Chapter 44 The Deal

I put the keys on the table at a quarter past six.

Twenty-four of them, on a steel ring, with twenty-four little brass tags stamped 1 to 24, on a long reading table in the library, between a stack of old JEE question banks and a sign that said PLEASE MAINTAIN SILENCE. They made a sound when I put them down, a soft heavy chime, and everybody at the table looked at them the way people look at a snake that's turned out to be a rope.

"Bhaiya," said Bunty faintly. "Apan saw."

"I know you saw. You were in the windscreen."

"Apan nearly—" He stopped. He looked at Ira. He looked at Malhotra sir. "Apan nearly had a medical emergency."

"Did you?"

"Apan is not going to discuss it," said Bunty, with great dignity, and sat down very carefully on the bench.

· · ·

The library was the only quiet room on the campus. It was joined to the Admin Block by the covered walkway on the first floor, and nobody went there, because there was nothing in it but books, and nobody in Kota reads books that aren't on the syllabus. Long tables, steel almirahs full of question banks and old Olympiad papers, a portrait of Ramanujan on the wall with a garland of plastic flowers, ceiling fans that didn't turn. It smelled of paper and dust. I'd liked it the moment I walked in.

There were five of us. Me, Bunty, Ira with her graph-paper map. Hariram ji in his khaki shirt with his bidi unlit behind his ear, because Ira had told him what she'd do to him if he lit it in a library. And at the end of the table, with his chalky hands folded on top of his red diary, Malhotra sir.

He was looking at the keys.

"How?" he said.

"Chaudhary ji kicks Rani's front tyre a little harder than the others," I said. "His weight goes on his left foot. His hip turns. For about half a second the hook's facing away from him."

Malhotra sir looked at me for a long moment.

"And what's on his belt now?"

"Twenty-four room keys from the warden's office in Ganga Bhawan. With tags. I went over there yesterday at two, while they were in the shade." I shrugged. "Anybody who looks at his belt sees a ring of keys. Nobody's going to count the numbers on the tags."

"Kunal counts things," said Ira quietly.

"Kunal counts people," I said. "Lists. Ranks. He doesn't look at keys. Nobody in this building looks at keys except me."

I believed that. I want you to know that I believed it completely. It's one of the things I was wrong about, and I'll get to it.

· · ·

Ira laid out the route.

She did it the way she'd done it for me in the transport office: the district map, Chaudhary ji's pencil charts, her own grid on graph paper, the brass compass in its wooden box. The farm track along the wall. The dry canal. The culvert under the bypass, three point four metres, BUS OK. The two villages. Jhalawar Road, four kilometres south of the checkpoint. Darrah. The hills.

Hariram ji leaned over the map with his reading glasses on the end of his nose and followed her pencil, and his eyebrows went up, and up, and up.

"The canal culvert," he said. "Chaudhary ji's monsoon road. Arre, I've driven it. Twice. In the rain, at night, with thirty children singing film songs." He looked at Ira over his glasses. "Beti, who taught you to read a map like this?"

"NCC."

"Then NCC," said Hariram ji, "should be running this country."

Ira went pink. I'd never seen her go pink. I filed it.

· · ·

"Tomorrow," I said. "Friday. One o'clock."

I laid it out. I'd been building it for four days, on the TIMETABLE page and the KEYS page and in my head in the dark, and now I laid it all out on the library table in order, the way you lay out a solution: every line, every step, nothing skipped.

At one o'clock, every dead person on the campus goes to the mess. All of them. It's the strongest habit they've got; Sushila aunty had proved that with two steel lids. From five to one till two, the yard is empty, the paths are empty, the hostels are empty. The back gate opens at one anyway; Pandey ji's done it every day for eleven days. It's the one minute of the day when this campus belongs to the living.

At half past twelve, Malhotra sir tells the people who want to go. Quietly, one by one, the way he's been asking them all week. No bags. Water bottles, medicines, nothing else.

At five past one, when the mess is full and the dead are sitting at their plates, Ira takes them out through the side grille and across to the yard in a line, heel and toe, the way she's drilled them. Twenty-two of them already know how.

Bunty starts Rani. Hariram ji starts Bhoot. Three minutes of air, with the buzzers screaming.

"Three minutes," said Ira. "With the buzzers. In daylight."

"At one o'clock," I said. "When they're at lunch. I've watched them at lunch for four days. The mess could catch fire at one o'clock and I don't think they'd get up." I didn't say I think. I'd stopped saying I think some time on Tuesday. "And if any of them do get up, I'll be in the yard."

This chapter was copied from NovelPhoenix without the author's permission; reading it there supports the person who wrote it.

"Doing what?" said Ira.

I didn't answer that. She didn't push. We both knew the answer was writing, and we both knew she hated it, and she'd already used up her question about it on the roof.

At ten past one, the buses go out of the back gate. Down the farm track, along the canal, under the bypass, and south. By half past two we're on the highway.

"And Rathore?" said Bunty. "And Kunal? And the Betaal? They're all in the lobby at one, bhaiya, eating. They'll hear the buzzers. They'll see us crossing the yard."

"That," said Malhotra sir, "is my part."

· · ·

He hadn't said anything while I talked. He'd sat at the end of the table with his hands on his diary and listened to the whole thing, all the way through, with his eyes half closed, the way he used to listen to a student working a problem at the board, waiting to see if they'd get there.

"At a quarter to one tomorrow," he said, "I'm going to ask Rathore to put me through to Major Sangwan on his satellite phone. I've never asked before. He'll do it. He's a polite boy." He turned his chalky hands over on the diary. "And then I'm going to talk to the Major about the separate truck. And the separate list. And a programme of capsules that a company in Pithampur has been testing on children in this institute for two years, with the Director's signature on the forms." His voice didn't rise at all. "I'm a physics teacher, Anand. I've been explaining things slowly to people who don't want to hear them for thirty years. I can keep that boy and that Major on the phone for an hour."

"And Kunal?"

"Kunal Bhatia," said Malhotra sir, "is going to be standing outside the guest suite listening to every word, because he can't help himself. And the rest of the Betaal will be standing behind him, because that's where they always stand." He looked at me. "You see, Anand? I've been studying the timetable too."

I didn't say anything for a while. I'd been so sure I was the only one.

"And Pandey ji?" said Ira. "The gate?"

"Pandey ji's been opening that gate for me at one o'clock for eleven days," said Malhotra sir. "He'll open it tomorrow. I'll tell him tonight." He paused. "He was my student, you know. Twenty-two years ago. A terrible student. Very kind."

· · ·

"How many?" I said.

He opened the red diary. Not at the wrapper. At a page near the back, which had names on it, in his small slanting hand.

"Thirty-one," said Malhotra sir. "So far. Kartik, because his insulin's finished. The two girls from Bhopal. The boy whose mother is in Nagpur. Six of Deshmukh's drill. Hariram ji, of course, and Lakshmi didi says no, she'll wait for the Army, she has a sister in Kota." He turned the page. "Some of them asked me what the separate truck was for. I told them I didn't know. That was true. And I told them what I thought, which was also true." He closed the diary. "There'll be more. When people see you actually going, there are always more."

"Thirty-one is a lot of people," I said.

"It is."

"It's not seventy."

"Not yet," said Malhotra sir. "My price stands, Anand. Whoever wants to go."

"I know."

He looked at me across the table for a long moment. Then something moved at the corner of his mouth, the not-quite-smile, the one I'd been trying to read for two years.

"You've stopped arguing," he said.

"Bunty and Ira outvoted me," I said. "Two against one. It was very undemocratic."

"That," said Malhotra sir, "is how democracy works."

· · ·

We'd almost finished when the clinic door opened downstairs, and the nurse came up the library stairs looking for Malhotra sir, with Kartik behind her.

Kartik was a thin, quiet boy from Ganga batch with big glasses and a habit of apologising. He held up his insulin pen. It was empty. You could see it was empty; the little window on the side, where the number of units showed, said 0.

"Sorry, sir," said Kartik. "It finished this morning. I've been stretching it since Monday. Half doses." He swallowed. "Sorry."

The nurse was a tall, tired woman from Udaipur with a stethoscope round her neck that she never took off. "Thirty-six hours," she said, to Malhotra sir, low, not quite out of Kartik's hearing. "Maybe less, in this heat. Then his sugar goes, and then it goes fast. I don't have anything for type one. I never did. The clinic was for staff and sprains." She looked at the window. "The big private hospital up the service road. Nine hundred metres. There's a pharmacy on the ground floor and a cold store behind it. If anything's still in there, it's in there."

Malhotra sir looked at Kartik for a long moment. Then he looked at me.

I knew what he was going to say before he said it. I'd been doing a sum of my own since six o'clock: Tara's clay pot, and forty-four degrees in Bhilai, and how long insulin lasts when a fridge is a cupboard. I'd done it four times. I hadn't liked the answer any of the times.

"Insulin," I said. "For Kartik. And more. As much as there is. In a cold pack."

"For Kartik," said Malhotra sir, "and for your sister."

I hadn't told him that. I'd told him she was diabetic. I'd told him about the clay pot. I hadn't told him I'd been doing the sum.

He'd been studying my timetable too.

· · ·

Aditya allowed it. Of course he did.

We asked him in the lobby at nine, Malhotra sir and me and Kartik with his empty pen, and he listened with his clipboard against his chest and his head on one side, and then he smiled the hoarding smile and said, "Of course. Medicine runs are good for morale. People need to see that we look after our own." He turned a page. "Two o'clock, in the heat. Take Sethi and Iyer as escort. And Pandey ji, with the gun."

"And Anand," said Malhotra sir.

Aditya's eyes came up from the clipboard and rested on me. On the bottom of the list.

"Anand's on bait duty, sir."

"Then he can be bait for me."

"Sir, with respect—"

"Rathore." Malhotra sir didn't raise his voice. He'd never once raised his voice in two years of teaching me; he didn't need to. "I've let you send children out there every day for a week to bring me my food. I've eaten it. I've said thank you. Today one of my students needs something that I can find faster than any of you, because I know what I'm looking for and you don't." He paused. "So today, I'm going. And I'd like Anand to come with me."

Aditya looked at him for a long time. Then at me. And I saw it again, the thing I'd seen on the stairs on Saturday night and at the bottom of the platform steps: a flicker, very quick, behind the smile, like a man reaching for a word he's sure he knows and finding the space where it should be.

He glanced down at his left hand. Just for a second, the way you glance at a watch. There was nothing written on it. Then he closed it.

"Of course, sir," said Aditya Rathore. "Two o'clock."

· · ·

Malhotra sir walked me back along the covered walkway afterwards, slowly, with his hands in his pockets, the way he walked between desks.

Halfway across, where the walkway ran over the gap between the Admin Block and the library and you could look down at the dead standing in the morning shade below, he stopped.

"Do you know why I want you, Anand?" he said. "And not just Sethi and Iyer?"

"Because I'm bait."

"No." He looked down at the dead. "Because on Saturday night, when Rathore went up those steps, I was on the terrace, watching. Not him. The others. All the Ganga students who took those capsules. And when he lifted his hand, every one of them leaned towards him. Sethi. Iyer. Bhatia. All of them. Like grass when the wind comes." He turned his head. "Except you. You stood up straighter."

I didn't say anything.

"I don't know what that boy has," said Malhotra sir. "I don't know what that company put in those capsules, or what it does to the ones who take them, or what it's doing to him. But I know a leash when I see one. I've been watching students wear them for thirty years." He took his hands out of his pockets and put one on my shoulder, briefly, the way he used to put a hand on the shoulder of a student at the board when they'd got there. "Tomorrow, everything depends on people who don't lean. So today, I'd like one of them with me."

He let go and walked on along the walkway.

"Two o'clock, Anand," he said, over his shoulder. "Bring your book. You're coming. You can walk among them without Rathore's leash."