Chapter 38 Rani

"Bhaiya," said Bunty. "Where are you going?"

I was at the side door of the Admin Block. I had my sandals on and my hand on the grille, and through the bars I could see them coming out of the hostels in the soft grey light, the long slow lines, thousands of them, turning towards the academic blocks. I was going to go with them. I was going to go to Block B, and up the stairs, and along the corridor with its notice boards, and sit down.

"Class," I said.

Bunty was standing at the bottom of the stairs in a vest and shorts with a toothbrush in his mouth. He'd been on his way out to the yard. He took the toothbrush out.

"Bhaiya," he said slowly. "You have never gone to class in your life."

I looked at my hand on the grille.

He was right. For two years I'd gone to class the way a cat goes to a bath. I'd sat at the back, I'd sold Maggi under the desk, I'd slept, I'd left early. I'd never once in my life woken up wanting to be on time.

And I'd woken up this morning at 6:55 with my sandals already on.

I stood there and held the grille and felt it. The pull. Not in my head. Lower, behind my ribs, like the tug of a current when you've waded too far out into a river. All those thousands of people going to class, and something in me that wanted to go with them, quietly and completely, the way you want to sleep when you're very tired.

7:00 — Block B — sit.

It wasn't my line. I'd read it on forty papers in the court on Saturday. I'd read it on a hundred papers since. And yesterday I'd put my hand right inside one of those papers and pulled out a line and pushed in another, and some of it, it seemed, had come out with me on my fingers.

I held the grille until 7:10, when the last of them had gone inside, and the pull faded, slowly, like the sound of a train you've missed.

Then I took my hand off the bars.

"Bhaiya?" said Bunty. He'd come right up to me. He was looking at my face. "Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I've seen thousands," I said. "This one was me."

· · ·

I wrote it in the Ledger, on the COSTS page, under Fear. I didn't know where else to put it.

Echo. Wed 6:55. Wanted to go to class. Lasted till 7:10. (After Section C, Tues.) Not a loss.

I looked at that for a while. Then I added:

Something added. Worse?

· · ·

"Rani," said Bunty.

It was half past two, in the heat, and the dead were in the shade. We were under Bus 14, on our backs on a sheet of cardboard on the hot concrete of the yard, side by side, looking up at the underneath of a bus. I'd come because he'd asked me to. Bunty had never asked me to come and see anything in two years.

"Who's Rani?"

"She is." He patted the steel above his face with enormous tenderness. "Hariram ji named her. Six years he drove her. Every bus has a name, bhaiya, the drivers name them, they just don't tell the students. Bus 9 is Bhoot, because the horn sounds like a ghost. Bus 3 is Chachi, because she's slow and she complains. And Bus 14," said Bunty, "is Rani. Because she's a queen."

"Because she's a queen."

"Hariram ji says when he got her she was new, and the other drivers were jealous, and she never once broke down on the highway in six years. Not once. Even in the monsoon." He pointed up at something black and greasy. "That's her starter. The starter's bad. That's the only thing. Hariram ji says sometimes you have to turn the key three times and talk to her nicely."

"What do you say?"

"Chal, Rani," said Bunty. "Chal, meri rani. Come on, my queen." He said it with a straight face. "It works."

I lay on the cardboard beside him and looked up at Rani's underneath, and for a while neither of us said anything, and it was, I realised, the most peaceful I'd been since Sunday the week before.

· · ·

He told me everything, lying there. Bunty had always explained machines better than people.

The battery had been weak. He'd swapped it at night for the battery out of Chachi, who wasn't going anywhere, and Hariram ji had helped him carry it, and nobody had noticed, because nobody looks at batteries.

The tyres were good, except the front left, which was soft. Chaudhary ji had known that. He'd kicked it every morning for years, a little harder than the others, Hariram ji said, as if he were reminding it.

And the brakes.

"Air brakes," said Bunty, and his face changed. "Bhaiya, this is the problem. Listen. Big buses have air brakes. When she's parked, the brakes are on, held on by springs. To let them off, you need air. The engine makes the air. It pumps it into the tanks, and when there's enough pressure, the brakes let go and you can drive."

"How long?"

"From cold? Two minutes. Three, maybe. Rani's compressor is old." He turned his head on the cardboard and looked at me. "And while she's building air, the low-air buzzer goes. Bzzzzzzzzzzz. Very loud. In the cab. It doesn't stop till the pressure's up. It's so you don't drive off without brakes and kill everybody."

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I did the sum. I did it the way he'd taught me to see it, lying there under the bus. An engine starting in the yard. A buzzer screaming in the cab. Three minutes. In the middle of a campus full of thousands of dead people who go to sound.

"Three minutes," I said.

"Three minutes," said Bunty, "of apan sitting in the driver's seat with the engine running and the buzzer going and every dead person on this campus coming to see what's for lunch." He looked back up at Rani. "And you can't make her go faster. Apan has tried. You can't argue with air."

· · ·

And the diesel.

"Her tank takes two hundred and forty litres," said Bunty. "She's got about a hundred and ninety in her. Bhilai is nine hundred and fifty kilometres. A school bus like Rani does three and a half kilometres to the litre, if you're kind to her and you don't go over sixty." He waited. "Do the sum, bhaiya."

"Two hundred and seventy litres. Without detours."

"There are always detours." He grinned at the underneath of the bus. "So apan's been feeding her."

"From the bay?"

"Bhaiya." He was genuinely offended. "The bay has a meter. You told me. You wrote it in your book, apan saw. Apan isn't stupid." He pointed sideways, across the yard, at Chachi, two buses down, slumped in the heat. "Chachi doesn't have a meter. Chachi has a tank, and a pipe, and apan has a pipe, and a bucket." He spread his hands on the cardboard. "One bucket a night. Twenty litres. Chachi to Rani. Hariram ji holds the torch. Nobody counts the diesel in a bus nobody's allowed to drive."

I looked at him. Bunty Chaurasia, JEE Main 91.2 percentile, qualified by 0.4, the luckiest number in Indore.

"You're a criminal," I said.

"Apan learned from the best," said Bunty, with dignity.

· · ·

Ira's drills started that week, on the Admin Block terrace, at four in the afternoon when the worst of the heat had gone off it.

She didn't ask anybody's permission. She just went up there on Monday with Simran and Ananya and started teaching them the field signals again, the way she'd taught us on the road from the godown. Halt. Down. Come to me. Danger. Water. The next day there were six people. On Wednesday, when I came up from the yard with grease on my shirt, there were twenty-two, standing in rows on the gritty concrete, girls from Kaveri Bhawan and boys from category C and D and two of the staff and Kartik with his insulin pen in his pocket, all of them watching Ira's hands.

She taught them signals. She taught them how to walk in a line without talking, heel and toe, each person watching the back of the person in front. She taught them first aid with a roll of bandage from the clinic: how to stop bleeding, how to tie a sling, how to lie someone on their side so they don't choke. She taught them how to count off. One. Two. Three. Every one of them, out loud, in order, until they could do it in under ten seconds.

"Why are we counting?" asked a girl from Kaveri Bhawan.

"So that if we ever have to move," said Ira, "we know we've got everyone."

She didn't say move where. Nobody asked.

On the edge of the terrace, Kunal and two of the Betaal leaned on the parapet and watched, and laughed. "NCC camp!" Kunal shouted, the first day. "Left, right, left, right! Deshmukh, are you giving certificates?" The others laughed. Ira didn't even look round.

Aditya came up on the second day and watched for a while with his clipboard under his arm. I watched him watch. I was waiting for him to stop it.

He didn't. He smiled at Ira, the hoarding smile, and said, "This is great. Really. Good for morale," and wrote something on his clipboard, and went back down. Later I heard him in the lobby telling Kunal that the drills should be put on the duty roster as physical activity, because it was important to keep people busy, and busy people were calm, and calm people did what they were told.

He wasn't wrong. He was just answering a different question.

· · ·

I found out much later that Ira had been watching me that week. Not the way she'd watched me before, checking her working. Differently. She told me about it on a roof, on a night I'll get to soon, and I'll tell you what she told me.

She'd watched me on Tuesday afternoon, she said, when Ananya's inhaler ran out.

It ran out at lunch. Forty-one doses on Thursday, and every one of them gone by Tuesday, and Ananya sat on the floor of the girls' room with the empty blue inhaler in her hands, pressing it and pressing it, and the hiss getting thinner each time. The nurse had nothing; she'd brought the important things from the clinic to the Admin Block on the first Monday, and salbutamol inhalers weren't one of them. They were still in the clinic, a small white building beside Kaveri Bhawan, four hundred metres away across the open yard, at half past one in the afternoon, when the whole campus was coming out of the mess.

I'd gone to get them. Of course I had. I'm a Betaal; it was the obvious thing. I didn't think about it.

Ira watched me from the terrace. She told me I walked out of the side grille and across the yard into the crowd coming out of the mess, hundreds of them, and through it, the way you'd walk through a crowd on a station platform, not hurrying, hands in my pockets. She said I stopped once, in the middle of them, to tie my sandal. She said I went into the clinic and came out four minutes later with a carton under my arm and walked back the same way, and that halfway across, a dead boy in a Ganga T-shirt turned and walked straight towards me, and I stepped out of his way like you'd step out of the way of a cyclist, and kept walking.

She said she'd had her hand over her mouth the whole time.

She'd watched me on Wednesday morning, too, on the terrace, when I'd gone to the parapet to look down at the yard where Bunty was under Rani. She said I'd leaned out over the parapet, far out, much further than anyone should lean over a three-storey drop, with my weight on my hands, to see under the bus. She said she'd taken a step towards me without meaning to. She said I hadn't even noticed I was doing it.

And on Wednesday at eleven, she said, when the gunshot came.

It came from somewhere outside the wall, to the west, a single crack, flat and loud, and every person on that terrace jumped. Twenty-two people at Ira's drill, and Kunal at the parapet, and Simran, and Ira herself. Somebody screamed. Ananya dropped her new inhaler.

I didn't jump. I was writing in the Ledger, sitting against a water tank, and I looked up, the way you'd look up at a bird.

"I watched your face," Ira said, on the roof. "It was like watching a clock. Nothing moved."

That was the week, she said, that she stopped wondering what I was afraid of, and started wondering what I'd do now that I wasn't afraid of anything at all.

· · ·

At noon on Wednesday, the radio said it.

There was an old radio in the lobby of the Admin Block, a black transistor with a broken aerial mended with a hairpin, that belonged to Pandey ji. It got All India Radio, mostly, and sometimes a Kota FM station that played film songs between the news. Pandey ji turned it on every hour for the bulletin, and everybody stopped whatever they were doing and listened, the way people in villages stop for the rain.

At noon on Wednesday, after the music, a woman's voice read the news in Hindi and then in English. Clear and calm, like a school announcement.

In view of the continuing health emergency, the Ministry has directed that blood screening will be carried out at all checkpoints, relief camps and evacuation points with immediate effect. All persons moving out of containment zones will be screened. Persons with anomalous results will be shifted to designated facilities for further observation and care. Citizens are requested to cooperate fully with health and security personnel.

Then she said it again, the way they do with important things, in case you weren't listening the first time.

The lobby had gone completely quiet. Ninety people, and you could hear the generators through the walls, and the hairpin buzzing on the aerial. People looked at each other. Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then a girl near the stairs, one of the ones from Ira's drill, said quietly, to nobody in particular, what everybody was thinking.

"They're going to test everyone's blood."

Across the lobby, at the foot of the stairs, standing perfectly still with his clipboard under his arm, Aditya Rathore was looking at the twelve of us. One after another. Counting.