Chapter 50 Siege

The sirens started at twenty to ten, all at once, everywhere in the north, as if somebody had pressed one button for the whole of Kota.

I was on the first-floor corridor, where Aditya had confined me, sitting against the wall under the window with the Ledger on my knees. I heard them before anyone else did, because I always hear things first. A long rising wail, far off over the city, then another, then a dozen, police sirens and ambulance sirens and the deep two-note bray of something military, until the whole northern sky was one long scream.

Then the helicopters. Two of them, three, very low over the city, their searchlights hanging down underneath them like long white legs, walking across the roofs. And from them, huge, distorted, the same few words in Hindi and English over and over, so loud you could hear them from the edge of the city eight kilometres away.

STAY INDOORS. CLEARING OPERATIONS IN PROGRESS. STAY INDOORS. DO NOT—

And under all of it, starting a few minutes later, gunfire. Not the single shots we'd heard all week, from somewhere outside the wall. Long bursts. Many guns. Coming from the north and the east, the way the Major had drawn it on the bonnet of his jeep, though I didn't know that then. A brigade, in a line, with every light it had, pushing the whole of a city in front of it.

I got up and went to the window.

· · ·

At half past nine, Aditya had switched on the floodlights on the court.

He'd done it exactly when the Major told him to, because he always did exactly what he was told. For an aerial survey. So the helicopter can see you. The four tall lights at the corners of the basketball court had hummed and flickered and blazed, and the court had turned white, and the forty dead in the cage had turned their faces up into it, and for ten minutes the Admin Block of the Shikhar Gurukul campus had been the brightest thing on the southern edge of Kota.

Brighter than the city, where the power had been out for twelve days. Brighter than anything for kilometres. Only the checkpoint on the bypass, two kilometres away, came close, and the checkpoint was a wall of wire and sandbags and men with guns, and the dead had learned in twelve days what wire and guns were.

At a quarter to ten, one of the helicopters came south.

It came low over the campus with its searchlight swinging, and hung there above us for a minute, the light walking across the hostels and the academic blocks and the Main Hall and the Admin Block, so bright through the window that I could see the grain of the paper on my own Ledger. The roar of it shook the glass. Then it tilted, and turned, and went away north again, back towards the city and the sirens and the guns, and didn't come back.

It hadn't surveyed anything. It hadn't landed. It hadn't dropped anything. It had hung over us for one minute like a lamp over a table, so that everything in the dark could see where the table was.

I stood at the window and understood.

· · ·

They came down Jhalawar Road at ten o'clock.

You could see it from the window. I don't know how to tell you what it looked like. The road was six lanes wide where it came out of the city, and from the window of the first-floor corridor of the Admin Block you could see a stretch of it a kilometre long, between the last dark buildings of Kota and the dark line of the bypass. And it was moving.

The whole road. From one side to the other. It moved the way a river moves at night, a darker dark, shifting, catching the light from the floodlights in a thousand places at once, a thousand faces turning. People. The dead of Kota, driven out of the city by sirens and searchlights and guns, pouring south down Jhalawar Road towards the bypass, towards the wall, towards the checkpoint floodlights. And then, a kilometre short of the wall, seeing us.

The river turned.

I watched it turn. The front of it bent towards the campus like iron filings bending towards a magnet, and the rest of it followed, off the road, across the waste ground and the fields and the nala, towards the light. Towards the floodlit court and the bright windows of the Admin Block and the droning generators. Towards the brightest table in the dark.

In the Hum it was like nothing I'd ever felt. Thousands of papers, tens of thousands, a hall the size of a city all standing up at once. Every exam hall in Kota breathing in together.

Behind me, along the corridor, someone started screaming.

· · ·

Aditya turned the floodlights off at ten past ten.

I heard the generators change their note as the load came off them. The court went dark. It didn't matter. Turning off a light doesn't call back the people who've already seen it. The windows of the Admin Block were still lit, and the DG sets were still roaring, and in the fields between the campus wall and the road there were tens of thousands of the dead who knew exactly where we were.

He was on the sat phone. I could hear him from the stairwell, from the second floor, his voice going up and up.

"Sir. Sir. The floodlights — sir, they're coming here, all of them, the whole road, sir, you said it was a survey—" A pause. "Sir, I understand, but there are ninety people in this building, sir, there are children—" A longer pause. "Yes, sir. Yes. I understand." His voice went quiet. "First light. Yes, sir. Hold the position."

The phone went silent.

I came up the stairs. He was standing on the second-floor landing with the sat phone hanging from his hand, staring at the wall. His face had gone the colour of the tube lights.

"He said to hold the position," said Aditya Rathore, to nobody. "He said the brigade will reach the bypass by first light, and they'll come in. He said our walls are good." He looked down at the phone. "He said, you're doing good work, Rathore."

He looked up and saw me. For a second I thought he was going to say something to me, the bottom of his list, the Sabarmati boy who'd stood in the floodlights for five minutes reading. His mouth opened.

Then Kunal shouted from the floor above, and the moment went, and he turned and ran up the stairs.

· · ·

The main gate went at half past ten.

I heard it from the corridor window. I didn't see it; it was on the far side of the building, the north side, on the service road. But I heard it. A long, groaning, tearing shriek of steel, like a bus braking on a wet road, going on and on, and then a crash that came up through the floor of the Admin Block into my feet. Thousands of bodies pressing on one sliding gate of steel bars, and the gate deciding it had had enough.

The author shares this story where it was originally posted — this site copied it without so much as asking.

After that it was like water coming into a boat.

They came in through the gap where the gate had been, and over the wall where the razor wire had sagged under the weight of the ones who'd climbed it and the ones who'd climbed on top of them. They filled the service road side of the campus, and then the lawns, and then the paths between the buildings. They came round the Admin Block on both sides, the way they did every night, but not slowly, not in circles. Fast. Hunting. Pressing in towards the light from every direction at once.

The ground-floor grilles began to scream.

They were good grilles. Iron, bolted into stone, the nuts on the outside, the way Bunty had found them. They'd been put there to keep out thieves. Not ten thousand people leaning on them at once. I could hear them from the first floor, every window on the ground floor, a long iron groan rising and falling, rising and falling, like something breathing.

The yard filled. I could see it from the corridor window, under the stars. The transport yard along the west wall, with its two rows of yellow buses, slowly filling with the dark, the dead flowing in between the buses and round them like a tide coming in round rocks, until Rani and Bhoot and Chachi and all the rest stood up out of a moving sea up to their wheel arches.

The two Betaal Aditya had posted in the yard that morning had gone. I didn't know where. I hoped they'd got back in.

· · ·

The Betaal fought from the windows.

All of them, on the first and second floors, at the grilles, freezing the dead pressed against the iron, a dozen at a time, twenty, holding them, letting go, holding them again. I felt them in the Hum, those tall presences walking between the desks, Sneha's tanpura, Rohan's tired tube light, Kunal's hard bright noise. I felt them working. Each freeze made a little island of stillness in the sea, and the sea flowed round the island and kept coming.

It was like trying to hold back the monsoon with an umbrella.

Kunal blanked at half past eleven. I felt it happen: a bright hard presence, writing faster and faster, freezing twenty, thirty, forty at the grilles on the north side, and then, all at once, nothing. Like a phone going dead in the middle of a call. Somebody screamed his name. Somebody dragged him away from the window.

At a quarter to twelve, Aditya called them up to the roof.

All of them. Every Betaal in the building except me, because he didn't need me, and because I was category E, confined to the first floor. I watched them go up the stairs past me, Sneha with her plait coming undone, Rohan with his eyes wide open, Mayank crying, two of them carrying Kunal between them with his eyes open and his whole body rigid as a plank. Up to the terrace, where the water tanks were, and the dead couldn't reach, and from where, Aditya said, they could freeze the ones on the stairs if the doors went.

He didn't say if the doors go, we'll be safe up there and nobody else will. He didn't need to. I'd read it on his face on the landing.

He wasn't a villain. I want to be clear about that. He was a boy doing a sum, and the sum said eleven Betaal on a roof could hold a staircase until first light, and eighty people in the building below could not. I'd seen that face before, on an Army captain at the school ground, at five past seven on the second night, when he'd ordered the trucks to leave. I'd recognised it then. I recognised it now.

It was my own face. It was the face I'd had at the top of a ladder in the Saraswati Self-Study Library, with Arjun's wrist in my hand.

· · ·

I did the sum too. Standing in the corridor of the first floor with the grilles screaming below me and eighty people crying and praying and dragging furniture against the stairwell doors.

The building would hold for hours. Not until morning. The grilles were already bending; I could hear the bolts working in the stone. When the first one went, the dead would be in the ground-floor rooms, and then the stairwells, and then it would be a matter of doors. Hours. Two, maybe three.

First light was at half past five.

The Army would come at first light. The Major had said so. He'd also said the floodlights were for a survey.

Two buses in the yard, with diesel, with their keys in a first-aid box under the driver's seat, in a sea of the dead up to their wheel arches. A back gate, two bolts and a bar, two hundred metres across that same sea. A farm track, a canal, a culvert three point four metres high. Eleven kilometres to the highway.

And between the eighty people and all of it, ten thousand dead.

Section A couldn't move them. Eleven Betaal on a roof freezing twenty at a time couldn't move them. Section B, Rohan's beautiful pull towards the light, couldn't move them; they were already at the light.

There was only one thing on that campus that had ever moved a crowd of the dead in a line, all together, without anyone holding them. I'd done it twice. I'd seen it spread from a cook to his helpers, and from a delivery man to sixty strangers on a service road.

I'd seen it spread.

I went up the stairs to the third floor to find Ira and Bunty.

· · ·

They were in the girls' big room at the end of the corridor, with the six class 11 girls from Kaveri Bhawan and Simran and Ananya and twenty others, all pressed into the far corner away from the window. Ira was on her feet in the middle of the room with a steel almirah dragged across the door behind her and her hand at her shoulder, giving orders in her flattest NCC voice, down, stay down, count off, one, two, three. Bunty was beside her, holding Ananya's hand. He'd come in from the yard at seven, when the dead went to the temple, the way Aditya had ordered. He was grey to the lips.

They both looked at me when I came in round the almirah. I saw them read my face.

"I need you," I said.

I'd never said that before. Not to anyone. Not to Bunty in two years of rooms and trunks and Maggi. Not to Ira on a roof with my hands in hers. Not to my father, ever, in my whole life. I'd built everything I'd ever built so that I would never have to say it.

It turned out to be quite easy. You just open your mouth.

"I can't do this alone," I said.

· · ·

So I told them everything.

I told them about Gopal Maharaj under the neem tree at ten to five on Tuesday morning, and the forty seconds Ira had timed from the roof, and the line I'd pulled out of thirty-one years and the line I'd pushed in. 5:00 — water tower — stand. I told them about the two mess helpers standing under the water tower at noon in the sun, where nobody had told them to go. I told them about the delivery man at the gas agency, and the sixty dead walking down the service road behind him in single file like a wedding with no band. I told them about Section C, the section in the red box on Aditya's laminated sheet, VISIBLE, NOT WRITABLE, and how it had circles, and how I'd been filling them in for four days and telling nobody.

I told them about the echo. Waking at 6:55 wanting to go to class.

And I told them the price.

"Section A takes things," I said. "If you get it wrong. It took fear. One wrong bubble, and fear. Section C is deeper. Everything in it is deeper. A wrong answer in Section C—" I stopped. I made myself finish. "I don't know what it takes. I've never got one wrong. Something bigger than fear. Something I'd go looking for."

Bunty's hand had tightened on Ananya's until she winced.

"What are you going to do?" said Ira. Very quietly.

"There's one of them on this campus," I said, "that every dead student in Kota will follow, if he goes somewhere. Not because he's strong. Because of what he is. You follow a teacher. You've followed one your whole life. You go where he goes, you sit where he says, you wait for him for twelve days in a room on the first floor of Block B with your hands folded." I looked at the window. "If the teacher goes to class, the school goes to class. And if the school goes to class, the rumour goes round, the way it went from the cook to the helpers. All of them. The city too. All of them, all at once, to wherever the teacher is."

"The Main Hall," said Ira.

She'd got there. Of course she had. She always gets there, by the route with the most checkpoints.

"Fifteen hundred seats," I said. "At the far south end. As far from the yard and the back gate as you can get on this campus. Every one of them has it in their paper already: Sunday — Main Hall — sit. I just have to move it to now. And give them a teacher to follow."

"His paper," said Ira.

"His paper."

"You're going to write on him. On Malhotra sir. In Section C."

"In Room 12," I said. "Block B. Through all of that." I tipped my head at the window, at the dark sea, at ten thousand of the dead pressing on the grilles below. "It's the only way. It's the only paper deep enough. He's got thirty years in him."

I watched it reach her. I watched her do the whole sum, every line, the way she'd done the proof on the night of the fifth floor, no skipped steps. Section C. A wrong answer. Something bigger than fear. The one man in the world whose paper I'd least want to get wrong. In the middle of the night, in the dark, with my hands like ice and my nose already bleeding from nothing, with no time to read the whole question.

I watched her get to the end.

Ira Deshmukh went white. Not pale. White, the way paper is white, all the colour gone out of her face at once, as if someone had pulled a plug.

I'd seen her face do a great many things in thirteen days. I'd never seen it do that.

She understood what I hadn't said. Whatever that answer cost, I was going to pay it in a classroom.