Chapter 45 Supply Run

"Beta," said Pandey ji, at the main gate, before we set off. "That day. At the back gate. With the two of them behind you."

He was holding the old double-barrelled gun across his chest with both hands, the way you'd hold a baby you'd been handed at a wedding and didn't know what to do with. His grey moustache was damp. It was two o'clock and forty-five degrees and he hadn't been outside the wall since Sunday.

"I couldn't open it," he said. "I wanted to. I had orders. One o'clock, and nothing behind you. I'm sorry."

"You were right," I said. "If you'd opened it, they'd have come in."

He looked at me as if I'd said something in another language. Then he nodded, slowly, and wiped his moustache with the back of his hand.

"You're a strange boy," said Pandey ji.

"Yes, ji."

"Malhotra sir always said so."

· · ·

There were five of us. Malhotra sir in front, in his rumpled white shirt, with a cloth bag over his shoulder and his sleeves rolled up and his hands in his pockets, as if he were walking to the market. Rohan and Sneha behind him, the escort, hands in their pockets too. Pandey ji with the gun. Me at the back, with the Ledger, and Lakshmi didi's list in my pocket in her big round handwriting: insulin (lots), inhalers, BP tablets, ORS, crocin, antibiotics (ask sister which), sanitary pads, Odomos if any.

The service road ran north from the main gate, along the wall, past the gas agency and its mobile tower, droning, and the yard where sixty dead had walked away behind a delivery man the day before. They hadn't come back. I looked down the road as we passed and saw nothing but heat.

"Your procession," said Rohan, without turning his head.

"Kunal's," I said.

Rohan didn't say anything to that. He'd stopped saying things to that.

· · ·

The hospital stood at a crossroads nine hundred metres up the service road, where the city began again. It was new and enormous and made almost entirely of blue glass, six storeys of it, with SUPER SPECIALITY across the top in silver letters and a big curved porch out front for the ambulances. Half the glass on the ground floor had been smashed. There were ambulances in the porch with their doors open. There were shoes.

"Ground floor," said Malhotra sir. "Pharmacy on the left after reception. The nurse says the cold store's behind it. Sethi, Iyer, you stay at the door and watch the road. Pandey ji, with me. Anand."

"Sir."

"Read the room."

I went in first.

· · ·

It was a hospital lobby. You've been in one. A big cool hall with a polished stone floor, a reception desk shaped like a wave, a bank of lifts with their doors open on darkness. A sign on a stand: OPD — PLEASE TAKE A TOKEN. Above the reception, a long electronic board, dead now, with red numbers frozen on it from the last moment the power had been on.

NOW SERVING: 47.

And under the board, in the OPD waiting area, on four long rows of steel chairs bolted to the floor, the patients were waiting.

Sixty of them, perhaps. Sitting quietly in their rows the way people sit in a hospital in India, with their bags on their knees and their papers in their hands. Old men in kurtas holding X-ray envelopes. A woman in a green sari with a little girl asleep against her shoulder. A young man with his arm in a sling. Most of them were holding a small white slip of paper. Their tokens. 48. 52. 61. Waiting for their number to come up on the board.

It never would. They didn't know that. They were waiting anyway, with their faces turned up towards the frozen red numbers, the way they must have been waiting when the power went, eleven days ago. Behind the reception desk, a dead receptionist in a maroon uniform sat with her hands on the keyboard. A dead nurse in white stood at the door of Consultation Room 3, holding a clipboard, waiting to call the next name.

The OPD queue was still a queue.

I stood in the doorway and turned their papers over, a few of them, quickly. Section C, dark and deep, on every one. Wait. Wait. Wait. No hunting. No hunger at all, almost. Just waiting, the strongest habit in the whole of India.

"Sir," I said quietly. "It's fine. They're in a queue. If we're quiet, they won't get up."

Malhotra sir looked at the rows for a long moment.

"Of course they won't," he said. "Nobody gives up their place in a queue."

· · ·

The pharmacy was a long counter of glass and white laminate behind the reception, with shelves to the ceiling behind it and a door at the back marked STAFF ONLY. The glass of the counter had been smashed, some time in the first days, by someone in a hurry; there were bright little drifts of it on the floor and across the shelves. The shelves had been half emptied. Not all the way. People in a panic take the wrong things. The painkillers were gone, and the cough syrups, and all the sanitiser. The things that mattered were still there, because nobody had known they mattered.

Malhotra sir knew. He went along the shelves with his cloth bag and Lakshmi didi's list and the nurse's list, reading the labels through his reading glasses, taking things down and putting them in the bag, quick and careful, the way he used to write on the blackboard. Salbutamol inhalers, a whole carton. BP tablets. ORS. Antibiotics: he checked each one against the nurse's handwriting, twice, moving his lips.

I stood at the end of the counter where I could see the OPD rows, and watched them wait.

Pandey ji stood beside me with the gun, breathing through his mouth.

"The insulin," said Malhotra sir. "Cold store." He nodded at the door marked STAFF ONLY. "Pandey ji, the torch. Anand, stay here and watch."

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They went through the door.

· · ·

I'll tell you what happened next as exactly as I can, because I've been over it so many times since, the way you go over a paper after the results come out, looking for the question where it went wrong.

Pandey ji came back out of the STAFF ONLY door after about a minute, alone, with the torch, to say something to me. I think he was going to tell me Malhotra sir wanted a bag. I'll never know. He stepped out through the door and his foot came down on the drift of broken glass in front of the counter, and it went crunch, loud as a gunshot in that hushed hall.

In the front row of the OPD chairs, the little girl asleep on her mother's shoulder lifted her head.

She was about five. She had a red ribbon in her hair, the kind you tie in a bow, and a small white token clutched in her fist, and she lifted her head off her mother's shoulder and turned and looked at Pandey ji across the lobby with her dead grey eyes.

I don't know what Pandey ji saw. I think, later, I understood it a little. He had a daughter. Malhotra sir told me that afternoon; he'd been showing everyone her photograph on his phone for eleven days, the way you'd show a ticket you were going to use. About five. A red ribbon.

Pandey ji made a sound I'd never heard a grown man make.

And then he lifted the gun and fired it.

· · ·

He didn't aim at her. I don't think he aimed at anything. He fired at the ceiling, both barrels, the way you'd scream, and the sound in that big stone hall was like the end of the world. Glass came down from the light fittings. Plaster came down. And sixty people waiting for their tokens to be called got out of their seats at once.

You don't know what that sounds like. Sixty steel chairs scraping on a stone floor, all together, like a hall standing up for an anthem. And then the feet.

"Sethi! Iyer!" I shouted at the door. "In! Now!"

They were already coming. Sneha first, her plait flying, her hands up, her lips moving; I felt the tanpura, the long steady drone, and the front row of the OPD queue froze in a ragged line, eight of them, ten, in mid-step, with their tokens in their hands. Rohan behind her, his eyes wide open for once. He didn't freeze them. He did something else, something I felt in the Hum like a pull, and a whole knot of them in the second row turned, all together, away from us, towards the smashed glass doors at the front, towards the light and the heat and the road.

Hunger. What does it want. He'd moved what they wanted. They went to the light like moths. It was the first time I'd seen anyone do it properly, and it was beautiful, and it wasn't enough.

The rest came at the counter.

At Pandey ji, standing frozen in front of it with an empty gun in his hands and his mouth open. At me, beside him.

I read three papers as fast as I'd ever read anything, a young man with his arm in a sling and two old men in kurtas with X-ray envelopes, and I didn't panic, because I couldn't any more. I read the whole question every time. Which way. Forward, forward, turning. Stop. Stop. Turn. Three of them stopped, a metre from the counter, a wall of statues. Then they slipped, and I read them again. Stop. Stop. Stop. My nose went. My hands went. I didn't care.

Behind me, the STAFF ONLY door crashed open.

Malhotra sir came out of it at a run, which I'd never seen him do. He didn't look at the dead. He didn't look at me. He took Pandey ji by the collar of his uniform with one hand, the way you'd take a boy who's frozen at the edge of a well, and pulled him off his feet, backwards, through the gap at the end of the counter, behind the shelves, through the STAFF ONLY door, and the door banged shut behind them.

I stood at the counter with my three statues and the hall roaring round me and held them.

· · ·

It was over in about four minutes. It felt like a paper.

Sneha didn't blank this time; she'd learned something at the gas agency, and she held fourteen and let them go and held them again, in rhythm, like breathing. Rohan pulled them to the light, a few at a time, and they went out through the smashed doors into the porch and the white glare of the afternoon and stood there, in the heat, among the ambulances, blinking and slowing, the way the dead always slowed in the sun. By the end there were only a handful left inside, standing still among the scattered steel chairs, and the little girl with the red ribbon, who had sat down again on the floor beside her mother's chair and was holding her token very tightly in her fist.

I let my three go. They didn't come for me. I was furniture again. They stood where they were and swayed a little and looked at the ceiling.

The STAFF ONLY door opened.

Pandey ji came out first, grey in the face, with the empty gun hanging from one hand. He didn't look at anyone. He walked out round the counter and through the lobby and out of the smashed doors into the sunlight, and stood in the porch beside an ambulance with his back to us, and his shoulders were shaking.

Malhotra sir came out after him.

He had the cloth bag over his shoulder, heavier now, and a white thermocol box under his arm, the kind pharmacies use to carry insulin. And his left hand was wrapped in gauze. A lot of it, wound round and round from the knuckles to the wrist, and taped, and already, at the side of the palm, a little dark spot was coming through.

"Sir," I said. "Your hand."

"Glass." He held it up and looked at it, as if it belonged to someone else. "The cold store door was glass. When I pulled Pandey ji in, I put my hand through it." He made a face. "Thirty years of telling students not to run in the laboratory."

I looked at the gauze. I looked at the dark spot. I looked at his face.

I'd been reading faces for two years in Kota and I'd never been able to read his. I couldn't then. It was exactly the face it always was: tired, patient, a little amused, chalk dust in the eyebrows.

There was broken glass everywhere in that pharmacy. I'd walked through it. Pandey ji had crunched it. It was the most natural thing in the world.

"Does it hurt?"

"It's glass, Anand," said Malhotra sir. "Of course it hurts." He turned towards the door. "Come on. Iyer, Sethi. We've been noisy enough for one afternoon."

· · ·

We walked back down the service road at half past three, in the heat, the five of us, with the bags. Nobody said much. Sneha's nose had bled and she'd wiped it on her dupatta and was holding the dupatta to her face. Rohan walked beside her with his hands in his pockets and his eyes open, looking at the road. Pandey ji walked at the back with the gun on his shoulder and didn't say anything at all.

At the main gate, Sukhdev slid it open for us, and Kunal was standing inside it, with his clipboard and two of the Betaal behind him.

"Bite check," said Kunal. "Everybody. Sleeves up."

"I'll do it, Bhatia," said Malhotra sir.

Kunal looked at him. "Sir, it's procedure, Rathore sir says—"

"I know what it is. I wrote the procedure, with Rathore, on the first Monday, in the lobby, on the back of a Physics question bank. I'll do it." He put the thermocol box down on the guard-room step. "Iyer. Sleeves."

He checked us himself. One by one, the way he'd count students off a bus after a school trip. Sneha's arms, both sides, wrist to elbow, turning them gently in the light. Rohan's. Mine; he turned my left arm over and looked at the old bite from Friday, the two pale brackets, for a long moment, and let it go. Pandey ji's, last of all, very gently, while Pandey ji stood with his eyes shut.

"Clean," said Malhotra sir. "All four."

"And you, sir?" said Kunal.

Malhotra sir rolled up the right sleeve of his white shirt and held his arm out, inside up, and turned it. Clean. He rolled up the left sleeve and held that arm out too, the bandaged hand loose at the end of it, and turned it. Clean, to the wrist, where the gauze began.

"Glass," he said, before Kunal could ask. "The pharmacy door. Ask Anand. He saw."

"I saw," I said.

I had seen. I'd seen the glass. That was what I'd seen.

Kunal looked at the gauze, and at me, and at Malhotra sir, and shrugged, and wrote something on his clipboard, and went away.

· · ·

Malhotra sir picked up the thermocol box from the guard-room step and opened it.

Inside, packed round with blue gel packs from the cold store, still cold, there were insulin pens for Kartik, two boxes of them, enough for a month. And beside them, separate, in their own little cardboard box, with a gel pack wrapped round it and an elastic band holding it in place, four small glass vials. Clear liquid. The kind of insulin my grandmother used, the kind Tara drew up into a syringe every morning and evening and put into the soft part of Dadi's stomach while Dadi said Rabba through her teeth.

He took out the little box with the four vials and held it out to me.

"For your sister," said Malhotra sir. "Keep it cold. Keep it in the shade. Tell her a physics teacher sends his regards."

I took it. It was cold in my hands. It was the coldest thing I'd held all week that wasn't my own fingers.

"You've never met her," I said.

He picked up the thermocol box with his good hand and looked at me over the top of his reading glasses, the way he'd looked at me across a hundred desks.

"I've met you," said Malhotra sir.