Chapter 46 Glass

For about three hours on Thursday afternoon, I was almost happy.

I want to be honest about that, because of what came after. I've thought about it a lot. I've wondered whether I should have known, whether the happiness was a kind of blindness, whether I'd have seen everything if I'd been paying attention instead of standing in the lobby of the Admin Block with a cold box in my hands, feeling something I didn't have a column for.

I don't know. I'll tell you what I saw, and you can decide.

· · ·

Kartik cried when the nurse gave him the pens.

He didn't make a sound. He just sat on the plastic chair by the clinic door with the box on his knees and his big glasses steaming up, and the nurse dialled the first dose and put the needle in his stomach and pressed, and he looked at the little window on the side of the pen where the number went down to zero, and then he took off his glasses and put his face in his hands.

"Sorry," he said, into his hands. "Sorry, sir. Sorry."

"What for?" said Malhotra sir, from the doorway.

"I don't know," said Kartik. "Sorry."

Ananya got a new inhaler in each pocket and one in her bag and one in Simran's bag, and looked at them the way Bunty looks at Maggi. Lakshmi didi went through the cloth bag on the reception desk item by item, ticking things off her list with a pencil, and when she got to Odomos if any and found two tubes, she laughed out loud and kissed them, which in that lobby, on that day, was the most beautiful sound I'd heard for a week.

People kept coming up to Malhotra sir. Students, staff, the electrician, the gardener. To say thank you. To touch his feet, some of them, the way you touch a teacher's feet on Guru Purnima. He let them. He stood in the lobby in his rumpled white shirt with his bandaged hand held a little away from his side and smiled his not-quite-smile and said "Arre, it's nothing, it's a pharmacy, I just read the labels" to every one of them.

He was sweating.

I noticed that. I want it on the record that I noticed it. His face was wet and his collar was dark. I noticed it, and I looked at the clock on the lobby wall, which said a quarter past four, and the thermometer beside it on the reception desk, the cheap plastic kind, which said forty-four, and I filed it.

· · ·

"Anand."

He'd come up beside me at the bottom of the stairs while I was watching Kartik. Up close, his face was very wet indeed. There was a drop of sweat on the end of his nose.

"Sir. You should sit down. You walked nearly two kilometres in the sun."

"It's forty-four degrees, Anand," said Malhotra sir. "Everyone's sweating. Even you, and you've got the hands of a dead man." He wiped his face with his good hand. "Listen. The keys."

"In my pocket."

"Give them to Chaurasia. Tonight. Tell him to put them in the bus and leave them there. Don't carry them on you tomorrow."

"Why?"

"Because if anyone stops anyone tomorrow," said Malhotra sir, "they'll stop you. You're the strange one. Chaurasia is just a boy from Indore who likes buses, and nobody ever searches a bus." He looked at me over his reading glasses. "Don't keep everything in one pocket, Anand. You of all people should know that."

It was good advice. It was exactly the kind of advice he'd always given: practical, a little dry, the advice of a man who's watched a lot of students lose a lot of things. I nodded. I didn't think about it any further than that.

He went up the stairs slowly, one hand on the rail.

· · ·

He found Ira on the terrace at five, at the end of her drill, and I was there, so I heard it.

"Deshmukh," he said. "Tomorrow. The little ones."

Ira had been rolling up a length of bandage. She stopped.

"The class 11 girls from Kaveri Bhawan," said Malhotra sir. "There are six of them. They're fifteen and sixteen and they've been very brave and they're very frightened. When it's time to cross the yard, they'll freeze. Little ones always freeze." He leaned on the parapet. He was breathing a little hard, from the stairs, I thought. "They listen to you. They watch your hands at the drill. Tomorrow, you take them. Personally. Don't let anyone else do it, and don't let anything else get in the way of it."

"Sir, I was going to lead the whole—"

"I know what you were going to do. Do this as well." He looked at her. "Can you?"

Ira looked at him for a long moment. I saw her read him. She was better at reading people than she knew; I'd watched her read Bhandari sir's chest in Room 603 and the guard's eyes through the hatch. I saw her try.

I don't know what she saw. Whatever it was, she put it somewhere I couldn't see either.

"Yes, sir," said Ira.

"Good," said Malhotra sir. "Good girl." And he went back down the stairs, slowly, with one hand on the wall.

NovelPhoenix contains the author's published chapter, but this display was taken from it without permission.

· · ·

At six, Lakshmi didi came and found me on the first-floor corridor with a steel plate in her hand, covered with another steel plate.

"Sir didn't eat," she said.

"He's tired."

"He didn't eat." She held out the plate. "Eleven days, Kabir beta. Every night, I put his plate on the table by the stairs, and every night he eats every grain and brings it back to me washed. Washed! A man who washes his own plate." She shook her head. "Tonight he said he wasn't hungry. Sir is always hungry. Sir is a teacher." She put the plate in my hands. "You take it to him. He listens to you."

"Nobody listens to me, didi."

"He does," said Lakshmi didi. "He talks about you. Anand this, Anand that. For two years. Didn't you know?"

I hadn't known.

I took the plate up to the third floor, to the room at the end of the corridor where he slept on a mattress under a window, and knocked. Nobody answered. The door was open a little. The mattress was neatly made, the sheet tucked in at the corners the way they teach you in a hostel. His red diary wasn't on it. His cloth bag wasn't there either.

I put the plate down on the floor beside the mattress, and covered it, and left it.

· · ·

I did the sum. Of course I did. I always do the sum. I did it on the stairs going down, and I want to show you how I did it, because it's the most important sum I ever got wrong.

He was sweating. It was forty-four degrees, he was in his fifties, and he'd walked nearly two kilometres in the sun and fought a pharmacy. Everybody was sweating.

He'd skipped dinner. He was tired. Old men skip dinner when they're tired. Dadi did.

He'd told me to give away the keys. That was sensible. It was exactly what a careful man does before a dangerous day: split the risk. I'd have done it myself, if I'd thought of it.

He'd told Ira to take the little ones. That was sensible too. He knew those girls. He knew Ira.

His hand was bandaged. It was glass. There was glass everywhere in that pharmacy. I'd seen it. I'd walked through it.

And on the other side of the sum, the thing that cancelled out everything else, the thing I'd have bet the whole Ledger on: Arvind Malhotra had written the bite-check procedure himself, on the first Monday, on the back of a question bank. He'd checked all four of us at the gate with his own hands, wrist to elbow, turning our arms in the light. He was a man who did things properly. A man who washed his own plate. A man who went through dustbins after every class for thirty years because rough work was the only honest thing a student ever wrote.

A man like that, if he'd been bitten, would have said so.

He'd have stood in the lobby and held up his hand and said I've been bitten, lock me in, the way the warden had said it, in a voice like a parade ground. He'd have made it a lesson. He'd have made it procedure.

So he hadn't been bitten.

I've been told since, by people who know about these things, that the cleverest people make the worst mistakes not because they don't see the evidence but because they see it and build something beautiful out of it that happens to be wrong. I believe that. I built something beautiful on those stairs. I built it out of everything I knew about him, which was a great deal, and it had one hole in it, right in the middle, where the thing I'd never been able to read about him should have been.

I'd never been able to read him. And because I couldn't read him, I read the glass instead.

· · ·

At half past five, before Lakshmi didi and the plate, Tara had called.

I'm telling it out of order. I know. I'm telling it this way because I want you to see what I was thinking about on those stairs, and it wasn't him.

The roof had three bars. The phone said Tara and I picked up before it had finished the first ring.

"Bhaiya! Thirty-one per cent!" She said it like a rank. "The power came for one hour at three in the morning and I charged it to forty and I've been so careful. Merin's here. She's reading to Dadi. Dadi's sugar is one-fifty-five. The insulin's in the clay pot, Bhaiya, the sand's wet, I check it every hour, I put my hand on it, it's cool, it's working."

"Tara."

"And there's no news of Annamma aunty. Sahu bhaiya went to the hospital yesterday and they wouldn't let him in. There's police. And Papa." Her voice changed. "Papa called on Tuesday. At twenty to seven. And he said Tara, utho, like always, and then he asked about you, and I said you were coming, and he said tell him, and then the line went." She stopped. "He didn't say what. Bhaiya, what was he going to tell you?"

I stood on the roof with the phone against my ear and looked south, at the checkpoint on the bypass shaking in the heat, and thought about my father at a phone in a shift office, not saying anything for a long time.

"I don't know," I said. It was true. It was the only completely true thing I'd said to her in eleven days.

"Will you ask him? When you see him?"

"Yes."

"Promise."

"Tara, I've got insulin," I said. "For Dadi. Four vials. Fresh. Cold. In a box."

A silence on the line. Then: "From where?"

"A physics teacher sends his regards."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I've got insulin," I said, "and tomorrow, at one o'clock, I'm coming."

I'd never said it. Not like that. Not on the stairs in Gayatri Residency on the first Monday, when she'd asked, and I'd left the sentence lying there unfinished. Not on the last page of the Ledger, where I'd written tell her I was coming, because I was dying, and dying people can say anything. Not on Sunday, when I'd said I've started, which isn't the same thing at all.

Tomorrow, I'm coming.

"Promise?" said Tara.

"I don't make promises I can't keep."

"So promise."

The line hissed between us, nine hundred and fifty kilometres of it.

"Promise," I said.

I ended the call at one minute fifty-eight seconds, two seconds under, for the first time in my life, because I wanted her to have the battery.

That was what I was thinking about on the stairs, at six, with the empty plate. Not his hand. Not his sweat. Tomorrow at one, and four cold vials in a box, and the word promise, which I'd never once in my life said to anyone without a price attached.

I was almost happy. I've told you that. I've told you I'd tell you the truth.

· · ·

At five to seven, the dead went to the temple, and Bunty came up the stairs with an envelope.

He had the bus keys in one hand, twenty-four of them on their steel ring, because I'd given them to him at half past six the way Malhotra sir had told me to, and he was on his way to Rani for the night. And in his other hand he had a long white envelope, the official kind, with SHIKHAR INSTITUTE printed in blue in the corner, sealed. He was holding it a little away from himself, the way you'd hold something that might be hot.

"Malhotra sir gave it to apan," he said. "At twenty to seven. In the lobby. He said give this to Anand at seven." Bunty looked at his watch, an enormous plastic thing from a cereal packet. "He said not before seven, bhaiya. He said it twice. He made apan say it back to him." He swallowed. "It's two minutes to."

"Where did he go?"

"Out. The side grille. Kunal let him out." Bunty frowned. "He said he wanted some air. Bhaiya, it's the temple time, they're all walking to the temple, why would he want air—"

I took the envelope out of his hand.

On the front, in the small slanting handwriting I'd known for two years, from a hundred blackboards, it said: ANAND. Not before 7.

I didn't wait two minutes. I've never in my life waited for a bell.

I tore it open. There were three sheets inside, folded, covered on both sides with that handwriting, small and careful and even, the handwriting of a man who'd had time. And I read the first line, standing on the stairs of the Admin Block in the last of the daylight, with Bunty breathing beside me, and the dead walking past the windows towards the temple, and the bus keys chiming softly in Bunty's hand.

Anand,

By the time you read this, I'll have a fever.

I didn't read the second line. I didn't need to.

I ran.