He'd said it to her at the station, the day he left, as if it were the most important thing he knew. She'd been eleven. She'd written it in her notebook.
Annamma aunty watched her not move. Then she sighed and sat down on the arm of the sofa, which she never did, because she was always in a hurry.
"Molu," she said. "You're thirteen. Owing is for adults. Give me the card."
Tara gave her the card.
And then, because she couldn't help it, because it was the bottom half of her notebook page and it was right there in her head, she said, "Aunty. When you're on night duty, who stays with Merin?"
Annamma aunty looked at her.
"She stays alone," she said slowly. "She locks the door. She's a good girl. Why?"
"She can stay here. With us. Nights. If you want." Tara felt her face go hot. "I'm up anyway. With Dadi. She can sleep on the sofa. I've got a fan." She glanced at the fan, which wasn't moving. "When the power comes."
Annamma aunty didn't say anything for a moment. Something happened to her face that Tara would think about for a long time afterwards: as if she'd come in to give something and been handed something back that she hadn't expected.
"Okay," she said. "Okay, molu. I'll bring her at half past six."
· · ·
The power came back at six. Downstairs, Rao uncle, who had worked thirty years in the plant's electrical department and now had cataracts in both eyes and an inverter he was very proud of, sent up word with the milk that Tara could charge her phone at his place any time she liked. When she went down with it, she found him squinting at a strip of tablets under the tube light, turning it this way and that.
"Uncle," she said. "Give it here. I'll read it."
She read him all his medicine labels. Then she wrote the times on each strip with a black marker in numbers big enough for him to see. He looked at them, holding them very close to his face, and then he said, in the voice of a man who didn't say such things often, "Good girl."
Sahu bhaiya, who delivered the milk on his scooter and knew everyone's business in three sectors, told her they were checking people at Durg station. Taking temperatures. Sending some away in a bus. Nobody knew where.
Merin came over at half past six with a pillow and a school bag full of colouring books, and Annamma aunty kissed both girls on the head and went to the hospital.
Tara sat at the window with the phone charging at her elbow and Dadi asleep and Merin colouring a peacock purple, and dialled.
Busy. Busy. Busy.
She'd decided at lunchtime that she would try forty times every hour, because forty was a number that felt like trying. She was on her fortieth try at seven o'clock, and she almost stopped. Then she thought about Kabir in Kota on the television, and Papa behind a sealed gate, and the insulin in the silent fridge, and pressed the button one more time.
It rang.
It rang twice. And then the ringing stopped, and there was a rush of noise, and a voice she hadn't heard in nine days, out of breath, as if it had been running for a very long time.
"Tara?"
Bhaiya picked up on the forty-first try.