Chapter 51 Three Halves

"There are three halves," I said.

"Bhaiya," said Bunty, "there's no such thing as three halves."

"There is tonight."

We were on the floor of the girls' big room, the three of us, in the corner nearest the door, with our heads together over the Ledger in the light of Ira's phone. Behind us, twenty-six people were pressed into the far corner, listening to the grilles scream two floors below. Ananya had her inhaler in her hand. Simran had both arms round two of the class 11 girls. Somewhere along the corridor someone was saying the Hanuman Chalisa, over and over, very fast, the way you say it when you're small and the lights have gone out.

"The dead half," I said. "That's me."

· · ·

I drew it for them. Badly. I've never been able to draw. A box for the Admin Block, a box for Block B, a long box at the bottom of the page for the Main Hall. A strip down the left side for the yard, with two little rectangles in it for Rani and Bhoot. And a gap in the wall at the bottom left for the back gate.

"I go out through the library," I said. "The library's dark. They go to the light; there won't be many round it. Out of the fire door, through them, to Block B. Up to Room 12."

"Through them," said Ira. Not a question.

"I'm furniture. I've walked through them every day for a week." I tapped the box for Block B. "In Room 12, I write on him. Now — Main Hall — teach. He walks to the Main Hall. His class follows him. And then it spreads, the way it spread from the cook to the helpers. From his class to every class. From the campus to the ones from the city who came down Jhalawar Road tonight. A rumour. Class has started. Everyone's going." I drew an arrow down the page from Block B to the Main Hall, long and shaky. "They go south. All of them, I hope. The yard empties. The back gate empties. The whole west side of the campus empties."

"You hope," said Ira.

"I've never done it on ten thousand."

"How long?"

"I don't know. To write it: a minute, maybe more. He's deep. For it to spread—" I thought about the mess helpers, six hours. The delivery man's procession, a few minutes. "Faster than you'd think. Slower than we'd like."

· · ·

"The human half," I said. "That's you."

Ira didn't say anything. She was still white. She'd been white since the end of the last sum, and her face hadn't come back, and her hands, holding the phone, were absolutely steady.

"Eighty people, more or less. Everyone in this building who isn't on that roof." I tapped the box for the Admin Block. "When the yard empties, you take them out. Not through the front. The side grille, on the west side, nearest the yard. Kunal has the key, on a string round his neck. He's on the roof."

"He's blanked."

"Then it's still round his neck." I drew a line from the Admin Block across the strip of the yard to a small square at the end of it. "The workshop. Concrete walls, steel shutters, one door. It's the depot. You get them there, in a line, heel and toe, the way you've drilled them. Twenty-two of them know how. The rest follow the twenty-two. You count them off in the workshop. And then—"

"The gate," said Ira.

"Two bolts and a bar. And a padlock, since this morning; Aditya's orders. Pandey ji has the key, but Pandey ji's on the second floor with his gun, and he hasn't spoken since Thursday." I looked at her. "Rohan's bolt cutters are in the workshop. From the gas run. On the bench by the door."

"How do you know?"

"I saw him put them there."

Of course I'd seen him put them there. I see everyone put everything everywhere. It's the only trick I've got.

· · ·

"And the machine half," I said, "is Bunty."

Bunty's round face had been getting slowly greyer and more determined the whole time I'd been talking, the way it had in the godown when he counted the Maggi, and now it set completely, like cement.

"Rani," he said.

"Rani and Bhoot. The keys are in the first-aid box under Rani's seat. Bhoot's is number nine. Give it to Hariram ji." I tapped the two little rectangles. "You don't wait in here. Ten minutes after I go, you and Hariram ji go out the same way, through the library. Keep to the dark along the west wall to the back door of the workshop. They're all at the lights; that side's empty. Then you get into Rani the moment you can, and you sit in the dark with the engine off, and you wait."

"In the yard," said Bunty faintly. "With them."

"In a fort. Hariram ji says so. The Supreme Court says so."

"Three minutes," said Bunty. "Of air."

"When the yard empties, and Ira's ready to bring them across, she flashes her torch twice from the side grille. That's when you start. Three minutes of air, with the buzzers screaming, with the yard empty, and every one of them on this campus walking the other way to class. That's the whole point of the dead half. To give you three minutes nobody's listening." I looked at him. "By the time the air's up, she'll have them in the workshop and the gate open. Then you bring Rani round to the workshop door, and Hariram ji brings Bhoot, and everyone gets on, and you go."

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"And you?"

"I'll be in the yard. Or near it. Somewhere I can see." I didn't say writing. I didn't need to. "If any of them come back, I'll stop them."

"Three at a time," said Ira. "For four seconds."

"Three at a time," I said, "for four seconds."

· · ·

She looked at me across the Ledger for a long time in the light of her phone. Then she said, very quietly, so that the room behind us couldn't hear:

"And if you get it wrong. In Room 12."

"Then something goes."

"What?"

"I told you. I don't know."

"What if it's—" She stopped. I watched her decide not to say it, whatever it was, and put it somewhere I couldn't see. "What if you don't come back?"

"Then you go anyway," I said. "Bunty drives. You navigate. The route's in here."

I closed the Ledger. I put the two rubber bands round it, the way they'd been round it for two years. Then I held it out to her.

"Page 112," I said. "The whole route. Every bearing you took. The address in Bhilai's on the inside back cover now, and Tara's number, twice. The timetable. The keys. Everything."

Ira looked at the book in my hand. She didn't take it.

"No," she said.

"Ira—"

"No. I'm not taking it." Her voice had gone tight, the way it went when she was holding something down. "That's what you do, isn't it? You give people the book and the key and the last page and you go and lock yourself in a room. I've already got your key. I've already got your last page. I'm not taking the book. You'll want it back."

"I'll want it back," I said, "if I come back. If I don't, someone has to have it."

We looked at each other.

Then she took it. Not gently. She took it out of my hand the way you'd take a knife away from a child, and pushed it down into the cloth bag over her shoulder, under the bandages and the compass and the graph-paper map, and pulled the drawstring tight.

"I'm keeping it for you," said Ira. "Not instead of you. For."

"That's a very fine distinction."

"I'm rank one," said Ira Deshmukh. "I make very fine distinctions."

"One more thing," I said. "Tara's vials. They're in the clinic fridge, top shelf, in the little box with the elastic band round it. Take them on your way down."

"Take them yourself. On the bus."

"I might not be on the bus."

She looked at me for a long moment in the light of the phone.

"Top shelf," she said at last, flatly, as if she were writing it down. "Elastic band."

· · ·

Lakshmi didi found us as I was standing up.

She came along the corridor in her big plain sari with a steel glass of water in each hand, the way she'd come along every corridor in that building for twelve days, and gave one to Ira and one to me, and then took something out of the fold of her sari at the waist.

A folded sheet of Shikhar letterhead.

"Sir gave me this," she said. "Last night. Before he went. He said for the morning assembly." She held it out to Ira. "I don't think there's going to be a morning assembly, beti."

Ira took it and unfolded it. I could see the writing from where I stood, small and slanting, in the middle of the page. Three words.

Trust Ira Deshmukh.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she folded it very small and put it in the pocket of her kurta, where, I knew without being told, there was already a small brass key and a page torn out of a Ledger.

"Thank you, didi," she said.

"He talked about you too," said Lakshmi didi. "Both of you. Every night." She looked at us, at the two of us standing there with our steel glasses, and something in her big kind face crumpled and straightened. "Drink your water. You can't save anybody thirsty."

We drank our water.

· · ·

Rohan was waiting at the top of the stairs.

He'd come down from the roof. I don't know when. He was leaning on the wall beside the stairwell door with his hands in his pockets, and his eyes, for once, were wide open, and there was blood dried on his upper lip from the windows.

"He's not coming down," said Rohan. "Rathore. He's going to sit on that roof with ten of us round him and hold the stairs till first light, and if the doors go, he's going to hold the stairs from the top and let the rest of the building go." He looked at me. "He thinks that's the right answer. He's worked it out. He's very good at working things out."

"He's not wrong," I said. "He's just answering a different question."

"I know." Rohan pushed himself off the wall. "What's yours?"

So I told him. Not all of it. The three halves. The Main Hall. The yard and the workshop and the gate.

He listened with his eyes open. When I'd finished, he was quiet for a long time.

"You're going to write on Malhotra sir," he said.

"Yes."

"Section C."

"Yes."

"Rank twelve," said Rohan Sethi, softly, and almost smiled. Then the smile went. "The workshop's two hundred metres across the yard. If any of them turn back while she's crossing, she'll need somebody who can stop them who isn't you, because you'll be wherever you are." He put his hands back in his pockets. "I'll go with her."

"Rohan."

"I owe you," said Rohan. "Remember? Nine of us came in through that gate. I'm the only one who knows it."

"I told you. Pay when it's expensive."

He looked at the stairwell door, at the dark beyond it, at the sound of the grilles screaming two floors down.

"It's getting there," he said.

· · ·

I went down the stairs to the first floor and along the corridor to the covered walkway.

Bunty came with me as far as the walkway door. He didn't say anything the whole way. At the door he stopped, and I stopped, and he stood there in the dark corridor with his round face working, and then he grabbed me round the neck with one arm the way he always did, like a wrestler, and held on, and banged his head against mine, hard.

"Bhaiya," he said into my ear. "Apan is being scared for you. Papa said. Somebody has to. So apan is doing it. Okay? You don't have to. Apan has got it."

"Okay," I said.

"Both of us. Apan is scared enough for both of us."

"Thank you, Bunty."

He let go. He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

"Don't fall off anything," said Bunty Chaurasia. "Apan can't drive and do the planning."

· · ·

The walkway was dark. The library at the end of it was dark. Ramanujan looked down at me from the wall with his plastic garland as I went past the long tables and the steel almirahs, and I thought about Malhotra sir sitting at that table yesterday afternoon under that portrait, writing me a letter as a physics problem with the sweat running into his eyes.

On the third shelf of the almirah by the window, behind the Irodov, where nobody in that institute would ever look, his red diary was exactly where he'd said it would be. I took it out. I didn't open it. I knew what was pressed flat in the middle of it, between two pages, like a flower. I put it inside my shirt, against my chest, and did up the button over it.

The fire door at the back. I put my hand on the bar.

Outside it, on the other side of a centimetre of steel, there were ten thousand dead people pressing towards the lights of a building full of the living. There was a sea, and somewhere on the other side of the sea, four hundred metres away, there was a first-floor classroom with a man standing at a blackboard holding up a stick of chalk that had worn away to nothing.

I wasn't afraid. I want to be honest about that, at the end. I've lost a lot of things; I'll tell you about all of them. But that night, at that door, I didn't miss fear at all. If I'd had it, I don't think I could have opened the door.

That was the plan, in the end. The whole of it. Not the three halves, not the keys and the culvert and the torch flashes. Underneath all that, the only thing it had ever really rested on, the only thing I'd ever really been good at, for two years in Kota, in every queue and hall and hostel, was the same thing.

Being invisible.

I pushed the bar, and went out into the dark among them.