Chapter 36 Zenith, Shikhar

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

It was ten to two in the morning, Monday night, and he was standing on the window ledge at the end of the third-floor corridor with a spanner in his teeth, a plastic bottle of diesel in his pocket, and nothing between him and the dead but three floors of air.

The Admin Block had grilles on every window. Iron, painted grey, bolted into the stone. I'd noticed the bolts on Saturday, the way I notice everything: they'd been put in from the outside. Somebody, years ago, had fitted the grilles after the building was finished, standing on a ladder in the car park, and they'd put the nuts on the outside because it was easier. The nuts faced the night.

I'd been awake since nine, since Tara's message. There's nothing you can do about a message from nine hundred and fifty kilometres away except the next thing on the list. This was the next thing.

And along the front of the building, at the height of the third-floor windows, there was a concrete ledge about forty centimetres wide, where the outdoor units of the air conditioners sat in a row like birds on a wire.

"I'll go," I'd said, on Sunday, when I'd shown him.

"Bhaiya," Bunty had said, with enormous patience, "you climbed one bamboo scaffold in your whole life and you're still telling people about it. Apan has been climbing on trucks since he was six." He'd taken the spanner out of his pocket and weighed it in his hand. "Also, you don't know what a spanner is for."

"It's for nuts."

"It's for love," said Bunty.

· · ·

He went along the ledge sideways, with his back to the wall and his belly to the night, past the outdoor units one by one, the way you'd edge past people in a cinema. Below him, round and round in the yellow light from the windows, the dead walked. I leaned out of the corridor window and watched him and didn't breathe. Ira stood behind me with her hand on my back. I don't think she knew it was there.

The Director's office was the fourth window along. Bunty stopped outside it and crouched on the ledge, and took the bottle out of his pocket, and dripped diesel on every nut of the grille, one by one, slowly, the way his father had taught him to do with rusted bolts on trucks that came in from the mines.

"Diesel gets in the threads," he'd explained, on Sunday. "Then it doesn't scream."

It didn't scream. I heard four soft clicks, one after another, from the far end of the ledge, as each nut gave. Bunty lifted the grille away from the window frame, very slowly, and leaned it against the AC unit beside him. Then he took a screwdriver from his other pocket and slid it into the gap of the window, and pushed, and the latch popped.

He disappeared inside.

A minute later the door of the Director's office opened from the inside, and Bunty's round face looked out into the dark corridor, shining with sweat and pride.

"Welcome," he whispered, "to Saxena sir's office. Please remove your shoes."

· · ·

It was enormous. I'd never been in an office like it. Wood on the walls, a carpet you sank into, a desk the size of Bunty's father's garage with a leather chair behind it that tilted. Framed photographs everywhere: the Director with a minister, the Director with a cricketer, the Director with a row of smiling toppers holding up their All India Ranks on cardboard. Aditya was in four of them.

On the desk there was nothing but a lamp, a pen stand, a framed motto in brass that said RANK IS A HABIT, and a satellite phone in a charging cradle, plugged into the wall, with a tiny green light glowing on it.

I looked at that for a long time. Number five on the KEYS page. Sat phone. Aditya's belt. Not every night, it turned out. The sockets in the guest suite weren't on the generator line; the ones in the Director's office were, because of the computers. Every second night, the electrician had told me, for the price of one Maggi, when the battery ran low, Aditya left the phone here to charge until three.

"Bhaiya," whispered Bunty, sitting very carefully in the leather chair and tilting it back, "this chair costs more than apan's whole family."

"Get out of the chair."

"Five minutes."

"Bunty."

He got out of the chair.

· · ·

We found them in the cupboard behind the desk. A tall wooden cupboard, locked, with a cheap little lock that Bunty opened with the screwdriver in about four seconds, wearing the expression of a surgeon.

Cartons. Brown cardboard cartons, a dozen of them, stacked on the shelves, each one sealed with brown tape and printed on the side in neat blue letters.

SHIKHAR COGNITIVE WELLNESS PROGRAMME — ELITE BATCH. NOT FOR SALE.

Ira took one down. She cut the tape with her thumbnail. Inside, packed in rows, were blister strips. Silver foil, and in every little plastic bubble, a capsule. Blue and silver. Exactly the size and colour of the one I'd swallowed with tap water at two in the morning, two years ago, sitting on my bunk.

She held up a strip in the light of the lamp and looked at it for a long time. Her face didn't move. It went very still, the way it had gone on the fifth floor when she'd watched nine dead people walk towards her.

"Not for sale," I said. "That's how you know. Nobody writes not for sale on something unless somebody's been selling it."

Behind the cartons there were files. Box files, the kind every office in India has, with the names written on the spines in marker. ADMISSIONS. FEES. And one that said, in the Director's own handwriting, CWP — CONSENT.

Ira opened it on the carpet and we knelt round it in the light of Bunty's torch.

Forms. Hundreds of them. One for each student. Shikhar Cognitive Wellness Programme. Focus Supplement Trial. Voluntary participation. A paragraph about concentration and exam stress and a "natural nootropic compound developed in partnership with a leading Indian research laboratory". A place for the student's name and batch. A place for the parent's signature.

I turned the pages. Ganga batch, almost all of them. Names I knew from the Wall of Selections and the app and the queue for my power banks. Rohan Sethi, signed by a father in Delhi in confident blue ink. Kunal Bhatia. Sneha Iyer. Aditya Rathore, two years ago, signed by Rajendra Rathore of Jodhpur in very small careful letters, as if he'd been worried about getting it wrong.

This chapter came from NovelPhoenix without consent; the author publishes it on that site, and readers support them by reading there.

Ira turned the pages too, faster than me. Then she stopped.

Ira Deshmukh. Ganga. And across the place where the parent was supposed to sign, in a different pen, in firm capitals, one word: DECLINED. And under it, a signature I didn't know, and a note, in a doctor's terrible handwriting: I would like to know what is in this. Please send me the composition. — Dr. S. Deshmukh.

Nobody had sent her the composition. There was a paper clip on the form, and nothing clipped to it.

Ira looked at her mother's handwriting for a long time.

"Aai," she said, very quietly. That was all.

· · ·

There was more. There's always more. I found it in the bottom of the box file, in a clear plastic sleeve, the way important papers are kept by people who don't want them found.

A delivery challan. The thin pink kind, carbon copy, with a stamp. AVIRAT NEUROSCIENCES PVT. LTD. Plot 41, Pithampur Industrial Area, Dhar (M.P.). Consignee: Shikhar Institute, Kota (Rajasthan) — Attn. Director. Description of goods: CWP-Z7, capsules, 10,000 nos. Remarks: Clinical supply. Not for resale.

And clipped behind it, a printout of an email. Dated April. From somebody at Avirat whose title was Head, Clinical Operations, to the Director.

Dear Mr. Saxena,

Batch Z-7 outcomes continue to exceed expectations: focus, stress tolerance and test performance markers all significantly above control. Reported side effects remain within acceptable limits (sleep disturbance, emotional flattening, occasional transient memory lapses). We recommend expanding to 1,000 subjects across your Kota centres from the June session. Our team will be in touch regarding logistics.

Warm regards.

I read it twice. Then I read the side effects a third time. Sleep disturbance. Pintu, who hadn't slept a whole night since his nephew's board exams. Emotional flattening. A calm so complete I'd thrown up when it wore off. Occasional transient memory lapses.

I thought about a boy on a platform in the floodlights, looking for one second like a man who'd walked into a room and couldn't remember what he'd come for.

Then I thought about something else, and went back to the cupboard, and found the stock register on the bottom shelf, a long thin book with a cloth spine, and ran my finger down the column for CWP-Z7.

Received: 10,000.

Issued, Elite Batch (Ganga), weekly: 2,960.

Balance: and then a number that had been written in pencil, and rubbed out, and written again, and rubbed out again, until the paper had gone thin.

"Six thousand," I said. "Near enough. Six thousand capsules not in that cupboard and not given to Ganga batch." I looked at the cartons on the shelves. Twelve of them. Maybe a thousand capsules. "Somebody in this building was selling the Director's trial to a chaiwala, every Thursday, at eleven o'clock, out of the back of a white Tempo with the Shikhar sticker scraped off."

"Pintu bhaiya," whispered Bunty.

"Pintu bhaiya was the shop," I said. "This was the warehouse."

· · ·

Ira sat back on her heels on the Director's carpet. In the light of the torch her face was completely white.

"Zenith," she said.

It was the name Pintu's customers used. The name I'd used, at the crossing. I don't know who gave it to the capsules first. Some topper, probably, two years ago, who'd thought it sounded cool, like a brand of watch.

"Shikhar," I said.

She looked at me.

"It's the same word," I said. "In two languages. The highest point. The peak. They named the institute after the top of the mountain and somebody named the capsules after the top of the sky, and it's the same word." I looked at the cartons. "Somebody thought that was very clever."

Ira had her phone out. She was photographing everything: the cartons, the consent forms, her mother's DECLINED, the challan, the email, the register with its rubbed-out balance. Her hands were completely steady. Her face wasn't.

"They knew," she said, as she photographed. Low and tight. "They knew. Sleep, feelings, memory. In April. And they wanted a thousand more. And then this happened, and Saxena took his boxes and left in an SUV, and now he calls Aditya every night and tells him to keep the programme students together." She lowered the phone. "Keep them together for what, Kabir? For who?"

"For the logistics," I said. "Our team will be in touch."

She opened her mouth.

And on the desk, in its charging cradle, the satellite phone began to buzz.

· · ·

It was very quiet, as rings go. A low, insistent electronic purr, and the little green light turning red and flashing. In that silent office at two in the morning it sounded like an alarm going off in a temple.

Then, in the corridor, footsteps.

Not dead footsteps. Living ones. Quick and light, coming fast from the direction of the guest suite.

I've never seen three people move so fast. Ira swept the consent forms into the box file and the box file into the cupboard in one movement. Bunty shut the cupboard door and turned the cheap lock with his screwdriver. I switched off the torch. There was one place to go and we all went there: under the Director's enormous desk, into the dark hollow where his knees had gone, all three of us, folded up like laundry. Ira's elbow was in my ribs. My knee was in Bunty's stomach. Bunty's face was pressed into the back of my neck, and I could feel him breathing like a pressure cooker on a low flame.

A key turned in the door.

The lights didn't come on. Whoever it was came in by the light of the corridor, fast, across the carpet, and picked up the phone from its cradle on the desk, directly above our heads, and pressed a button.

"Sir," said Aditya Rathore.

He was standing so close to the desk that I could see his feet in the gap under the front panel. Bare feet, on the expensive carpet. I could have touched them.

"Yes, sir. No, sir, I was awake." A pause. "Ninety-one, sir. Twelve now. One new one on Saturday." Another pause, longer. He was listening. "Yes, sir. The list is ready. The Major's asked for it by Thursday." Pause. "Separate sheet, yes, sir. The way you said."

Bunty's breath went in very slowly against my neck, and stopped.

"No, sir," said Aditya. "None of them know about the programme. I haven't told anyone." A pause. "The consent forms are still in the office, sir, in the cupboard, I can—" He stopped. "Sir?"

Silence. Just the faint electronic crackle of a voice at a great distance, very small, coming out of the phone above our heads.

"Sorry, sir," said Aditya. "Sorry, I — what was the—"

He stopped again.

There was a long, terrible pause in the dark. Above us, the Director's voice went on, small and smooth and far away. And Aditya Rathore stood at the desk with the phone against his ear and didn't say anything at all, and I watched his bare feet on the carpet, and they shifted. Once. The way your feet shift when you're standing at the top of a staircase in the dark and you've forgotten whether there's one more step.

"Yes, sir," he said at last, very quietly. "Yes. Of course. Sorry. It's late." And then, in a voice I'd never heard him use, not on the stairs, not on the platform, a boy's voice: "Sir — what did I just say?"

The voice on the phone said something short.

"Yes, sir," said Aditya. "Good night, sir."

He stood there for a while after the call ended. I could hear him breathing. Then he unplugged the phone from its cradle and took it with him, and went out, and the key turned in the lock behind him, and his footsteps went away down the corridor, slower than they'd come.

· · ·

We stayed under the desk for a long time.

"Bhaiya," Bunty whispered eventually, into the back of my neck. "Apan has been holding a sneeze for eleven minutes."

"Hold it for one more."

"Apan is going to die."

"Then die quietly."

He sneezed into my collar, very small, like a cat. Ira, in the dark beside me, made a sound that might, in another life, have been the beginning of a honk.

Then we crawled out, and Bunty went back along the ledge in the dark and put the grille back and did up every nut with the spanner, slowly, with love, and Ira and I let ourselves out of the Director's office by the door, and turned the little brass knob on the inside so it would lock behind us, the way it had been.

· · ·

I didn't go to sleep. I sat on the mattress in my storeroom with the generators roaring through the wall and thought about chains.

On Sunday morning in Room 603, Ira had wrapped a chain round the handle of a fire door, with a dead man on the other side of it, and snapped a padlock shut, and kept the key. On the court, on the first night, somebody had wrapped a chain round a gate with forty boys on the other side of it, and kept the key. I'd spent two years in Kota thinking I was the one who held keys. You find the lock, you find who's holding the key, you find their price.

Aditya Rathore thought he was holding the chain. The list, the ranks, the Register, the phone. He thought he was the one at the gate with the padlock.

He was on the other side of it. He just couldn't remember how he'd got there.

That's the thing nobody tells you in Kota, where everybody spends two years trying to get to the top of a list. Somebody always holds the other end of the chain.