Chapter 54 Rumour

I walked to class with them.

I hadn't meant to. I'd meant to go straight back to the yard, the way I'd told Bunty and Ira, to be somewhere I could see. But when I came down the stairs of Block B and out onto the path, the path was full, and all of it was going south, and I found that I wanted to see it. I wanted to see whether it was true. So I put my hands in my pockets and walked with them, the way I'd walked to Room 12 with them on Monday morning: one more student, going to a lecture, very slightly late.

It was like being in a river.

They came from everywhere. Out of the shadows of the academic blocks, out of the doorways of the hostels, off the lawns, out of the dark under the neem trees. From the Admin Block, most of all, in a great slow tide, letting go of the grilles and turning away from the light, their faces lifted, all of them, towards the south. They filled the main path from one side to the other and then the lawns on either side of it, thousands of them, shoulder to shoulder, walking.

Not hunting. Not fast. The way you walk to an exam at five to nine on a Sunday morning, with your admit card in your hand and your stomach tight, in a crowd of people all going exactly where you're going, nobody talking.

And through the broken main gate, from the fields beyond, from Jhalawar Road, the others came. The ones from the city. The ones the Army had driven down the road with sirens and searchlights and guns. They poured in through the gap where the gate had been and joined the stream, and the stream took them, the way a river takes whatever falls into it. They'd never been to Shikhar Gurukul in their lives. Some of them had never been to a coaching class at all; I saw a man in a vegetable seller's vest, and a woman with a dupatta over her head, and an old Sardar ji in a white turban. It didn't matter. Everyone in India has been to a class. Everyone knows what it means when everyone around you starts walking towards the same building at the same time.

Class has started. Everyone's going. You're late.

It didn't need to be true. It just needed to spread.

· · ·

The Main Hall stood at the far south end of the campus with its big dome black against the stars. Fifteen hundred seats. The biggest room in the institute, where they held the campus Sunday tests and the orientation day and the result-day celebrations, with the toppers on the stage holding up their ranks on cardboard. I'd never been inside. I'd seen it only from the roof of the Admin Block, and from the window of the sample room, the night I died.

Its doors were open. All six of them. And they were going in.

They went in through all six doors at once, in six slow streams, and when the hall was full, and it was full very quickly, the ones behind them didn't stop. They stood outside. On the big lawn in front of the hall, where the institute held its morning assemblies on the first day of every session, they stood in rows. Not crowded together. In rows. Lines across the lawn, one behind another, the way they'd stood on that lawn on the first morning of every year of their lives, for the national anthem and the Director's speech. Hundreds of rows. Thousands of them. All facing the doors of the hall.

I stood at the edge of the lawn, among them, and looked in through the nearest door.

The hall was full from the front row to the back. Fifteen hundred dead students and dead strangers and dead teachers, sitting in the steel-framed seats in the dark, facing the stage. Absolutely still. Absolutely silent. The way a hall is silent in the second after the invigilator says Begin.

And on the stage, at the big roller blackboard they used for writing the time remaining during tests, there was an old man in a white shirt.

He'd found chalk. Of course he had. There was a box of it on the invigilators' table at the side of the stage; there always is. He had a fresh stick in his good hand, broken in half, the way he always broke it. And he was writing on the board, in big slanting letters you could have read from the back row, if anyone in that hall had still been able to read.

W = ∫ F · dr.

He wrote it, and stepped back, and looked at it. Then he turned round to the hall, to fifteen hundred faces and the thousands more on the lawn outside, and lifted his hand, the way he'd lifted it ten thousand times, to begin.

I looked at him for a long time.

I knew who he was. I knew what he'd done. I could have told you every word he'd ever said to me, in order, with dates. And I felt nothing at all. Not grief. Not pride. Not the thing that had come up out of me in Room 12 like water out of a broken pipe. It was like looking at a photograph of somebody else's teacher.

Grief: gone, I thought, very clearly. Friday night, 12:47. Section C. Wrong answer. I'd have written it on the COSTS page, under Fear, if I'd had the Ledger. Ira had the Ledger. It was in her bag, under the bandages and the compass. For, she'd said. Not instead of.

I tested it, the way I'd tested the fear on the windowsill. I thought about Tara. Tara at the kitchen table in Bhilai with the red notebook, Tara on the phone saying Bhaiya like the first rain, Tara saying promise.

An unapproved reproduction was taken from the author's story page, where reading the chapter supports their work.

And it was there. The thing in my chest. Hot and helpless and huge. Love's a different page, I thought. They hadn't torn that one out. Not yet.

I turned round and walked back against the river, towards the yard.

· · ·

Walking back was harder. You can walk with the dead for hours; walking against them is like walking against a crowd leaving a cricket stadium. I went along the edges, through the gaps, round the backs of the buildings, with my hands in my pockets and my face dry and my nose still bleeding. Nobody turned.

I came round the end of Yamuna Bhawan at twenty past one and saw the yard.

It was empty. Two rows of yellow buses in an empty concrete yard under the stars, and behind them the pale line of the west wall, and the dark shape of the workshop at the end, and not one of them anywhere. The last of them were drifting away south past the end of the mess, slowly, the way the last people leave a platform after the train's gone.

It had worked.

I stood at the corner of the hostel and looked at it, and I wanted to feel something, and found that I could. Not grief. Something else. I didn't have a name for it. Bunty would have called it apan did it. I'll call it that.

Then the torch.

At the side grille of the Admin Block, low down on the west wall, a light came on. Once. Off. Twice. Off.

Ira.

· · ·

Across the yard, an engine started. Bhoot, first time, and her horn went off by accident, a long hollow wail like a ghost in a film. Then Rani, coughing, dying, coughing again. And then, the third time, catching, roaring, and over the roar, two buzzers at once, screaming in their cabs, bzzzzzzzzzzzz, loud enough to wake every dead person in Rajasthan.

Three minutes.

And out of the side grille of the Admin Block, into the empty yard, in a line, came the people.

I'll tell you about that properly later, when I tell you what Ira told me, because it was hers. All I'll tell you now is what I saw from the corner of Yamuna Bhawan: a long thin line of people coming out of a dark doorway into the starlight, heel and toe, close together, each one watching the back of the one in front, the way she'd drilled them on the terrace at four in the afternoon for five days while Kunal shouted NCC camp. Not running. Walking. Fast and quiet. Seventy of them, near enough, strung out across two hundred metres of empty concrete towards the dark door of the workshop, with a tall girl at the front with a torch under her dupatta and her other hand at her shoulder.

And beside the line, walking with it, his hands out of his pockets for once, Rohan Sethi.

· · ·

Not all of them had gone to class.

I'd known that would happen. I'd planned for it. A rumour is a rumour; it doesn't reach everyone, or it reaches them late, or it reaches them and they don't believe it. And some of them, I think, didn't have it in them to believe. People who'd never been to a class in their lives. People who'd always skipped.

They came round the end of the mess as the buzzers screamed. A dozen of them, maybe. Then twenty. Turning back from the river, the way a few people always turn back at the gate of a stadium because they've heard something behind them, and coming towards the noise. Towards the buses. Towards the line of seventy living people strung out across the yard.

I went to meet them.

Which way. Stop. A boy in a vest. Stop. A woman in a nightie. Stop. A tall man with a broken arm swinging. Three statues in the starlight, halfway between the mess and the yard. I held them. Four seconds. Five. They slipped; I read them again. Stop. Stop. Stop. My nose was pouring. My hands had stopped being hands. The others came round them, the way water comes round rocks, and I read three more, and three more, and three more.

Near the workshop, I felt Rohan doing the same. The tall tired presence walking between the desks, and under it a pull, Hunger, the thing Aditya had been teaching him since Monday: six of them by the workshop door turned away from the line all at once and walked off towards the lit windows of the Admin Block, the way moths go to a lamp. Then six more. He was good. He was much better than me at that. He'd been rank twelve in Ganga batch, and he'd been rank four on the court, and he'd been neither, really; he'd been a boy with good eyes and half-closed lids waiting for the expensive moment.

I read three more. And three more.

The line went into the workshop. The last of them. I saw the tall girl at the door, counting them in, her hand on each shoulder as they passed. I couldn't hear her. I could see her lips. Sixty-six. Sixty-seven. Sixty-eight.

The buzzers stopped.

First Bhoot's, then, a few seconds later, Rani's. And in the sudden silence I heard, across the empty yard, as clearly as if he'd been standing beside me, Bunty Chaurasia saying, Air's up, to nobody, in a voice like a boy who's just got his rank.

· · ·

I'd turned round, I think, to look for the next three. I don't remember. What I remember is looking up.

At the Admin Block. At its roof.

The terrace of the Admin Block looked straight down on the transport yard; I'd sat on it on Sunday night with Malhotra sir on an upturned bucket, and looked down at the dead going round and round in the yellow light. Now the light from the windows below lit the parapet from underneath, and along the parapet, in a line, black against the orange sky, the Betaal were standing, watching. Nine of them. Rohan was in the yard, and Kunal, I found out later, was down at the grille.

And in the middle of them, at the parapet, with his hands on it, looking south, was Aditya Rathore.

He was looking at the Main Hall. At the dome, black against the stars, and the lawn in front of it, filled from edge to edge with thousands of the dead standing in rows, the way they'd stood on the first morning of every session, facing the doors. I watched him look at it. I watched him look for a long time.

Then he turned his head, slowly, and looked down into the yard.

At the two buses, engines running, air up. At the dark door of the workshop with sixty-eight people inside it. At the statues frozen in the starlight between the mess and the yard. And at the thin boy in the borrowed shirt standing in the middle of them with his nose pouring blood and his hands at his sides.

Across two hundred metres of yard, in the light from the windows, Aditya Rathore's eyes met mine.

He didn't move. He didn't shout. He didn't lift his hand, the way he'd lifted it on the platform on Saturday night, the way that could stop thirty-one of them for a full minute. He just stood at the parapet of the roof of the building he'd kept alive for twelve days with a list and a clipboard and a phone, and looked at me.

And I watched him understand. The hall full of the dead. The rows on the lawn. The old man on the stage. The thing his laminated sheet had said, in a red box with a thick border, could not be done.

He knew.