Chapter 27 Fear: Gone

"You owe me," said Ira.

It was the first thing she said after Morning, and she said it before I'd even sat up. She was sitting against the barricade with her notebook in her lap and her eyes red from not sleeping, and she said it the way a bank says it.

"I know," I said.

"Everything. From the beginning. No skipped lines."

"That's a lot of lines."

"I've got all morning," said Ira. "So have you. The gate opens at one."

Bunty was awake too, though he was pretending not to be, lying on his back on the floor with one eye open like a crocodile. Simran was sitting up on the study table with her arms round Ananya. Everyone was looking at me. I'd spent two years arranging my life so that a room full of people would never look at me like that, and here I was, at seven in the morning, with blood on my shirt, and nowhere to put my face.

I found I didn't mind.

That was the first strange thing that morning. There would be a lot of them.

· · ·

So I told them. Not all of it. I'll be honest about that, at least: I never tell anyone all of anything. But more than I'd ever told anybody.

I told them about Pintu's tapri at eleven at night, two years ago, and the one blue capsule for three hundred rupees.

Ira's face didn't move. She'd known. She'd worked it out in the night, I could see that, she'd done the proof. But knowing a thing and hearing it said are different, and I watched the difference arrive.

"At the crossing," she said. "I said I never took one. And you said nobody thought you had."

"Yes."

"And then you paid him three thousand rupees to stop talking."

"Silence costs extra," I said. "He told you that himself."

"That's not funny."

"No," I said. "It's true, though."

"Only one?" said Ira.

"Only one."

"Why?"

I thought about the hotel ballroom in Mumbai, which I'd told her about through a locked door twelve hours before, when I'd thought I was dying. She'd been there for that part. She knew.

"I wanted to see if my hand would move," I said.

Ira looked at me for a long time. Then she looked down at her notebook, and wrote something, and didn't show me what.

· · ·

I told them about the bite. That part was easy. They'd been there.

I told them about the stillness, the static, and the Hum, as well as I could. I told them about the papers.

"Question papers," said Bunty slowly. He'd given up pretending to be asleep and was sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at me. "You see. Question papers."

"Each one of them is a paper. Face down. I turn it over and it's got sections, like a Sunday test. Section A is easy. Which way. Up, down, stop, turn. One correct option. If I fill in the right one, they do it."

"And if you fill in the wrong one?"

"Negative marking," I said.

Nobody laughed. Usually people laugh at that. In Kota, negative marking is the joke everyone has heard a thousand times and laughs at anyway, out of solidarity.

"Section B is harder. What does it want. More than one correct option. I haven't tried that yet." I'd decided, somewhere in the telling, not to mention the third section. I'd barely been able to read it, and I'd never in my life shown anybody a paper I didn't understand. "I can hold three at a time. Four, five seconds each. Then they slip."

Bunty's mouth had been slowly opening while I talked, and now it was fully open, and his eyes had gone very round, and I watched him arrive, by the long scenic route Bunty takes to all his conclusions, at the obvious one.

"Bhaiya," he whispered. "You're a superhero."

"I'm not a—"

"You are! You're a superhero! Bhaiya, you stopped three dead people with your brain! Like in the films! Like—" He was up on his knees now, both hands in the air. "Apan knew it! Apan always knew it! Since the first day in 304, Bunty said to himself, Bunty, this one is not normal, this one is—"

"Bunty."

"—a hero of the masses! Kabaadi, the junk dealer, by day! And by night—"

"Bunty, I lost something."

He stopped, with both hands still in the air.

· · ·

I tried to explain that part properly, because it seemed important, and because I wanted to see if I could.

"The first one I did," I said. "On the fifth floor. I got it wrong. I panicked and I filled in stop when the answer was turn. And when I got it wrong, it took something out of me. Like a page torn out of a book."

NovelPhoenix publishes the author's chapter for readers, while this version was reproduced without their permission.

"Took what?" said Simran. It was the first thing she'd said all morning.

"Fear."

Silence.

"I'm not afraid," I said. "Of anything. I've checked. Last night I leaned out of that window, five floors up, and looked down, and I felt nothing. An hour before that I'd been so scared on that same windowsill I nearly couldn't move. I remember being scared. I remember exactly what it was like. I just can't do it any more."

I watched Bunty's face. I watched the superhero go out of it, slowly, like a tube light going off, and something else come in to take its place. It took a while, because he was working it out, but when it came it was very simple and very Bunty.

"But Bhaiya," he said, "what if you get another one wrong?"

"Then it takes something else."

"What else?"

"I don't know." I considered it. "That's the interesting part."

"Interesting," said Bunty. He looked at Ira. "He said interesting, didi."

"I heard him," said Ira.

She hadn't taken her eyes off my face the whole time. She was doing what she'd done in the night, I think: watching for the thing that wasn't there.

· · ·

I took out the Ledger, because I always take out the Ledger. It's how I think.

I found a clean page near the back and wrote a new heading across the top of it, in capitals. I didn't know what else to call it.

COSTS.

And under it:

Fear: gone. (Fri night, approx. 9:16. Wrong answer, Section A.) Would recommend.

I turned the book round and held it up so they could all see. I thought it was quite good. It had the right shape, anyway, the shape of a joke.

Ira read it. Her mouth went thin.

"That's not funny," she said.

"I know," I said.

And then I stopped, because something odd had happened while I said it, and I wanted to look at it properly before it went away.

"I know it isn't," I said slowly. "I can see that it isn't. I just can't tell why it isn't."

Nobody said anything after that for quite a long time.

· · ·

At 6:55, from the window of the sample room, we watched the campus go to class.

They came out of the hostels on the far side of the wall in long, slow lines, hundreds of them, the way they'd come out of the hostels in Rajeev Gandhi Nagar on Monday morning, and walked across the grounds in the early light towards the long buildings in the middle. Sushila aunty had been right. You could set your clock by them.

"Bhaiya," said Bunty quietly, at my shoulder. He'd read the last page too. "Do you want to go to class?"

I checked. I took it seriously.

"No," I said.

"Thank God," said Bunty, with enormous feeling. "Apan was worried. You've never wanted to go to class in your life. If you'd wanted to go now, apan would have known it was over."

· · ·

We spent the morning on the plan, because there's always a plan.

"They'll have a list in there," I said. "Pintu said. Rank Raj. Every one of them who can do what I did, ranked by how many they can stop and for how long. Aditya Rathore at the top."

"So?" said Ira.

"So the moment they know what I am, they'll put me on it."

"So?"

"So I've been on a list before," I said. "It was three metres high, on the highway at Power House."

She understood that. I saw her understand it.

"I'll show them three," I said. "Stop, and nothing else. Three, for four seconds. That's true. It's just not all of it." I didn't say which part wasn't all of it. "If I'm going to be on their list, I'm going to be on the bottom. Nobody asks the bottom of the list for anything. Nobody watches the bottom of the list. The bottom is the best seat in any hall. You can see everybody, and nobody looks at you."

"You want to be dead rank," said Bunty. "Again. Among the—"

"Yes."

"Bhaiya, that's the saddest thing I've ever heard."

"It's worked so far."

"Has it?" said Ira.

I didn't answer that.

"And before they know?" she said. "At the gate. When they ask if anyone's bitten."

"Then I'm bitten. I'm not going to make you lie for me."

"I won't lie," said Ira. She closed her notebook. "If they ask if anyone's bitten, I'll tell them nobody here is dangerous. That isn't a lie."

"They won't ask if anyone's dangerous. They'll ask if anyone's bitten."

"Then," said Ira Deshmukh, "I'll answer the question they should have asked."

I looked at her. Rank one, Ganga batch, NCC, who'd refused every blue capsule she was ever offered and been proud of it, who'd never once in her life got a question wrong on purpose. Sitting on the floor of an unfinished hostel with a dead boy's key in her pocket and the last page of my Ledger folded small, I was fairly sure, next to it.

I'd planned for a lot of things. I hadn't planned for her.

· · ·

At half past twelve we went down the stairs.

The dead from the fifth floor had gone. They'd gone down at dawn, I suppose, to wherever their timetables told them to go. The man in the checked shirt was where he'd fallen, beside the plank, and we walked round him without looking. Bunty walked round the other one too, the one on the fifth floor, with his eyes shut and Simran leading him by the hand. He hadn't said anything about the rod since the night. He didn't need to.

Out on the waste ground the heat hit us like opening an oven door. Forty-five degrees, maybe more. The air shook over the fields.

And under the babool tree in the middle of the field, in the shade, sitting with their backs against the trunk and their heads on their chests, were the woman from the farm and the bearded man in the vest and lungi. Side by side. Like labourers resting after their lunch.

1:00. Field. Sit under the tree.

I'd read it on her paper last night, in the faint grey print of the third section. I hadn't been sure. Now I was.

I didn't say anything. I filed it.

· · ·

We walked along the wall in single file, Ira in front with her hand at her shoulder, the way we'd done it a hundred times. Nobody spoke. It was 12:58. Beyond the wall, very faintly, I could feel them, the thousands of papers in the hall the size of a city, all moving in the same direction now, slow and heavy, the way a crowd moves when the mess opens.

The green gate. The hatch at head height.

Ira knocked. Not with her fist this time. Three times, clearly, with her knuckles. The way you knock on a staffroom door.

The hatch slid open. Grey moustache. The same eyes as yesterday, red-rimmed now, and a little ashamed. They looked at Ira, and past her, down the empty track behind us.

Nothing behind us. Only heat.

"Anyone bitten?" said the guard.

"Nobody here," said Ira, clearly, "is dangerous."

The eyes looked at her for a moment. I don't think they'd been told what to do with an answer like that.

Then there was a voice behind the guard, inside the gate. A man's voice, tired, a little hoarse, as if it had been talking to rooms full of children for thirty years and was used to being listened to.

"Open it, Pandey ji. That's Deshmukh. I'd know that knock anywhere."

Bolts. A bar lifted. The gate opened half a metre, scraping on the concrete, and there in the gap, in a rumpled white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, with chalk dust on the pocket and on the knee of his trousers and in the grey of his hair, stood Malhotra sir.

He looked at Ira, and something in his face let go. He looked at Simran and Ananya and Bunty, one by one, counting, the way a teacher counts after a fire drill.

Then he looked at me.

He didn't look surprised. That was the thing I'd remember. Of all the people I'd met that week, he was the only one who looked at me as though I was exactly what he'd expected.

"Anand," said Malhotra sir. "Of course it's you."

Behind him, coming across the yard from the direction of the big lit building, there were three boys in Shikhar hoodies with the sleeves pushed up, walking easily, the way people walk who've been obeyed for a week. The one in front was tall and broad and smiling. He was the only person I'd seen in six days who looked like he was enjoying himself.

I knew him. I knew most people in Kota, one way or another. Kunal Bhatia, Ganga batch, rank five or six most weeks, a boy who used to come to the Tower on Sundays and buy power banks from me two at a time and never once say thank you.

He stopped beside Malhotra sir and looked at the five of us in the gap of the gate, and his smile got wider.

"Bite check," said Kunal Bhatia. "Sleeves up. Arms out."