Chapter 49 Last Class

He woke at fourteen minutes past eight.

I know because I was looking at my watch. I'd been looking at it the whole time, in the dark, in the front row, with my hands folded on the Ledger. Twenty-four minutes. Not long. Shorter than Bhandari sir. I'd wondered, sitting there, whether it would be shorter for him because he'd been so sure, or longer because he'd fought it. It was just twenty-four minutes. The fever doesn't care what kind of man you were.

His chest moved.

Not like breathing. Like a reflex, a sort of hitch, the way a machine shudders when someone switches it on at the wall. Then his hand moved on the desk. The good hand, the right one. It found the half stick of chalk that was lying an inch away from it, and closed on it, the way it had closed on chalk ten thousand times.

He stood up.

He did it slowly, like an old man getting up from a chair at the end of a long day. His reading glasses were still on the end of his nose. His bandaged hand hung at his side, dark at the edge of the gauze. He stood behind the teacher's desk of Room 12 in his rumpled white shirt with the chalk dust on the pocket, and turned, the way he'd turned ten thousand times, to the board.

And he wrote.

Under WORK, ENERGY AND POWER, in the same slanting hand, smaller, the chalk squeaking because he hadn't broken it this time:

W = ∫ F · dr

The work done by a force. The integral, along the path, of the force with every small step of the path. The first equation of chapter five. I'd known it since I was eleven. Every student in Kota knows it. It's the line that tells you that work depends on the path.

He put the chalk down on the ledge.

Then he turned round, and faced the class.

· · ·

The class was me. Only me, in the front row, in the dark, in Room 12, with my hands on the Ledger. Forty empty desks behind me.

He looked at me. Not the way the dead look at you, through you, at whatever's behind you. At me. His eyes found the front row, and stopped there, and stayed, the way a teacher's eyes find the one student in the room who's looking out of the window.

"Anand," said Malhotra sir. "Pay attention."

· · ·

The dead say the things they said most.

I'd known that since Room 603. Fifteen minutes remaining. I'd known it since the night of the warden. Three-oh-four! Attendance! I'd written it in the Ledger as pattern number five, with a box round it, in pencil. It's the habit that goes deepest. It's the last thing to go.

Two years. Every week I'd sat at the back of his class at the Tower and sold Maggi under the desk and slept, and every week, two or three times, he'd stopped in the middle of whatever he was writing and turned round and found me without even looking, and said it. Anand. Pay attention. Not angry. Not even loud. The way you'd remind somebody to tie their shoelace. The class would laugh, and I'd sit up, and he'd turn back to the board, and I'd go back to sleep.

Thirty years in front of a blackboard. Four thousand students, roughly, if you counted. And of all the things he'd ever said, of all the lines worn deep enough into him to come out the other side, the one that came out was my name.

I cried.

I hadn't cried for Shubham, in the bathroom. I hadn't cried for Arjun, on the ladder. I hadn't cried for Sushila aunty, or for her husband at the dairy, or for the boy in cubicle forty-one. I'd thought about them, all of them, every day, and written their names in the book. I'd thought that was the same thing.

It wasn't. I sat in the front row of Room 12 and cried the way Bunty had cried into Sushila aunty's dal, steadily, with my hands on the Ledger, and I didn't try to stop, because there wasn't anyone to see it except a man who had always seen it anyway.

He stood at the board and looked at me for a while longer. Then he turned back round and picked up the chalk, and stood there with it raised, as if he were deciding what to write next.

· · ·

When I could see again, I turned his paper over.

I didn't want to. I wanted to leave him alone, for once, the one person in the world I'd never been able to read. But I had to know. I'd always had to know.

It was like all the others, and nothing like them. Section A, bright and simple. Which way. Section B, faint: he wasn't hungry, or not much, yet. And at the bottom, Section C. Thirty years deep. Darker and more certain than any I'd seen, darker than Gopal Maharaj's, darker than the warden's.

7:00 — Room 12 — teach.

2:00 — the Tower — teach.

6:00 — the library — read.

9:00 — home — mark the papers.

And in a row by itself, faint, very old, so faint I almost didn't see it: After class — the dustbin by the door — look.

I sat in the front row and looked at that last line for a long time.

Then I put his paper back, face down, without touching a single circle. I closed the Ledger, and stood up, and went to the door.

At the door I turned round. He was standing at the board with the chalk raised, very still, in the dark.

"Good night, sir," I said.

He didn't turn round. He was busy. He had a class in the morning.

· · ·

Ira was in the library.

She was sitting on the floor under the window by the fire door, the one I'd gone out of, with her back against a steel almirah full of old question banks and her knees drawn up, in the dark. She'd been there since five past seven, she told me later. Bunty had come running down the walkway to find her with my name in his mouth and nothing else, and she'd known which way I'd gone, because she always knows which way I've gone, and she'd sat down by the door I'd used and waited for me to come back through it.

I came back through it at twenty to nine, through the dead, with the Ledger under my arm and my face still wet.

She stood up when she saw me. She didn't ask anything. She looked at my face in the light from the walkway, and read it, the way I'd watched her read Bhandari sir's chest in Room 603, and something in her face gave way.

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"Room 12," I said. "He's teaching."

Ira Deshmukh crossed the library and put her arms round me and held on.

She didn't say anything. She just held on, hard, the way you hold on to the rail of a bus when it brakes, with her face against my shoulder, and after a while I felt her shaking, and after another while I realised that I was too.

I'd never been held like that. I want to tell you that clearly, because it's true and I've never told anyone. My mother had held me, I suppose, when I was small; I don't remember. Papa didn't hold people. Dadi held my hand. Bunty grabbed me round the neck, sometimes, like a wrestler. Nobody had ever just held on.

I didn't know what to do with my hands. In the end I put them on her back, both of them, and she flinched at how cold they were, and didn't let go.

· · ·

I read his letter at midnight, in my storeroom next to the generators, by torchlight, with the DG sets roaring through the wall.

I'm not going to give you all of it. Some of it is mine. But I'll give you what you need.

It was a problem. Of course it was. A particle on a closed path. Conservative forces, and the work they do, which is zero, if you go all the way round and come back to where you started. You have lived your whole life as if every force were conservative, Anand. And then friction. The force that never gives back. The heat that goes into the floor. The path that matters.

And near the end, a line on its own, with a space above it and a space below it, the way he used to leave space on the board around the one thing you had to remember for the exam:

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

I read that line eleven times.

Then the last line, small, at the bottom, 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.

I lay on the mattress with the letter on my chest and the torch off and looked at the dark for a long time. I couldn't work it out. Not that night. I worked out a great many other things, lying there, about diesel and keys and buses and what a plan looks like when its middle has been taken out. But not that.

· · ·

At six on Friday morning, after Chaudhary ji's rounds, I went across to the yard to tell Bunty.

He was in Rani, in the driver's seat, with his head on the steering wheel. He'd taken the keys across at seven the evening before, while the dead were at the temple, the way Malhotra sir had told me to, and hidden them in the first-aid box under the driver's seat, and then he'd sat in the dark with Hariram ji and waited, because the dark had come, and the yard wasn't a place a living boy could cross after the dark came.

He lifted his head when I knocked on the door. He looked at my face through the glass.

He didn't need me to say it. He read it. Bunty had been reading my face for two years by the long scenic route, and he got there faster that morning than I'd ever seen him get anywhere.

He opened the door. He came down the steps. He stood in front of me in the grey light with his round face working, and then he put both his hands over it and bent over, right over, in the middle of the yard, as if somebody had punched him in the stomach, and made a sound that I'm not going to describe either.

Hariram ji came down Rani's steps and put his old hand on Bunty's back and kept it there, and looked at me over Bunty's bent head, and didn't say anything at all.

· · ·

At seven, I went to Room 12.

I don't know why. Yes, I do. I wanted to see if his habit was any good.

The class came at five to seven, the way it had come every morning for twelve days, in from the corridor in a slow quiet line, Ganga batch, with their badges and their notebooks. They sat down at their desks. They folded their hands. They turned their faces to the front.

And for the first time in twelve days, there was a teacher.

He was standing at the board. He'd been standing there all night, I think, with the chalk raised. When they sat down, he turned round and looked at them, at the rows, the way he'd looked at rows of students every morning for thirty years, counting. Then he turned back to the board and lifted the chalk and began to write. Nothing. The chalk moved in long slanting lines across the black, and there was nothing on the board but the squeak of it and a little dust, because the stick had worn down to nothing in the night. He wrote anyway. He wrote with his whole arm, the way he always had. Every now and then he stopped and turned and looked at a desk, and his mouth moved.

And the class watched him. Forty dead students with their faces lifted, following the chalk.

I stood in the doorway and watched them watch him, for a long time.

It was good, his habit. I'd like you to know that. Of all the habits I saw in those thirteen days, it was the best one.

· · ·

The lockdown came at nine.

I should have seen it coming. I'd seen everything else. But I was standing at the window of the first-floor corridor when Kunal came up the stairs two at a time with the clipboard, and the look on his face, and I knew before he reached the top.

He'd checked Chaudhary ji's belt.

He told the whole lobby, standing on the third step next to Aditya, in a loud clear voice that he'd been waiting all week to use. He'd been suspicious since Wednesday night, he said, since he caught Chaurasia in the yard with a bucket. So at half past five this morning he'd gone out and walked beside the transport supervisor on his rounds, the way the Sabarmati boy did, and looked at the key ring on his belt. Really looked at it.

He held something up. A brass tag on a loop of wire.

GANGA BHAWAN — ROOM 214.

"Somebody," said Kunal, "has taken the bus keys."

The lobby went silent.

"And somebody," said Kunal, "has been siphoning diesel out of Bus 3 every night. I've checked the tank. And Malhotra sir walked out of the side grille at twenty to seven last night, alone, at temple time, and didn't come back." He looked straight at me across the lobby. "And the only person on this campus who ever walks next to Chaudhary ji on his rounds is Kabir Anand."

Aditya didn't say anything for a long moment. He stood on the step beside Kunal with his clipboard against his chest, looking at me. He wasn't smiling.

"Where's Malhotra sir, Anand?" he said quietly.

"Room 12," I said. "Block B. He's teaching."

I watched it go through the lobby. Lakshmi didi put her hand over her mouth. The nurse sat down on the clinic chair. Kartik, by the door, took off his glasses. And Ira, standing at the foot of the stairs with the six class 11 girls from Kaveri Bhawan round her, didn't move at all.

Aditya closed his eyes. Just for a second.

Then he opened them, and the order came on, the way the lights come on in the Admin Block when the generators start.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Let's align." His voice was steady. "From now on. The diesel bay is locked; Kunal has the key. Two Betaal in the yard with the buses at all times, day and night. Nobody leaves this building without my permission. Nobody. Chaurasia, you sleep inside from tonight. Hariram ji, inside." He turned his head and looked at me, at the bottom of the list. "Anand. Category E is confined to the first floor until further notice."

"For the keys?"

"For the keys," said Aditya. "Which don't matter, actually. You can have them. Without diesel, a key is just a piece of metal." He turned a page on the clipboard. "And for whatever you did at the gas agency on Wednesday, which Kunal still thinks was him."

He was wrong about the diesel. Rani had more than two hundred litres in her tank, and Bhoot nearly as much; I'd watched Bunty feed her every night. But he wasn't wrong about the two Betaal in the yard. A bus with diesel and a key and two of Rathore's people sitting on its steps is still just a bus.

· · ·

At noon there was an assembly in the lobby. He didn't call it a town hall.

Major Sangwan had called him at seven in the morning, he said. Tonight, the Army would conduct clearing operations in the central zones of Kota. Sirens, lights, helicopters with loudspeakers; we should not be alarmed. We should stay inside. We should keep the generators running and the lights on. The Major had asked, specifically, for the floodlights on the court to be switched on at half past nine, for an aerial survey of the campus, so the helicopter could see us and plan the evacuation.

"Sunday," said Aditya. "On schedule. Two more nights."

People clapped. Not many. Some.

I sat on the floor of the first-floor corridor with my back against the wall where I'd been confined, and opened the Ledger on my knees, and turned to KEYS.

I went down the page with my pencil.

1. Bus keys. In Rani, under the driver's seat. Two Betaal in the yard. I drew a line through it.

2. Diesel. Bay locked; Kunal. Line.

3. Back gate. Pandey ji. He'd open it for Ira, Malhotra sir had said. Ira was in the girls' room on the third floor, and nobody was leaving the building. Line.

4. Admin side grille. Kunal. Line.

5. Sat phone. Aditya. And nobody now to keep him on it at a quarter to one. Line.

6. The Major. Floodlights at half past nine. I looked at that one for a long time. Then I drew a line through it anyway.

7. Malhotra sir. I didn't draw a line through that one. I couldn't. I sat and looked at it, and at the question mark after it, which I'd written on Sunday night, and which now had an answer that I'd written myself in two other places in the same book.

Every plan I'd ever made had been crossed out. All of them, in one morning, in pencil, by me.

· · ·

I've told you I'd tell you things in the order I learned them. So I'll tell you how that Friday ended in the order it happened, and I won't tell you anything I didn't know at the time.

At seven, the dead went to the temple.

At nine, they went to the hostels.

At half past nine, Aditya Rathore went down to the court with Kunal and switched on the floodlights for the Major's helicopter, and the court turned white as a hospital, and the forty basketball players in the cage turned their faces up to it.

And at twenty to ten, that night, the city came to us.