Chapter 29 Rank Raj

At ten past seven the sun went down behind the hostels, and the dead in the basketball court woke up.

I'd seen it happen before, in the lane outside Gayatri Residency, in the road below the library. I'd never seen it from this close. One moment there were forty of them standing about on the orange court in the dusk, slow, aimless, like boys waiting for someone to bring a ball. The next, every head came up at once, and they turned, all forty, towards the Admin Block, towards us, and came at the fence.

They hit it together. The whole long wall of chain-link bellied in towards us with a sound like a wave hitting a sea wall, and the poles that held it groaned in their concrete, and sixty people on the Admin Block terrace stepped back at the same moment and then, embarrassed, stepped forward again.

Then the floodlights came on.

There were four of them, on tall poles at the corners of the court, the kind they use for night matches. The generators behind the Admin Block changed their note, deeper, working harder, and the lights hummed and flickered and then blazed, and the court turned white as a hospital, and in the middle of all that whiteness forty dead basketball players hung on the fence with their fingers through the wire and their faces turned up towards the light.

"Every Saturday," said Bunty, beside me, at the parapet. He'd been asking around all afternoon. Nobody can stop Bunty asking around. "Every Saturday night they test everyone again. Like the Sunday test. Lakshmi didi says the ranks change sometimes."

"Of course they do," I said. "Otherwise why would anyone come?"

· · ·

They'd built a little platform at the near end of the court, between the Admin Block and the fence, out of tables from the mess and planks from somewhere, with a set of steps. That was where the Betaal stood to be tested. Just outside the fence, two metres from the wire, in full view of the dead and the floodlights and the terrace, which was packed. Everybody had come. The students, the staff, Lakshmi didi with her arms folded. The terrace of the Admin Block on a Saturday night, I realised, was the only show in town.

Kunal stood at the bottom of the steps with a clipboard and a stopwatch, the big kind PE teachers use. He called the names. The Betaal went up one at a time.

I watched every one of them. I read their faces, and the cage, and the papers, all at once. I'd always been good at reading a hall.

A boy called Mayank went first, lowest on the list: Load 5, Grip 3. Five of the dead let go of the fence and stood still for about twenty seconds, and then dropped back onto the wire. Polite applause. A girl from Yamuna Bhawan: Load 6. A boy with glasses: Load 7, and his nose bled, and he wiped it on his sleeve and grinned and got a cheer. Then four more, eight, eight, nine, ten, a blur of nosebleeds and applause.

Then a boy I knew.

Rohan Sethi walked up the steps slowly, with his hands in his pockets, and stood at the edge of the platform with his eyes half closed, the way he'd walked to class every morning on the road past Gayatri Residency, as if he'd already solved the day.

He looked thinner. There was a dark stain on the shoulder of his T-shirt, old and brown, and when he took his left hand out of his pocket I saw that he held that arm a little stiffly, as if it still hurt him to lift it.

The last time I'd seen him he'd been running into the crowd at the school ground with a dead man's teeth in his shoulder and his face like paper.

The time before that, he'd been coming through the wicket gate of Gayatri Residency at half past nine on Sunday night with the dead a few metres behind him, and he'd stopped, half through the gap, and looked at the key fob in my hand a second longer than anyone else had.

He was one of the nine names in my Ledger. With a box drawn round them.

He froze eleven. Grip six. He came down without acknowledging the applause, and at the bottom of the steps he looked up, straight at me on the terrace, as if he'd known exactly where I was standing all along.

He didn't say anything. He didn't nod. He just looked at me for one long second, and then he looked away, and walked back into the crowd with his hands in his pockets.

I filed it under UNKNOWN. In pencil. I had a feeling I'd need a rubber.

Then a thin dark girl with a long plait, very upright, who walked up the steps as if she were walking onto a stage. Sneha Iyer. Ganga batch, rank three or four most weeks; I'd sold her a calculator once and she'd checked every button. She stood at the edge of the platform and closed her eyes, and her lips moved very slightly, and fourteen of the dead let go of the fence at once and stood with their arms at their sides, perfectly still, like boys at assembly.

She held them for nearly fifty seconds. Kunal shouted the numbers. Fourteen. Grip eight. Real applause.

I felt her do it. In the Hum, a tall presence walking between the desks, and under it, very faintly, something I didn't understand until much later: a steady drone, one long note, like the tanpura that plays under a singer.

Kunal handed the clipboard to someone else and went up himself. Load 17, Grip 7. He did it with his arms folded and his eyes open, smiling at the terrace the whole time, and when he came down he raised both fists over his head like a boy who'd scored in a match, and half the terrace cheered.

· · ·

Aditya went last. Of course he did.

He didn't hurry up the steps. He stood at the top of them for a moment with his hands loose at his sides, looking at the cage, and the whole terrace went silent, the way an exam hall goes silent when the topper's name is read out. Even the generators seemed to hum more quietly.

The author publishes this chapter on NovelPhoenix, but this page presents text taken without their approval.

And I felt him.

It wasn't like the others. The others had been tall presences walking between the desks. Aditya was the hall. He came into the Hum the way a principal comes into an exam room, and every paper in the cage turned towards him, and I felt something else too, something I didn't expect and didn't like: a warmth. A pull. Like standing next to a heater on a winter night, the kind of warmth you want to lean into without deciding to.

On the terrace around me, I saw the Ganga students lean. Not much. A few centimetres. The ones who'd taken the blue capsules every Sunday for two years. Their faces turned towards the platform like flowers towards a window, and something in their eyes went soft and shining, and I thought, oh, and I made myself stand up straight.

Aditya lifted one hand. Not dramatically. The way you lift a hand to stop an auto.

Thirty-one of the dead let go of the fence at once.

They didn't just stop. They stepped back from the wire, all thirty-one together, one pace, like soldiers, and stood in the white floodlight in a ragged double line with their arms at their sides and their faces lifted, utterly still. The other nine went on clawing at the fence around them, and the stillness of the thirty-one made the nine look like something happening in another, cheaper film.

Kunal's stopwatch went round once. Thirty seconds. Forty-five. Fifty.

Sixty.

Aditya lowered his hand. The thirty-one came back to the wire with a crash.

His nose didn't bleed. I looked for it. I was the only person on that terrace looking at his face instead of the cage, and his nose didn't bleed, and his hands didn't shake, and he didn't look tired at all. He looked, for just a second, before he turned round to the terrace and smiled, like a man who's walked into a room and can't remember what he came in for.

Then the smile came on.

"Thirty-one," called Kunal. "Grip nine!"

The terrace went mad.

· · ·

"Kabir Anand," said Kunal, when it had died down. He read it off the clipboard with relish. "Sabarmati. Pending."

A little ripple of laughter went across the terrace. Sabarmati. The bottom batch. The word had been a joke on every floor of Shikhar Tower for as long as there'd been a Shikhar Tower.

I went down the stairs from the terrace and out across the concrete to the platform, and up the steps, and stood where the others had stood, two metres from the wire.

Forty of them. Close enough to smell. Their fingers through the chain-link, their faces turned up into the floodlight, their mouths working. Not at me. I was furniture. They were looking past me, over my head, at the sixty living people on the terrace.

I wasn't afraid. I noticed that, standing there. A week ago I'd have been sick on the steps.

I turned their papers over. All of them. One after another, the way you flick through a question paper in the first five minutes, not answering anything, just reading.

Section A, bright and simple on every one. Which way. Forward, all forty, forward, forward, forward.

Section B, heavy, shaded dark. Sound. Light. Movement. The terrace. The floodlights.

And Section C.

I read the Section Cs for a long time. Longer than I should have. Longer than anyone had ever stood at the top of those steps doing nothing. I could hear the terrace getting restless behind me, a murmur, somebody laughing. I didn't care. I'd never had forty Section Cs in front of me at once, in good light, with time to read them.

They were all nearly the same. That was the thing. Forty different boys, and almost the same timetable, printed so deep in them that it showed through everything else, like a watermark. 7:00 — Block A — sit. 1:00 — mess — sit. 6:00 — court — play. Two years of their lives. Every one of them had come down to this court at six o'clock every evening, after the last class, to play basketball under these lights, and laugh, and shout, and be seventeen.

And there, at six o'clock last Sunday, somebody had locked the gate.

I put the papers down. I picked out three, near the front, and filled in stop.

Three of them let go of the fence.

They stood there, in the white light, with their arms half raised, perfectly still. I could feel the edges of the papers already sliding in my grip. I let them slide.

One. Two. Three. Four.

They came back to the wire.

There was a pause on the terrace. Then the laughter started, the way it starts in a classroom when someone gets a question so wrong that it's funny: a few people first, unsure, and then everybody, and then louder because everybody was. Three. Somebody whistled. Somebody shouted Sabarmati! in a voice like a cheer.

"Three," called Kunal, beaming. "Grip one!"

At the bottom of the steps, Aditya Rathore had been watching me. He'd watched the whole thing, with his head on one side, the clipboard under his arm. Now he wrote on it. And then he looked up, and smiled at me, a different smile from the one on the hoardings, smaller and more real, almost fond.

"Dead rank," said Aditya. Not loudly. Just to me. "Even among the dead."

· · ·

Twelve of twelve. That was the list, when Kunal pinned it up on the wall by the stairs that night. My name at the bottom, in green, in Aditya's neat hand. 12. K. Anand — L3 / G1. And next to it, in a different colour, red, one word.

Bait.

"Bait duty," said Bunty, reading it over my shoulder in the lobby, in a voice of deep horror. "Bhaiya, what is bait duty?"

"When they go out for supplies," said a voice behind us, "the lowest rank goes first and writes something. Anything. Doesn't matter if it's right." It was the boy with glasses, the one who'd done seven. He seemed sorry for me. "Writing's loud, you know? The dead all turn to you. You run, they follow, the others go in and get the stuff." He shrugged. "Mayank was bait till tonight. He's eleven now. He's very happy."

"I'm very happy for Mayank," I said.

Bunty looked at me. Then he looked up the stairs, at the third floor, where Ira was. Then back at me, and at the list, and I watched him do it, all of it, by the long scenic route.

"Bhaiya," he said, very quietly. "You did it on purpose."

"Bunty."

"You did three on purpose. You stood up there for five minutes looking at them, and then you did three. On purpose. So they'd put you on bait." He was nearly crying. "Bhaiya, who does that—"

"Quieter."

He shut his mouth. He looked like a pressure cooker that had been told not to whistle.

· · ·

Aditya caught me on the stairs at nine, on my way up to the room they'd given me, which was a storeroom on the first floor with a mattress in it, next to the generator pen. Category E. I hadn't known there was a category E. Apparently they'd made it for me.

He was coming down with Kunal and the satellite phone, and he stopped a step above me so that his face was level with mine, and smiled the small real smile again.

"Anand."

"Sir." I said it the way I'd said it to every warden and peon and invigilator in Kota for two years. It means nothing. It's like please at a ticket counter.

"You looked at them for a long time," said Aditya, "before you froze three."

"I'm slow."

"You're not slow. I've read your file." He tilted his head, the way he had at the bottom of the steps. "Five minutes. Nobody looks at the cage for five minutes. Most people look for ten seconds and then panic." His eyes rested on mine, pleasant and curious and completely awake. "What were you reading?"

I thought about forty boys playing basketball under the floodlights at six o'clock, and a padlock, and the empty circles at the bottom of a paper that a laminated sheet said I couldn't fill in.

"The question paper, sir," I said. "I always read it fully before I fail it."