Chapter 43 Bunty

Bunty

Bunty Chaurasia had slept in a lot of strange places, but he'd never slept in a queen.

Hariram ji had been sleeping in Rani since the first Sunday. He'd told Bunty on Monday, the first time Bunty came across the yard at dusk with a pipe and a bucket: a school bus with grilles on every window and the door shut is the safest room in Kota. The Supreme Court had said so. "They made the grilles to stop children falling out," said Hariram ji, laying out his bedroll along the back seat. "They didn't know they were building a fort."

So Bunty had slept in Rani for three nights now. On the long seat behind the driver's, with his head on the spare-tyre cover and his feet against the window, listening to Hariram ji snore on the back seat and to the dead going round and round the Admin Block a hundred metres away, a sound like the sea, if the sea had feet.

It was the best sleep he'd had since Indore.

· · ·

At midnight they fed her.

That was what Hariram ji called it. Feeding. They went out of Rani's door in the dark, quietly, the old man first with a torch wrapped in a handkerchief so it only gave a glow, Bunty after him with the bucket and the pipe, and crossed the fifteen metres of concrete to Chachi, two buses down. The yard was empty at night. The dead went to the light, and the yard had no light, only Chaudhary ji standing at the window of the transport office at the end of the yard with his hands behind his back, the way he stood all night, every night, looking out at his buses.

Bunty didn't look at Chaudhary ji. He'd tried once, on the first night, and seen the shape at the window, perfectly still, and had to go and sit in Rani for ten minutes with his head between his knees.

He unscrewed Chachi's fuel cap. He fed the pipe in. He sucked on the other end, the way his father had taught him when he was nine, quick and hard, and got a mouthful of diesel, the way he always did, and spat, and the diesel came down the pipe into the bucket with a soft gurgle like a baby drinking.

"Twenty litres," whispered Hariram ji, holding the glow over the bucket. "Then stop. Chachi's a lady. You don't take everything from a lady."

"Hariram ji, she's a bus."

"So is Rani," said Hariram ji, "and you talk to her like your wife."

Bunty didn't have an answer to that. He watched the bucket fill.

· · ·

He was carrying it back across the yard, both hands on the handle, diesel slopping, when a voice behind him said:

"What's this, Chaurasia?"

Bunty didn't drop the bucket. He would remember that afterwards, with pride. His whole body went cold from the top of his head to the backs of his knees, and every hair on his arms stood up, and something in his stomach turned over twice, like a fish, but he didn't drop the bucket.

He turned round.

Kunal Bhatia was standing between the two rows of buses with his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. Night patrol. He'd walked across the yard among the dead from the Admin Block, the way the Betaal walked everywhere, as if it were a park, and Bunty hadn't heard a thing. In the faint glow from Hariram ji's handkerchief, he was smiling.

Hariram ji had vanished. Bunty didn't blame him. Hariram ji was sixty-three.

"Kunal bhaiya," said Bunty. "Good evening."

"It's midnight."

"Good night, then."

"What's in the bucket?"

There's a moment in every film, Bunty had always believed, when the hero is caught by the villain's henchman with the evidence in his hands, and the hero has to say something so good that the henchman lets him go. Bunty had seen that moment in perhaps four hundred films. He'd rehearsed it in the bathroom mirror at home in Indore since he was eleven. He had a whole collection of lines for it.

None of them came.

"Mosquito repellent," said Bunty.

Kunal's eyebrows went up.

"It's an old Indore recipe," said Bunty, and once he'd started, he found he couldn't stop. "Diesel and neem oil. Two to one. You rub it on the windows, the mosquitoes smell it and they die. My grandmother made it. Every monsoon. In Indore we have very bad mosquitoes, Kunal bhaiya, very bad, Indore mosquitoes are famous, they're bigger than Kota mosquitoes, you can hear them coming, it's like a—"

"It's May," said Kunal. "There are no mosquitoes."

"That," said Bunty, "is because of the repellent."

Kunal looked at him for a long moment in the dark. Then he looked at the bucket. Then at Chachi, with her fuel cap off and the pipe still hanging out of it like a tongue.

"Rathore sir says nobody touches the buses."

"Apan isn't touching the bus, bhaiya. Apan is touching the diesel."

It was the best line he'd ever said, and it was completely useless, and he knew it. So he did the only other thing he could think of. He put the bucket down, very carefully, so it wouldn't slop, and put his hand into the pocket of his shorts, and took out the power bank. The last one Bhaiya had given him, on Saturday, fully charged, for emergencies. He held it out.

"For your phone," said Bunty. "For emergencies."

Kunal looked at it. Then he took it, and turned it over in his fingers, and put it in the pocket of his hoodie, and smiled.

"I'll be watching you, Chaurasia," he said pleasantly. "You and your bhaiya."

He walked away between the buses, back towards the Admin Block and the light and the slow sea of the dead, hands in his pockets.

The author has published this chapter on their official page, but this copy was made without permission.

Bunty picked up the bucket. He carried it the last fifteen metres to Rani. He poured it into her tank through the funnel without spilling a drop, and screwed her cap back on, and went inside, and shut the door, and sat down on the floor of the aisle between the seats, and shook for twenty minutes.

Hariram ji came out from under the back seat.

"Mosquito repellent," said Hariram ji, with deep respect. "Arre, Bunty. You should be in films."

· · ·

His father called at ten past one.

The phone was in airplane mode, the way Bhaiya made everyone keep it, but Bunty had worked out that if he turned airplane mode off for one minute at one in the morning, sometimes a call came through. Not every night. The network was full of people at every hour. But his father had worked it out too, the way his father worked out every machine, and they had a sort of arrangement now without ever having said so.

"Bunty."

"Papa."

Indore was still under curfew, his father said. The cases near the station had spread to Rajwada. The Army was in Indore too, now; you could see the trucks from the garage roof. Mummy was fine. Pinky and Gudiya were fine and still fighting over the TV remote, even though there was nothing on the TV except the news. The garage was shut. Two customers' trucks were still parked inside, and his father had been starting their engines once a day, every day, so their batteries wouldn't die, because that was what you did with a customer's truck.

"And you?" said his father. "Still at that campus?"

"Still here, Papa. There are buses. We're leaving soon. Me and bhaiya and didi and some others." He lowered his voice, though there was nobody in Rani but Hariram ji, who was asleep again. "I'm going to drive one."

There was a silence on the line.

"You," said his father.

"Me."

"You can't reverse into the garage, Bunty."

"Papa, I reversed the JCB once."

"Into the wall."

"The wall was in the wrong place."

His father laughed. It was a short, rough laugh, the laugh he did at the garage when a customer said something stupid but not too stupid, and Bunty closed his eyes in the dark and held the phone against his ear and listened to it, and thought it was the best sound he'd heard since Indore.

"What kind of bus?" said his father.

"School bus. Big one. Air brakes. Papa, the compressor's old, it takes three minutes to build air, and the low-air buzzer—"

"Three minutes," said his father. "Air brakes. On a cold engine." The laugh had gone. "Bunty. Listen to me. You start her and you sit. You don't touch the brake lever till the buzzer stops. You don't care who's shouting. You don't care if the world is ending. You sit and you wait for the air. If you go before the air's up, she won't stop when you need her to, and then you're not a driver, you're a passenger with a steering wheel." A pause. "Understand?"

"Understand, Papa."

"And drive slow. Don't be a hero."

"Apan isn't the hero, Papa," said Bunty. "Bhaiya's the hero. Apan's just the driver."

Another silence. Longer.

"This bhaiya of yours," said his father. "The one who's always right."

"Yes."

"Is he scared?"

Bunty thought about it. He thought about Bhaiya on the terrace that morning, leaning out over the parapet so far that Bunty's own stomach had dropped. Bhaiya at the gunshot, looking up the way you look up at a bird. Bhaiya with his nose pouring blood at the gas agency, walking back along the service road with his hands in his pockets so they wouldn't do anything. Bhaiya's face, all week. Calm, the way water is calm at the bottom of a well.

"No," said Bunty. "Not any more. He can't be. Something happened to him, Papa. He's not scared of anything."

His father didn't say anything for a while.

"Then you'd better be scared for him," he said at last. "That's how it works, beta. Heroes forget to be scared. Somebody has to do it for them. Usually it's the driver."

The line hissed.

"Okay, Papa," said Bunty.

"Okay," said his father. "Go to sleep. Start her and sit."

The call ended. Bunty put the phone back on airplane mode and lay down on the seat behind the driver's with his head on the spare-tyre cover, and looked up at Rani's dark ceiling, and thought about it.

Somebody had to be scared for Bhaiya. All right. He'd be scared for him. He was already scared for himself; it wasn't much more work. He'd be scared for both of them. He'd do it properly, the way his father started customers' trucks every day so the batteries didn't die. Every day, whether you felt like it or not, because that's what you do.

He fell asleep deciding it, and dreamed of Sarafa at night, all the jewellers closed and the street full of food, and Bhaiya standing in the middle of it with a plate of garadu, not eating, looking at everything, the way he looked at everything, as if he were reading it.

· · ·

He woke at twenty-five past five, in the grey, with a crick in his neck and the taste of diesel still in his mouth.

He sat up in the seat behind the driver's and looked out through Rani's big windscreen at the yard. The sky over the west wall was going from black to the colour of ash. The buses stood in their two rows, yellow turning to grey in the half-light, and at the end of the yard, the door of the transport office opened.

Chaudhary ji came out.

Bunty had seen him do his rounds every morning for three days, through Rani's windscreen. He knew the order. Down the left-hand row, door, tyre, windscreen, Bus 1 to Bus 12, across, and back up the right-hand row. Rani was Bus 14. Chaudhary ji would come to her second on the way back up.

He slid down in the seat until only his eyes were above the dashboard.

And then he saw that Chaudhary ji wasn't alone.

There was someone walking beside him.

Bunty's whole body went cold again, exactly the way it had at midnight with the bucket, from the top of his head to the backs of his knees. A thin boy in a borrowed shirt that came down too far, walking beside the dead transport supervisor in the grey dawn, close, at his elbow, matching him step for step, the way you'd walk beside an old man in a queue at the bank. Hands in his pockets. Not hurrying. Stopping when Chaudhary ji stopped. Waiting while Chaudhary ji tried each door, kicked each tyre, peered in at each windscreen. Moving on when he moved on.

Bhaiya.

Bunty put both his hands over his mouth.

They came down the left-hand row like that, the two of them, Bus 1, Bus 2, Bus 3. Bunty watched them through the windscreen and didn't breathe. There were dead in the yard now, the first ones, drifting back from the Admin Block towards the hostels in the dawn, and they passed within a few metres of the two of them, and nobody turned. Bus 10. Bus 11. Bus 12. Across the end of the yard. And then back up the right-hand row, towards him. Bus 13.

Bus 14.

Chaudhary ji stopped at Rani's door, a metre from Bunty's face, on the other side of the glass. He was a big grey-haired man, close up, with a heavy, patient face and a Shikhar badge on the pocket of his khaki uniform. He tried Rani's door. It was locked; Hariram ji had locked it from inside. He moved to the front wheel.

He drew his foot back to kick Rani's soft front tyre, the way he'd kicked it every morning for years, a little harder than the others.

And as his foot swung, and his weight went onto his other leg, and his hip turned, Bhaiya's right hand came out of his pocket.

It was the quickest thing Bunty had ever seen. Quicker than his father with a spanner. Bhaiya's fingers went to the big steel snap hook clipped through the belt loop on Chaudhary ji's right hip, the hook with the twenty-four keys on it, and pressed the catch, and the hook opened, and the ring was in Bhaiya's hand, and in the same movement, the same exact movement, so that there was no moment at all when Chaudhary ji's belt was empty, Bhaiya's other hand clipped something else onto the loop.

Another ring. Another bunch of keys, with little tags on them. Bunty found out later that they were the room keys from the warden's office in Ganga Bhawan, twenty-four of them, because Bhaiya had counted.

Chaudhary ji's foot hit the tyre. Thud. The keys on his hip chimed softly, the way they always did.

Bhaiya's hand, with twenty-four bus keys in it, was holding them so tight that they didn't make a sound.

Chaudhary ji leaned in and peered at Rani's windscreen. He looked straight through it, straight at Bunty's eyes above the dashboard, a metre away, and didn't see him. Then he straightened up and moved on to Bus 15, and Bhaiya moved on with him, matching his steps, hands back in his pockets, as if nothing at all had happened.

As he passed Rani's windscreen, Bhaiya turned his head and looked at Bunty.

He didn't smile. He didn't wink. He just lifted his right hand a little way out of his pocket, enough for Bunty to see the brass tags, the way Pintu bhaiya had lifted his kettle under the godown shutter, and put it back.

Bunty took his hands off his mouth.

"Bhaiya," he whispered, to Rani's empty windscreen. "Bhaiya. Bhaiya, you idiot, you—"

He had to stop there, because something very urgent had happened to his bladder, and he had to get out of the driver's seat and down the aisle and out of Rani's back emergency door at a speed he hadn't known he possessed, and that, he would always maintain afterwards, was the only reason he didn't see the end of Chaudhary ji's rounds.