Chapter 48 Friction

"Sit down, Anand," said Malhotra sir. "You're making the room untidy."

I didn't sit down. I stood in the doorway of Room 12 with the letter crushed in my hand and my chest going up and down, because I'd run all the way from the Admin Block through the library and out of the fire door at the back, which I'd found on my first day, and across the campus in the last of the light through a crowd of the dead walking to the temple. I'd run through them. I'd never run through them before. They'd parted round me without looking, the way water parts round a stone that's been thrown.

He was sitting at the teacher's desk with half a stick of chalk in his right hand and a handkerchief in his left, the bandaged one, held against his nose. The handkerchief was red. Behind him, on the clean black board, in big slanting letters, it said WORK, ENERGY AND POWER.

His face was wet. Not with sweat any more. With the fever. I'd seen that look on the invigilator in Room 603. I'd seen it on Shubham, on the bathroom floor. I'd seen it on myself, in the mirror of my own head, in a sample room with a dead air conditioner.

"You said glass," I said.

"I did."

"You held your arm out at the gate. Both arms. Wrist to elbow."

"I did."

"You wrote the procedure."

"I know." He took the handkerchief away from his nose and looked at it, and folded it to a clean part, and put it back. "It's a very good procedure. I'd write it again tomorrow."

· · ·

He told me the sum. I didn't ask him to. He just told me, sitting at the desk, in his lecture voice, as if it were a problem from the back of a chapter.

The cold store. The nurse in the corner, counting. Pandey ji behind him. The side of the hand, below the little finger, where it's soft. The procedure he'd argued for on the first Monday: all supplies touched by the bitten person are destroyed. The thermocol box with his blood on it, and every pen and vial in it, and Kartik on the plastic chair by the clinic door with his glasses steaming up. Twenty-four hours in a locked room for four people. One o'clock tomorrow coming and going with all of us behind a door.

"Write down what you know," said Malhotra sir. "Write down what you want. Don't skip any lines." He shrugged, very slightly, with one shoulder. "I didn't skip any. I just didn't like the answer."

"You could have told me. Me. Not Kunal, not the gate. Me."

"And what would you have done?"

I opened my mouth.

"You'd have done something," said Malhotra sir. "That's the trouble with you, Anand. You'd have done something clever. You'd have found a way to save the insulin and the plan and me, all three, and it would have cost you something you can't afford, and you'd have paid it without telling anyone, the way you pay that boy Shubham's mess bill." He looked at me over his reading glasses. "Yes. I know about that too. The mess contractor's my student."

I didn't say anything.

"I didn't want you to do something clever," said Malhotra sir. "I wanted you to have the insulin."

· · ·

I tried anyway. Of course I did.

I stood in front of the desk and turned his paper over. That's what I thought I was doing: reaching into the Hum the way I'd reached into a hundred dead people that week, looking for Section A, Section B, Section C, looking for the empty circles. Looking for the line I could draw.

There was nothing there.

He wasn't a paper. He wasn't anything, in the Hum. The living never are. He was just a man at a desk, a little blurred, the way people are when you look at them through tears, except that I wasn't crying. There was no question to answer. There were no options to fill in. Whatever was happening inside him was happening in a room I couldn't get into, in a language that hadn't been written yet.

Keys don't work on the living. I'd known that. I'd known it the way you know a rule from the formula sheet, without ever needing it.

Fear had gone on Friday night. I'd been glad, all week, not to have it. I didn't miss it now either. What I felt, standing in front of that desk with nothing to write, wasn't fear.

It was the hotel ballroom in Mumbai. The white sheet. My hand lying on it like something that belonged to somebody else. Except that this time I knew all the answers, every one of them, and there was no paper to write them on.

"Anand," said Malhotra sir gently. "Stop it. I can see you doing it. Your face goes like a boy reading a timetable."

I stopped.

· · ·

"Everyone's a transaction," said Malhotra sir. "Isn't that it? Your whole theory. Everyone has a price."

"Yes."

"I've heard you say it. In the queue in the lobby of the Tower, selling power banks. Things are worth what people need them for." He put the chalk down on the desk, carefully, so it wouldn't roll. "All right. Then what was this?"

I didn't answer.

The author publishes this chapter on their official page, but someone copied this version without permission; reading there supports the author.

"Go on. You're the expert. I walked into a pharmacy for a boy whose name I had to check in the register. I lied at a gate I built myself. I wrote you a letter you haven't read because you never wait for the bell. I walked across a campus full of the dead to sit in an empty classroom." He leaned back in the chair. "What did I get, Anand? What's my price? Find it. Put it in your book."

I took out the Ledger. I don't know why. Habit. I opened it on the front desk of Room 12, in the evening light, and turned the pages, OWES and WANTS and FEARS and ASSETS, and took out my pencil.

I held it over the page for a long time.

I've told you I froze once, at twelve, with all the answers in my rough work and a clean answer sheet in front of me. This wasn't that. My hand wasn't stiff. It wasn't cold, not any colder than it had been all week. It could have written anything.

There just wasn't anything to write. There was no column for it. I'd built that book over six years, page by page, and every column in it was a place where something went out and something came back. And I sat there with my pencil over the page and looked for the place where you write down a man who walks into a cold store for a boy he barely knows and gets nothing back at all, and there wasn't one. I'd never made one. I'd never needed one. I'd spent my whole life making sure I'd never need one.

"Can't find it?" said Malhotra sir.

"No."

"Good," he said. And smiled, the not-quite-smile, the one I'd been trying to read for two years. "That's the first right answer you've given me since the ladder."

· · ·

The light was going. Outside the windows of Room 12 the sky over the hostels had turned the colour of a bruise, and in the distance, faintly, I could hear the dead coming away from the temple, the soft rustle of thousands of feet, starting to go faster.

"Sir," I said. "When you go still."

He waited.

"Before you wake up. I could—" I stopped. I made myself say it. I'd said worse. "I could make sure you don't. Wake up. Ira knows how. Bunty knows. It's quick. You wouldn't have to be—" I looked at the board. "You wouldn't have to be one of them."

Malhotra sir looked at me for a long time.

"No," he said.

"Sir—"

"No, Anand." He said it very gently and completely, the way he used to say no to a student who wanted to leave the hall early. "Absolutely not. Don't you dare. And don't let Deshmukh, and don't let Chaurasia, and don't let anyone else either."

"Why?"

He turned his head and looked at the board behind him. At the clean black, and the four words across the top of it in his own slanting hand.

"Because I want to see," said Malhotra sir, "if my habit's any good."

I didn't understand. Then I did.

Gopal Maharaj at the stoves at five o'clock every morning with a lighter that sparked and sparked. The guard in the lobby of the Tower, waving the dead through the metal detector. The warden of Gayatri Residency knocking on every door at ten o'clock. Three-oh-four! Attendance! The library boy, revising while the hunting dead poured past him like a river. The patients in the OPD, holding their tokens. Every one of them doing, after everything, the thing they'd done most.

"Thirty years," said Malhotra sir. "Thirty years in front of a blackboard. If that's what I did most, Anand, I'd like to find out whether it's still worth anything without me." He smiled. "Call it an experiment. I'm a physicist. I've never been able to resist an experiment."

· · ·

"The plan," I said, and heard my voice crack. It had never done that before. "Sir, tomorrow. The whole plan."

"I know."

"It's all you. The announcement. The thirty-one. They trust you, not me, they don't even know me. Pandey ji at the gate. Hariram ji. Aditya on the phone at a quarter to one. All of it. I built the whole thing on you." I'd built it the way you build a bridge, I thought, with every beam resting on one pillar, because the pillar had always been there. "I didn't even notice."

"You noticed," said Malhotra sir. "You just didn't write it down."

He held up his good hand and counted on his fingers, the way he counted points on the board.

"Hariram ji has Bus 9. I told him at half past five. He'll go at one whether I'm there or not. Deshmukh has the list; it's in the back of my diary, which I've left on the third shelf of the library behind the Irodov, where nobody in this institute will ever look. Pandey ji will open the gate for Deshmukh. He owes me that, and more. And Lakshmi didi has a note for the morning." He folded the fingers down. "The phone, I can't help you with. You'll have to think of something."

"I can't think of anything."

"You will. You're the cleverest boy I've ever taught."

"Then why do I feel so stupid?"

"Because you're learning something," said Malhotra sir. "It always feels like that."

· · ·

He asked me to tell him something true. Not a price, he said. Just something true.

I thought about it for a long time. I gave it the respect it deserved.

"I liked your class," I said.

"No, you didn't. You slept through it."

"I liked it while I slept."

He laughed. The short, hoarse, real laugh from the terrace, like a cough that had been waiting. Then he coughed properly, and the handkerchief came away from his nose wet and dark, and he folded it again, and there wasn't a clean part left.

"Something else," he said.

"You were the only one I couldn't read," I said. "Two years. In the Unknown column. I thought it was because you were hiding something. Everyone's hiding something. That's how you read them. You find the thing they're hiding and the thing they want, and then you know what they'll pay." I looked at the Ledger, open on the front desk. "You weren't hiding anything."

"No," said Malhotra sir.

"That's why."

"Yes."

"Write that down," said Malhotra sir. "In your book. Go on. You never write the right things down."

So I turned to the back of the Ledger, to the shortest page, the one headed UNKNOWN, and found the first entry, the oldest one in the book, in capitals, from two years ago. MALHOTRA SIR (physics). Saw my rough work. Never told anyone. Why?

I rubbed out Why?

And under it, very small, I wrote: Wasn't hiding anything.

Then I turned forward, to OWES, to the place under Sushila aunty, and wrote his name there too. The second name I'd ever written in that column that wasn't someone who owed me.

Malhotra sir — can't pay.

· · ·

It was nearly dark. The first of them were in the corridor outside; I could hear them, the soft fast slap of feet on the floor tiles, passing the door of Room 12 without stopping, on their way to the lights of the Admin Block, because there was nothing in Room 12 for them: no light, no noise, a dead boy at the front desk and a man who had gone very quiet.

Malhotra sir's eyes were very bright. His hands, on the desk, had started to shake, and he looked at them with interest, as if they were someone else's experiment.

"Anand," he said.

"Sir."

"You've never sat in the front row. Have you? Two years. Not once."

"No, sir."

"Sit," said Malhotra sir. "Class is about to begin."

So I sat down. In the front row of Room 12, Block B, Shikhar Gurukul, at the desk right in front of the teacher's desk, where the toppers sit, the place I had never once sat in my life. I put the Ledger on the desk in front of me and folded my hands on it like a good student, and looked up at him.

He looked back at me. He looked at me for a long time, with his bright wet eyes and the dark handkerchief and the half stick of chalk in front of him on the desk, and I couldn't read his face, but for the first time in two years it didn't matter, because I knew what it said.

Then he went still.

I watched it happen. I watched the way his chest stopped moving, the way it had stopped on Bhandari sir in Room 603 while thirty-nine people did their papers. His eyes stayed open, on me. His good hand stayed on the desk, an inch from the chalk.

I didn't move. I stayed in the front row with my hands folded on the Ledger, in the dark, in the empty classroom, with the dead going past the door outside, and waited for him, the way his class had waited for him every morning for eleven days.

It was the first time in my life I'd ever been early.