Chapter 56: Air Pressure

The trouble with engines is that they don't stop being loud just because the air's up.

I'd known that. I'd written it in the plan. Three minutes nobody's listening. But the buzzers stopped and the engines didn't, two big diesel engines idling in an empty yard at a quarter to two in the morning, and every few seconds Bhoot's horn went off again by itself, a long hollow wail like a ghost in a bad film, because something in her wiring had decided tonight was the night. And on the edge of the river of the dead walking south to class, the ones who'd never quite believed it heard the engines, and turned round, and came back.

Not many. That was the thing. A rumour like that one doesn't miss many. But you don't need many.

I held three.

· · ·

They came round the end of the mess in ones and twos, and then in a knot of ten, and I met them where the yard began. Which way. Stop. Stop. Stop. A man in a vest. A girl with a plait. A boy in a Shikhar ID card. Three statues in the starlight, and the others coming round them the way water comes round rocks, and I read three more.

Three seconds to read a paper properly. That was my speed; Aditya's laminated sheet would have called it slow. Four or five seconds to hold them before they slipped. You can do that sum. I did it. Three seconds a paper, three papers, nine seconds. Hold for four. Every thirteen seconds, three of them got to move again, and in thirteen seconds a dead person can cover a lot of yard.

I did it anyway. I didn't have anything else.

Behind me, across the yard, I could hear them getting on the buses. Ira's voice. Count off. One. Two. Three. Feet on steps. Somebody crying. I didn't turn round. If I'd turned round I'd have lost three papers, and three papers was the whole of my hand.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

My nose had been bleeding since Room 12. It had stopped being a nosebleed some time ago and become something more like a tap. It ran down my lip and off my chin and down the front of Bunty's borrowed shirt, and I could taste it, iron, and I didn't care, because I couldn't. My hands had gone. I don't mean they were cold. I mean that when I looked down at them, in the starlight, I couldn't have told you they were mine.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

The gap was getting longer. That was the thing I noticed, the way you notice your own handwriting going wrong in the last ten minutes of a paper. Three seconds to read became four. Four became five. The papers wouldn't turn over properly; they kept sticking, the way pages stick when your fingers are wet. And every time I filled in a bubble, the room behind my eyes got a little whiter.

· · ·

I knew that room.

I'd been in it at the gas agency, two days before, for a few seconds, and stopped at the edge. A big high white room with chandeliers. Rows and rows of little tables. A digital clock on a screen at the front, counting down. A sheet of paper on the table in front of me, clean and white, with my roll number at the top and nothing else on it at all, and my hand lying on it like something that belonged to somebody else.

I'd lived next door to that room for five years.

At the gas agency, I'd stopped. I'd put my hands in my pockets and not written anything, and after a while the room had gone away. I'd known, then, that if I wrote one more thing, I'd go in and not come out for a long time.

I knew it now.

Stop. Stop.

I looked at the knot of them coming round the end of the mess, twenty of them now, more, drawn by the engines and Bhoot's ghost horn. I looked at the gap between them and the buses. I did the sum. If I stopped writing, they'd be at Rani's door in under a minute, with half of Ira's sixty-eight still on the steps.

So I didn't stop.

Stop.

The chandeliers came on.

· · ·

I don't remember the next part. I've been told it. Bunty told it to me, three times, at Darrah, with his hands, and Ira told it once, without any hands at all, and I'll tell it to you the way they told it to me.

· · ·

Ira saw me from the bottom of Rani's steps.

She'd counted thirty-eight onto Rani and looked up for the one she hadn't counted, and there I was, at the far end of the yard by the corner of the mess, standing in the starlight with three frozen dead in front of me and twenty more coming round them. And she saw the three lurch, and freeze, and lurch, and freeze, slower each time, and she saw my face.

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She dropped my Ledger into Simran's arms and ran.

Bunty saw her go from the driver's seat and shouted Didi! so loudly that Hariram ji heard it in Bhoot with the engine running. Rohan saw her go and went after her.

She got to me as the chandeliers came on.

Bunty says I was standing perfectly still. Not frozen like the dead, he says, not like a statue. Like a boy in an exam hall who's stopped writing. My eyes were open. My hands were at my sides. The blood was still coming down my face, and I wasn't wiping it. And the three in front of me, the ones I'd been holding, were moving again, because there was nobody holding them any more, and the twenty behind them were coming round, and I was just standing there.

Blanked. The way Sneha had blanked at the gas agency in the cage doorway, with her hands up and her eyes shut. Too many keys, too fast. I'd been warned. It was on the laminated sheet.

Ira didn't know what blanking was, not really. She'd never read the sheet. She just saw a boy standing still in front of the dead, the way he'd stood still in front of an invigilator in Room 603 a lifetime ago, and she took hold of the collar of Bunty's shirt with both hands and pulled.

I'm thin. I've always been thin. She's taller than me and she's done two years of NCC and she was, Bunty says, absolutely furious. She pulled me backwards off my feet and dragged me across the concrete of the yard by my collar, the way you'd drag a sack of atta, the way Malhotra sir had dragged Pandey ji backwards through the door of a cold store. My heels made two long marks in the dust. Bunty saw them from Rani's windscreen in the light from the windows, he says, two long lines across the yard, and that was when he started crying, and he didn't stop till the canal.

The dead came after us.

· · ·

Rohan Sethi stopped them.

He came past Ira at a run, the other way, towards the dead, with his hands out of his pockets. And he stopped between us and them, in the middle of the yard, near the workshop door, and lifted both his hands.

Eleven. That was his number on Saturday. Load eleven, Grip six. He did eleven. A line of them, across the yard, in front of the workshop, frozen in the middle of a step with their arms half raised. A wall.

Then he did more.

Bunty says he did fourteen, then sixteen. Bunty says he could see Rohan's nose start to bleed from Rani's windscreen, sixty metres away, a dark line down his face in the light from the windows. Bunty says the wall held for longer than any wall Rohan had ever made on the court. Grip six is forty seconds. Bunty counted. It held for a minute and a half.

Ira got me to Rani's steps. Two of the drill boys came down and took my arms, and the three of them dragged me up the steps and into the aisle and dropped me on the floor between the seats, and Ira turned round in the door and shouted.

"Rohan!"

He didn't turn round. He was standing in the middle of the yard with his hands up and his wall in front of him, and the twenty behind the wall pressing on it, and more coming round the end of the mess, and his face, Bunty says, perfectly calm. The calmest he'd ever looked. His eyes wide open.

"Rohan, come on! Now!"

"Go," said Rohan Sethi.

He said it quite quietly. Ira heard it anyway, across the yard, over the engines. Everybody in the front half of Rani heard it.

"Go," said Rohan. "I'm paying."

· · ·

Bunty went.

He didn't want to. He's told me that every time. But his father had told him, on the phone, at ten past one on Thursday morning: you don't care who's shouting. You don't care if the world is ending. And the air was up, and the brakes were off, and the gate was open, and thirty-eight people were on Rani and thirty on Bhoot, and Rohan had said go.

So he released the brake, and put Rani in gear, and drove her round the end of the second row and down the narrow lane between the workshop and the wall, so close to the bricks that her mirror scraped them the whole way, and out through the back gate onto the farm track, with Bhoot behind him, roaring, with Hariram ji at the wheel and her ghost horn wailing.

The last thing anybody on either bus saw of the Shikhar Gurukul campus was the yard in the light from the windows of the Admin Block. The two long marks of my heels in the dust. The empty concrete. And in the middle of it, standing perfectly still, with his hands raised, in front of a wall of the dead that was starting, very slowly, at one end, to move, a boy in a Ganga T-shirt with his eyes wide open.

Bunty says he didn't look back after that. Ira did. She stood in Rani's door all the way to the end of the wall, holding the rail, looking back.

She won't tell me what she saw. I've stopped asking.

· · ·

I came back on the floor of the bus.

That's the first thing I remember after the chandeliers. Not the white room going away. Just being somewhere else, all at once, the way you wake up on a train and don't remember falling asleep. A floor. Steel, ridged, vibrating. The smell of diesel and dust and a lot of frightened people. A roar, very close, all round me. Darkness, with a green glow somewhere above me and to the left.

And a hand on my face.

It was holding my face. Not gently. Firmly, the way you'd hold the face of someone who keeps trying to turn away. Palm against my cheek, thumb under my eye, wiping something away, over and over. It was warm. It was the warmest thing that had touched me all week.

"Kabir," said a voice. "Kabir."

I opened my eyes. Ira was kneeling in the aisle over me with her braid come completely undone and her face a foot from mine. Behind her, a row of faces, looking down from the seats. Simran, holding the Ledger against her chest in both arms. Ananya. Kartik with his glasses. The class 11 girls.

And from the front, from the green glow, at the top of a voice that was cracking in about four places at once:

"BHAIYA! Is he awake? Didi, is he awake? Bhaiya! BHAIYA!"

"He's awake," said Ira, without taking her eyes off me. "Drive."

"Apan IS driving!"

I tried to sit up. Ira put her hand flat on my chest and pushed me back down onto the floor, quite hard.

"Did it work?" I said.

My voice came out in pieces. Ira looked at me for a long time. Her face was doing something I'd never seen it do, even on the fifth floor, even in the library at twenty to nine with her arms round me. I couldn't read it. I've told you. I never could.

"You're an idiot," said Ira Deshmukh.

Which I took, on balance, to mean yes.

· · ·

She told me later, at Darrah, that I'd been out for eleven minutes. That we were on the farm track, going along the end of the wall with the lights off, at fifteen kilometres an hour, with Bhoot behind us. That everyone had counted off twice. That Rohan had stayed.

She didn't tell me that then. Then, lying on the floor of Rani with her hand on my chest and the steel humming under my back, I only said one more thing, because it was the thing I'd seen last, before the chandeliers, before the white room, when I'd looked up at the roof.

"Aditya saw," I said.

Ira didn't move her hand.

"I know," she said.