Chapter 41 Bait

"Gas run," said Kunal. "Bait boy, you're up."

It was a quarter past four. I'd come down from the roof with the green line still in my head, and he was waiting at the bottom of the stairs with five of the Betaal behind him and a clipboard under his arm, the way Aditya carried his. He'd started doing that on Monday. I don't think he knew he was doing it.

"Lakshmi didi's got two cylinders left," he said. "The kitchen in the lobby goes through one every three days. There's a gas agency on the service road, four hundred metres outside the main gate. Cage full of cylinders. I scouted it Sunday. Fifteen of them in the yard, maybe." He smiled. "You go in first and make some noise. You know how to make noise, Anand? You write something. Anything. Doesn't matter if it's wrong. They all turn to you, you walk them out to the road, we roll the cylinders out the back. Easy."

"Easy for who?"

"For us," said Kunal. "That's what bait means."

Lakshmi didi was standing in the door of the lobby kitchen with her arms folded. "Red ones," she called after us. "Not the blue. The blue ones are too heavy, you'll drop them and blow yourselves up and then who'll cook?"

"Red ones, didi," said Kunal, and winked at her.

She didn't wink back. She looked at me instead, for a long moment, the way she'd looked at the dead in front of the temple, and put her palms together, very briefly, and turned back to her stove.

· · ·

There were six of us. Kunal in front with his clipboard. Sneha Iyer, with her long plait tucked into the back of her kurta. Rohan, hands in his pockets. Dev, the boy with glasses who'd done seven on Saturday and bled for it. Mayank, who'd been bait until Saturday and kept looking at me with a kind of guilty sympathy, as if he'd handed me a disease. And me, at the back, with the Ledger in my pocket, which I never go anywhere without.

We went out of the main gate at half past four. I'd never seen it from the inside: a big sliding gate of steel bars on the north side of the campus, a guard room with a broken window, a red-and-white boom barrier stuck halfway up. The other guard, a young man called Sukhdev who never spoke, slid the gate open just wide enough for one person at a time, and slid it shut behind us.

The service road ran along the outside of the wall, past a row of shuttered shops, a closed dhaba, a tyre shop with its tyres stacked like coins. The dead were in the shade of the shutters, ones and twos, the way they were everywhere at that time of day. We walked past them in a line, the six of us, hands in our pockets, and they didn't look up.

The gas agency was a small yard at the end of the row. A tin-roofed godown at the back. A tiny office at the front with a calendar on the wall and a framed picture of a goddess garlanded with plastic marigolds. And in the middle of the yard, a big cage of heavy wire mesh with a padlocked door, full of cylinders: rows and rows of red ones, and at the back, a row of the taller blue ones for hotels and messes.

And on the flat roof of the building next door, a mobile tower.

I saw the tower before I saw anything else. It was the ordinary kind you see on rooftops all over India, a lattice of steel with white dishes and grey panels bolted to the top, and at its foot, on the roof, a big steel cabinet the size of a car. A generator. Running. A steady, heavy drone that filled the whole yard, the way the DG sets filled the Admin Block. There was a sticker on the cabinet door with a date in marker, three days ago. Somebody from the phone company had been coming, escorted, to fill it with diesel. They needed the networks up. Everybody needed the networks up.

And standing in the shade of the godown, in the shade of the tower's building, in the shade of the cage, all round the yard, packed close together and swaying very slightly in time with the generator's drone the way people sway near a loudspeaker at a wedding, there were the dead.

Not fifteen. I counted. I can't help counting.

Sixty-one.

"Huh," said Kunal.

· · ·

"It's the generator," I said. "They come to the noise. It's been running for a week."

"I can see that, Anand." He was looking at the yard with his jaw set. Then he looked at the clipboard, as if there might be an answer on it. Then he looked at me. "Doesn't change anything. You go in, you make noise, you bring them out. Sixty, fifteen. Bait is bait."

"Kunal," said Sneha quietly. "Listen to it."

She meant the Hum. I'd felt it the moment we'd turned into the yard. The generator's drone wasn't just a sound. In the Hum, it was a kind of smear across everything, like rain on a windscreen. The papers of the sixty-one were there, I could feel them, but blurred, the print running, as if someone had left them out in the monsoon.

Noise jams it, Aditya's laminated sheet had said, somewhere in the small print. I'd read that line twice and thought I understood it. I hadn't. You don't understand rain on a windscreen until you're trying to drive.

"It'll be fine," said Kunal. "Bait. Go."

So I went.

· · ·

I walked into the yard among them. They didn't look at me. I was furniture. I walked right up to the nearest one, a big man in a vest standing in the shade of the cage with his face turned up towards the drone, and turned his paper over, and through the smear I read Section A as well as I could and filled in turn, which is the easiest answer there is.

It went in like writing on wet paper. The pencil dragged. The mark spread. But it went in, and the big man turned, and in the same instant every one of the sixty-one felt me write, and turned too.

Sixty-one faces. All looking at me.

I started walking backwards. Slowly, towards the road, the way you walk backwards from a dog you don't want to run from. They came after me. Not fast; it was a quarter to five, and the heat was still on them like a hand. But all of them. A whole yard of them, coming out of the shade in a slow wave, past the office and the goddess and the cage, towards me.

Behind them, I saw Kunal and the others slip into the yard round the side of the godown. Rohan had a pair of bolt cutters. The padlock on the cage door went with a snap I heard even over the generator.

So far, so good, I thought. That's always when it goes wrong.

· · ·

At five o'clock, the heat broke.

You can feel it, in Kota in May. It's not cooler, exactly. It just stops pressing down. And the dead feel it before you do. The wave coming after me across the yard got faster. Not much. Just enough that the gap between me and the big man in the vest went from six metres to four.

I'm a terrible runner. I've told you that. I was walking backwards on a broken road in sandals.

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"Kunal," I said.

He'd seen it. He came round the corner of the cage rolling a red cylinder on its rim, the way delivery men do, let it go, and stepped out into the yard behind the wave with his arms folded, the way he'd stood on the platform on Saturday night, smiling.

He was going to freeze seventeen. I knew it before he did it. It's what he did. Seventeen, Grip seven, his number, the number on the wall.

He reached for them through the smear of the generator, and I felt him do it, the tall presence walking between the desks, reaching out with both hands for seventeen papers at once.

Nine of them froze.

The other eight skidded out of his grip like soap. I felt it happen: his keys going in crooked, the marks spreading on the wet paper, half of them not taking. The nine stood still in the yard with their arms half raised. The other eight shuddered and kept coming, and now, because he'd written, because he'd written seventeen times, they weren't all coming for me any more. Half the wave had turned round.

Towards Kunal. Towards the cage. Towards the others.

Kunal's smile went. He reached again, harder. Wrong, I thought. Don't. Through that noise, harder is wrong. He wrote again, a whole handful at once, fast, and I felt something give in him, a small snap, like a pencil lead breaking, and he swore and put his hand to his face, and when he took it away there was blood on it.

Then Sneha.

· · ·

She came out of the cage door with her plait swinging, between the dead and the others, and held up both hands, and closed her eyes, and her lips moved, and I felt the tanpura under her, the long steady drone of it, trying to sing over the generator.

She froze fourteen. Her number. Then four more. Then six more, fast, faster, one after another, the dead stopping in a ring round the cage door like people stopping to listen to a song in the street.

Too many. Too fast. I knew it the way you know a student is going to run out of time when you see them still on question one at the halfway mark.

Sneha Iyer blanked.

I'd never seen it. I'd read about it on Aditya's sheet. Blanking: too many keys too fast. Total freeze. The Betaal cannot move or write until it passes. I'd thought it sounded like something that happened to other people.

She just stopped. In the cage doorway, with her hands still raised and her eyes still shut and her lips still parted on a word. Completely still. As still as the dead she'd frozen. And all round her, as her grip went, the twenty-four she'd been holding woke up at once, and turned, and came for the only thing in the doorway that was still warm.

· · ·

Rohan got there first. He came out of the cage and took Sneha round the waist from behind and dragged her backwards into the cage, stiff as a mannequin, her heels scraping on the concrete. Dev and Mayank were inside, shouting, pulling the door shut, holding it. The door of a cylinder cage isn't built to keep anything out. It's built to stop people stealing gas.

Kunal was in the middle of the yard with blood on his face and nine frozen dead round him, and the nine were starting to wake up.

And I was by the road with thirty of them coming at me, four metres away, three.

I did the sum. It took less than a second. It always does, at the end.

I couldn't freeze sixty-one. I couldn't freeze thirty. I could freeze three, through that noise, for maybe three seconds, and then I'd be bleeding and Sneha would still be in the cage with her eyes shut.

I didn't need to freeze them. I needed them to leave.

· · ·

He was standing by the office door. I'd seen him when we came in, because I always read a room before I sit down in it, and he was the only one in the yard who hadn't been swaying to the generator. A thin old man in a khaki shirt, with the gas agency's name embroidered on the pocket in red thread, and a cloth tied round his head against the sun. The delivery man. He was standing exactly where, I found out later from Lakshmi didi, the agency's cylinder cart had been kept for twenty years, the big iron handcart with two wheels and a long handle that he pushed round the colonies every afternoon. Dev and Mayank had wheeled it round to the cage a quarter of an hour ago to carry the cylinders. The old man was standing where the cart wasn't, with his hands slightly raised, as if they were still on the handle.

I turned his paper over and went straight to the bottom.

Through the smear, Section C was hard to read. It was like reading a page under a running tap. But I'd been reading timetables for three days, and his was a short one, and I'd seen a hundred like it. 6:00 — godown — load the cart. 4:30 — service road — push the round. 7:00 — office — sit.

4:30. The round. He'd been ready to go for half an hour, and the cart had gone without him.

I didn't change the place. I didn't change what he did. I just drew one line, from now to the round, through all that water, and pushed.

Now — service road — walk the round.

It took twenty seconds. It felt like twenty years. The pencil wouldn't go through the wet. I could feel the line tearing as I drew it, and drew it again, and somewhere in the middle of it my nose went, both sides, a rush, and my hands went so cold they hurt.

And at the twentieth second, it went in.

The old man lowered his hands. He turned, slowly. He walked out of the yard, past me, onto the service road, and turned south, and began to walk, steadily, with his hands held out in front of him a little way, as if he were pushing something heavy and familiar, the way he'd walked every afternoon for twenty years.

The nearest dead turned their heads and watched him go.

Then one of them fell in behind him.

Then another. Then three more, and five, and then I felt it go through them the way it had gone through the mess helpers at the water tower, from one paper to the next, quicker than I could follow, the way a rumour goes round a hostel after lights out. The round. It's time for the round. And the thirty coming at me, and the others coming out of the yard, turned away from me one after another, and from the cage, and from Kunal, and followed him.

They went down the service road in a line. Sixty of them, near enough. In single file, behind a thin old man in a khaki shirt pushing a cart that wasn't there, past the shuttered shops and the tyre shop and the closed dhaba, slow and orderly, like a procession going to a temple, like a wedding party with no band.

I'd never seen them walk in a line. Nobody had.

· · ·

That was when it started to go.

I'd written three times in five minutes through a generator: a turn in the yard, and that long, tearing match, and in the middle of it, without meaning to, I'd frozen a dead girl who'd come too close on my left, by reflex, the way you put your hand out when you trip. Three keys. Through rain.

And the room in my head began to go white.

Not the sky. Not the yard. Inside. A big, high, white room with chandeliers, very quiet, and rows and rows of little tables, and a digital clock on a screen at the front, counting down. And on the table in front of me, a sheet of paper. Clean. White. With my roll number at the top and nothing else on it, nothing at all, and my hand lying on it like something that belonged to somebody else.

I knew that room. I'd been in it for five years.

Fifteen minutes remaining, said a voice, very far away.

I stopped.

I don't know how. I just knew, the way you know you're at the edge of a step in the dark, that if I wrote one more thing, anything, I'd go into that white room and not come out of it for a long time. So I didn't. I stood by the road with my nose pouring blood and my hands like ice and the procession walking away from me down the service road, and I didn't reach for anything. I put my hands in my pockets so I couldn't.

The white room stayed there for a while, at the edge of things, waiting.

Then, slowly, it went.

· · ·

We came back with four cylinders. Not six. Rohan carried Sneha over his shoulder like a sack of atta; she came out of it at the main gate, all at once, gasping, and then sat down on the ground and cried, and didn't remember anything after the fourteenth one. Kunal had a cut lip and a nose that wouldn't stop bleeding and a face like thunder. Dev and Mayank pushed the cart. I walked at the back, with my sleeve against my face.

Aditya met us in the lobby.

"Sixty-one," said Kunal, before anyone else could speak. He'd wiped the blood off. He was standing straight again, with the clipboard. "Way more than Sunday. The phone tower's generator is pulling them in. I had Anand bait them out, and when they turned on us, I used a Hunger key on the lead group and pulled the whole lot down the road." He shrugged. "Bit messy. We got four."

"A Hunger key," said Aditya. "On sixty."

"On the lead group. The rest followed."

Aditya looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at me, standing at the back with my sleeve against my nose, and his eyes rested on me for exactly one second longer than they needed to, and then the hoarding smile came on.

"Good work, Kunal," he said. "Really good. That's leadership."

I didn't say anything. I'd never wanted to say anything less. Kunal could have it. Kunal could have all of it, the credit and the clipboard and the smile, and the more of it he had, the less anyone would look at the bottom of the list.

That was the plan. It was a very good plan. It had worked my whole life.

· · ·

Rohan found me at the tap behind the Admin Block at dusk, washing the blood off my face.

He leaned on the wall beside me with his hands in his pockets and watched me do it for a while.

"That wasn't Hunger," he said.

I went on washing.

"I've done Hunger. Aditya's been teaching me since Monday; he says I'll be rank three by Saturday. You move what they want. Sound, light. They go to it." He was watching the tap, not me. "They go to it like a crowd goes to a fight. All at once. Pushing. Every which way." He turned his head. "Hunger doesn't make them walk in a line, Anand."

"Luck," I said.

Rohan Sethi looked at me for a long time with his half-closed eyes, the way he'd looked at me from the bottom of the platform steps on Saturday night, and in the Hum beside me I could feel him, that tall tired presence walking between the desks, reading.

"Rank twelve," said Rohan, "doesn't get lucky."