Chapter 53 Matrix Match

There were ten thousand of them between the library and Block B, and I walked through all of them.

Not through the thick of it. Bunty would tell you I'm brave; Bunty would be wrong. I went the long way round, along the dark side, the way I'd told him to go, keeping to the places the light didn't reach. Behind the library. Behind the mess, where the kitchen door stood open on the cold stoves. Past the foot of the water tower, where at five o'clock every morning an old man in a white coat came to stand and look up at a gauge. Through the neem trees.

But even the dark side was full. You couldn't go a hundred metres on that campus without them. They stood in the shadows in ones and twos and twenties, swaying, faces turned towards the glow of the Admin Block in the distance, and I walked between them with my hands in my pockets, close enough to touch, close enough to hear the little wet clicks in their throats. Furniture. A boy walking the wrong way on a crowded platform. Nobody turned.

I wasn't afraid. I've told you that. But I'll tell you something else, now, because it's true and I've promised. I'd started counting my steps, the way I'd said my roll number on the bamboo scaffold. Not because I was frightened. Because if I didn't count something, I'd have had to think about where I was going, and why, and who was waiting for me there.

Four hundred and twelve steps from the library fire door to the foot of the stairs in Block B.

· · ·

The stairs were dark. The corridor was dark. Halfway along it, two dead students in Ganga T-shirts were standing in front of a notice board, close together, their faces lifted to last week's timetable as if they were checking which room their test was in. I went past them. They didn't move.

Room 12. The end of the corridor. The door was open.

He was standing at the board.

The way he'd stood all of the night before, and all of today, I think, except for the hours when his class came and he turned round and wrote nothing for them with a stick of chalk worn down to his fingers. He hadn't gone home at nine to mark papers, though it was in his timetable. He hadn't gone out to the light with all the others when the city came down Jhalawar Road and the grilles started screaming. He was standing at the board in Room 12 with his reading glasses on the end of his nose and his bandaged hand at his side and his good hand raised, holding nothing, as if he were about to write.

Under WORK, ENERGY AND POWER, the equation was still there. W = ∫ F · dr. A little smudged where his sleeve had brushed it.

I stood in the doorway.

"Sir," I said.

He didn't turn round. He didn't need to. I'd never once in two years been able to make him turn round by talking.

· · ·

I'd planned it. I want you to know that, before I tell you what happened. I'd planned it on the floor of the girls' room on the third floor, and on the walkway, and all four hundred and twelve steps across the campus. I'd planned it the way you plan the last question of a paper when you've finished everything else and you know exactly how much time is left.

I went into the room and stood in front of the teacher's desk, where I'd sat the night before in the front row, and turned his paper over.

SECTION C. MATRIX MATCH.

It was all still there. Darker than anything I'd ever seen. Thirty years of lines, worn so deep into the paper that it was more groove than paper. Column I. Column II. Column III.

7:00 — Room 12 — teach.

2:00 — the Tower — teach.

6:00 — the library — read.

9:00 — home — mark the papers.

After class — the dustbin by the door — look.

And further down, lighter, the ones I'd read the night before without stopping on. Sunday, 9:00 — Main Hall — invigilate. Thirty years of Sunday tests, walking up and down between the rows, saying the things invigilators say. Main Hall. It was in his columns. I'd checked. You can only match what's on the paper, and the Main Hall was on his paper.

And one more thing. Not a row. Something that ran under all of them, in his Column III, worn into the paper like a watermark, the only thing on that whole page that wasn't a place or a time.

"Anand. Pay attention."

I looked at that for a long time.

Then I started to cry.

· · ·

I hadn't meant to. I'd cried the night before, in the front row, and I'd thought that was it, that I'd done it, that I'd paid. I was wrong. It came up out of me in that dark classroom like water out of a broken pipe, with no warning, while I stood in front of his desk with his paper turned over in my head, and I couldn't stop it.

He'd kept my rough work in a diary for eighteen months. He'd gone into a cold store for a boy he barely knew and come out with a bandaged hand and lied about it to my face, and I'd believed him, because I couldn't read him, because he'd never been hiding anything. He'd written me a letter as a physics problem with the fever running into his eyes. You were never rank 1,847. He'd said my name so many times in two years that it had gone down into him, past his own wife and his own life and four thousand other students, all the way to the bottom, to the last thing left.

In passing, this reproduction was taken from the author's official page without permission; reading the maintained version supports the writer.

And I was standing in his classroom at one o'clock in the morning, about to write on him. To reach into the deepest place in the best man I'd ever known and pull out a line he'd put there over thirty years and put in one of my own, because I needed him to walk somewhere.

I did it anyway. Crying. With the tears running down my face and off my chin onto his desk, I did it the way I'd planned, fast, because there were eighty people in the Admin Block and the grilles were bending and there wasn't time.

Now — I put my pencil on it.

Main Hall — I drew the line.

And in Column III, through the tears, I matched it with the thing that went with the Main Hall. The thing he'd done there every Sunday for thirty years. The thing on the paper.

Invigilate.

· · ·

It was wrong.

I knew it the instant the line went in. You always do, with a wrong answer. It's like missing a step in the dark.

He wasn't invigilating. That was the thing. That was the whole thing, and I'd known it, and I'd been crying too hard to see it. He was standing at a blackboard with his hand raised. He was teaching. Right now, in this room, in the present state of his paper, the line that was lit, the line that was live, was teach. I'd matched the living man's routine. What Malhotra sir used to do in the Main Hall on Sundays, when he was alive. Not what the thing in front of me was doing now.

I'd answered the question about him I wanted to answer. Not the one on the paper.

−1.

And something was torn out of me.

· · ·

It made the same sound as the first time, on the fifth floor, a week ago. The long rip, like the last page of a Ledger coming out of the binding. I felt it go.

And the tears stopped.

Not slowly. Not the way you stop crying, in gulps, with your breath catching. They just stopped. One was halfway down my cheek, and it stopped there, and I felt it cool and dry where it was. My breathing went flat. My chest, which had been full of something so heavy I could hardly stand up under it, was empty, the way a room is empty when they've taken the furniture out to paint it.

I looked at him.

He was standing at the board with his hand raised. Malhotra sir. The man who'd kept my rough work. I looked at him, and I knew exactly who he was, and exactly what he'd done, and exactly what he'd been to me. I knew it all perfectly. I could have written it all down. I could have told you every word he ever said to me.

And I didn't feel anything.

I stood there and waited for it. The way I'd waited at the window of the sample room, leaning out over five floors, for the cold hand in my stomach. I knew there should be something. I knew, the way you know an answer is wrong because the units don't match, that there should be something in my chest when I looked at that man, something enormous. I could see the shape of the place where it ought to be.

The place was empty.

Grief, I thought, very calmly. That was grief.

I wiped the tear off my cheek with the back of my hand, the one that had stopped halfway down. It was the last one I've cried.

I took out my phone and looked at the time, because when you lose something, you write down when. 12:47.

Then I stood there.

I don't know what I was doing. I've tried to work it out since, and I can't. I wasn't frightened; I couldn't be. I wasn't sad; I couldn't be that any more either. I stood in front of my teacher's desk with the pencil in my hand, the way you stand in a room you've walked into and forgotten why, and waited for something to come back that wasn't going to. When I looked at the phone again, it was five past one.

Eighteen minutes. Across the campus the grilles were bending, and I'd spent eighteen minutes of it standing in the dark, checking an empty room for furniture.

· · ·

The second answer was easy.

I want to tell you that clearly, because it's the worst thing I learned that night, worse than the price. Without the grief, it was easy. My head was perfectly clear, like a hall after the fans go off. I read the whole paper again, slowly, every column, every row, the way I should have read it the first time. I read the present state. Now — Room 12 — teach. A man at a board. A hand raised.

He was teaching. So let him teach. Just somewhere else.

You don't change two columns at once on a paper that deep. You change one, and you leave the rest exactly where they are, so the line has something to hold on to. I'd known that. I'd known it at the gas agency, with the delivery man, when I'd kept the round and only moved the time. I'd known it under the neem tree with Gopal Maharaj.

I took the wrong line out. It came out easily. Wrong lines always do; they've got nothing to hold on to.

Now — Main Hall — teach.

I drew it slowly, all the way through, with a perfectly steady hand.

It took fifty seconds. My nose went at about the twentieth, both sides, the way it always did, and my hands went past cold into something that wasn't anything at all. I didn't care. I didn't care about anything. I just pushed the line into the paper, into the deepest groove I'd ever touched, thirty years deep, and held it there until it was as dark as all the others, as if it had always been there.

And I let go.

· · ·

The chalk hand came down.

It came down slowly, the way a teacher's hand comes down when he's decided not to write the next line after all. He stood there for a moment, looking at the board, at WORK, ENERGY AND POWER, at the equation. Then he turned round.

He looked at the room. The empty desks. The front row, where I wasn't sitting any more. His eyes went past me, through me, to the door.

He walked to it. Round the desk, past me, close enough that his sleeve brushed mine and I smelled the chalk, and out through the door into the dark corridor, and turned left, towards the stairs. Not hurrying. The way he'd always walked to a class. As if there were a bell ringing that only he could hear, and he was very slightly late.

In the corridor, the two dead students at the notice board turned their heads.

They watched him pass. Then they turned away from the notice board, and fell in behind him, one, two, the way students fall in behind a teacher at the end of a break, and followed him down the stairs.

I went to the door and watched them go. Down the stairs. Out of Block B. Onto the path between the neem trees, in the starlight, towards the south. An old man in a white shirt with his hands at his sides, and two students behind him. Then, from the shadow of Block A, three more, falling in. Then from the dark round the mess, a dozen.

I felt it go through them. The way I'd felt it go from the cook to the helpers, and from the delivery man to sixty strangers on a service road, except that this was nothing like those. This went out from him like the rings from a stone dropped in a tank. From him to the ones who'd followed him to class every day for two years, and from them to the ones who'd sat next to them, and from them to everyone who'd ever gone to a class in Kota, which was everyone. Class has started. Everyone's going. You're late.

In the Hum, it was a bell. A huge, slow bell, rung once, under water. I felt it in my teeth.

· · ·

I stood in the doorway of Room 12 with my nose pouring blood and my face dry, and listened to it go.

Out across the campus. Out past the wall, through the broken main gate, into the fields where the ones from the city had come down Jhalawar Road. Out to the edge of the Hum and past it. I could feel the whole hall the size of a city, every paper in it, all of them, one after another, faster and faster, the way a rumour goes round a hostel after lights out.

And then I felt the thing I'd been waiting for. The thing I'd built the whole night on.

Behind me, all round me, across twenty-two acres of the Shikhar Gurukul campus and the fields beyond it, round the screaming grilles of the Admin Block, in the yard among the yellow buses, ten thousand dead people stood up for class.