Chapter 40 Checkpoint

Rakesh

Sepoy Rakesh Tanwar had stood at a lot of barriers in six years in the Army, and he'd never stood at one where the people in the queue were more frightened of him than of what was behind them.

The checkpoint was on Jhalawar Road where it ran under the big concrete bridge of the bypass, on the southern edge of Kota. They'd built it on the second day of the emergency, out of everything the trucks had brought: concertina wire across all six lanes, sandbags waist-high in a horseshoe, two floodlight towers on trailers with a diesel generator chugging between them, a row of steel barricades painted red and white. Under the bridge, in the shade, there was a long green Army tent with a red cross on the flap. And in front of the tent, every day from seven in the morning till the light went, there was the queue.

It came out of the city towards them along the empty six lanes. Cars with mattresses tied on the roof. Tempos with whole families in the back. Motorcycles carrying three people and a gas cylinder. A tractor with a trolley full of old women. And people on foot, hundreds of them, with bundles on their heads and children on their hips and plastic bags in their hands, walking out of Kota in the heat with their faces set the way people's faces set when they've decided to leave a place and not look back.

Everyone wanted to go south. South was away. South was the hills, and Madhya Pradesh, and the villages they'd come from, and the rumour, which went up and down the queue all day like a fly, that the Fever hadn't got that far yet.

And between them and south, there was Rakesh, and the wire, and the tent.

· · ·

He was from a village near Jhunjhunu, in Shekhawati, which is the kind of place where every second house has a photograph of a man in uniform on the wall with a garland round it. His grandfather had been in the Army. His father had been in the Army, and come home to the village with a pension and a bad knee and a habit of getting up at five. His younger brother was practising for the recruitment rally right now, Rakesh hoped, running laps round the village pond every morning in the dark the way Rakesh had at his age.

He'd thought he knew what the Army was for. He'd thought that for six years.

It was forty-four degrees under the bypass, and the heat came up off the road in sheets, and the generator chugged, and the queue moved forward one family at a time, and at the front of it, at the table outside the tent, the Army doctor did the test.

She was a Captain, from the medical corps, small and quick and exhausted, with her hair scraped back under her cap and a mask over her face and blue gloves on her hands. She'd been doing it for two days, since the order came. A prick on the finger with a little spring needle. A drop of blood on a white plastic cartridge the size of a matchbox. A drop of liquid from a bottle. Ten minutes. Then you looked at the window on the cartridge, and there was either one line, or two lines, or something else.

One line meant clean. You got a stamp on the back of your hand in purple ink and you went through the wire and south.

Two lines meant the Fever. That didn't happen often at the checkpoint, because people with the Fever didn't usually get as far as the checkpoint. When it did, the Captain took off her mask and spoke to them very quietly and kindly, and two soldiers walked them to a place behind the sandbags, and Rakesh didn't watch what happened after that.

And something else meant anomalous.

· · ·

It happened to the Mehta family at about three o'clock.

Rakesh remembered them afterwards because the father had been so polite. He was a small man in a blue shirt with a pen in his pocket, a bank clerk, he told Rakesh while they waited, from the colony behind the stadium. He had his wife with him, and his daughter, who was sixteen and tall and quiet and had a scarf wrapped round her left arm from the wrist to the elbow, though it was forty-four degrees. They'd been walking since six in the morning. They had one suitcase between them and a bag of oranges, and the father offered Rakesh an orange while they waited, and Rakesh said no, and the father insisted, and Rakesh took it and put it in his pocket because he didn't know what else to do.

The mother and the father got one line each. Purple stamps.

The daughter's cartridge had a line, and then, beside it, very faint, a second line, and then, between the two, a thin smudge of colour that wasn't supposed to be there. A sort of blue.

The Captain looked at it for a long time. Then she looked at the girl. Then, very gently, she asked the girl to unwrap the scarf from her arm.

The girl looked at her father.

"It's a scratch," said the father. "From a gate. A week ago. She's fine, madam, you can see she's fine, it's been a week, if it was the — if it was that, she'd have—"

The girl unwrapped the scarf.

It wasn't a scratch. Even Rakesh, who wasn't a doctor, could see what it was. Two curved rows of marks on the inside of the forearm, healed over, pale, like brackets.

"How long ago?" said the Captain quietly.

"Last Monday," said the girl. Her voice was perfectly steady. "I had a fever for one night. Then I woke up." She looked at the Captain. "I'm fine. I can hear them, that's all. I can hear them all the time. It's like a fan. But I'm fine."

The Captain closed her eyes for a second. Then she opened them and wrote something on a form on her clipboard, and tore off a copy, and looked up at Rakesh, and nodded at the white truck.

· · ·

The white truck stood behind the tent, under the bridge, where the queue couldn't see it. It was a big closed container truck, the kind that carries vegetables in cold storage, painted white, with a number stencilled on the side and no windows at all. It had arrived on the second day with a Subedar and four men who didn't talk to anyone. Every evening at dusk it drove away south with whatever had been put in it during the day, and every morning it came back empty.

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Rakesh had been told what it was for. Persons with anomalous results to be shifted to a designated facility for observation and care. He'd been told it in exactly those words, on the second day, by the Major himself, and he'd said Yes, sahab, and he'd believed it, more or less, because the Major didn't lie to his men.

The girl went quietly. That was the worst of it. She just picked up her scarf and folded it, very neatly, and held it in both hands, and walked between Rakesh and another sepoy towards the back of the tent.

Her father didn't go quietly.

He went from polite to screaming in less than a second. He went over the table, over the cartridges and the forms and the bottles, and the Captain fell back, and he had his daughter by the arm, by the other arm, the one without the marks, and he was shouting, Where are you taking her, where, I'm coming, I'm coming with her, she's sixteen, she's only sixteen, I'm her father—

Rakesh got him round the chest from behind. He did it the way they'd been trained, firmly, without hurting him. The father was small and very light and fought like a cat, and Rakesh held him, and the father screamed his daughter's name over and over into the hot air under the bridge, Priya, Priya, Priya, and the girl walked away between the soldiers and didn't look back, because, Rakesh understood later, she couldn't have kept walking if she had.

The doors of the white truck opened. She climbed in. The doors closed.

Rakesh held the father until he stopped fighting, and then he went on holding him, because the man's legs had gone, and he'd have fallen. The mother stood beside them with the bag of oranges and didn't make a sound.

The orange was still in Rakesh's pocket. He could feel it against his leg, round and heavy and warm.

· · ·

At five, Jassi started shaking again.

Agniveer Jaswant Singh Gill was twenty-one and from a village outside Ludhiana, one of the new four-year boys, and had the best laugh in the company, and for nine days he hadn't laughed once. He'd been with Rakesh on the second night of the emergency, in a lane in the old city by the river, when something had come out of a dark doorway and got him by the shoulder. He'd had a fever for one night. He'd woken up.

And he'd told the Major, the next morning, standing very straight in front of the Major's jeep with his shoulder bandaged and his hands shaking, that he could hear them.

Rakesh didn't understand it, even now. Nobody in the company did, except, maybe, the Major. What they knew was this: Jassi had been in Kota once before, two years ago, at a coaching centre near the river, preparing for the NDA exam, and he'd failed it, and gone home, and joined the Army through the recruitment rally the next year. And at the coaching centre, he told Rakesh one night, everybody had bought blue-and-silver capsules from a tea stall before the tests. For focus. He'd taken them for six months.

The Major had made him a listener. That was the word they used, in the company, not to his face. He sat on an upturned ammunition box behind the sandbags all day, with his eyes closed and his hands on his knees, and listened. Not with his ears. With whatever the bite had given him. And sometimes he opened his eyes and said something, and the Major wrote it down.

At five o'clock he opened his eyes and his hands were shaking so badly that his water bottle rattled on his knee.

"One more," said Jassi. "North. In the city. Near the river." His voice was thin. "She's writing."

"She?"

"It feels like a she." He shut his eyes again. "Small. Scared. She's stopping them, one at a time, to get past. Every time she does it, it's like a match being struck."

The Major was standing at the sandbags behind him with a pair of binoculars, looking north up the empty six lanes towards the city. He didn't lower them. He said, "Grid?"

Jassi said some numbers. The Major wrote them on a pad on his knee, without looking down.

Major Sangwan was a big, grey, quiet man from Haryana, with a moustache like a brush and a voice like gravel in a bucket. He'd been in the Army twenty-two years. He'd been in Kashmir and the north-east and with the UN in the Congo, and he'd brought every man in the company home from all of it, and the men would have walked into the river for him. Rakesh would have. He'd thought so, anyway, until three o'clock.

· · ·

At dusk, before the white truck left, the Major called the section commanders together behind the tent, and Rakesh was close enough to hear.

"Friday night," said the Major. "We push from the centre."

He had a map on the bonnet of his jeep. He drew on it with a finger. "The brigade comes in from the north and east, all of it, every vehicle, sirens, lights, helicopters with loudspeakers. We drive the whole city in front of us. Everything dead in Kota goes south." His finger moved down the map, down Jhalawar Road, to the bypass. To where they were standing. "Away from the river. Away from the railway. Away from the hospitals. South, into the open ground on this side of the bypass, between the city and us, where we can deal with it."

"And the bypass, sahab?"

"The bypass stays shut," said the Major. "Wire, lights, guns. Nothing comes through it. Not dead, not living. Friday night, from nine o'clock, this checkpoint is a wall." He looked at them. "Anything on the city side of this wall on Friday night, I don't want to know about until Saturday morning."

Rakesh thought about the campus. He'd seen it from the bridge, every evening, the big lit building in the middle of the dark trees to the west, with its generator droning. A coaching campus, they said. Ninety-odd survivors. The Major talked to some boy there every night on a satellite phone. The boy had sent a list that morning. Rakesh had seen the Major reading it on the bonnet of the jeep, two pages, the second page much shorter than the first.

The campus was on the city side of the wall.

Nobody said anything about it. Rakesh didn't either. He was a sepoy. He stood at a barrier and held people back, and that was what he was for.

· · ·

The section commanders went back to their posts. The Major stayed at the jeep, folding the map. Jassi was still on his ammunition box behind the sandbags, with his eyes shut and his water bottle rattling on his knee, and as the Major passed him, he spoke.

"Sahab."

The Major stopped.

"There's something else," said Jassi. His eyes were still closed. "I didn't say before. I wasn't sure. I'm still not sure." His voice had gone very low, the way people's voices go in a temple. "Yesterday. At dawn. Just before five. From the south side. Over there." He lifted one shaking hand and pointed, without opening his eyes, straight at the dark trees to the west, and the lit building in the middle of them. "Somebody wrote a deep one."

"Deep."

"Not like the others. Not stopping. Not pulling. The others are like matches being struck, sahab. Like pencils on paper." Jassi swallowed. "This was like a bell. Like a temple bell, a big one, heard from under a lake. Very far down. Very slow. I felt it in my teeth." His hand was shaking so hard now he had to put it back on his knee. "And then it didn't stop. It went on, quieter and quieter, but it went on. All day yesterday. Spreading. Like when you drop a stone in a tank and the rings go out." He swallowed again. "And today, sahab. Just before five. Same place. Another one. Smaller. Faster. Like somebody in a hurry."

The Major stood there in the dusk with the folded map in his hand and looked at the lit building in the trees for a long time.

Rakesh, at the wire, watching, saw something in his face that he'd never seen there in six years. Not fear. The Major didn't do fear. Something much more careful than fear.

"Find it," said Major Sangwan.

Behind the tent, the white truck started its engine and pulled out onto the empty highway, south, into the dark, with no lights on the back, and Rakesh stood at the barrier with a stranger's orange in his pocket and watched it go until he couldn't see it any more.