Chapter 26 Ira

Ira

Ira Deshmukh kept the log until she ran out of things to log.

21:15. K. awake. Climbed scaffold (!!). Came through the net.

21:16. All 9 turned to him. Then away. Then back to us.

21:17. K. did something. All 9 turned to him again. 3 stopped. Like statues. Approx. 4–5 sec.

21:18. Pushed one through the net. B. used the rod. (B. not OK.)

21:19. Room. Barricade.

21:30. Quiet.

K.: nosebleed, both sides. Hands very cold. Pulse 48.

She'd counted the pulse herself, two fingers on the inside of his wrist, fifteen seconds on her phone's stopwatch, times four, the way Aai had taught her when she was nine and wanted to be a doctor too. Forty-eight beats a minute. Aai would have said that was an athlete's heart. Kabir Anand had the athletic ability of a folded chair.

He'd let her take it without a word. He'd watched her count with an expression of polite interest, as if she were doing it to someone else.

Then he'd lain down on the floor of the sample room with his head on Bunty's bag, and gone to sleep.

· · ·

She worked it out while he slept. She'd been working it out, really, since the field. But she made herself do it properly now, step by step, in the dark, the way you do a proof: no skipped lines.

One. Pintu at the Talwandi crossing: All your toppers who took my blue ones, the ones who got bitten and didn't die. Betaal, every one.

Two. Kabir was bitten at one o'clock.

Three. Kabir didn't die. Or he did, for two and a half hours, and then he stopped.

Therefore.

She'd stood in the sun at the crossing and said I never took one, proud of it, the way she was proud of very few things. And he'd said nobody thought you had, smoothly, in that voice, and turned straight back to Pintu, and paid him three thousand rupees and two power banks to stop talking.

Silence costs extra.

She'd thought at the time that he was paying to hide something about Pintu. He'd been paying to hide something about himself.

She sat with her back against the barricade and her knees drawn up and felt it come up in her, slow and hot. Contempt. She knew that feeling well. She'd felt it for two years, every time she saw a topper slip a blue-and-silver capsule out of a pocket before a big test. Aditya Rathore, with his face on the hoardings. Rohan Sethi, who walked to class with his eyes half shut. Half the Ganga batch, by the end. Aai had told her about those pills when she was fifteen, at the kitchen table in Pune, in her flat doctor's voice: Anything that makes you calm by taking something away is not medicine. It's a loan. Ira had refused every one she was ever offered. It was one of the few things about herself she was completely sure of.

And Kabir Anand, who laughed at everything, who sold lucky pencils to frightened girls and charged sixty rupees for a packet of Maggi, had taken one.

She waited for the contempt to finish.

It didn't finish. It went on for a while and then it got mixed up with something else, and she couldn't separate them, and she didn't want to look at the something else too closely, so she looked at the window instead.

· · ·

From the window of the sample room, you could see the campus.

She hadn't realised that, in the afternoon. Now, at night, it was impossible not to see it. A hundred metres away across the track, the pale line of the wall, with its razor wire catching the light. Beyond the wall, dark trees, dark buildings. And in the middle of the dark, one building lit up from end to end, every window yellow, with the steady drone of a generator coming across the fields.

It looked exactly the way Sushila aunty had said it would. A ship with its lights on in the middle of the sea.

And the sea was moving. In the yellow spill from the windows, Ira could see them: shapes walking round and round the lit building, hundreds of them, slow and endless, like the crowd going round a temple on a festival night. Round and round. Wanting in.

That's where Malhotra sir was. That's where tomorrow was.

At one o'clock tomorrow, she would have to walk up to that green gate with Kabir Anand beside her, and the guard with the grey moustache would look through the hatch, and somebody would ask the question everyone asked now. Anyone bitten?

She thought about that for a long time.

Then she took out her notebook and turned to the page with his name at the top.

· · ·

It had filled up, the page, since Sunday night in Meera Residency when she'd first written Why? under his name. Small notes, in pencil, the way she kept all her lists.

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Key. (Had it the whole time.)

Knew before B. sir moved. How?

Rank: deliberate. 63 tests.

Godown: knew the shutter would be open. How?

Pays Pintu. For what?

Billboard. "I'll tell you another time." (Probably not.)

She read them all again by the light of her phone, held low under her dupatta so it wouldn't show at the window. Then she added, underneath:

Zenith. Only one? (Ask.)

Bitten 13:00. Still 18:31–21:00. Not dead.

Not afraid. (Of anything? Test.)

She looked at those for a while. They were good notes. They were the kind of notes you could take to an officer. And they missed the only thing that mattered, and she knew it, so after a long time she wrote one more line.

Held the grille.

And after that, because she was honest even in her own notebook, even at midnight, even about him:

Arithmetic?

She looked at the question mark. She'd written a lot of question marks on this page. This was the first one she was afraid to answer.

· · ·

She didn't sleep. She'd sat outside a locked door for five hours that evening and she knew she wasn't going to sleep.

Five hours. She'd been thinking about that too, and not getting anywhere. She'd told herself, at the time, that it was procedure. You don't leave a casualty. You keep the log. Somebody has to hold the key. Aai would have sat outside that door; Aai had sat outside worse doors than that, at Sassoon, during the bad monsoon. All of that was true.

It wasn't why.

She knew it wasn't why, because when the sounds behind the door had stopped at 6:31, and she'd called his name three times and got nothing, she'd written Still. Like B. sir in 603 in her log in a perfectly steady hand, and then she'd put her forehead down on her knees and stayed like that for a long time, and it hadn't been procedure.

She didn't name it. There are things you don't put on a list, because once you write them down they're true.

· · ·

At about two in the morning, something crashed on the ground floor, a long metal clatter, a sheet of tin or a bucket going over in the dark.

Ira flinched so hard she banged her head on the barricade. Simran, on the study table, whimpered in her sleep. Bunty, who had been snoring like a pressure cooker on a low flame, at intervals of about ninety seconds, stopped mid-snore and said "Hm? Hm?" and started again.

Kabir didn't move.

She watched him. He was lying on his back on the floor with his hands folded on his chest and his head on Bunty's bag, and when the crash came, his eyes didn't even open. His breathing didn't change. He slept through it the way a person sleeps through rain.

That's not right, she thought. Nobody sleeps like that. Not this week. Not in Kota.

She'd seen him sleep before, on the floor of Goyal Traders, two nights running, among the Maggi cartons. He slept like a cat in those days, curled up, one eye nearly open. He woke at every sound. She'd noticed because she did too.

Now he slept like a stone at the bottom of a well.

Not afraid, she'd written. Of anything? Test.

She didn't need to test it. She'd watched his face on the fifth floor with nine dead people walking towards him and his nose pouring blood. She'd seen faces like that before, a few times, on very old men in the hospital where Aai worked, at the very end, when there was nothing left to be afraid of. She hadn't liked it then either.

· · ·

His Ledger was lying beside his head, half under the bag, held shut with its two rubber bands.

She'd never touched it. Nobody had. In two years, Bunty had told her, nobody in Gayatri Residency had ever seen inside it. Bhaiya would sell you his kidney, didi, Bunty had said, but not that book.

She'd already read the last page. He'd slid it under a door to her. That was different. That was addressed.

She looked at the Ledger for a long time.

Then she slipped the rubber bands off, very slowly, and opened it under her dupatta by the light of her phone, and broke what was left of her rules.

It was exactly as she'd imagined and nothing like it. Page after page of names and numbers in small square handwriting, dates, sums, little crossings-out. Room 118, Sahil, one bank, 400, due 9 a.m. Rents and debts and repayments, two years of a hostel's whole economy. OWES: nine names from Sai Kripa, in a column, with a box drawn round them. Bunty — 5 rupees (35 of 40). She nearly laughed at that. A little further down, Arjun Patel — half a Bourbon, with one straight line through it.

PATTERNS, in capitals, and under it, numbered, everything he'd learned about the dead since Sunday. 1. Sound.5. Habit: they don't hunt. A door is a wall.8. Some habits beat the night. And at the bottom, in handwriting that shook, added that afternoon: 9. Lunch beats a bite. (Sushila aunty. 1:00.)

And at the back, a page she almost missed, because it had almost nothing on it.

UNKNOWN.

MALHOTRA SIR (physics). Saw my rough work. Never told anyone. Why?

TARA. Can't read her through a phone.

And under those, in pencil, dated Thursday, the night in the library:

IRA DESHMUKH. Stayed for the other five. Why?

Ira sat very still.

She thought about the library. The orange light on the floor between them. You put six of your girls on that truck and stayed for the other five. There wasn't a list for that. She'd thought he was being kind. She'd thought he was just saying the thing people say.

He hadn't been being kind. He'd been taking notes.

She turned back to her own notebook, to her own page, to his name at the top and the word underneath it that she'd written on the first night. Why? Then she looked at his page again, at her name, and his one word under it, the same word, in his small square hand.

Two people, in two notebooks, on two different nights, asking the same question about each other. And neither of them had known.

She closed the Ledger. She put the rubber bands back on, exactly as they'd been, and slid it back under the bag beside his head.

She didn't put the last page back. The torn one, with the key folded inside it. She'd read it eleven times since a quarter to five. She folded it smaller and put it in the pocket of her kurta, next to a small brass key she'd been carrying since Sunday.

You found it on the floor, he'd said, about that one. Well. She'd found this one on a floor too.

· · ·

By four, she'd decided.

At one o'clock, she'd go up to that gate and do the talking, the way his page said. She'd ask for Malhotra sir. And when they asked if anyone was bitten, she'd vouch for him. Rank one. Malhotra sir's student. They'd listen to her. They always listened to rank one; he'd said that himself, in Room 603, pressing a key into her hand. They listen to rank one.

And then, once they were inside, once Ananya had a bed and Simran had stopped crying and there was a wall between all of them and the dark, she was going to sit Kabir Anand down and make him tell her everything. The capsule. The billboard, properly. What he'd done to those three on the fifth floor. What had happened to his face. Everything, from the beginning, no skipped lines.

That would be her price. He'd understand a price.

The sky outside the window went from orange to grey to a thin, clean blue. Somewhere far off a peacock screamed, the way they do at dawn on the edge of Rajasthan, as if the world was ending, which it was. In the campus, the shapes round the lit building began, slowly, to drift away.

On the floor, Kabir opened his eyes.

He didn't sit up at once. He lay there looking at the ceiling for a moment, and then he turned his head and found her, sitting against the barricade with her notebook in her lap and her eyes, she knew, red from not sleeping. He looked at her for a long time. She couldn't read his face. She'd never been able to read his face. That was the whole problem.

Then he smiled. Not his usual smile, the trader's one. Something smaller.

"Morning, rank one," said Kabir.