Chapter 52 Bunty

Bunty

Bunty Chaurasia had been scared for both of them for exactly forty minutes, and he was already very tired.

It was harder than it looked. You had to do it all the time. You couldn't stop, not for a second, not even to blink, because the moment you stopped being scared for Bhaiya, Bhaiya might do something, and there'd be nobody being scared for it. Bunty had always assumed fear was a thing that happened to you. It turned out, if you were doing it for someone else, it was a job.

He did it with his whole body, crouched in the black dark at the back of the workshop with his shoulder against Hariram ji's shoulder and his face against a steel shutter that smelled of grease and diesel and old rain.

They'd come out of the library fire door at twenty-five to one, ten minutes after Bhaiya, the way Bhaiya had told them. Out into the dark, along the west wall, keeping to the shadow where the wall met the ground, Hariram ji in front with his hand on the bricks and Bunty behind with his hand on Hariram ji's shirt. Bhaiya had been right, the way Bhaiya was always right. That side was empty. All of them were at the lights. Bunty could see them, a hundred metres away to his left the whole time, a great dark heaving mass round the lit Admin Block, pressed against the screaming grilles, and he could hear them, a sound like the sea, if the sea had ten thousand mouths.

He hadn't looked at them after the first time. He'd looked at the wall.

The workshop had a back door. Steel, with a padlock that Hariram ji had a key for, because Hariram ji had a key for everything in the transport yard except the one ring that mattered. They'd gone in, and pulled it to behind them, and crouched in the dark among the oil drums and the tyres, breathing.

· · ·

"Now?" whispered Bunty.

"Wait," whispered Hariram ji.

The front of the workshop opened onto the yard through a big rolling shutter, and the shutter was up a hand's breadth at the bottom, the way somebody had left it on Thursday. Bunty lay down on his stomach on the cold concrete and put his eye to the gap.

The yard was full.

Not packed, like the ground round the Admin Block. Full the way a railway platform is full at night, people standing about in ones and twos and little groups between the buses, waiting. Dark shapes. Swaying. Some of them moving slowly towards the light, some of them just standing, the way the dead stood when they'd come a long way and forgotten why. Between him and Rani, twenty metres away in the second row, with her yellow sides grey in the starlight, there were maybe fifteen of them.

Fifteen, between him and the door of a bus.

"Now?" whispered Bunty.

"Wait," whispered Hariram ji, very gently. "In the monsoon in '17, beta, I waited four hours at the canal culvert for the water to go down, with thirty children singing film songs in the back. Four hours. They sang every song in Sholay twice. You can wait twenty minutes for a few dead people to get bored."

· · ·

They got bored at five to one.

It happened slowly, the way all the important things with the dead happened slowly. One by one, the shapes between the workshop and Rani drifted away, towards the Admin Block and the light, the way people drift away from a platform when they realise their train's been cancelled. A gap opened between the second row of buses. Then a wider one.

"Now," said Hariram ji.

They went out under the shutter on their stomachs, like soldiers in a film, which Bunty would think about later with enormous pride, and then got up and ran, bent double, the twenty metres to Rani's door, and Bunty found the little flap behind the front wheel arch by feel, in the dark, and the red tap inside it, the emergency release that every school bus has so the firemen can get in, and turned it. Rani's door sighed open on its hinges, very softly, like an old woman sitting down.

They were inside. Hariram ji pulled the door shut behind them with both hands. Bunty fell into the driver's seat and sat there, shaking, in the dark.

They'd done it. They were in the fort.

Outside the grilles, a dead man walked past Rani's windscreen a metre from Bunty's face, slowly, towards the light, and didn't look in.

· · ·

He got the first-aid box out from under the seat with hands that wouldn't stop trembling, and opened it on his knees, and took out the ring. Twenty-four keys, twenty-four brass tags. He found 9 by touch, the way he'd been finding things by touch in the dark under trucks his whole life, and worked it off the ring, and put it into Hariram ji's old hand, and closed the old fingers over it.

"Bhoot," whispered Bunty. "When the yard's empty. When didi flashes."

"Bhoot," said Hariram ji. "I know." He held the key against his chest for a moment. "Twenty years I've driven for Shikhar, beta. Nineteen. I've never once driven a bus nobody gave me permission to drive." He smiled in the dark. "It feels very good."

Then he went and sat on the seat behind Bunty, the one Bunty had slept on for three nights, and they waited.

· · ·

Bunty prayed.

He hadn't prayed properly since his board exams. He prayed now to Khajrana Ganesh, the Ganpati of the big temple in Indore, where his mother took them every Wednesday, where the line of devotees went round and round the courtyard and the whole place smelled of marigolds and ghee and wet stone. He prayed with his eyes shut and his hands together on Rani's big steering wheel.

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Ganpati Bappa. Please let Bhaiya get it right. Please let him get the answer right, whatever it is. Please don't let it take anything else out of him. He's got hardly anything left in there, Bappa, apan can see it, he's like a godown after Diwali. Please.

Apan will give up Maggi. For a month.

He thought about that.

For a week.

Three days, Bappa. Three days is a lot. You know apan. Three days is a sacrifice.

Behind him, Hariram ji began to talk, very quietly, the way old men talk on night buses to keep the driver awake. About the monsoon of '17, and the culvert, and the thirty children who'd sung every song in Sholay twice, and how he'd come out the other side at four in the morning with the water up to Rani's steps and every one of them asleep. About his daughter's wedding in Bundi, and the band that came three hours late, and how he'd danced anyway, without music, in the street, because you don't wait for a band. About Chaudhary ji, who for three years had kicked Rani's soft front tyre every morning and written front left tyre — soft in his book every evening and sent the book to the office every month, and every month the office had written back next month.

"Three years," said Hariram ji. "Next month. And every morning he kicked it anyway, a little harder. To remind it." He was quiet for a while. "He was a good man, Chaudhary ji. Very strict. Never let anyone touch the keys. Not once."

Bunty thought about Bhaiya's hand on the snap hook in the grey dawn, quick as a spanner.

"Bhaiya touched them," he said.

"Yes," said Hariram ji. "I think Chaudhary ji would have been very angry. And then I think he would have checked the tyre."

· · ·

He had Shubham's receipts in his pocket.

He'd moved them there on Thursday night, out of the bottom of his bag, where they'd been since the Wednesday he'd found them in Bhaiya's trunk in Room 304. He didn't know why. He'd just felt, on Thursday night, that they shouldn't be at the bottom of a bag any more. A thin folder of pink slips. JAI AMBE CATERERS — GAYATRI RESIDENCY MESS. Received from K. Anand. Every month since August of the year before last. June paid in advance, on the Friday before the test.

He put his hand on his pocket and felt them there, a flat square of paper against his leg, and thought about Bhaiya on the roof saying Yes when Bunty had asked if he'd have let go of him on the ladder.

Liar, Bunty had said.

He'd known it was a lie. He'd known since the Wednesday in Room 304, sitting on Bhaiya's bed with that folder in his hands. A boy who pays his roommate's mess bill every month for two years and never tells anyone, not even the roommate, is not a boy who lets go of people on ladders. He's a boy who lets go of people on ladders and then never forgives himself for the rest of his life, and pays for it every month, in silence, to somebody's mess contractor.

He'd been meaning to give the receipts back. To put them on the table in front of Bhaiya and say apan knows. He'd been carrying them for nine days, waiting for the right time.

There'd never been a right time. There never was, with Bhaiya. You had to make one.

Afterwards, Bunty told himself, with his hand on his pocket. When we're out. Apan will give them to him then. Apan promises, Bappa. Three days of no Maggi and the receipts.

· · ·

At ten past one, through the grilles, the dead began to turn.

He saw it first in the yard. The few who were left out there among the buses, standing about in the dark, swaying. One moment they were facing the Admin Block, the light, the way they'd all been facing it all night. And the next, as if somebody had called their names from a long way off, they lifted their heads.

All of them. At once.

And turned. South. Away from the light. Towards the far end of the campus, where the dome of the Main Hall stood up against the stars.

And began to walk.

Not hunting. Not fast. The way students walk to an exam hall at five to nine on a Sunday morning. Steady, unhurried, sure, all in the same direction, as if there were a bell ringing that only they could hear.

Bunty pressed his face to the windscreen.

Beyond the yard, round the Admin Block, the great dark heaving mass was doing the same thing. He could see it in the light from the windows. The faces at the grilles turning away, one after another, in a wave, the way a field of wheat turns when the wind goes through it. The ones at the back first, and then the middle, and then the front, letting go of the iron, turning, walking. Away from the light, away from the screaming windows, away from the eighty people in the building, south, past the mess and the hostels and the academic blocks, towards the Main Hall. A river, turning round in its bed.

He could hear it. Under the generators. The sound of the sea, changing its mind.

"Hariram ji," whispered Bunty. "Hariram ji."

The old man leaned forward over the back of Bunty's seat and looked out through Rani's windscreen for a long time without saying anything.

"Bhaiya did it," said Bunty. His voice had gone completely. It came out as a squeak. "Hariram ji. Bhaiya did it. Bhaiya did it, bhaiya did it, he—"

"Shh," said Hariram ji, very gently, with his old hand on Bunty's shoulder. "Not yet, beta. Wait for the torch."

· · ·

The yard emptied. It took eleven minutes. Bunty counted them on his cereal-packet watch, by the light of the Admin Block, while the last of the shapes between the buses drifted away south, and then there was nobody. Nobody at all. Two rows of yellow buses standing in an empty concrete yard under the stars, and the generators droning, and the screaming of the grilles slowly dying away to nothing as the weight came off them.

He sat in Rani's driver's seat with his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the side of the Admin Block, on the dark place low down on the west side where the side grille was, and waited.

He'd never waited for anything so hard in his life. Not his JEE Main result. Not the result of the 0.4.

At twenty-two minutes past one, at the side grille, a torch came on.

Once. Off.

Twice. Off.

Bunty's whole body went cold from the top of his head to the backs of his knees, the way it had in the yard with the bucket, and then, for the first time all night, it went warm.

"Hariram ji," he said.

"I saw," said Hariram ji. He was already up, already at the door, with Bhoot's key in his fist. He pulled the door open and went down Rani's steps and across the empty yard to the first row at a sort of shuffling run, an old man running for a bus, and Bunty watched him all the way until he was up Bhoot's steps and inside.

Then he put Rani's key in the ignition.

Start her and sit, said his father, in his head, in the voice he used at the garage when a customer was shouting. You don't touch the brake lever till the buzzer stops. You don't care who's shouting. You don't care if the world is ending. You sit and you wait for the air.

He turned the key.

Rani's starter whined, and coughed, and died.

He turned it again. The starter whined. The engine caught for half a second, shuddered, and died.

Across the yard, Bhoot's engine roared into life, first time, and her horn went off by accident, a long hollow wail like a ghost in a film, and Bunty nearly screamed.

He shut his eyes. He put both his hands on the wheel. He did what Hariram ji had told him to do, on Monday, under the bus, on a sheet of cardboard on the hot concrete, in the most peaceful hour he'd had since Indore.

"Chal, Rani," said Bunty Chaurasia, very softly, to his queen. "Chal, meri rani. Come on. Come on, my queen. Please."

He turned the key a third time.

Rani woke up.

The engine caught and held and roared, and the whole bus shook under him like a living thing, and the dashboard lit up green and red, and in the cab, right beside his ear, loud enough to wake every dead person in Rajasthan, the low-air buzzer began to scream.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Bunty sat. He took his hands off the brake lever and put them in his lap. He looked at the needle on the air-pressure gauge, sitting on the bottom of its dial, and began, very slowly, to watch it climb.

"Come on, Rani," he whispered. "Come on."