Chapter 39 Screening

Aditya called the meeting for half past twelve, before the mess let out, while the radio was still warm.

He didn't use the whiteboard this time. He stood on the third step with his clipboard held against his chest like a shield, and the twelve of us, the Betaal, sat together at the bottom of the stairs, because Kunal had told us to. The rest of the building stood round the lobby and looked at us. I'd been looked at by a hall before. I'd never been looked at by a hall that was doing a sum about me.

"Okay," said Aditya. "Let's align on this. I want everyone to hear it from me first, so that nobody hears it wrong."

He smiled. It was a good smile. It was a little thinner than usual round the edges.

"Blood screening. You've all heard the radio. I spoke to Major Sangwan this morning, at seven, before the announcement, so I know more than the radio does. Here's what it means." He held up one finger. "One: when the Army comes for us, everyone will be tested before they get on the trucks. Everyone. Me too. That's normal. That's procedure. It's to keep the clean zones clean." Two fingers. "Two: people whose results are unusual will be taken to a separate facility. For observation. For care." He looked at us, the twelve, at the bottom of the stairs. "That's us. We already know our results will be unusual. We've known since we woke up."

Nobody moved.

"And I want to be very clear," said Aditya, "that this is good news."

· · ·

He explained why. He explained it well. That was always the frightening thing about Aditya: he believed every word, and he explained it well.

Registration, he said, means recognition. For a week the twelve of us had been the only people on this campus who could walk among the dead, and fetch food, and fetch medicine, and keep the generators fed. Without us, ninety-one people would have starved by Thursday. The Army knew that. The Major knew that. The Major had told him so. And now the government was setting up special facilities for people like us, which meant that somebody, somewhere, in Delhi or wherever these things were decided, had understood that we were special. Not sick. Special. People with a capability. People who could help.

"Think about it," said Aditya. "What happens to a topper? A topper gets the best college. A topper gets the scholarship. A topper gets taken care of. Separate facility doesn't mean separate from everyone. It means separate from the queue." He smiled at the twelve of us. "We're the toppers, guys. We always were."

Some of the Betaal were nodding. Mayank, the boy who'd been happy to hand me the diesel cans, had his hands clasped between his knees and was nodding very fast, the way you nod when you need something to be true. Kunal was grinning. Sneha Iyer sat very upright with her long plait over her shoulder and didn't nod at all. Rohan Sethi sat two steps above me with his hands in his pockets and his eyes half closed, and if you didn't know him you'd have thought he was asleep.

"The Major says the corridor will be secure by Sunday," said Aditya. "Four days. Evacuation on Sunday. Everyone out, everyone tested, everyone safe. I've sent him the list this morning. All ninety-one names, rank, room, everything. And a separate page for the twelve of us, with our test scores, so they know exactly what each of us can do. So they can look after us properly." He tapped the clipboard against his chest. "I've done the hard part. All we have to do now is wait."

He turned the page on his clipboard as he said it. Just for a second, a flick of the thumb, the way you turn a page when you're checking something.

I've always been able to read upside down. It's one of the first things you learn if you sell things for a living: the list on the other person's side of the counter. I read the page in the second it took him to turn it.

It was the separate sheet. Twelve lines, in green, in his neat hand. The numbers from Saturday night. And at the end of each line, in a column he'd ruled himself, a word.

1. A. Rathore — L31/G9 — High value.

2. K. Bhatia — L17/G7 — High value.

All the way down, through Standard and Standard and Standard.

12. K. Anand — L3/G1 — Low value.

He turned the page back. He hadn't noticed me reading it. Nobody ever notices the bottom of the list reading.

· · ·

"Low value," said Ira.

We were in the transport office. It was half past two, the heat at its worst, the dead in the shade, and Ira had been in the transport office every afternoon since Monday, working. I'd told her about the sheet on the way across the yard. She hadn't said anything until now.

The transport office was a small concrete room at the end of the yard with a desk and two chairs and a steel almirah and a window looking out over the buses. Chaudhary ji was standing at the window. He stood there every afternoon between his rounds, with his hands behind his back and his key ring on his hip, looking out at the yard the way he'd looked out at it for eleven years. Ira had worked round him for three days. She'd stopped noticing him, she said, the way you stop noticing a hostel warden. I'd noticed that she'd put her chair with its back to him anyway.

"Low value means low priority," I said. "It's good. It's the best place on a list. Nobody looks at it."

"They're putting the twelve of you in a separate truck, Kabir."

"Then I'll be at the back of it."

This unapproved copy came from the author's NovelPhoenix chapter, and readers who use the source publication support the person who wrote it.

"That's not funny."

"No," I said. "I know."

She looked at me across the desk. Then she looked down at what she'd been working on, and for a while she didn't say anything, and I looked at it too.

· · ·

It was a map.

Not one map. Three, laid out on the desk and weighted at the corners with a stapler and a steel glass and a dead man's tea mug. A big printed district map of Kota, the kind the transport department uses, with the roads in red and the railways in black and the villages as little circles. A set of the campus bus route charts, hand-drawn in Chaudhary ji's careful pencil, with every stop marked and every turning numbered. And on top, on a sheet of graph paper from the physics lab, Ira's own map, drawn from the other two in pencil, with a grid and numbers along the edges, the way they'd taught her in NCC.

Beside it, there was a brass compass from the physics lab, the old kind in a wooden box, with a needle that swung and settled.

"The bypass checkpoint is here," said Ira. She touched the graph paper with a pencil. Her voice had gone into its NCC register, flat and exact, the way it always did when she was about to tell you something she was sure of. "Where Jhalawar Road goes under the bypass bridge. Sandbags, wire, floodlights. That's where the screening will be. Every vehicle going south out of Kota goes through it. That's the plan. That's why it's there."

"So we can't use Jhalawar Road."

"Not till we're past it." The pencil moved. "The back gate opens onto the farm track along the wall. Everyone thinks the farm track only goes to the fields. It doesn't. It goes south-west for six hundred metres, along the end of the wall, then turns south through the fields. Here. There's a canal here, a small one, dry now, and the track runs along it, east, for nearly three kilometres." The pencil followed it. "And here the canal goes under the bypass. Through a culvert. A big one, for the canal and the farm carts. It's on the transport chart, because in the monsoon Chaudhary ji used to send the buses round that way when the main road flooded."

She tapped Chaudhary ji's pencil chart. There it was, in his careful hand: Monsoon diversion. Canal culvert under bypass. Max height 3.4 m. BUS OK.

"Three point four metres," said Ira. "Rani is three point one. I measured her on Monday with a tape from the workshop."

I looked at her.

"The culvert's two kilometres west of the checkpoint," she said. "In the dark, with the lights off, they won't see us. They're looking north, at the city, at the road. Not west, at a canal. Then the track goes south-east through two villages, here and here, and joins Jhalawar Road again here, four kilometres south of the bypass." The pencil stopped. "Past the checkpoint. Past the screening. On the highway, going south, to Darrah, and the hills, and Madhya Pradesh."

She put the pencil down.

"Eleven kilometres of farm track," she said. "At night. With the lights off. I've walked every metre of it on paper and taken bearings every two hundred metres, so I can do it with a torch under my dupatta and the compass. If Bunty drives at fifteen kilometres an hour and doesn't hit a buffalo, we're on the highway in under an hour."

I'd been doing sums my whole life. I've told you that. I've sat in rooms with the best toppers in Kota and watched them do sums, and I've always been faster. I've never in my life been as impressed by a page of working as I was by that sheet of graph paper on Chaudhary ji's desk.

"Ira," I said.

"Don't," she said. "Don't say anything clever. I'm not in the mood."

So I didn't.

· · ·

"Two buses," said Ira. "Rani and Bhoot. Bunty drives Rani. Hariram ji drives Bhoot. Malhotra sir says he'll find the people. I told him about the office yesterday. About the forms, and the email, and Aai's declined." She paused. "He didn't say anything for a long time. Then he said, I was never told. I signed nothing. I didn't know. Over and over. I've never seen him like that. Then he said, Find the road, Deshmukh. I'll find the people."

"Two buses is a convoy," I said.

"Two buses is two buses."

"Ira. Listen to me." I leaned on the desk. "The Army is coming on Sunday. For you, that's good news. You get tested, you're clean, you get on a truck, you go to a safe zone, you go home to Pune. For Bunty, the same. For Simran and Ananya and Kartik and Lakshmi didi and seventy-three other people in this building, the same. The Army's the best thing that could happen to them." I tapped the separate sheet in my head, the green line at the bottom of it. "It's only bad for twelve people. And only one of those twelve has a sister in Bhilai."

"So."

"So the trio was never the right number either," I said. "It should be one. Me. I take Rani and go out through your culvert and you two wait for the Army."

"You can't drive."

"I'll learn."

"You can't read a map."

"I'll learn that too."

"You can't do anything," said Ira, "on your own. You never could. You've just spent two years making sure you never found out."

· · ·

Bunty had been sitting on the steel almirah the whole time, eating dry Maggi out of the packet, with his legs dangling, listening. Chaudhary ji stood at the window behind him with his hands behind his back.

"Bhaiya," said Bunty.

We both looked at him.

"Apan has something to say." He put the Maggi down. He wiped his hands carefully on his shorts. He looked at me, and then at Ira, and then at me again, and I watched him do it, all of it, the long scenic route, every stop, every turning.

"Apan is with didi," said Bunty.

I didn't say anything.

"Everyone who wants to go." He said it quickly, as if he'd been holding it in his mouth for days, which I think he had. "Two buses. Rani and Bhoot. Apan drives Rani. And Rani goes where bhaiya goes. That's not a vote. That's just what Rani does." His face had gone very red. "And bhaiya, you're not going alone. You can't even ride a cycle. Apan has seen you try to put the straw in a Frooti."

"Bunty—"

"Two against one, bhaiya," said Bunty Chaurasia, and picked up his Maggi again, and stuffed a handful into his mouth, and looked out of the window so that he wouldn't have to see my face, and his hands were shaking.

In two years he had never once disagreed with me about anything that mattered. I'd counted on that. I'd counted on it so completely that I'd never even written it down.

I looked at Ira. She was looking at Bunty. Her mouth had gone very soft at one corner.

"Everyone who wants to go," she said.

"Everyone who wants to go," I said.

It was the first argument I'd ever lost. I found I didn't mind as much as I'd always thought I would.

· · ·

I sat up on the roof at four, after the transport office, with the Ledger on my knees, and looked at the green line in my head, the one I'd read upside down.

12. K. Anand — L3/G1 — Low value.

It was a good line. I'd built it on purpose, on Saturday, in the floodlights, freezing three for four seconds while the terrace laughed. It was a dead rank, the deadest I'd ever had, and it had done exactly what my dead ranks always did: it had put me at the bottom of the list, where nobody looks.

Low value means low priority. On a list like that, at the bottom, you're the last name they'll bother to look for. You might even get lost. Lists lose people at the bottom all the time.

Unless somebody, somewhere, had told them what I could actually do.

I looked south, over the parapet, over the pale campus wall and the brown fields shaking in the heat, towards the bypass. Two kilometres away, at the bridge, I could just make out the checkpoint: a dark line of sandbags, the glint of wire, two floodlight towers standing over the road like herons. I'd never been near it. Nobody there had ever seen me.

But on Tuesday morning at five o'clock, under a neem tree, I'd pulled a thirty-one-year-old line out of a dead man and pushed another one in, and it had taken forty seconds, and it had been the loudest thing I'd ever done.

I'd been thinking of it as the quietest.