Chapter 37 Section C

At ten to five on Tuesday morning, I went out to break the rule in red.

I'd been thinking about it since Saturday, since the window and the laminated sheet and the empty circles at the bottom of Gopal Maharaj's paper. I'd thought about it on the terrace with Malhotra sir, and in Room 12 with forty dead students waiting for a teacher, and under the Director's desk with Bunty's breath in my collar. I'd thought about it for so long that by the time I walked out past Kunal's yawn and the grille into the dark, it didn't feel like a decision any more. It felt like the next question on a paper.

SECTION C — HABIT. VISIBLE, NOT WRITABLE. Do not attempt.

Aditya had written that. Aditya, who saw spreadsheets. Who could stop thirty-one of the dead for a full minute, and who couldn't remember his mother's voice.

I'd been reading the thing he'd called not writable for four days. It had circles.

· · ·

I'll tell you my reasons, because I had them, and they were good ones. I always have good reasons. That's never been my problem.

The first was Sushila aunty.

I'd been thinking about her more than I let myself. About the lids, and her voice going over the roofs. Khana lag gaya. The man in the vest had had his teeth in my arm, and she'd banged two steel lids together at one o'clock, and he'd let go of me and gone to lunch. Not because the sound was loud. The cooker had been loud. Because it was one o'clock, and someone was calling him to eat, and for sixty years of his life that was what one o'clock had meant.

Hunger had been holding my arm. Habit had made it let go.

The library boy, revising while the hunting dead poured round him. The warden, knocking and waiting and moving on. The basketball players, coming to the court at six to be locked in. The whole campus, going to the Main Hall on Sunday for a test that would never be marked. Everything I'd learned since Sunday said the same thing, in the same handwriting. The deepest thing in them wasn't hunger. It was the timetable.

And the second reason was seventy people.

You can't move seventy people out of a campus full of the dead with Section A. I could hold three for four seconds. Aditya could hold thirty-one for a minute. There were thousands of them. If I was going to take whoever wanted to go, I needed the dead to be somewhere else, at a time I chose, all of them, without anybody having to hold them there. I didn't need to stop them. I needed to change where they went.

Sushila aunty had done it with two lids, for five minutes, and it had cost her everything.

I wanted to know if it could be done properly.

The third reason I didn't tell myself until afterwards, and I'll tell you now, because I've promised to be honest. The third reason was that I'd been afraid of nothing at all for four days, and when you're afraid of nothing, do not attempt reads very differently. It reads like an invitation.

· · ·

At 4:52, Gopal Maharaj came out of the staff quarters behind the mess and started along the path to the kitchen.

I was waiting for him under the neem tree halfway along. It was still dark. Behind me, round the Admin Block, the dead were finishing their last circles of the night. In front of me, coming slowly along the path with his careful old man's walk, in his white coat, with the pencil behind his ear, was a man who had lit the stoves of the Shikhar mess every morning at five o'clock for thirty-one years.

I turned his paper over.

I skipped Section A. I skipped Section B. I went straight to the bottom of the paper, to the faint grey section that every Betaal on campus had been told not to touch, and read it properly, the whole thing, for the first time, the way you read a matrix match question in the last half hour of a paper when you've finished everything else and you have time to do it right.

SECTION C. MATRIX MATCH. Match each entry in Column I with the correct entries in Column II and Column III.

Column I was times. 4:45. 5:00. 7:00. 10:00. 1:00. 3:00. 9:00.

Column II was places. Water tower. Kitchen. Store. Mess hall. Staff quarter. Temple.

Column III was things he did. Look up at the gauge. Light the stoves. Make chai. Count the sacks. Serve. Sit. Pray. Sleep.

And the matches were already filled in. Thirty-one years of them, so dark you could hardly see the paper underneath, the lines between the columns worn deep, like paths across a field that people have walked across every day for a generation. 4:45 — water tower — look up at the gauge. 5:00 — kitchen — light the stoves. 7:00 — kitchen — make chai.

The water tower. I'd almost missed it. Before he lit the stoves, every morning, for thirty-one years, Gopal Maharaj had walked to the water tower that fed the mess and stood under it in the dark and looked up at the float gauge on the side of the tank, to see how much water there was for the day. It was such a small thing that I don't think he'd ever told anyone he did it. It was printed in him deeper than his name.

That was how matrix match works. You can't put an answer that isn't on the paper. You can't match 5:00 with transport yard if transport yard isn't in his columns, any more than you can match an element with a property it doesn't have. Every right answer was already there. It was just a question of which line to draw.

I picked up my pencil, inside my head, and drew one.

5:00 — water tower — stand.

· · ·

It was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

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Section A had been like filling in a bubble. A tap, and done. This was like dragging a pencil through wet cement. The old line from 5:00 to kitchen didn't want to come out. Thirty-one years. I had to pull it out of the paper, slowly, a millimetre at a time, and the paper fought me, the way an old habit fights you, and while I was pulling, the new line had to be drawn at the same time, or the whole row would be left blank, and a blank row, I knew without knowing how I knew, would be wrong.

I don't know how long it took. Ira told me afterwards that she'd been on the terrace, unable to sleep, and had seen me standing under the neem tree, and timed it. Forty seconds. Forty seconds of standing completely still in the dark beside a dead man on a path, with my eyes open.

It felt like the whole three hours of a paper.

Somewhere around the twentieth second my nose began to bleed. Not the slow warm trickle of Section A. A rush, both sides, down my lip and off my chin onto my shirt. My hands went so cold I couldn't feel them. There was a pressure behind my eyes like someone standing on my skull. I kept pulling.

And at the fortieth second, the line came free.

I felt it go in. The new match. 5:00 — water tower — stand. It went into the paper the way the old ones were in it: not lightly, not like a pencil mark. Dark. As if it had always been there.

I let go.

Gopal Maharaj stopped walking.

He stood on the path for a moment in the dark, with his head a little to one side, the way old men stand when they've come into a room and are trying to remember why. Then he turned round. Not towards the kitchen. Away from it. And walked, slowly, carefully, along the path past the end of the mess, to the base of the white water tower with SHIKHAR painted round its tank, and stopped there, and lifted his face, and stood.

It was five o'clock.

I stood under the neem tree with blood running off my chin and watched him, and I'm not ashamed to tell you that my legs went, and I sat down on the path in the dirt.

· · ·

He stood there until seven.

I know, because I sat there and watched him the whole time, with my sleeve pressed against my nose, while the sky went grey and then white and the dead came back from the Admin Block and went into the hostels to lie down. He never moved. He stood at the foot of the water tower with his face turned up to the gauge, the way he'd stood for a few minutes every morning of his working life, and now he stood there for two hours.

At seven, he turned round and walked back to the kitchen, and went in, and I heard, very faintly, the chink of the big steel kettle.

7:00 — kitchen — make chai. I hadn't touched that row. He was still Gopal Maharaj. He'd just stopped lighting the stoves.

I didn't know, sitting there, whether it would last. A freeze in Section A breaks in seconds. I didn't know if a match in Section C broke at all.

It didn't. It was permanent. I found that out the next morning, and every morning after, until the end of what I'm telling you. Every morning at five, Gopal Maharaj walked to the water tower and stood there till seven. As far as I know, he's still doing it.

· · ·

There wasn't a wrong answer. I checked. I sat on the path and went through myself the way Aditya went through his black notebook, the way you'd pat your pockets after you've been in a crowd. Tara. Bhilai. Mummy, the hospital, the platelet counts in Papa's notebook. Shubham, Arjun, Sushila aunty, every name in the Ledger. Grief, when I touched it, still there. Love, still there.

Fear, still gone. But I'd known that.

Nothing new missing. A right answer had cost me nothing but blood and a pair of hands I couldn't feel. I sat there and felt something that I think, if I'd still had the equipment for it, would have been fear of how easy that had been.

I didn't tell anyone.

· · ·

"Your nose," said Ira, at breakfast.

We were sitting on the floor of the first-floor corridor with steel plates of Lakshmi didi's poha, which was mostly onion and hope. My shirt was a clean one, borrowed from Bunty; it came down to my knees. I'd washed my face three times. She looked at my nose anyway, and then at my eyes, and then at my hands, which were still too cold to hold the plate properly.

"The heat," I said.

"It's seven in the morning."

"I'm very sensitive to heat."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked down at her poha. She'd got very good, that week, at deciding which of my lies to let go and which to save for later. I could see her saving this one.

"I've been thinking," she said, "about the office."

I'd been waiting for that.

"I want to tell them," said Ira. Very low. "Everyone. Tonight, at the town hall. I want to stand up on that step where he stands and show them the photographs. The forms. Sleep, feelings, memory. The email. A thousand more. I want every Ganga student in this building who ever swallowed one of those things to know what it was."

"And then?"

"And then they'll know."

"And then Aditya calls Saxena on the sat phone," I said. "And Saxena calls the Major. And the Ganga students who took the capsules, the ones who lean towards Aditya every time he walks into a room like flowers towards a window, look at your photographs and look at him, and believe him. Not because they're stupid. Because the thing in them that answers to him is louder than anything you can show them on a phone." I put down my plate. "You'd lose. And then he'd lock the office, and the diesel bay, and the gate, and us. And we'd never get a bus out of here."

"So we keep it."

"We keep it until it's worth something."

She looked at me as if I'd hit her.

"Worth something," said Ira. "Everything's a price with you. Everything. Even this."

"Especially this," I said. "That's why it's worth keeping."

She stood up. She took her plate and walked away down the corridor without finishing her poha, which, in a building where everybody was hungry, was the angriest thing I'd ever seen anyone do.

Then she stopped at the top of the stairs, with her back to me, and stood there for a while.

"Malhotra sir," she said, without turning round. "I'm telling Malhotra sir. Today."

"Yes," I said. "Tell him."

She went down the stairs.

· · ·

At noon, I went back to look.

I told myself it was a scientific check. It was, partly. I went out in the heat with my two diesel cans, past the dead standing in the shade, past the mess, to the water tower, to see if Gopal Maharaj was still in the kitchen where he should be at midday.

He was. He was standing at the cold stoves with the gas lighter in his hand.

But under the water tower, in the white noon sun, where nobody had ever stood at noon, there were two other people.

Two of the mess helpers. A young man in a vest and an old woman in a green sari with her pallu over her head. I knew them from Lakshmi didi's stories: they'd worked beside Gopal Maharaj in that kitchen for twenty years, chopping, stirring, carrying, following him from stove to stove. They stood side by side at the foot of the water tower in the full glare of the sun, where they'd never stood in their lives, and looked up at the gauge.

I hadn't touched them. I hadn't even turned their papers over.

I stood there with the cans in my hands and felt the hair rise on my arms. Matrix match, I thought. Match each entry in Column I with the correct entries in Column II. And when you change one person's answer, the people who've been copying from him for twenty years change theirs.

It hadn't stayed where I'd put it. It had spread. Quietly, by itself, in the six hours since dawn, the way a rumour spreads through a hostel, from one bed to the next, until by morning everyone knows a thing that nobody told them.

I turned their papers over then. Both of them. At the bottom of each, in Section C, dark and deep, as if it had always been there, in a hand that wasn't theirs and wasn't quite mine:

Water tower — stand.

· · ·

I didn't sleep much that night, either. I lay on my mattress next to the roaring generators and looked at the ceiling and thought about rumours, and how far they go, and how you can never call one back.

I must have slept in the end, because I woke.

It was 6:55 on Wednesday morning. The light through the window was grey and soft. Outside, in the campus, I could hear the hostels opening, and the slow soft rustle of thousands of feet on the paths.

And I was already sitting up on the mattress, with my sandals on, reaching for the door, with one clear and simple and perfectly ordinary thought in my head, the way you have a thought on a school morning before you're properly awake:

I'm going to be late for class.