Chapter 31 The Neighbours

On Sunday morning the dead went to the test.

I watched it from the roof of the Admin Block at a quarter to nine, with a bucket of water I was supposed to be carrying to the generator pen. It was a week to the hour since Bhandari sir had stood up in Room 603 and said fifteen minutes remaining, and for two years before that, every Sunday of my life had started the same way: a queue, a locker, a metal detector, a hall, a paper. I'd thought I was used to it.

I'd never seen it from outside.

They came out of the hostels in their long slow lines, the way they did every morning. But they didn't go to the academic blocks. They went south, all of them, past Block A and Block B and Block C, down the long path between the neem trees to the big domed hall at the far end of the campus, and in through its doors. Thousands of them. It took nearly twenty minutes for them all to go in. At nine o'clock exactly, the last of them disappeared inside, and the doors stood open on the dark, and the whole campus went quiet.

"Main Hall," said Bunty, beside me. He'd come up to find me because I hadn't come down. "Sunday test. Every week, nine to twelve. Lakshmi didi says they come out at twelve and go to the mess." He looked at the hall for a long time. "Bhaiya. Do you think they're writing?"

"I think they're sitting."

"For three hours."

"It's what they know."

Bunty thought about it. "Apan never once sat for three hours," he said. "Apan always left after one and a half and said it was a strategy." He shook his head slowly. "And now even the dead are more sincere than apan."

· · ·

Category E, it turned out, meant diesel.

Every morning, somebody had to fill twenty-litre cans from the pump at the diesel bay in the transport yard and carry them across to the generator pen behind the Admin Block, where the two big DG sets drank them. In daylight, in the heat, among the dead, which meant it had to be a Betaal. The lowest Betaal. Mayank had done it until last night. Mayank had been extremely happy to hand me the cans.

So I spent my first Sunday at Shikhar Gurukul walking backwards and forwards across the yard with a can in each hand, past the two dead drivers who stood all day in the shade at the far end of the yard, in the corner where the drivers had always gone to smoke, past the open door of the workshop, past Hariram on the step of Bus 14 with his bidi, who whispered "Maggi wala!" every single time I went past, hoarse and delighted, as if it was the first time, and wheezed with silent laughter every single time, as if it was the funniest thing he'd ever said.

I counted, of course. I can't carry a can without counting. Six trips in the morning. Twenty litres a can, two cans a trip. Two hundred and forty litres, and the electrician said the DG sets would want the same again by night. I looked at the pump. It had a meter on it, a mechanical one with little rolling numbers, and someone had chalked a figure on the wall beside it every morning since Monday. The figures went down, every morning, in a neat column.

I copied the column into the Ledger. I didn't know what it was for yet. I just knew that when a number goes down in a neat column every morning, somebody is going to want to know about it eventually, and I'd rather it was me.

· · ·

At two o'clock I turned my phone on.

That was our rule. Mine and Tara's. Two p.m. and nine p.m., two minutes, the rest of the time airplane mode. I'd given her that rule on Monday night, on the stairs of Gayatri Residency, in the voice I use for rules.

We'd hardly managed it once since.

On Tuesday at two, the network had been jammed solid by every phone in Kota. On Tuesday at nine I'd been sitting in the dark in a godown full of Maggi. After that, godowns and libraries and roofs and fields, and every time I'd turned the phone on, the network had been a single trembling bar or nothing, the calls had failed, and the most I'd managed was SMS. Safe. Moving. Keep phone dark. And from her, in reply, two days later: Dadi ok. Insulin ok. Dont worry about us.

I hadn't believed a word of it. Dont worry about us is what you say when you want someone to stop asking.

The Admin Block roof had three bars. I'd checked that on Saturday. I stood in the corner by the water tanks with the phone against my ear and listened to it ring, and ring, and then:

"Bhaiya!"

It was the first time I'd heard her voice in six days.

I'd like to tell you something clever about how that felt. I can't. I stood on a roof with dead people sitting in a hall at one end of the campus and dead people sitting in the mess at the other end, with diesel on my hands and a bite on my arm, and my sister said Bhaiya in a voice like the first rain, and for a second I couldn't say anything at all.

"Bhaiya? Bhaiya, are you there? Can you hear me? The line's bad—"

"I'm here."

"Where are you? Are you OK? Did you eat? You didn't call for six days, Bhaiya, six, I counted, I wrote it down, I thought—" She stopped. Then, in a much smaller voice: "I thought."

"I'm OK. I'm at a campus. Shikhar's. South of the city. There are walls, and food, and a generator." I didn't tell her about the field, or the grille, or the fifth floor. I'd decided that before I turned the phone on. "How's Dadi?"

"Dadi's fine! Dadi's fine, Bhaiya. Her sugar was one-forty this morning. Listen. Listen, I have to tell you everything, I've got it all written down, I'll read it, it's faster—"

The author's chapter is published on NovelPhoenix's website, but this version was taken without permission.

I heard pages. The red notebook. I'd have known that sound anywhere. She'd started that notebook when she was ten, copying me, and it had taken me two years to notice that she'd never once used it the way I used mine.

· · ·

She read it to me. All of it, very fast, in the voice she used for reading out her homework when she knew it was good.

Annamma aunty had come back from the Sector 9 hospital on Tuesday morning, after her night duty, with Papa's medical card and two whole boxes of insulin. Two, Bhaiya. The hospital store had given her two because she'd told them it was for a stroke patient and she'd shown them her own ID. She wouldn't take any money. She'd said owing was for adults. Merin was sleeping at their quarter every night now that Annamma aunty was on double duty, because the hospital was very full.

Rao uncle downstairs had run a long wire up the stairs from his inverter so that the fridge could stay on for the insulin when the power went, which was every afternoon, twelve to six. In return, Tara read the labels on all his medicines and wrote the times on the boxes in big black marker, because of his eyes. And on Thursday, when the fan stopped and Dadi got very hot, Rao uncle had carried his own table fan upstairs, all by himself, one step at a time, and plugged it into the wire.

Sahu bhaiya came every morning on his scooter with two packets of milk and the news. They were checking everyone at Durg station now, and sending some people away in buses. There were cases in Raipur, near the railway colony. He'd brought them bananas on Friday. He wouldn't take money either.

"And Mrs. Pillai from the third floor," said Tara, "her husband is diabetic too, and the chemist didn't have any, so I gave her one of the boxes."

I closed my eyes.

"Tara."

"Bhaiya, she needed it. We had two. We only need one. One box lasts Dadi more than a month, Bhaiya, I did the sum. And she brings us rotis now, every evening. She makes very good rotis. Better than mine."

"Tara—"

"And Papa called."

I stopped.

"On Friday. From the shift office, on their phone, for one minute. He asked about Dadi and the insulin and if the door was locked. He sounded—" She hesitated. Tara never hesitated. "He sounded very tired, Bhaiya. He said they're all inside, they're sleeping in the canteen, they're doing double shifts. He said the furnace can't stop. He asked if you'd called."

"What did you tell him?"

"I said you were coming," said Tara.

· · ·

I was quiet for a while. She let me be. The line hissed between us, nine hundred and fifty kilometres of it, and somewhere in it, I knew, there were other people's calls, thousands of them, mothers and fathers and brothers, all trying to get through the same thin wire.

"You know what you told me," Tara said at last. Carefully. As if she'd been practising. "On Monday. On the phone. You said don't open the door for anyone. Don't owe anybody anything. You said be careful of nice people most of all, because nice people always want something you haven't figured out yet."

"I remember."

"I wrote it down. Every word. I've got it here." Pages. "And then I did the opposite. Of all of it. I opened the door for Annamma aunty and I owe her two boxes of insulin. I opened the door for Rao uncle and I owe him a fan and a wire. I owe Sahu bhaiya bananas. I owe Mrs. Pillai rotis, I think, or she owes me, I can't work it out, it keeps going round." She took a breath. "You said trust no one, Bhaiya. I did the opposite. And Dadi's alive."

I stood on the roof with my eyes shut.

I could see it. That's the thing. I've always been able to see things, it's the only trick I've got. I could see the whole shape of it, the way you see the shape of a solution before you've written a line: a thirteen-year-old girl in a two-room quarter in Bhilai with a red notebook, and around her, in a ring, a nurse and an old man with bad eyes and a milk boy and a woman who made very good rotis, all of them owing each other, none of them keeping count, all of them holding each other up. And in the middle of the ring, Dadi, alive.

It was the most efficient system I'd ever seen. It shouldn't have worked. It worked better than anything I'd ever built.

I could see that it was true.

And I said, "You got lucky."

There was a pause on the line.

"You always say," said Tara, slowly, "there's no such thing as luck. Only preparation. You always say that, Bhaiya. You said it at the station when you left."

"Then you were very well prepared," I said, "by accident."

She didn't laugh. She didn't argue, either. She'd been arguing with me since she was four, and she knew when I'd closed a door.

"Are you coming?" she said instead.

On Monday, on the stairs, she'd asked me the same thing, and I hadn't been able to finish the sentence. Since then I'd written Tell her I was coming. Tell her I'd started on the last page of a Ledger and slid it under a door, because I was dying, and you can say things on a last page that you can't say on a phone.

I wasn't dying now. Probably. I'd checked.

"Tara," I said. "I've started."

The line hissed.

"What does that mean?"

"It means I've started," I said. "Put the phone on airplane mode. Nine o'clock. Two minutes."

"Bhaiya—"

I ended the call. Two minutes and fifty seconds. Fifty seconds over. If anyone in Gayatri Residency had done that, I'd have lectured them about battery discipline.

· · ·

I sat down on the hot concrete between the water tanks and opened the Ledger.

UNKNOWN. TARA. Can't read her through a phone.

I looked at it for a long time. Then I took out my pencil, and after her name, very small, I wrote one word.

Truth?

I looked at that for even longer.

Then I rubbed it out. I rubbed it out carefully, the way I'd rubbed out Sushila aunty's name from the OWES column, until there was nothing left on the page but a faint grey smudge where the word had been. You could still see it, if you knew where to look. Most of the important things in that book were like that.

"Who's Tara?" said Ira.

She was standing at the top of the roof stairs. I don't know how long she'd been there. She had a steel glass of water in each hand, and she held one out to me, and I took it.

"My sister."

"I know. I read it. On the last page." She sat down on the concrete next to me, not too close, and drank her water. "I meant, who is she. What's she like."

I thought about it. I gave it the respect it deserved.

"She does the opposite of everything I tell her," I said, "and it works."

Ira considered this. Then she smiled, very slightly, into her glass. It was the first time I'd seen her smile since the fifth floor.

"I think I'd like her," she said.

· · ·

Bunty found us there at six, when the dead were coming out of the mess and drifting towards the grounds for the evening. He came up the stairs two at a time and stood over us, sweating and grey with grease to the elbows, wearing a look I'd seen on his face only once before, in the godown, when he'd counted the Maggi.

"Bhaiya," he said. "Didi. I've been talking to Hariram ji all afternoon."

"About what?"

"Everything." He crouched down between us and dropped his voice, as if the water tanks might be listening. "The buses all start. He checks them. All twenty-four. Batteries fine, tyres fine. The tank under the diesel bay holds twenty thousand litres, he says. On Sunday it was half full. The electrician says it's maybe six thousand now, and going down. And the keys."

"The keys," I said.

"Every key for every bus," said Bunty, "on one big ring. Twenty-four keys. Hariram ji says the ring belongs to the transport supervisor, Chaudhary ji. Chaudhary ji keeps it on his belt. Always. Even at night. Even in the bathroom, Hariram ji says, and nobody's ever been allowed to touch it, not once in eleven years."

"So we ask Chaudhary ji."

Bunty looked at me. Then he looked over the parapet, down into the transport yard, where the long yellow buses stood in their rows in the evening light, and among them, walking slowly from bus to bus, stopping at each door, peering in at each windscreen, moving on, a heavy grey-haired man in a khaki uniform with a big ring of keys swinging from his belt.

"Bhaiya," said Bunty. "Chaudhary ji died on Sunday."