Chapter 42 Roof

Ira found me on the terrace at ten, between the water tanks, where I always went.

She didn't say anything at first. She sat down on the gritty concrete a little way from me with her back against the next tank, and pulled her knees up, and looked out over the parapet at the night. Below us, round and round in the yellow light from the windows, the dead walked. Above us, the sky was dirty orange with dust and city glow, and very far away to the north, over the city, a helicopter was crossing it slowly with a searchlight hanging underneath, sweeping the roofs.

I was sitting with my hands under my arms. They'd been cold since the gas agency. Not cool. Cold, the way your hands go in December in Bhilai when the power's off and you've been doing homework by candlelight. It was thirty-eight degrees on that terrace at ten o'clock at night, and I couldn't feel my fingers.

"Kunal says he used a Hunger key," said Ira.

"Kunal's very talented."

"Rohan says Kunal's nose was bleeding before the dead turned round. Rohan says Sneha was blanked before the dead turned round." She didn't look at me. "Rohan says the only person in that yard who wasn't busy when the dead turned round was you."

"Rohan talks a lot for somebody with his eyes shut."

"Rohan," said Ira, "has said eleven words to me in four days. Today he said all of those."

· · ·

We sat there for a while. The generators droned. Somewhere out in the dark beyond the wall, a dog barked and kept barking, and then stopped all at once in the middle of a bark, and didn't start again.

"I watched you," said Ira.

And she told me. I've already told you most of it, because I promised to tell you things in the order I learned them, and this was the night I learned them. Ananya's inhaler, and the walk across the yard through the crowd coming out of the mess, and the sandal I'd stopped to tie. The parapet I'd leaned over on Wednesday morning, much too far, to look under a bus. The gunshot at eleven, and twenty-two people jumping, and my face not moving at all.

"Like a clock," she said. "Nothing moved."

"I told you," I said. "On Saturday. In the sample room. Fear's gone. The first wrong answer took it. I wrote it in the book. Would recommend."

"I know you told me." She turned her head and looked at me for the first time. "Telling me isn't the same as me watching it. On Saturday I thought it was a joke you'd make till it stopped being true. I thought it would come back. Like a cold." She shook her head slowly. "It isn't coming back. Is it?"

"No."

"How do you know?"

"Because I don't miss it," I said. "If it were coming back, I think I'd miss it."

· · ·

"What's next?" said Ira.

She said it very quietly, looking at the dead.

"The next wrong answer. It took fear the first time. What does it take the second time?"

"I don't know."

"Guess."

"I don't guess," I said. "I calculate. And there isn't enough data."

"Guess, Kabir."

I thought about it. I gave it the respect it deserved, the way I give everything. I thought about Aditya Rathore on the platform in the floodlights, looking for one second like a man who'd walked into a room and forgotten why, and Pintu's red eyes, and the email from Avirat Neurosciences with its little list of side effects. Sleep. Emotional flattening. Memory. I thought about what was left in me, and which parts of it a page could be torn out of.

"Something I'd notice," I said at last. "That's the only pattern. It doesn't take things you won't miss. It takes things you'll go looking for."

Ira didn't say anything for a long time.

"Stop," she said.

"Stop what?"

"Writing. Any of it. Section A, Section B, whatever you did at the gas agency, whatever you did under that neem tree on Tuesday morning for forty seconds while I stood on this roof with my watch." Her voice was perfectly flat, perfectly level, tightening. "We've got a route. We've got Rani and Bhoot. Malhotra sir's finding the people. You don't need to write anything. You can walk among them. That's enough. Just walk. Don't write."

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"You were on the roof on Tuesday."

"I couldn't sleep. I timed you." She looked at me. "What were you doing?"

"Reading."

"You're lying."

"Yes," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. She'd got so good, that week, at knowing which of my lies to let go. I watched her decide about this one. I watched her decide to let it go, and hate it, and let it go anyway.

"Promise me," she said instead. "You'll stop."

I've made a lot of promises in my life. Most of them were for money, and I kept every single one, because that's what makes people come back. I've never once made a promise I didn't know I could keep.

"I can't," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because we're taking whoever wants to go," I said, "and there are thousands of them down there, and two buses, and one gate, and three minutes of air brakes. And I don't know yet what I'll have to do to get seventy people through that. I only know I'm not going to be able to do it by walking."

She didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer to it. I'd made sure there wasn't, the same way I make sure there's never an answer to a price.

· · ·

After a while she said, in a different voice, "Give me your hands."

"What?"

"Your hands. They're cold. You've been sitting on them for twenty minutes, you think I haven't noticed?" She held out her own, palms up, in the orange dark. "Hypothermia. First aid. You warm the extremities. NCC, two years."

"It's thirty-eight degrees."

"Then it should be easy."

I took my hands out from under my arms. She took them in both of hers, quite briskly, the way Aai must have taken a patient's hands, and held them, and then her face changed.

"Aai ga," said Ira, very softly. "Kabir. They're like ice."

"I know."

"Like a dead—" She stopped.

"Yes," I said. "I know."

She didn't let go. She held my hands between hers on her knee and rubbed them, slowly, the way you'd rub warmth into a child's hands after the monsoon, and didn't say anything else, and I didn't either. I couldn't think of anything to say. That doesn't happen to me. I always know what to say; it's usually a lie, but I always know it.

I sat on the roof of the Admin Block of the Shikhar Gurukul campus with my hands in Ira Deshmukh's hands and felt them, very slowly, start to hurt, the way frozen things hurt when they start to come back.

· · ·

"Aai messaged," she said, after a long time. She was still holding my hands. "Today. At two. The first message in six days." She didn't let go to take her phone out; she told it to me from memory. "All safe. Pune lockdown. Neel asks about you every hour. Come home however you can. Don't wait. Aai."

"Don't wait," I said.

"Again. That's what she said on the first day, too. Don't wait for anyone. You don't ask permission." Ira looked down at our hands. "I used to think she meant don't wait for the Army. Or the warden. Or the institute."

"What does she mean?"

"I don't know," said Ira. "I'm still working it out."

I thought about the UNKNOWN page in the Ledger, and her name on it, in pencil, dated Thursday. IRA DESHMUKH. Stayed for the other five. Why?

I'd moved people out of that column before. Not many. Bunty had taken two years, and I'd only moved him in the godown, when I'd finally understood that there was nothing he wanted from me that I could sell him. Malhotra sir had been in it for two years and was going to stay there. Tara had been in it since Monday, the first Monday, and every phone call put her deeper in.

And Ira was never going to come out. I knew that, sitting there. I'd known it, really, since the sample room. She was going to stay in that column for the rest of my life, however long that turned out to be, the one entry in the whole book I'd never be able to close.

I found I'd stopped minding.

· · ·

"Didi! Bhaiya!"

Bunty's head came up through the hatch at the top of the terrace stairs, round and anxious and smelling of diesel from twenty metres away. He'd been on the stairs, I realised. Keeping watch. He'd been keeping watch for us on the stairs for an hour, and pretending he hadn't.

Ira let go of my hands. Not quickly. Not as if she'd been caught. She just let go, and put her own hands on her knees, and looked at Bunty as if nothing at all had happened. I've never admired anyone so much.

"Bunty," she said. "Go to sleep."

"Apan was going to," said Bunty. "But apan thought of a joke. For bhaiya. Bhaiya, listen. Listen to this one. It's very good."

"Bunty—"

"What do you call," said Bunty, "a Kota student who survives the end of the world?"

Neither of us said anything.

"A dropper," said Bunty, triumphantly. "Because he still has to give the exam next year."

There was a silence on the terrace.

Ira put her face down on her knees. Her shoulders shook. I couldn't tell, for a second, whether she was laughing or crying, and then the honk came out, muffled by her knees, the goose-honk from the landing outside the sample room, and she couldn't stop it, and Bunty beamed at both of us in the orange dark like a man who's just been given an All India Rank.

"Goodnight, bhaiya," he said, enormously satisfied. "Goodnight, didi." And his head went down through the hatch again, and we heard him go down the stairs, humming.

· · ·

When Ira had stopped laughing, she wiped her eyes with the end of her dupatta and sat for a while looking south, over the parapet, at the checkpoint lights burning white on the bypass two kilometres away.

"It would have been in eleven days," she said.

"What would?"

"JEE Advanced." She said it quite calmly. "The Sunday after next. I worked it out this afternoon. I've known the date for two years; I had it on the wall above my bed in Meera Residency. Eleven days." She almost smiled. "I was going to come first, you know. In the country. I'd decided. I was going to walk into that hall and come first, and then go home to Pune, and Aai was going to cry, and Baba was going to pretend not to, and Neel was going to tell everyone at his school." She was quiet for a moment. "I haven't thought about it once since Sunday. Not once. And today I suddenly remembered, and I sat in the transport office and cried for half an hour with a dead man standing at the window behind me."

"It's postponed," I said. "Indefinitely. They said so on the first Monday. You'll still get to come first."

Ira turned her head and looked at me in the dark. She looked at me for a long time. I couldn't read her face. I'd never been able to read her face. That had always been the whole problem.

"Not everything is," she said.