Chapter 33 The Back of a Maggi Wrapper

The terrace of the Admin Block at night was the strangest place I'd ever sat down.

It was flat and gritty and still warm from the day, with a low parapet round the edge and the black water tanks standing in a row like big silent men. Above it, a sky the colour of dirty milk, with three stars showing through the dust. Below it, all round, in the yellow spill of light from the windows, the dead walked.

You could hear them from up here. Not their feet. Something underneath their feet, a kind of rustle, like wind going through dry grass, the sound of thousands of people moving slowly in the same direction. Round and round. Sushila aunty had called it a sea. From the terrace it sounded more like breathing.

Malhotra sir turned over two plastic buckets by the tanks and sat on one of them and pointed at the other, and I sat on it.

He didn't say anything for a while. He looked out over the parapet at the dark campus, at the dark academic blocks, at the dark dome of the Main Hall in the distance, with his elbows on his knees. Then he reached into the bag he'd brought up with him, a cloth bag with a bank's name printed on it, and took out a diary.

It was a fat old hardbound thing with a dark red cover, the kind medical representatives give out to doctors at New Year, with the name of a cough syrup stamped on the front in gold.

"A medical representative gave me this in 2019," said Malhotra sir, "in exchange for nothing at all. It's the only free thing anyone has ever given me in Kota." He held it on his knee. "Is that the famous book?"

I'd brought the Ledger, the way he'd asked. It was on my lap, with its two rubber bands.

"Which book?"

"The one you write everybody in." He didn't look at it. "I suppose I'm in it."

"Unknown column."

"Good," said Malhotra sir. "I'd be offended anywhere else."

· · ·

He opened the diary.

It was full of handwriting, his handwriting, small and slanted, the same handwriting that had covered the blackboard of the fourth-floor lecture hall in the Tower every afternoon for two years. Dates. Notes. Problems, with diagrams. Here and there, a page with nothing on it but a single line. He turned the pages slowly, the way you turn the pages of an album, until he came to a place near the middle where something had been pressed flat between two pages, the way people press flowers.

He turned the diary round on his knee so I could see.

It was a Maggi wrapper.

A yellow-and-red Maggi wrapper, the ordinary masala kind, slit open along the side and flattened out so that the silver inside showed. And on the silver, in pencil, small and dense and fast, filling every centimetre, there was working. A diagram of a ladder leaning against a wall. A circle. A few lines of algebra. And at the bottom, boxed, an answer.

Leaves the wall when its top is at 2/3 of its starting height.

I knew the handwriting. Of course I knew it. It was mine.

· · ·

I remembered the day. That's the strange thing. I hadn't thought about it once in eighteen months, and the moment I saw the wrapper I remembered all of it, the way you remember a smell.

A Thursday, before Diwali, in class 11. Malhotra sir had put a problem on the board at the end of the lecture and said it wasn't in the syllabus and wouldn't be in the test and he'd give a chocolate to anyone who solved it by Monday. A uniform ladder leaning against a smooth wall on a smooth floor, released from rest. At what point does it leave the wall? Half the Ganga batch had copied it down. I'd been sitting at the back of the fourth-floor lecture hall in the Tower, the way I always sat, selling a packet of Maggi to the boy next to me under the desk, and I'd looked up at the board and seen it.

You know how sometimes you see the answer before you've seen the question properly? It was like that. The centre of the ladder moving on a circle. The wall pushing until the moment it can't. Energy, and a constraint, and the instant the push goes to zero.

I'd done it on the back of the wrapper in about four minutes, because it was the only paper I had that wasn't my notebook, and I didn't do real work in my notebook. Then I'd looked at it for a while, the way you look at something you've made that nobody will ever see. Then I'd screwed it up and dropped it in the dustbin by the door on my way out, with all the other wrappers.

"Four lines," said Malhotra sir. "Energy, the circle, and the moment the normal force goes to zero. I've been teaching that problem for twenty-six years, Anand. The best solution I'd ever seen before this one was a page and a half long." He looked at the wrapper on his knee. "Nobody claimed the chocolate."

"You went through the dustbin."

"I go through the dustbin after every class." He said it simply, as if it were obvious. "Every class, for thirty years. Rough work is the only honest thing a student ever writes. The answer sheet is what you want the examiner to think. The rough work is what you actually thought." He tapped the wrapper, very gently, with one chalky finger. "I've found a great deal of interesting thinking in dustbins. I've never found anything like this."

I didn't say anything.

I was thinking about a hotel ballroom in Mumbai, and a bin by the door, and six solutions on six loose sheets with ROUGH WORK WILL NOT BE EVALUATED printed across the top in grey. I'd dropped them in that bin when I was twelve, and walked out to the car park, and nobody had gone through that bin. I'd lived for five years as if nobody ever went through bins.

Somebody had. On the fourth floor of Shikhar Tower, on a Thursday before Diwali, a physics teacher with chalk on his trousers had bent down and gone through the dustbin by the door, and found a Maggi wrapper, and smoothed it out, and kept it.

The author's published chapter is on the page they use for publication, while this copy was taken without permission.

I've lost my fear. I've said that already. But the thing that happened in my chest on that terrace, looking at my own handwriting on the silver side of a Maggi wrapper, wasn't fear. I don't have a name for it. It was the thing that happens in your chest when somebody has been carrying something of yours for eighteen months, very carefully, and you didn't know.

· · ·

"Why didn't you tell?" I said.

It came out rougher than I meant it to. It was the question at the top of my Unknown column. It had been there for eighteen months, in capitals. MALHOTRA SIR (physics). Saw my rough work. Never told anyone. Why?

He'd known. I'd always been sure he'd known. Two days after Diwali he'd stopped beside my desk in the middle of a lecture and looked down at me for a second longer than he looked at anyone, and walked on. That was all. He'd never said a word. He'd never asked me a question in class, or given me a look, or told the batch counsellor, or done any of the things a teacher does when he finds out a boy at the back is lying about who he is. He'd just gone on teaching. And every Sunday my rank had come out at eighteen hundred and something, and every Monday he'd walked past my desk.

"Who would I have told?" said Malhotra sir.

"Anyone. The batch counsellor. My father. The Director. They'd have moved me up to Ganga in a week. They'd have put my face on the side of the Tower."

"Yes," he said. "That's why."

I waited.

"You'd have run, Anand." He said it quietly, looking out at the dead. "I've been teaching for thirty years. I've seen boys like you before. Not many. Two or three. You find out what they are and you tell them, and you tell everyone else, and you put them in the top batch and stand them in front of the camera, and they run. Not out of Kota, necessarily. Out of themselves. They find somewhere to hide inside, where nobody can reach them, and they stay there." He turned his head and looked at me for the first time since he'd opened the diary. "You were already hiding. I could see that. If I'd dragged you out, you'd only have found somewhere deeper."

"So you let me hide."

"Hiding is also a skill," said Malhotra sir. "You were very good at it. Sixty-three tests, and you never once missed your mark by more than thirty places. Do you know how hard that is? To be wrong so precisely?" Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "I've had toppers who couldn't be right that precisely."

"Then why keep the wrapper?"

He closed the diary over it, gently, the way you close a book on a pressed flower.

"Because I wanted to see," he said, "what you'd save it for."

· · ·

The dead went round below us. The generators droned. Somewhere far away to the north, over the city, a helicopter crossed the sky with a light hanging under it, very small, and was gone.

"Well?" said Malhotra sir. "What are you saving it for?"

"My sister," I said.

He nodded, as if I'd given the answer he'd expected, and waited.

"She's thirteen. In Bhilai. My grandmother's had a stroke and she's diabetic and my sister's the only one there to give her the insulin. My father's locked inside the steel plant for two weeks. He sent me a message on Tuesday night." I'd never told anyone this part. Not Ira, not Bunty. "Three words. Your sister. Please. He's never asked me for anything. So I owe it to him. And I owe it to her. That's why."

"Good answer," said Malhotra sir.

"Thank you."

"Wrong reason."

I looked at him. He was looking out at the dark again, with his elbows on his knees, perfectly calm.

"Then what's the right reason?"

"If I told you," said Malhotra sir, "you'd write it down in that book and charge somebody for it."

I opened my mouth. I closed it. It was, I had to admit, a fair point.

· · ·

He told me about Aditya, after that. Not a lot. He didn't seem to like talking about people when they weren't there, which in Kota is a very unusual habit.

"He's a good boy," he said. "That's the problem. He's a good boy who's doing exactly what the grown-ups on that phone tell him to do. That's the most dangerous kind of boy there is." He rubbed his eyes. "I've heard him on it, at night. The Director. And the Army officer. Sangwan. The Major wants a list of everyone in the building, and a separate list of the ones like you."

"The special cases."

"Is that what they call you?" He shook his head slowly. "In thirty years, Anand, I've never seen a government make a separate list of people it planned to treat the same as everybody else."

I thought about Pintu at the Talwandi crossing, with his red eyes, touching his calf through his lungi. The ones who got bitten and didn't die, they put in a separate truck. A truck with no windows.

"I know," I said.

"I thought you might." He looked at me. "So. You want the buses."

"I want a bus."

"You want the buses," said Malhotra sir, as if I hadn't spoken, "and the diesel, and the keys, and somebody to open the back gate, and somebody to keep Rathore busy while you do it. And you can't do any of that alone, because you can't drive and you can't read a map and the guards don't trust you, and the only people in this building who trust you are a mechanic's son from Indore and the most stubborn girl I have ever taught." He paused. "Am I wrong?"

"No."

"Then here's my price."

I almost laughed. I'd been waiting two years for Malhotra sir to name a price. I'd never been able to work out what it would be.

"You take whoever wants to go," he said. "Everyone. Not you and your two friends in one bus in the night. Everyone in this building who wants to leave. If that's seven people, you take seven. If it's seventy, you take seventy, and you'll need two buses, and Hariram can drive the second one. That's my price, Anand. You find the keys and the diesel and the road, and I'll find the people, and I'll keep Rathore on the phone, and I'll open the gate myself if I have to."

"That's a lot of people."

"Yes."

"A convoy is a dinner bell."

"Then make it a quiet one. You're the cleverest boy I've ever taught. Think of something."

I looked at him for a long time.

"What do you get?" I said. "Out of it. If I take seventy people. What's in it for you?"

He laughed. It was the first time I'd ever heard him laugh, in two years, and it surprised me: a short, hoarse, real laugh, like a cough that's been waiting.

"Everyone has a price, Anand," said Malhotra sir. "That's your whole theory, isn't it? I've heard about you. Everyone has a price." He tucked the diary back into his cloth bag, carefully, with the wrapper safe inside it. "You're right. Everyone does. Mine just isn't for me."

· · ·

Before we went down, he said one more thing. He said it standing at the top of the terrace stairs, with the bag over his shoulder, looking back at the dead going round and round below in the yellow light.

"Do you know what the hardest thing to teach is? In physics? In thirty years?"

"Rotational mechanics," I said. "Everyone hates rotation."

"Friction," said Malhotra sir.

I waited.

"Students love conservative forces. Gravity. Springs. You lift a stone, you put energy in, you drop it, you get the energy back. It doesn't matter which way you went. Up the stairs or up the lift, the answer's the same. Clean. Reversible. Fair." He smiled a little. "Like a transaction. Like your book."

"And friction?"

"Friction ruins every beautiful problem. Friction never gives back. Whatever you spend against it, it keeps. It turns into heat and goes into the floor and you never see it again. And the path matters. The longer the way you go, the more it takes." He looked at the dead for a moment longer. "Students hate it. They want everything to come back."

"So do I."

"I know." He turned to go down the stairs. Then he stopped, and said, without turning round, so quietly I nearly didn't hear it over the generators:

"But friction is the only reason anyone can walk, Anand. Without it you'd just slip. Every step you've ever taken, you took because the ground refused to give back what you pushed into it."

He went down the stairs.

I sat on the upturned bucket for a long time after that, with the Ledger on my knees and the dead going round below me in the light. I took out my pencil to write it down. I always write things down.

I didn't. I don't know why. I just sat there and held the pencil, and remembered it instead.