Chapter 55: Ira

Ira

Ira Deshmukh had sixty-eight people on a staircase in the dark, and every one of them was watching her hands.

She'd brought them down from the third floor and the second in groups, the way she'd planned it on the graph paper in the transport office while a dead man stood at the window behind her. Twenty-two from the drill as leaders, one at the front of each little group, one at the back. The six class 11 girls from Kaveri Bhawan right behind her, because Malhotra sir had said personally, and she did what Malhotra sir said. Simran with Ananya. Kartik with his new pens in a bag round his neck. The two girls from Bhopal. The boy whose mother was in a hospital in Nagpur. Hariram ji's thirty and Bunty's thirty-eight, though they didn't know yet which bus they'd be on, and neither did she.

Sixty-eight. She'd counted them on every landing.

The ones who were staying had stayed upstairs. Lakshmi didi, who had a sister in Kota and a diya to light. The nurse, who wouldn't leave the clinic. The electrician, who said the generators would stop if he left them, and somebody had to keep the lights on for whoever was left. Two students who believed the Major. Sukhdev, who never spoke. Pandey ji.

Pandey ji had come down the stairs to the first floor as she passed, with the old gun on his shoulder, and stopped her with a hand on her arm.

"Beti," he'd said. It was the first thing anyone had heard him say since Thursday. "The back gate." And he'd put something in her hand. A small padlock key on a loop of string. "Malhotra sir said I owed him." His moustache was wet. "I'm a guard. I stay with the building. Somebody has to lock the grille after you."

She'd wanted to argue. There wasn't time. She'd put the key in the pocket of her kurta, with the brass key from Room 603 and the page from the back of a Ledger and three words on Shikhar letterhead, and said thank you, Pandey ji, and gone on down.

At the clinic door the nurse had been waiting for her, with a small thermocol box in her hands. Ira had sent Simran down for it the minute he'd gone through the walkway door, because she didn't trust anything to on your way down. Four vials, packed round with fresh gel packs from the freezer compartment. "Keep it in the shade," the nurse had said, and Ira had put it in the cloth bag on her shoulder, next to his Ledger.

· · ·

They were on the last flight, the one down to the ground floor and the side grille, when the singing started.

That was what it sounded like, from inside. The grilles had been screaming for two hours, every window on the ground floor, a long iron groan rising and falling like something breathing. And then, at about ten past one, the screaming started to change. To go down. Like the note of a harmonium when someone takes their hands off it, one key at a time.

Sixty-eight people on a dark staircase held their breath and listened to the grilles go quiet.

"He's done it," whispered someone behind her. One of the Bhopal girls. "Didi, has he—"

Ira put her fist up. Halt. Quiet. Sixty-eight people went silent.

She didn't know if he'd done it. She knew something had happened. She'd felt it, standing on the third-floor landing ten minutes before with her hand on the rail: nothing she could have described, nothing in her own body, just a strange stillness that went through the building like the moment after a bell stops ringing. And then the grilles.

She went down the last steps to the corridor that led to the side grille, with her torch under her dupatta, and Kunal Bhatia was standing in front of it.

· · ·

He'd come down from the roof. He was grey in the face and there was dried blood on his lip and his eyes didn't quite focus, the way people's eyes don't when they've blanked and come back, but he was on his feet, with his back to the iron, and the grille key on its string round his neck, and his arms folded.

"Nobody leaves," said Kunal.

Behind her, sixty-eight people stopped on the stairs.

"Kunal," said Ira.

"Rathore sir's orders. Nobody leaves this building without his permission. Nobody. You heard him at the lockdown. The Army comes at first light." His voice was hoarse. "You open this grille, you'll get every one of them killed."

"They're going," said Ira. "Listen."

They listened. Beyond the grille, beyond the iron and the dark, the sound of the sea was changing its mind. A soft rustle of thousands of feet, all going the same way. Away.

Kunal's face didn't change. "It's a trick. They come back. They always come back."

"Not this time."

"How would you know, Deshmukh?" He laughed. It came out wrong. "You can't even hear them. You're not one of us. You're just rank one."

Ira looked at him for a long moment. At the blood on his lip and his unfocused eyes and his folded arms, and the key on the string. She thought about Room 603, and a boy who'd sold her a pencil she didn't need and then pressed a key into her hand and said they listen to rank one. She'd hated him for that, for days. For giving her the credit. For knowing she'd be listened to.

She took the folded sheet of Shikhar letterhead out of the pocket of her kurta and opened it, and held it up in the light of her torch so that Kunal could see it, and the people behind her on the stairs could see it too.

"Malhotra sir," said Ira Deshmukh, quite loudly, in her flattest, clearest NCC voice, the one that carried to the back of a parade ground, "left a note for the morning assembly."

She read it out.

"Trust Ira Deshmukh."

It was three words. It didn't take long. In the silence after it, on the stairs behind her, somebody started to cry.

Kunal looked at the paper. He knew the handwriting. Everyone in that building knew the handwriting; it had covered every blackboard any of them had ever sat in front of.

No mystery in the source: this chapter was taken from where the author publishes without permission, and that page supports their work.

"That's not—" he began.

"Rathore isn't coming down, Kunal."

It wasn't Ira who said it. It was Rohan Sethi, who'd come along the corridor behind her from the walkway without a sound, the way the Betaal went everywhere, and was standing at her shoulder with his hands in his pockets and his eyes, for once, wide open.

"I was on the roof," said Rohan. "I heard him. He's going to sit up there with the ten of you and hold the stairs till first light, and if the doors go, he's going to hold the stairs from the top and let everyone below go." He looked at Kunal. "He thinks that's the right answer. He worked it out. He's very good at working things out." He paused. "You know he's not coming down. You know it. That's why you're down here and not up there."

Kunal stood with his back to the grille for a long time.

Then, from somewhere on the stairs behind Ira, a small voice. One of the class 11 girls from Kaveri, the youngest, who hadn't said a word all night.

"Kunal bhaiya," she said, "NCC camp is leaving."

Somebody laughed. It was a terrible, cracked, frightened laugh, and it went up the staircase like a spark, and for a second sixty-eight people in the dark were laughing, very quietly, with their hands over their mouths.

Kunal Bhatia looked at them. Then he made a sound that might have been a laugh too, and shrugged, the way he'd shrugged at the back gate on Saturday when she'd said nobody here is dangerous, as if she'd made a joke he'd decided to allow.

He took the string over his head and held out the key.

"Deshmukh," he said. "If they come back, I'm locking it behind you."

"Lock it," said Ira, and took the key. "Pandey ji will help you."

· · ·

She unlocked the grille. She looked out.

The yard was empty.

Two rows of yellow buses in the starlight, and a long empty stretch of concrete, and at the end of it, two hundred metres away, the dark square of the workshop. Nobody. Not one of them. Away to the left, past the end of the mess, she could see the last of them drifting south, slow and quiet, the way the last people leave a platform. And beyond that, far away, at the south end of the campus, a dark mass on the lawn in front of the Main Hall, standing in rows.

Rows. She'd stood in rows on that lawn on the first day of every session for two years. Jana gana mana.

He'd done it.

She didn't let herself think about what it had cost. Not yet. She put that somewhere she'd look at later, the way she put everything, and lifted the torch, and pointed it at the dark shape of Rani in the second row, and pressed the switch.

Once. Off.

Twice. Off.

Across the yard, an engine started, and a horn went off like a ghost, and then another engine, coughing, dying, coughing, catching. And two buzzers began to scream.

"Line," said Ira, not loudly. And then, to the stairs, in the voice she'd used on the terrace at four o'clock every afternoon for five days: "Heel and toe. Watch the back in front of you. Nobody runs. Nobody talks. Go."

· · ·

They went.

Out of the side grille, into the starlight, in a line. She'd drilled twenty-two of them, and the twenty-two had watched her hands, and the other forty-six watched the twenty-two, and it worked. It worked the way a thing works when you've practised it until it's boring. Heel and toe. Close together. Each one watching the back of the one in front. Not running. Fast and quiet across the open concrete, past the yellow buses with their engines roaring and their buzzers screaming, towards the dark door of the workshop.

There were statues in the yard.

She saw them as she went past. Between the end of the mess and the edge of the yard, standing perfectly still in the starlight, in the middle of a step, with their arms half raised: a boy in a vest, a woman in a nightie, a tall man with a broken arm. Frozen. And then, as she watched, unfrozen, lurching forward, and then frozen again, all three at once, as if someone had pressed pause.

She knew who'd pressed pause. She didn't look for him. She couldn't. She had sixty-eight people behind her.

Halfway across, a straggler came round the end of the workshop.

A boy, a student, in a Ganga T-shirt, coming back from the river towards the noise of the engines. He turned his face towards the line. Towards the middle of it, where Simran was. Simran made a sound.

Ira's fist went up. And then her hand went flat, palm down, and pushed down through the air, once.

Down.

Sixty-eight people dropped flat on the concrete. All at once. Without a word. The way she'd made them practise it on the terrace, over and over, until Kunal had shouted NCC camp! and half the Betaal had laughed.

The boy in the Ganga T-shirt stopped. He stood there, swaying, his face turned towards the place where the line had been, listening. There was nothing to listen to now but the buzzers, far away by the buses. He turned his head towards them.

And then, from beside the line, Rohan Sethi did something, and the boy turned away. Not frozen. Turned, all at once, towards the lit windows of the Admin Block, the way a moth turns towards a lamp, and walked off towards them, and was gone.

Ira's hand came up. Up. Go.

Sixty-eight people got up off the concrete and went on.

· · ·

The workshop door. She stood beside it, the way she'd stood at the door of the godown on the second night, and counted them in, one hand on each shoulder as they passed.

"One. Two. Three."

The class 11 girls. Simran and Ananya. Kartik with his pens. The Bhopal girls. The boy from Nagpur. The drill leaders, the stragglers, the slow ones, the ones who were crying. Each shoulder warm under her hand.

"Sixty-six. Sixty-seven. Sixty-eight."

Everyone.

The buzzers stopped. First Bhoot's. Then Rani's. And in the silence, across the yard, she heard Bunty's voice from Rani's open window, cracking like a boy's: Air's up.

She went through the workshop and out of its back door to the gate.

Two bolts and a bar. The bolts were stiff; she pulled them back with both hands. The bar was heavy; two of the drill boys lifted it. And the padlock, the new one, Aditya's orders, since that morning. She took Pandey ji's key out of her pocket, from among the other things, and put it in the lock, and turned it, and the padlock fell open in her hand.

The gate swung outwards, scraping on the concrete.

Beyond it, the farm track. Pale in the starlight, running away along the end of the wall, empty, towards the fields and the dry canal and the culvert and the south. Not one of them on it. Not one.

She stood in the gateway for one second and looked at it.

Then she turned round and ran back through the workshop to the yard, and Rani was coming round the end of the second row with her headlights off and Bunty's round face behind the windscreen, lit green from underneath by the dashboard, with a grin on it so wide it looked like it hurt.

"Didi!" he shouted, through the window. "Didi, Rani's up! Air's up! Get them on! Get them on!"

And Bhoot behind her, with Hariram ji at the wheel, his bidi behind his ear.

"Count off!" shouted Ira, to the workshop. "On the buses! Front ones on Rani, back ones on Bhoot, count off as you go!"

They came out of the workshop and onto the buses, up the steps, counting, one, two, three, the way she'd taught them, and she stood at the bottom of Rani's steps with her hand on each shoulder, and counted with them, and at thirty-eight, the last of Rani's, she looked up, over their heads, across the yard, for the one person she hadn't counted.

He wasn't there.

· · ·

He was in the yard.

At the far end of it, near the corner of the mess, where the statues had been. He was standing in the starlight with his hands at his sides, and in front of him, frozen in a ragged line, there were three of them. And beyond the three, coming round the end of the mess, more. Drawn by the engines, the way he'd said they would be. Ten. Twenty. Coming back from the river towards the noise.

He was holding three. She could see his face, even from there, in the light from the windows. Perfectly calm. Perfectly still. The way it had been on the fifth floor, with nine of them walking towards him. Like a clock.

And down the front of him, from his nose to his chin and down his shirt, black in the starlight, the blood.

The three in front of him lurched, and froze again. More slowly this time. She could see it was slower. She could see the gap between the lurch and the freeze getting longer.

Thirty-eight people were on Rani. Thirty were on Bhoot. Bunty was shouting something from the driver's seat. Rohan was beside her, saying her name.

Ira Deshmukh, rank one, Ganga batch, NCC Junior Division, who had refused every capsule she was ever offered and had never once in her life got a question wrong on purpose, looked at the boy in the yard holding back the dead with his face.

Don't wait for anyone, Aai had said, on the first day. You don't ask permission.

She'd thought she knew what it meant.

She dropped Kabir's Ledger into Simran's arms on Rani's bottom step, and ran.