Chapter 34 Timetable

"Bait boy wants overtime," said Kunal.

It was a quarter to five on Monday morning, and he was sitting on a plastic chair beside the side door of the Admin Block with the grille key on a string round his neck and his eyes half closed, because it was his turn on night watch and he hated it. He looked at me standing in front of him with two empty diesel cans, and grinned.

"The heat," I said. "If I do the cans before six, I don't have to do them at noon."

"Sabarmati logic." He got up, yawning, and unlocked the grille. "Go on, then. Don't write anything. If you write anything out there at this time of night, every one of them in the yard is going to come and have a look at you, and I'm not coming to get you."

"I never write anything," I said.

"I know," said Kunal. "I've seen your score."

He locked the grille behind me, and I walked out into the dark among the dead.

· · ·

I'd decided on the terrace the night before, after Malhotra sir went down the stairs. If I was going to take whoever wanted to go, I needed to know exactly what I'd be taking them through. Not roughly. Exactly. To the minute. Every one of the dead on that campus was a timetable, and a campus is just all their timetables added together, and I'd been reading timetables my whole life.

So on Monday I walked among them from before dawn till after dark, and wrote it all down.

It was still night at a quarter to five. They were all out, thousands of them, circling the Admin Block slowly in the dark the way they did every night, round and round, faces turned towards the lit windows. I went through them the way Pintu had gone through the crossing at Talwandi. Not hurrying. Not looking at them. Hands in my pockets. They parted round me like water round a stone and closed again behind, and the soft rustle of their feet went on, and nobody turned.

Furniture. It's the most restful thing I've ever been.

I put the cans down at the diesel bay and went on, round the back of the mess, to the kitchen door.

· · ·

At five o'clock exactly, the cook came.

I knew him from the window on Saturday: the old man in the white coat with the white moustache and the pencil behind his ear. Lakshmi didi had told me his name. Gopal Maharaj. Thirty-one years in the Shikhar mess, from the first year it opened, when the campus was three buildings and a field. He'd lived in the staff quarter behind the mess with his wife, who'd gone to her village for a wedding on the Friday before. He'd been the one who lit the stoves every morning. Always him. He'd never let anyone else do it.

He came out of the dark from the staff quarters with his slow, careful old man's walk, and went in through the kitchen door, and I went in behind him.

The kitchen was big and black and smelled of cold oil. There was a row of huge gas burners along one wall, under a steel hood, the kind that can boil a hundred litres of dal. The cylinders that fed them had gone; somebody had taken them to the Admin Block on Monday. Gopal Maharaj didn't know that. He went to the first burner and bent over it and turned the knob, and took a long gas lighter off its hook, and clicked it. A spark. Nothing. He turned the next knob. Click. A spark. Nothing. All the way along the row, every burner, the way he'd done it every morning for thirty-one years, and then he stood in front of the cold stoves with the lighter in his hand and waited for them to light.

At seven, I learned later, he went to the big kettle and made chai. With no water and no gas and no tea. He went through every movement. Lakshmi didi had watched him do it from the window on Tuesday and cried.

I turned his paper over, standing behind him in the dark kitchen, and read Section C again, the way I'd read it from the window. 5:00 — kitchen — light the stoves. 7:00 — kitchen — chai. Clearer, close up. Much clearer. The little empty circles beside each row.

I put it back. I wrote it in the Ledger instead.

5:00. Gopal Maharaj (cook). Kitchen. Lights stoves (no gas). Stays.

· · ·

At half past five, in the grey before dawn, Chaudhary ji did his rounds.

I was waiting for him in the transport yard, between the two rows of buses. He came out of the transport office at the end of the yard, a heavy grey-haired man in a khaki uniform with a Shikhar badge on the pocket, and started down the left-hand row. And he did exactly what Bunty had said he would do. At every bus, he stopped. He tried the driver's door. He kicked the front tyre, once, with his right foot. He leaned close to the windscreen and peered in, at the dashboard, as if checking that nobody had left the lights on. Then he moved on to the next one.

I walked beside him. Close. Matching my steps to his, the way you'd walk next to an old man in a queue. He didn't look at me once.

The key ring hung from his belt on the right-hand side, on a big steel snap hook clipped through his belt loop. Twenty-four keys, each with a little brass tag stamped with a number. They chimed softly every time he kicked a tyre.

Bus 1, Bus 2, Bus 3. All the way down the left-hand row to Bus 12, across, and back up the right-hand row from 13 to 24. Twenty-four buses, twenty-four doors, twenty-four kicks. It took him eighteen minutes. Then he went back into the transport office and stood at the window, looking out at the yard, with his hands behind his back.

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At Bus 14, he'd kicked the tyre a little harder than the others. I noticed that. I didn't know what it meant. Perhaps Bus 14 had always had a soft tyre. Perhaps he'd just liked it.

5:30. Chaudhary ji. Yard. Checks all 24 (door, tyre, windscreen). 18 min. Keys: right hip, snap hook, belt loop. Then office window.

And later, when I'd watched him do it again in the evening:

6:00 p.m. Same, in reverse. (Buses "coming back".)

· · ·

At five to seven, the hostels opened, and the campus went to class.

They'd gone back to the hostels at first light, all of them, from their circles round the Admin Block, the way students go back to their rooms after a late night out, and lain down on their beds, or stood beside them. At five to seven, they came out again, in their long lines, and went to the academic blocks.

I went with them. Into Block B, in the middle of a crowd of dead students, up a staircase I'd never climbed, along a corridor with its notice boards still full of last week's timetables. Nobody noticed me. I was just one more boy going to class. It was the first time in my life I'd ever gone into a lecture on time.

Room 12 was on the first floor, at the end. The door was open.

They were sitting at their desks. Forty of them, perhaps, in rows, facing the front, Ganga batch from the badges on their T-shirts, with their hands on the desks in front of them. Some had notebooks open. Some had pens. They sat perfectly still, with their faces turned towards the blackboard, and waited.

On the blackboard, in chalk, in small slanting handwriting I knew better than my own, there was still the last lecture from the Saturday before everything. Electrostatics. Gauss's law. A diagram of a sphere with arrows coming out of it. And underneath, underlined twice: The flux depends only on what's inside.

Malhotra sir's class.

Every morning since Sunday, I realised, they'd come to Room 12 at seven and sat down and waited for him. And every morning, four hundred metres away, behind the grilles of the Admin Block, the man they were waiting for had been alive, drinking Lakshmi didi's terrible tea, not knowing.

They'd have waited for him forever.

I stood at the back of Room 12 for a long time. I don't know why. Then I wrote it down, and went out, and the class went on waiting behind me.

7:00. Block B, Room 12. Malhotra sir's Ganga class. Sits. Waits. (He doesn't know.)

· · ·

It was a long day. I'll give you the timetable instead of the day, because that's what I gave myself.

At one o'clock, they all went to the mess. Every one of them, from every block, in a single slow tide, and sat at the long tables in front of the empty plates until two.

From two till five, in the worst of the heat, they stood in the shade. Wherever there was shade: under the neem trees, along the north walls of the buildings, inside doorways, under the buses. That was when the Betaal did the supply runs, and when the living could cross the yard if they were quick and quiet. That was when Hariram sat on the step of Bus 14.

At six, the grounds. The ones in the court pressed against the fence. The others went to the football field behind the hostels and stood in loose groups on the brown grass as if waiting for teams to be picked.

At seven, the temple. The few hundred, in silence, in front of the unplugged aarti machine.

At nine, the hostels. All of them, back to their rooms, the way they'd gone back every night of their lives at nine for roll call.

And at half past nine, out again. Hungrier than habit, now that it was dark. Round and round the Admin Block, faces to the light, until dawn.

On Sundays, nine to twelve, the Main Hall.

I wrote it all on one page. I ruled it the way Aditya had ruled his Register, in columns: time, place, who, what. I put the page between KEYS and COSTS. When I'd finished, it was the most useful page in the Ledger, and I looked at it for a long time, and felt something I hadn't felt about a page I'd written in a very long time. I think it was pride. I'm not sure. It had been a while.

Ira read it over my shoulder that evening, in the corridor, with a glass of tea in her hand.

"You realise," she said, "that you're the first student in the history of Shikhar to actually study the timetable."

"I've always been a late developer."

She almost laughed. She was getting better at almost laughing.

· · ·

Rohan Sethi found me in the transport yard at three that afternoon, in the heat, while the dead stood in the shade under the buses.

I was leaning on Bus 9 with the Ledger, writing. He came across the yard between the dead the way all the Betaal did, unhurried, hands in his pockets, and leaned on the bus next to me, and didn't say anything for a while. Close up, he looked older than seventeen. There were dark rings under his half-closed eyes, and the stain on his shoulder had been washed but hadn't come out.

"The girl I pushed onto the truck," he said at last. "At the school ground. Do you know if she got out?"

"No."

"Long hair. A green dupatta. She'd lost a shoe." He looked at the dead under the buses. "I don't even know her name."

I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that wasn't a lie, and I found I didn't want to lie to him.

"You pressed the car alarm," said Rohan.

I kept writing.

"At Gayatri. On Sunday night. The white Scorpio up the lane, the one that went off and pulled them all away from the gate." He said it flatly, the way you'd read out a question. "Everybody thought it went off by itself. I was standing right behind you in the gap. You had your hand in your pocket on a key fob. You pressed it twice. I saw your hand."

"It was very dark."

"I've got good eyes. I'm rank twelve. Was." He turned his head and looked at me. "Nine of us came in through that gate. You're the reason. You've got all nine of us in that book, I bet. I'm the only one who knows it."

I closed the Ledger.

"So?"

"So I owe you," said Rohan Sethi. Simply. Like a boy stating his blood group. "I wanted you to know I know. That's all."

I looked at him for a long time. In the Hum, beside me, he was one of those tall presences that walk between the desks, and under that, there was something steady and quiet and very tired, like a tube light that's been on all night.

"Don't pay me now," I said. "Now's cheap."

"When, then?"

"When it's expensive."

He thought about that. Then he nodded, slowly, as if it were a perfectly reasonable answer, and pushed himself off the bus.

"Three," he said, over his shoulder, as he went. "On Saturday. For four seconds."

"What about it?"

"I've watched you walk." He didn't turn round. "You don't walk like a boy who can do three."

· · ·

Bunty came in at seven, when the dead went to the temple, black with grease to the shoulders and smelling of diesel and extremely happy.

"Bus 14," he announced, to the whole first-floor corridor, "is a very good bus."

"Bunty—"

"Hariram ji says she's the best in the yard. He drove her for six years. He says she's got a bad starter and a soft front tyre and the low-air buzzer goes off if you look at it, but she's got a heart." He sat down on the floor beside me and leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. "She just needs love, bhaiya. Like apan."

"What did you do to her?"

"Today? Today apan only listened to her." He opened one eye. "Tomorrow apan starts the love."

· · ·

At nine o'clock I turned my phone on, on the roof, by the water tanks, for two minutes.

There was no call. Tara hadn't called at two either. The network had been bad all day, Lakshmi didi said; everyone's calls were failing. But at 9:01, the phone buzzed once in my hand.

One SMS. From Tara. Sent at 4:12 that afternoon. It had taken five hours to come nine hundred and fifty kilometres.

Durg mein bhi aa gaya. Annamma aunty hospital se nahi lauti.

It's in Durg too. Annamma aunty didn't come back from the hospital.