Chapter 28 Shikhar Gurukul

I rolled up my own sleeve before Kunal Bhatia could tell me to.

I'd decided that at the window that morning, watching the dead go to class. Ira had a plan for the gate, and it was a good plan, an Ira plan, and it would have cost her something I didn't want her to pay. So I undid the button on my left cuff, and turned the stiff, blood-black cotton back over my elbow, and held my arm out into the sunlight, inside up.

Two curved rows of marks below the elbow. Dark now, scabbed, the skin round them gone a strange pale colour, like paper that's been wet.

Behind Malhotra sir, the guard with the grey moustache made a noise and swung something up off his shoulder. It was a gun. An old one, a long double-barrelled thing with a wooden stock, the kind farmers keep for nilgai. It pointed at my chest.

"Relax, Pandey ji," said Kunal.

He didn't take his eyes off my arm. He was smiling the whole time. He leaned in and looked at the bite closely, the way you'd look at a watch someone was trying to sell you, and then he looked at my face.

"When?"

"Yesterday. One o'clock."

"Fever?"

"Two-thirty. Nosebleed at 4:31. Out at about 6:30. Back at nine."

He raised his eyebrows at the times. Then his eyes went somewhere else. Not up, not down. Inwards, the way your eyes go when you're listening to music through one earphone. I knew that look now. I'd seen it on Pintu at the crossing.

And I felt him do it. It's hard to describe. In the Hum, just for a second, something went past me that wasn't a paper. It was tall, and it walked between the desks.

"He's one of us," said Kunal, and his smile got bigger. "Bitten yesterday and still talking. Look at you, Kabaadi. Rathore sir is going to want you."

Pandey ji lowered the gun, slowly, the way you lower something you'd still like to be holding.

Ira was standing very straight beside me. "I told you," she said to Kunal, "that nobody here was dangerous."

"That wasn't the question, Deshmukh."

"It was the right one."

Kunal looked at her for a moment, the way toppers look at each other, a quick cold measuring. Then he laughed, as if she'd made a joke he'd decided to allow.

Malhotra sir hadn't said a word. He was looking at my arm. Then he looked at my face, for a long time, and I couldn't read anything in his at all. I'd never been able to. That was why he'd been in the Unknown column for two years.

"Come in," he said. "All of you. Before the mess lets out."

· · ·

The Shikhar Gurukul campus is twenty-two acres of everything a coaching company thinks a parent wants to see.

I'd been there before, twice, delivering Maggi to the drivers, but only as far as the transport yard. That was where we came in now, through the back gate, into a long strip of concrete along the west wall with the buses parked in two rows, nose to tail, yellow and enormous in the white afternoon light. Twenty-four of them. I counted, the way Sushila aunty had counted dead people. SHIKHAR — RANK IS A HABIT down every side. Grilles over every window. Beyond them, a low workshop with its shutters half up, and a concrete apron with a pump on it and a sign that said DIESEL — NO SMOKING, and beside the sign an old man in a khaki shirt sitting on the step of Bus 14, in the shade of the bus, smoking a bidi.

He looked up as we went past. His face split open.

"Maggi wala!"

"Hariram ji."

"Maggi wala's alive!" He slapped his knee. "Arre, I owe you sixty rupees!"

"Eighty," I said. "You took one on credit in March."

Hariram laughed so hard he nearly fell off the step. Bunty, beside me, had stopped walking. He was staring at the buses the way some people stare at the sea. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. Malhotra sir had to come back and take him by the elbow.

· · ·

The rest of it I saw in pieces, walking fast behind Malhotra sir in the heat, the way you see a city from a train.

Hostels on the west side, three of them, tall and cream-coloured, with names in Hindi and English over their doors: GANGA BHAWAN, YAMUNA BHAWAN, and the girls' hostel, KAVERI BHAWAN. Between them, a long low building with big windows and a tin roof. The mess.

The mess windows were open. I looked in as we passed. I didn't mean to.

They were sitting at the tables. Hundreds of them, in long rows, at the long steel tables, in front of empty steel plates. Students in Shikhar T-shirts and track pants. A few in the white coats of the mess staff. They sat with their hands in their laps and their heads a little bowed, completely still, the way they'd been taught to sit in the mess at one o'clock every day of their lives, and waited for food that wasn't coming.

Nobody had served them for six days. They came anyway.

"Bhaiya," Bunty whispered. "Don't look."

I'd already looked. It's the thing about me. I always look.

Further on, in the middle of everything, three long buildings in a row, Academic Blocks A, B and C, with their classroom windows in neat lines like the squares on an answer sheet. At the far south end, the dome of a big hall. A white water tower with SHIKHAR round its tank, the one I'd seen from the library roof. A little Hanuman temple, painted orange, by the mess, with a bell over its door. Neem trees. Lawns that had been green a week ago and were going brown.

And walking among the dead, in the yard outside the mess, there were people.

Living people. I saw two of them, a boy and a girl, crossing between the mess and a storeroom with sacks on their shoulders, flour or rice, walking straight past the open doors of the mess, past a dead cook standing in the doorway in his white apron. They didn't hurry. They didn't look at him. He didn't look at them.

Furniture, I thought. They're furniture too.

"Betaal," said Malhotra sir, without turning his head. "They go where the rest of us can't. They bring food from the mess store, medicines, whatever we need." He paused. "It gives them a certain standing."

He said standing the way he used to say approximately in class, when a student had got an answer that was technically right and completely wrong.

· · ·

The Admin Block was the lit building I'd seen from the sample room. Three storeys of grey stone and glass, with iron grilles bolted over every window, water tanks on the roof, and behind it, a pair of big diesel generators in a fenced pen, droning. A covered walkway on stilts ran from its first floor across to a smaller building with LIBRARY over the door.

A provenance check: the chapter appears on NovelPhoenix where its author publishes it, while this copy was not permitted.

Between the Admin Block and Academic Block A, there was a basketball court.

It had a high chain-link fence all the way round it, the kind they put round courts so the ball doesn't go into the road, and a gate in the fence with a new chain and a new padlock. Inside the fence, standing on the faded orange court in the sun, there were about forty of them.

Students, mostly. Tall boys in vests and shorts. A few in jerseys. They stood about the court in the heat in no particular pattern, the way people stand about at the end of a game, and every now and then one of them took a slow step and stopped again.

"They used to play at six," said Malhotra sir. "Every evening. Basketball, after the last class. On Sunday evening they came to the court the way they always did." He looked at the padlock. "Somebody locked the gate."

He didn't say who. He didn't have to. Somebody who'd noticed that the dead keep timetables, and that a timetable is a kind of lock.

I filed that too. I was going to have a lot of files.

· · ·

There were ninety-one people living in the Admin Block of the Shikhar Gurukul campus that Saturday afternoon, counting us, and I met most of them in the first ten minutes, in the lobby, because that was where everybody was.

Students, mostly. Sixty-nine of them. Ganga batch and the batch below it, the ones who'd been on campus on Sunday or had got here since. They were thin and quiet and looked at us the way you look at a bus that's arrived late. Nine staff: a big kind-faced woman from the mess everybody called Lakshmi didi, a mess helper in a stained apron, two guards, a nurse from the campus clinic, an electrician who looked after the generators, an old gardener, Hariram, and a peon from the accounts office who'd spent the first two nights hiding in the record room. One teacher, whom you've met. And eleven others, who didn't look like the rest.

They were sitting on the stairs, mostly, and on the reception desk. They had better clothes. They had food in their hands, at three o'clock in the afternoon, when nobody else did. And when we came in, they didn't look at us the way the others did. They looked at me.

The Betaal. Eleven of them. Twelve, now.

And at the top of the stairs, coming down, the face from the hoardings.

· · ·

You've seen Aditya Rathore. Everybody in India who's ever driven through Kota has seen Aditya Rathore. He's on the side of the Tower, and on the flyover, and on the back of every auto in Rajeev Gandhi Nagar: a tall, good-looking boy in a white shirt, arms folded, smiling slightly, with his All India Rank from last year's JEE Main in numbers taller than he is. Shikhar's poster topper. Shikhar's answer to anyone who asked whether it was worth it.

In real life, he looked exactly like the hoardings, which almost nobody does. He had a clipboard under one arm with coloured tabs sticking out of it, red and green and yellow. He had a satellite phone clipped to his belt, a fat black thing with a stubby aerial. He came down the stairs without hurrying, and Kunal went up two steps to meet him and said something in his ear, and Aditya looked across the lobby at me over Kunal's shoulder.

"Kabir Anand," he said. Pleasantly, the way a manager greets a new employee on his first day. "Sabarmati. Rank 1,847."

I hadn't told him my name.

"You've got the institute's database," I said.

"I've got the Director's laptop," said Aditya, "which is the same thing, but with better battery." He smiled. He had a very good smile. You could tell it had been photographed a great deal. "Bitten yesterday at one, and here you are, walking about. Interesting." He tilted his head. "You don't know how interesting. Most people your rank don't even survive the fever."

"I'm very consistent," I said.

His eyes rested on me for a second longer. Then he turned the smile on, like a tube light, and held out his hand.

"Welcome to Rank Raj."

· · ·

It worked like this. Aditya explained it himself, standing on the third step so everyone could see him, with the clipboard, in the voice of a boy who'd given a lot of presentations.

Everybody had a rank. That was the first thing. Ranks were how Shikhar had always worked, and Shikhar had kept everybody in this building alive for six days, and he saw no reason to stop now. For the students, your rank was your last Shikhar rank: he had them all, on the laptop. For the Betaal, your rank was your test. Every new Betaal was tested in the court once, at seven, after sunset, and ranked by how many of the dead they could stop at once and how long they could hold them. Load and Grip, he called it. The list was on the wall by the stairs. Eleven names, in his neat handwriting, in green.

And your rank decided everything else. Your room. Your rations. Your duties.

"It's not personal," said Aditya. "It's a system. Systems are fair because they're not personal. Deshmukh," he said, turning to Ira with genuine warmth, "rank one. Welcome. You're in 2A, second floor, the best room we've got. Category A rations. We're honoured."

"I'd like to be with my girls," said Ira.

Aditya glanced at his clipboard. "Simran Kaur, rank 1,203. Ananya Mishra, 1,560. Category C. Third floor, the big room."

"Then put me in category C."

"That's not how it works."

"Then how does it work?"

Aditya looked at her kindly, the way the hoardings look at everybody.

"Rank is a habit, Deshmukh," he said.

Nobody in the lobby laughed. I don't think anybody in that lobby had laughed at those words in years. They'd been painted on the side of every bus any of us had ever ridden in.

Ira looked at him for a long, level moment. Then she said, very politely, "Thank you, Aditya," and picked up her bag, and walked up the stairs past him to the third floor, to the big room, with Simran and Ananya behind her. She didn't look back.

Aditya watched her go. His smile didn't move at all. He wrote something on his clipboard.

"Bhavesh Chaurasia," he said, turning a page. "Rank 1,788. Category D." Bunty opened his mouth. "D is for dependable," said Aditya, before he could speak, and Bunty closed it again, looking deeply suspicious.

"And you," said Aditya to me. He turned to a fresh page, and wrote my name at the top of it, in green. "Pending."

· · ·

Kunal gave me a sheet of paper at four, in a plastic sleeve. "Orientation," he said. "Read it before the test. Rathore sir wrote it."

I took it up to the window at the end of the second-floor corridor, where the light was good and nobody was, and read it three times.

It was beautiful. I mean that. It was the most beautiful study material I'd ever seen. Typed, laminated, colour-coded, with a header and a footer and a version number, BETAAL ORIENTATION v3.2, the way the best coaching institutes do their notes. Whatever else Aditya Rathore was, he was a topper.

THE HUM, it said, at the top. Each Betaal perceives the dead differently (sound, pattern, image). For simplicity, Rank Raj uses the following standard terminology.

And then, in green:

SECTION A — MOTION. Direction and stopping. Single-option commands. All Betaal. Tested: Load (how many at once), Grip (how long, scored /10).

In yellow:

SECTION B — HUNGER. Redirecting wants (sound, light, movement). Multi-option. Advanced. Rank 1–3 only. Do not attempt without supervision.

And in red, at the bottom, in a box with a thick border:

SECTION C — HABIT. The deepest layer. Some Betaal can perceive it faintly. It is VISIBLE, NOT WRITABLE. Do not attempt. Wrong answers in any section carry a cost. Do not guess. Report all wrong answers to K. Bhatia.

I stood at the window and looked out across the campus at the mess. It was after four. The dead had come out of the mess at two, and were standing about in the shade of the buildings now, in the heat, in ones and twos. There was one right below me, at the corner of the mess, in the white coat of the mess staff. An old man, thin, with a white moustache and a pencil behind one ear.

I turned his paper over.

Section A, bright. Section B, faint and heavy. And at the bottom, Section C.

Last night, on the fifth floor, it had been grey on grey, like the words across the top of a rough sheet. I'd barely been able to make out one line.

Now I could read it.

Not all of it. Not perfectly. But the columns were there, and the rows, and the words in them. 5:00 — kitchen — light the stoves. 7:00 — kitchen — chai. A timetable, thirty years deep, printed into the paper like a watermark. And beside each row, faint but definitely there, the little empty circles you fill in to answer.

Visible, not writable, said the laminated sheet in my hand, in red, with a thick border.

I looked at the empty circles for a long time.

Then I put his paper back, face down, and folded the orientation sheet in half, and put it in the Ledger, and didn't tell anyone.

· · ·

Malhotra sir found me there at half past five.

He came down the corridor slowly, with his hands in his pockets, the way he used to walk between the desks during a test, and stopped beside me at the window, and looked out at the same view I was looking at. He smelled of chalk. Even here. Even now.

For a while neither of us said anything.

"Why are you here, Anand?" he said at last.

I'd been thinking about how to answer that question for three days. I'd thought about telling him about Tara, and Papa's message, and nine hundred and fifty kilometres. I'd thought about the diesel tank and the twenty-four buses and the gate. In the end I gave him the short answer, the one I'd given Sushila aunty.

"Buses," I said.

Malhotra sir nodded slowly, still looking out of the window. Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It wasn't quite a smile.

"Of course," he said.

He went away down the corridor again with his hands in his pockets, and I watched him go, and he was still in the Unknown column, and he was going to stay there.

At the bottom of the stairs, Aditya Rathore passed him going the other way, with his clipboard and his satellite phone and Kunal a step behind him, and saw me at the window, and raised one hand, pleasantly.

"Test's at seven, Anand," he called up. "After sunset." He smiled. "Grip means nothing in the afternoon."