Chapter 32 The Price of Diesel

At half past seven, when the dark had come and the dead had begun their slow circles round the building, Aditya Rathore held a meeting in the lobby.

He did it every Sunday, Lakshmi didi told me. A town hall, he called it, which was the kind of phrase he used. Everybody came, because there was nowhere else to go after dark, and because the lobby was the only room in the Admin Block with all its lights on. Ninety-one people sat on the floor and the stairs and the reception desk, under the tube lights, with the generators droning behind the walls and the grilles over the windows, and every now and then a soft thump against the glass from outside, which everybody had learned not to look at.

Aditya stood on the third step with his clipboard. He had a whiteboard beside him, on an easel, with numbers on it in three colours.

"Diesel," he said. "Let's align on diesel."

· · ·

He explained it well. I'll give him that. He explained it the way the best teachers at Shikhar explained thermodynamics: one idea at a time, with the numbers written up, so that by the end you felt you could have worked it out yourself.

Everything in the building ran on diesel. The two DG sets ran the lights, and the lights kept the dead at the windows instead of at the doors, because the dead go to light, and a lit window with a grille over it is a better place for them to be than a dark door. The DG sets ran the pump that brought water up from the borewell to the tanks on the roof. They ran the fridge in the clinic, which held Kartik's insulin and the antibiotics and the nurse's whole small pharmacy. They ran the floodlights on Saturday nights.

"Six thousand litres," said Aditya, and wrote it in green. "At current use, about five hundred litres a day. That's twelve days." He wrote it in yellow. "From tomorrow, the DG sets run only from seven at night till six in the morning. The pump runs one hour a day. The clinic fridge goes on to the inverter batteries in the daytime. That gets us to sixteen days." Red. "Sixteen days is more than enough. Major Sangwan told me again last night that the evacuation corridor will be secured within a week."

A murmur went through the lobby. Not a happy one, not an unhappy one. The sound ninety people make when they've been told there's a date.

"And the buses," said Aditya.

Beside me, on the floor, Bunty went very still.

"Twenty-four buses," said Aditya pleasantly, "with about two hundred litres in each tank. That's nearly five thousand litres of diesel, sitting in the yard, doing nothing. I've been asked about the buses." He looked round the lobby with his hoarding smile. "I want to be very clear. Nobody touches the buses. Every litre in those buses is a litre out of our lights, and our water, and Kartik's insulin." He nodded towards a thin boy sitting near the clinic door with an insulin pen in his shirt pocket, who looked down at the floor. "When the Army comes, we'll need the buses to go out with the convoy. Until then, they stay where they are. Nobody drives anywhere. Nobody goes anywhere. Waiting is a strategy."

He said it the way he'd said rank is a habit, as if it had been painted on the side of something.

"Questions?"

A girl from Kaveri Bhawan put up her hand. "Will they take us home? The Army? Or to a camp?"

"To a safe zone first. Then home. The Major's working on it."

"Which safe zone?"

"The Major's working on it."

A boy at the back: "My parents are in Bhopal. Can we go to Bhopal?"

"Once the corridor's secured, I'm sure the Army will arrange onward transport." Aditya's smile didn't move. "Look. I know everyone's tired. I know everyone wants to go home. I want to go home too. But a week ago, ninety of us were alone in this building with no plan, and today we have water, light, food, medicine, and the Indian Army on the phone every night. That didn't happen by accident. That happened because we stayed together and stayed inside and did things in order." He paused. "Let's not throw that away because we're impatient."

Nobody said anything after that. Ninety people looked at the whiteboard with its three colours, green and yellow and red, and I watched them decide. You can see it, if you know how to look. It's the same thing you see in an exam hall when a hard paper comes round and people decide, one by one, to stop fighting it and just do the questions they can.

They were going to wait.

He wasn't wrong. That was the trouble with Aditya Rathore. He was almost never wrong. He was just answering a different question from the one I was asking.

· · ·

"Trio," I said.

We were in the stairwell between the first and second floors, the three of us, where the light was bad and the walls were thick. Bunty was sitting on the stairs with his knees up. Ira was standing with her arms folded. I was leaning on the wall.

"One bus," I said. "Bus 14. Bunty drives. Ira navigates. I get us through the gate and out. Three people. Three people is fast and quiet. Three people fits in the front of a bus and can sleep in the back. Three people doesn't need a second bus, or a second driver, or a vote."

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"And Simran?" said Ira. "And Ananya?"

"They're safer here."

"You don't believe that."

"I believe it more than I believe in a convoy." I hadn't meant to say it so sharply. "You were at the school ground, Ira. You saw what fourteen trucks full of people looks like when it's dark and the dead come. It looks like a dinner bell. A bus with seventy people in it is a dinner bell with wheels. One bus with three people in it is a bus."

"Everyone who wants to go," said Ira, as if I hadn't spoken. "That's what we take. Everyone who wants to go."

"Nobody wants to go. You saw them."

"Some of them do. Kartik's insulin runs out on Thursday. He told me. Four days. The nurse has nothing for type one, the clinic was only ever stocked for the staff. Two of the girls in my room are from Bhopal; that's on the way. There's a boy on the second floor whose mother is in a hospital in Nagpur and he hasn't heard from her since Tuesday." She unfolded her arms. "They didn't put their hands up tonight because Aditya made it sound like putting your hand up was stupid. That's not the same as not wanting to go."

"It's the same in a bus."

"It's not the same in a person."

"Bhaiya," said Bunty quietly, from the stairs.

We both looked at him.

"Nothing," said Bunty. "Carry on." But he didn't look at either of us, and he was turning something over and over in his hands, and after a while I realised it was a spanner, and that he'd been carrying a spanner since the afternoon.

· · ·

"You didn't leave the nine at the gate," said Ira.

I'd known she'd get there eventually. She always gets there. She just takes the route with the most checkpoints.

"Sai Kripa," she said. "Sunday night. Bunty told me. Nine boys outside the gate and the dead coming, and the warden wouldn't open it, and you did something with a car alarm so they could get in. You could have stayed in your room. Nobody would ever have known."

"It was profitable. They're all in the book."

"Have any of them paid you?"

I didn't answer.

"You held a grille," said Ira, "with your bare hands, against a whole colony, for four people who'd just done the exact opposite of what you told them. That wasn't profitable either."

"That was the plan."

"Stop saying that." She didn't raise her voice. Ira never raises her voice; she tightens it. "Every time you do something decent you call it the plan, or arithmetic, or profit. I don't know who you think you're fooling. It isn't me. It isn't him." She tipped her head at Bunty. "I think it might be you."

"Trio," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment, the way she'd looked at Kunal at the gate: a quick, cold measuring, topper to topper.

"Everyone who wants to go," she said, and went up the stairs to the third floor without looking back.

Bunty sat on the step below me and turned the spanner over in his hands.

"Bhaiya," he said at last, "can I say one thing?"

"You're going to."

"Apan has never seen anybody win an argument with didi," said Bunty. "Not once. Not even you. Apan is just saying." He stood up, with dignity, and put the spanner in his pocket. "Apan is going to sleep now. Tomorrow apan is going to fix Bus 14."

"Bus 14 isn't broken."

"Every bus is broken," said Bunty, "if you look closely enough."

· · ·

I didn't sleep. I sat in my storeroom next to the generator pen, on my mattress, with the DG sets roaring through the wall like two trains that never arrived, and opened the Ledger to a fresh page.

I wrote a new heading across the top of it. I'd been thinking about it since the afternoon, since Bunty had said every key for every bus.

KEYS.

And under it, the way you'd list the options before you start a hard question:

1. Bus keys. 24 on one ring. Chaudhary ji's belt. (Dead. Rounds 5:30 a.m. & 6 p.m.)

2. Diesel. Bay pump: meter + chalk column on the wall. Electrician checks every morning. Buses ~200 L each.

3. Back gate. Pandey ji. Two bolts and a bar. Opens 1 p.m. only.

4. Admin side grille. Keys: Kunal, Aditya. Night patrol.

5. Sat phone. Aditya's belt. Saxena + the Major.

6. The Major. "Within a week." (Says who? Says Aditya.)

7. Malhotra sir. ?

I looked at the list for a long time. It was a good list. It had the shape of a solution. Every one of those things was a lock, and every lock has a key, and I'd been finding keys for people my whole life.

It was only when I got to the bottom that I noticed I'd written 24 on one ring and buses ~200 L each, plural, and not Bus 14.

I looked at that for a while too. Then I didn't rub it out.

· · ·

At five to seven, before all that, I'd been at the window at the end of the first-floor corridor, watching the evening.

You could see the little orange Hanuman temple from there, by the mess, with its bell hanging over the door and its marigolds gone brown. And at seven o'clock exactly, the dead came to it.

Not all of them. A few hundred. They came from the grounds and the hostels and the paths, slowly, the way people come to a temple in the evening after work, and stood in front of it in a loose crowd, facing the door, perfectly quiet. Some had their hands together. Some just stood.

There was a machine on a shelf inside the temple door, Lakshmi didi told me, when she came and stood beside me at the window. An automatic aarti machine, the kind you can buy for any small temple: a little electric bell and a little electric nagada drum, on a timer, so that the aarti rings at seven every evening even when the pujari's gone home. On the first night, the dead had come at seven, and the machine had rung, bell and drum, loud enough to hear across the campus, and every dead person within half a kilometre had turned towards it and come. So on Monday morning Aditya had walked across and unplugged it.

"Seven o'clock," said Lakshmi didi, "and no aarti." She shook her head. "Thirty years I've been hearing that bell. Even the dead are missing it."

They stood in front of the dark temple in silence for half an hour. Then, slowly, they drifted away.

Lakshmi didi had brought a small clay diya with her, and a matchbox. She lit the diya on the window ledge, in front of the grille, facing the temple, and put her palms together and closed her eyes and moved her lips. Then she opened her eyes and smiled at me, a little embarrassed, the way people do when you've caught them praying.

"For Hanuman ji," she said. "He's used to more noise. I don't want him to think we've all forgotten."

I wrote it down later, at the bottom of the KEYS page, in small letters, under the seven. I didn't give it a number.

Temple: aarti machine. Timer still set for 7. Unplugged, not broken.

· · ·

Malhotra sir found me at nine, the way he'd found me on Saturday, walking down the corridor slowly with his hands in his pockets.

He stopped at the door of my storeroom and looked in at the mattress and the Ledger and the generators roaring through the wall, and for a moment I thought he was going to say something about category E. He didn't. He looked at me instead, for a long time, with an expression I couldn't read. He was the only person in the building I'd never been able to read. He'd been at the top of my Unknown column for two years.

"Anand," he said. "Come with me. Bring your book." He paused. "I want to show you something I've never shown anyone."