Chapter 57: Aditya

Aditya

At eight minutes past one, on the roof of the Admin Block, Aditya Rathore felt a bell ring under water.

He'd been standing at the parapet with eight of them round him. Sethi had slipped away down the stairs a long time ago, without a word to anyone, and Kunal had gone down ten minutes earlier, grey and shaking from his blank, saying he'd keep order at the grille. The others were along the parapet on both sides of him, Sneha with her plait coming undone, Mayank crying quietly, Dev with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and blood on his lip, all of them freezing what they could at the windows below, twenty at a time, holding, letting go, holding. Aditya himself had held thirty-one, and thirty-one again, and thirty-one again, for an hour, until his whole skull rang like a struck plate.

It hadn't mattered. You can't hold back a sea with your hands. He'd done the sum on the second-floor landing with the sat phone in his hand, and the sum said: the stairs, from the top, until first light. Eleven people on a roof can hold a staircase. Eighty people in a building can't.

He'd known what that meant for the eighty. He'd known it the way you know the answer to a question you've already marked.

And then, at eight minutes past one, the bell.

· · ·

He saw it the way he saw everything in the Hum: as a sheet. Rows and columns, ten thousand rows, one for each of them, each with its values in its cells, all of them reading light and noise and the grilles, the grilles, the grilles. He'd been watching the sheet for three hours.

And something went down the sheet like a formula being copied.

Not one cell. Not one row. A change at the very bottom, in the deepest column, the one his own handbook had printed in red with a thick border round it. It started somewhere to the south, in the dark, and it went down the rows the way a formula goes down a column when you drag it: one row, the next, the next, faster and faster, ten, a hundred, a thousand, every cell in the deepest column of the sheet changing to the same value at once.

He didn't need to read it. He watched it happen with his eyes.

Below him, round the walls of the Admin Block, ten thousand faces let go of the grilles, and turned south, and began to walk.

· · ·

He watched them fill the Main Hall.

You could see it from the roof. The big dark dome at the far end of the campus, and its six doors open, and the river of them going in through all six, and when it was full, the lawn in front of it filling instead. In rows. The way the whole institute stood on that lawn on the first morning of every session for the anthem, with the Director on a stage in a white kurta, and the toppers in the front row in new uniforms. Aditya had stood in the front row twice. He remembered that. He was almost sure he remembered that.

He turned his head and looked at the sheet again, at the deepest column, at the value that had been copied into ten thousand cells.

Now — Main Hall — sit.

Section C. HABIT. He'd written that phrase himself, on the first Monday, on the Director's laptop, in the guest suite, at two in the morning, for version one of the orientation sheet. VISIBLE, NOT WRITABLE. Do not attempt. In red. With a border.

He'd attempted it, once.

On the first Monday night. On a dead warden in Ganga Bhawan, who walked the corridors every night at eleven checking the doors and was dragging three others behind him through the hostel every time he did it. Aditya had turned the man's row over and seen the deepest column, faint and grey, like a watermark, and reached into it to change the time. And got it wrong.

He hadn't known, that night, what he'd lost. He'd only known something was gone. He'd found out the next morning, by accident, reaching for the name of the man who'd driven his school bus in Jodhpur for six years and given him a toffee every Diwali, and finding a clean empty space with the shape of a name around it. He'd started the black notebook that Tuesday. And he'd written NOT WRITABLE in red on version two of the sheet, and version three, and every version after, because it was safer for everyone if nobody believed it could be done.

Somebody had done it.

On ten thousand.

· · ·

He knew who.

He'd known, really, since the gas agency. Since Kunal had stood in the lobby with blood on his face and said I used a Hunger key on the lead group, and the Sabarmati boy had stood at the back with his sleeve against his nose, saying nothing, and Aditya had looked at him one second too long. Hunger doesn't make them walk in a line. He'd known that. He'd known it better than anyone; he'd written the sheet.

This copy was taken from the page the author uses for publication without permission; the official chapter supports the writer.

He'd known, if he was honest, since Saturday night, since a thin boy in a bloodstained shirt had stood at the top of the platform steps for five minutes, in the floodlights, two metres from the wire, reading.

He hadn't been able to remember, on Sunday morning, who WATCH was about.

He looked down into the yard.

· · ·

They were crossing it.

He could see them in the light from the windows below: a long thin line of people coming out of the side grille, heel and toe, close together, each one watching the back of the one in front, the way Deshmukh had drilled them on the terrace while Kunal laughed and he, Aditya, had called it good for morale and put it on the roster as physical activity. Sixty-something people, crossing two hundred metres of empty concrete towards the workshop, with Deshmukh at the front, her hand at her shoulder.

Sixty-something people he'd been prepared to let go. From the top of the stairs. At first light.

Two buses were running in the yard. One of them had a horn like a ghost.

And between the yard and the mess, in the starlight, among a scatter of frozen dead in the middle of a step, there was a thin boy in a borrowed shirt with his hands at his sides and his face perfectly still and his nose pouring blood down the front of him. Holding three. Letting them go. Holding three.

Rank twelve. L3/G1. Low value.

Aditya Rathore stood at the parapet of the roof and looked at him.

And the boy, as if he'd felt it, looked up.

· · ·

Their eyes met across two hundred metres of yard.

He could have stopped it. That was the thing he would think about, afterwards, every night, for a long time. He could have stopped all of it, from where he stood.

He could have turned round and walked to the switchboard at the top of the stairs and pushed one switch, and the floodlights on the court would have come on, white as a hospital, the brightest thing on the southern edge of Kota. And the sheet would have changed. Not the deepest column; he couldn't touch that, he'd learned that the hard way. But the column above it. What does it want. Light. Ten thousand faces on the lawn and in the hall would have lifted, and turned, and the light would have pulled them back across the campus to the yard, and the buses, and the boy.

Or he could have taken the sat phone out of his pocket and called the Major. Sir. Two buses. Going out of the back gate by the canal road, the monsoon diversion, under the bypass at the culvert, two kilometres west of your checkpoint. Sixty-eight on board. Two special cases. One of them can write in Section C. And the Major, who'd hung the campus up like a lamp tonight for the whole of Kota to see, would have said good lad, and sent the white truck to the culvert.

He stood there with his hand on the phone in his pocket and didn't take it out.

He didn't know, then, why not. He tried to work it out, standing at the parapet, the way he worked everything out: in rows, in columns. He didn't get very far.

There was pride in it. He knew that much. A Shikhar student had done the thing the Director's company and the Director's handbook and the Director's poster boy had all agreed could not be done. Somebody from Sabarmati. Somebody with his photo in nobody's hoarding. It was, in a way he'd never be able to explain to Mr. Saxena, the most Shikhar thing that had ever happened.

There was curiosity. What else could a boy like that write, if he'd written that?

And there was the line of people going into the dark door of the workshop, one by one. Sixty-eight of them. Alive. Every one of them alive, at a quarter to two in the morning, because the boy at the bottom of the list had walked across the campus to Room 12 while the boy at the top of it stood on a roof and did a sum.

He'd kept ninety people alive for twelve days with a list. He'd been proud of that. He was still proud of it.

He hadn't been able to keep them alive tonight. Somebody else had.

· · ·

He took his hand out of his pocket. He took out the green pen instead.

He was afraid, standing there, of one thing. Not the dead. He'd stopped being afraid of the dead some time in the first week; he'd never known whether that was courage or whether it was one of the things that had gone. He was afraid that he'd go to sleep tonight on the sofa in the guest suite, and wake up at six to the sound of the dead going to class, and look at the yard, and not remember any of it. Not remember who. Not remember what.

It had happened before. WATCH.

So he turned his left hand over on the parapet, palm up, in the light from the windows below, and wrote on it, in small green capitals, pressing hard, the way he'd been writing things on his hands since the first Wednesday.

KABIR ANAND — HABIT.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked up. The yard. The two long marks in the dust where Deshmukh had dragged the boy across it by his collar. The bus with the ghost horn going round the end of the second row and down the lane beside the workshop, with its mirror scraping the wall. The other one ahead of it, already gone. The back gate standing open on the dark.

And in the middle of the yard, in front of a wall of frozen dead that was starting, at one end, to move, Rohan Sethi, rank four, Load eleven, Grip six, with his hands up and his eyes wide open.

Aditya watched him for a while. He didn't write anything on his hand about Rohan. He thought he'd remember.

· · ·

At twenty past two, the sat phone buzzed in his pocket.

The long number. No name. He took it out and looked at it, and then pressed the button.

"Aditya, beta." The Director's voice, smooth and warm and arriving from a great distance. "I heard about the operation. Terrible, terrible night. Are you all right? How are my numbers? Are the programme students together?"

Aditya stood at the parapet. Behind him, the eight of them were sitting against the water tanks with their heads in their hands. Below him, the yard was empty. To the south, under the dome, ten thousand dead sat in rows and faced a stage, where an old man in a white shirt stood at a roller blackboard with a stick of chalk, teaching nobody anything at all, with his hand raised.

He looked down at his left palm, at the green capitals, in the light from the windows.

Then he closed his hand over them. Tight. As if he were holding something small that might get away.

"Everything's under control, sir," said Aditya Rathore.