Chapter 47 Malhotra

Malhotra

The nurse had been standing in the corner of the cold store for eleven days, counting.

Arvind Malhotra understood that afterwards, in the few seconds he had for understanding anything. She was a short woman in a white uniform with a pen clipped to her pocket and a clipboard still in her left hand, and she stood facing the big steel vaccine fridge in the corner of the cold store with her head bent a little, the way you'd stand doing a stock count at the end of a shift. Insulin, regular, ten. Insulin, glargine, six. Eleven days. In the dark. Counting.

He'd seen her when he came in with Pandey ji and the torch, and he'd done what Anand had taught them all to do without ever quite saying so. He'd read her, and decided she was busy, and left her to it. He'd filled the thermocol box with gel packs and pens and the four small vials, very quietly, with his back to her, and sent Pandey ji out to ask Anand for another bag.

Then the gunshot. Both barrels, out in the lobby, in that big stone hall.

He'd run out, and found Pandey ji frozen in front of the counter with a dead hall coming at him, and taken him by the collar and dragged him back, the way you'd drag a boy back from a well. Through the STAFF ONLY door. Into the cold store. Into the dark.

And the nurse in the corner had stopped counting.

· · ·

He didn't remember all of it. He remembered pushing Pandey ji behind him, against the shelves, with his left arm. He remembered her hands, small and strong, coming out of the dark. He remembered thinking, very clearly, she's shorter than me, and then her teeth closing on the side of his left hand, below the little finger, where the hand is soft.

It didn't hurt at first. That surprised him. It was like having your hand shut in a car door, a huge dull pressure, and then heat.

Pandey ji had hit her with the stock of the gun. Twice. Malhotra had never seen Pandey ji hit anything in twenty-two years, not since the day he'd stood in Malhotra's physics class at the Government Senior Secondary School in Ajmer and failed to find the centre of mass of a triangle, very kindly, for the fourth time. Pandey ji hit her twice, sobbing, and she let go, and fell, and didn't get up.

And then they'd stood in the dark of the cold store and looked at each other by the light of the dropped torch, and at Malhotra's hand, and at the two curved rows of marks on the side of it, and the blood coming up in them, slow and dark.

"Sir," Pandey ji had said. "Sir. Sir."

"Pandey ji," Malhotra had said. "Give me the gauze. Top shelf, on your left. The wide one."

· · ·

He did the sum while he wrapped his hand. He'd been doing sums his whole life. He did it the way he'd taught four thousand children to do it, roughly, if you counted: write down what you know, write down what you want, and don't skip any lines.

What he knew.

He had never taken the capsules. He'd never even seen one until Deshmukh showed him the photographs on Tuesday. So there was no chance of the other thing, the thing that had happened to Anand and Sethi and Iyer and the poster boy. No humming. No question papers. He'd go the way the warden of Gayatri Residency had gone, and the invigilator in Room 603, and eleven days of patients in that lobby outside. Two to six hours. Fever, nosebleed, stillness. Then whatever was left of him would get up.

What he wanted.

Kartik Sharma, rank 211, Ganga batch, type one diabetic, thirty-six hours from going into a coma. A woman in Bhilai with a stroke and a granddaughter of thirteen. Thirty-one people in the Admin Block who'd told him, one by one, quietly, that they wanted to go. And one boy from Sabarmati batch who had kept him in a column called Unknown for two years and was finally, finally, about to do something with what he'd been hiding.

And the procedure.

He'd written it himself. That was the joke of it. On the first Monday, in the lobby, with Rathore, on the back of a question bank, while eighty-odd terrified people watched. Anyone bitten on a supply run: report at the gate. The party is quarantined for twenty-four hours. All supplies touched by the bitten person are destroyed. He'd argued for that last line. Blood on a packet is blood on a packet, he'd said. We can't take the chance. Rathore had written it down in green.

Report it at the gate, and every pen and vial and inhaler in his cloth bag would go into the incinerator behind the clinic tonight, because his blood was on the thermocol box. Report it, and Anand and Sethi and Iyer and Pandey ji would spend tomorrow in a locked room. And one o'clock tomorrow would come and go, and the buses would sit in the yard, and thirty-one people would wait for a Major on a satellite phone.

Kartik would be dead by Saturday. The woman in Bhilai would run out.

He looked at the sum for a while, in the dark, with the gauze half wound.

Then he wound the rest of it, and taped it, and looked at Pandey ji.

"Pandey ji," he said. "You didn't see this."

Pandey ji's face crumpled.

"I'm not ordering you," said Malhotra. "You don't owe me anything. You owe me less than nothing; I failed you in physics three times. I'm asking."

Pandey ji looked at him for a long time in the light of the dropped torch. Then he wiped his face with his sleeve, and nodded, and picked up the gun, and went out through the STAFF ONLY door and across the lobby and into the sun, and stood in the porch with his back to everyone, and shook.

Malhotra picked up the thermocol box with his good hand.

"Glass," he said, out loud, to the dark, practising. "Glass."

· · ·

He checked them all at the gate himself. He'd known he would have to. If Bhatia did it, Bhatia would want to see everyone, including the teacher; Bhatia liked that kind of thing. So he did it first, briskly, the way he'd count children off a bus, and when Bhatia asked, he rolled up both his sleeves and held out both his arms, clean to the wrist, with the gauze beginning just where the clean ended.

"Glass," he said. "Ask Anand. He saw."

NovelPhoenix's website carries the chapter published by its author, but the words shown here were copied without permission.

And Anand said I saw, and Malhotra didn't look at him, because he didn't trust his face.

· · ·

By four o'clock the fever had started.

He'd expected it. He'd read the invigilator's timetable, the way they all had, from the boy's notes: bitten at six-thirty, still at ten-thirty-one. He'd been bitten at twenty-five to three. He gave himself until seven, to be safe. Physics teachers always give themselves a margin.

He watched Kartik get his first dose by the clinic door, and cry, and say sorry. That had been worth it. Whatever came after, that had been worth it.

He let them touch his feet. He'd never liked it, all his life, but he let them. Arre, it's nothing, it's a pharmacy, I just read the labels.

He told Anand to give the keys to Chaurasia. It was good advice, and he knew Anand would take it, because it was the kind of advice Anand would have given himself. That was the trick with that boy, he'd learned. You couldn't tell him anything. You could only tell him things he'd have thought of in a minute anyway, and save him the minute.

He told Deshmukh to take the little ones. She'd looked at him on the terrace in a way that made him think, for a second, that she knew. Then she'd decided not to. That was Deshmukh too. She would carry it, whatever it was, where nobody could see, and do the job anyway. Trust Ira Deshmukh. He'd known that since she was fifteen.

He found Hariram ji in the yard at half past five, sitting on the step of Bus 14 with his bidi.

"Hariram ji. Tomorrow. Bus 9."

"Bhoot? Arre, sir, Bhoot's horn sounds like a—"

"I know what it sounds like. If I'm not there at one, you drive her anyway. Deshmukh will have the list. Whoever's on it gets on. You don't wait for me."

Hariram ji looked up at him from the step for a long time with his bidi halfway to his mouth. He'd been driving for Shikhar for nineteen years. He'd driven Malhotra to Jaipur for the Olympiad camp twice, and to Udaipur for a physics fair, and once, in the monsoon, through the canal culvert at midnight with thirty singing children.

"Sir," said Hariram ji. "What's wrong with your hand?"

"Glass," said Malhotra.

Hariram ji looked at him for a long moment more. Then he put the bidi back behind his ear, unlit, and stood up, and touched Malhotra's feet, which he had never done in nineteen years, and sat down again.

"Bhoot," he said. "One o'clock. I won't wait."

· · ·

He wrote the letter in the library, at the long table under Ramanujan, from a quarter to five until a quarter past six, with the sweat running into his eyes.

He wrote it the only way he knew how to write anything important. As a problem.

Consider a particle moving along a closed path, he wrote, in his small slanting hand, on Shikhar Institute letterhead from the library's stationery cupboard. It begins at a point A. It goes somewhere. It returns to A.

If the only forces acting on it are conservative forces — gravity, a spring, the force between two charges — then the total work done on it over the closed path is zero. Whatever energy it spends going out, it gets back coming home. It doesn't matter which way it went. The path doesn't matter. Only the beginning and the end.

You have lived your whole life as if every force were conservative, Anand. You put something in and you expect it back. You keep a book so that you can be sure you got it back. That is very clever and it is very wrong, and I have been waiting two years to tell you so.

There is one force that is not like that. You know which one. I told you on the terrace.

He stopped there for a while. His hand was shaking. He wiped his face with his handkerchief, and when he took it away there was blood on it, a single bright spot from his nose. A quarter to six. Earlier than he'd thought. He'd always been bad at giving himself enough margin; it was the one thing his wife had scolded him for, in the twenty years before she died.

He wrote faster.

He wrote about friction. He wrote about the heat that goes into the floor and never comes back, and about the path mattering, and about why a person can walk. He wrote about a boy at the back of the fourth-floor lecture hall solving a ladder problem in four lines on a Maggi wrapper and throwing it in the bin. He wrote, near the end, a line he'd been carrying in his head for two years, since the Monday after Diwali, waiting for the right time to say it, and there had never been a right time, and now there wasn't going to be one.

You were never rank 1,847. Stop letting other people's lists tell you what you're for.

He signed it the way he signed the bottom of every test paper he'd ever marked. A. Malhotra. And then, because he was a teacher, he added a line at the very end, small, like a footnote.

P.S. The answer to the friction problem is not in this letter. You'll have to work it out yourself. You always do.

He folded the three sheets into a Shikhar envelope and wrote on the front, ANAND. Not before 7.

On a fourth sheet, separate, he wrote three words, and folded it, and wrote on the outside For the morning assembly, and took it down to the lobby kitchen and gave it to Lakshmi didi, and asked her to keep it till then.

She looked at his face for a long time.

"Sir," she said. "You haven't eaten."

"I'm not hungry, didi," he said, which he'd never once said to her in eleven days, and she put her hand over her mouth.

· · ·

At twenty to seven he gave the envelope to Chaurasia in the lobby. He made him say it back. Give this to Anand at seven. Not before seven. Chaurasia said it back, twice, with his round face very serious, holding the envelope away from himself as if it might be hot.

He went to the side grille. Bhatia was there, on watch, with the key on a string round his neck.

"Some air, Bhatia."

"Sir, it's temple time, they're all out—"

"I know what time it is." He looked at the boy. "I'll be quite safe. They're busy."

Bhatia unlocked the grille.

· · ·

It was the first time Arvind Malhotra had ever walked among the dead.

In eleven days he'd watched them from windows. He'd watched Anand walk among them, and Sethi, and the poster boy, the way you'd watch boys diving off a high rock into a river, with your heart in your mouth. He'd never gone out himself. A physics teacher of fifty-six with bad knees doesn't walk among the dead.

He found he wasn't afraid. That surprised him most of all.

They were going to the temple. All round him in the evening light, in their hundreds, slow and quiet, the way people go to a temple after work, past the mess and the dark hostels, towards the little orange building with its dark bell and its silent machine. They went past him and round him and he went through them, the other way, towards the long dark shape of Block B, and none of them turned, because they were going somewhere they'd gone every evening of their lives, and he was just an old man walking the wrong way.

Up the stairs he'd climbed every morning for eleven years. Along the corridor, past the notice boards with last week's timetables. The first floor. The end.

Room 12.

He'd thought it would be empty at this hour, and it was. The class only came at seven in the morning. He stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the rows of empty desks in the evening light, and the blackboard, with his last lecture still on it from the Saturday before everything. Electrostatics. Gauss's law. A sphere with arrows coming out of it. The flux depends only on what's inside.

He'd underlined that twice. He'd always liked that line.

He picked up the duster from the ledge and cleaned the board. All of it, slowly, top to bottom, left to right, the way he'd cleaned it every morning for thirty years, until the black was black again and there was chalk dust in the air in the last of the light, hanging, turning, like a little galaxy.

He took a new stick of chalk from the box on the desk. He broke it in half, the way he always did, because a whole stick squeaks.

And across the top of the clean board, in big slanting letters, he wrote the name of the chapter he'd always loved best in the whole syllabus. The first one he'd ever taught, thirty years ago, in a government school in Ajmer, to a class that had included a very kind boy called Pandey who could not find the centre of mass of a triangle.

WORK, ENERGY AND POWER.

Then he sat down at the teacher's desk, with the half stick of chalk in his good hand, and his handkerchief pressed to his nose, and the fever singing in his ears like a hall full of fans, and waited for the bell.

He'd told Chaurasia not before seven. He'd said it twice. He'd made the boy repeat it. He'd taught that boy's bhaiya for two years, and he knew exactly what that boy's bhaiya did with instructions.

At four minutes past seven, there were running feet on the stairs. Bad running. The running of a boy who'd always said running was a question of comparative advantage. Along the corridor, past the notice boards. And then a thin figure in the doorway of Room 12, in a borrowed shirt that came down too far, breathing hard, with three sheets of Shikhar letterhead crushed in one hand, and a face that Arvind Malhotra had been trying to read for two years.

He could read it now. That was something.

"You're late, Anand," said Malhotra sir. "As usual."