Chapter 58: Back Gate

Ira navigated standing up.

She stood in Rani's open door at the top of the steps, with one hand on the rail and the other holding the brass compass in its wooden box, and the torch under her dupatta, pointed down at the graph-paper map clipped to the box with a hair clip, so that the only light on the whole bus was a faint red glow on her chin. She called the turns to Bunty in a low, flat voice without looking round.

"Track bends left in eighty metres. Bearing one-nine-five. Slow."

"Slow," said Bunty, from the driver's seat. He was driving with his face nearly against the windscreen, both hands at ten to two on Rani's big wheel, the headlights off, the dashboard dimmed to nothing, by the light of a half moon that had only come up after midnight. "Apan is slow. Apan has never been slower."

"Ditch on the right after the bend. Keep left. Stay on the pale bit."

"Pale bit," said Bunty. "Okay. Okay. Pale bit."

Behind us, close, Bhoot came on with her lights off too, Hariram ji at the wheel, a big dark yellow shape in the moonlight following our tail like a buffalo following a cowherd.

I was on the front seat behind Bunty. Ira had made me lie on the floor for the first ten minutes and then given up, the way she'd given up on a lot of things that week, and let me sit, with a bottle of water and a strip of bandage pressed under my nose and Simran holding the Ledger beside me like a baby she'd been asked to mind.

Out of the windows, the fields went past in the moonlight. Flat and pale and empty, the stubble silver, the babool trees black. Here and there, standing in the middle of a field, one of them, alone, swaying, facing north, towards the campus, towards class. They didn't turn as we passed. Fifteen kilometres an hour, no lights, no horn. A school bus is a very quiet thing when it's trying.

· · ·

The canal came up on the left at five past two. A wide dry trench with sloping sides, cracked mud at the bottom, a few black puddles holding the moon. The track ran along the top of its bank, east, straight as a ruler.

"Three kilometres," said Ira. "Straight. Then the culvert."

"Straight is good," said Bunty. "Apan likes straight."

He drove it. Three kilometres along the top of a canal bank in the dark, at fifteen kilometres an hour, with a two-metre drop into the trench on the left and a ditch on the right, and a bus full of people holding their breath behind him. I watched his hands on the wheel the whole way. They didn't shake once. Bunty had been shaking for thirteen days, at sounds and at shadows and at the bottom of every staircase, and on the canal bank, with the whole of Rani in his hands, he was as steady as his father at the garage.

Some people are only afraid when they've got nothing to do.

· · ·

The culvert was at twenty past two.

We saw the checkpoint first. You couldn't miss it. Two kilometres away to the east, on the line of the bypass, the floodlights were burning, two white suns on their trailer towers, and between them a long low glitter of wire, and sandbags, and the shapes of trucks. The Major's wall. It lit up the whole sky over that part of the bypass, white and hard, like a cricket stadium at night.

And a long way in front of us, in the dark, where the canal ran up against the black embankment of the bypass, a hole.

Chaudhary ji's monsoon road. Canal culvert under bypass. Max height 3.4 m. BUS OK.

"Three point four," said Ira, very quietly. "She's three point one."

"Thirty centimetres," said Bunty. "Thirty centimetres is a lot. Thirty centimetres is a whole ruler." He was sweating. "Apan has done less. Apan once took a truck under a railway bridge on the Indore ring road with five."

"Did you hit it?"

"A little," said Bunty.

He took Rani down off the canal bank onto the track that ran along the bottom of the trench, slowly, in first gear, the whole bus tilting forward so that everyone grabbed the seat in front, and into the mouth of the culvert.

It was a concrete tunnel, square, about as long as two buses, with the bypass running over the top of it. The floor was cracked mud and puddles. The roof was close. Very close. I could see it in the faint light from the dashboard, grey concrete with damp stains, passing a hand's breadth above the top of the windscreen. Nobody on that bus breathed. Bunty drove through it at the speed of a man walking, with his tongue between his teeth.

Somewhere above us, in the dark, on the bypass, there were soldiers with guns. The Major had said: nothing comes through. I thought about some soldier at a barrier two kilometres away, holding someone back. I didn't know his name then. I found it out much later, and it doesn't belong in this part of the story.

Halfway through the culvert, behind us, Bhoot's ghost horn went off by itself.

· · ·

It was the loudest sound I've ever heard. In that concrete tunnel, with the bypass over our heads, it went off like the end of the world, a long hollow wail bouncing off the walls and the roof and out of both ends of the culvert into the night, and every person on Rani screamed, and then clapped their hands over their mouths.

It stopped. Three seconds. Then, behind us, through Rani's back window, I saw Hariram ji's door open and Hariram ji lean out of it, and reach down under his dashboard, and pull, and come up with something in his fist that I found out later was the whole horn wire, out by the roots.

Silence.

We sat in the culvert, all of us, in both buses, and listened. To the bypass over our heads. To the checkpoint two kilometres away. To the night.

Nothing.

If anyone on that wall heard a ghost wail once under the bypass at twenty past two in the morning on the night of the clearing operations, they must have thought it was one more strange sound on a night of strange sounds. Nobody came. No searchlight swung our way. The white suns burned on their towers to the east, and the soldiers under them went on looking north, at the city, at the road, the way Ira had said they would.

"Go," said Ira.

Bunty went. Out of the far end of the culvert and up the bank of the canal on the other side, Rani's engine straining, and onto the track again, south of the bypass.

South of the wall.

· · ·

At twenty to three we came to the first village.

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It wasn't really a village. A cluster of low houses, mud and brick, with flat roofs and tin doors and a little whitewashed temple at the corner with an orange flag on a bamboo pole. A hand pump. A neem tree. Cow dung cakes stacked against a wall in neat round towers. The track went straight through the middle of it, between the houses, about as wide as Rani.

And the dogs knew we were coming before we got there.

They started barking when we were still a hundred metres off. Village dogs, four or five of them, thin and furious, coming out from under the cots and the tractor trailers and running at us down the track, barking at Rani's wheels, at the dark, at everything. In the silence of the fields it sounded like a band.

Ira's fist went up. Bunty stopped.

In the doorway of the third house, a man was standing. An old man in a dhoti, with a white cloth round his head. He'd been standing there, I think, since the beginning. He turned his face towards the dogs, and the noise, and the big dark bus.

I read him. Which way. He was going to come out of the doorway.

Stop.

He stopped. I held him. Four seconds. Five. My nose started again under the bandage, and I let it. The dogs ran round Rani barking themselves hoarse, and then, the way dogs do, lost interest all at once, and trotted back to their cots.

I let the old man go. He stood in his doorway and looked at the empty track, and after a while, turned his face north again.

"Bhaiya," whispered Bunty. "Apan saw you do that."

"Drive."

He drove. And at the far end of the village, across the track, in the moonlight, there was a tractor.

· · ·

A big red tractor with a trolley behind it, parked across the track between the last house and a wall, the way you'd park a tractor in your own village on a Sunday afternoon when you weren't expecting anybody to need the road. Its owner had parked it there, I suppose, on the first Sunday, and gone inside, and never come out.

"Bhaiya," said Bunty. "Apan can't go round."

He couldn't. There was a wall on one side and a ditch on the other. Rani was two and a half metres wide.

"It's in neutral," said Hariram ji, at Bunty's window. He'd come up from Bhoot on foot, in the dark, an old man walking between two buses in a village full of sleeping dogs. "Farmers always leave them in neutral. Handbrake off, and it'll roll." He looked at the drill boys on Rani's front seats. "Four of you. Strong ones. Push."

Four of them got off. Kartik got off with them, though he wasn't strong, because he was still saying sorry to everyone for the insulin. They went to the tractor in the moonlight, and Hariram ji climbed up into the seat and let the handbrake off, and the five of them put their shoulders to the back of the trolley and pushed, and the whole thing groaned and creaked and rolled, slowly, a metre, two, three, off the track and into the ditch with a long sliding crunch.

Every dog in the village woke up again.

Nobody stopped to see if anything else did. They ran back to Rani and up the steps, and Hariram ji went back to Bhoot at a kind of shuffling trot, and Bunty put Rani in gear before the last of them was through the door.

"Sorry," said Kartik, to me, as he passed my seat, out of breath. "Sorry."

"What for?"

"I don't know," said Kartik. And sat down, and put his face in his hands, and laughed.

· · ·

Hariram ji stopped Bhoot at a crossroads at twenty past three, a kilometre past the second village, where the farm track met a tarmac road going back north towards the bypass and the city.

He came up to Rani's door on foot again, slowly, and stood at the bottom of the steps with his bidi behind his ear and didn't come up.

"Beta," he said, to me. "My people want to talk."

His people. Thirty of them. The ones on Bhoot. Most of them had family in Kota, or near it. Most of them had heard the radio, the same as all of us, every hour on Pandey ji's transistor: relief camp at Nayapura stadium, Army protection, food, doctors, families being reunited. And most of them had spent the last hour and a half on a dark bus going away from all of that, towards nine hundred and fifty kilometres of highway and nobody knew what, with a boy who could do things to the dead that nobody understood.

They wanted to go back. Not to the campus. To the checkpoint, at first light, with their hands up. To be screened, and given a purple stamp on the back of the hand, and taken to Nayapura in an Army truck, and found by their families.

"They're clean," said Hariram ji. "They'll pass. Their blood's ordinary." He looked at me. "Not like yours, beta. They know that. That's why they want to go one way, and you have to go the other."

"And you?"

"My wife's in Kota," said Hariram ji. "In Kunhadi. I don't know if she's there. I have to go and look." He smiled. "Nineteen years I've driven for Shikhar. I've never once left a bus full of children at a crossroads in the dark. I'm not going to start tonight."

· · ·

Ira hated it.

She stood in Rani's door and argued, low and fast, with her hand at her shoulder. That the checkpoint was the Major's, and the Major had hung us up like a lamp. That we didn't know what happened at the camps. That the separate truck went out of Nayapura too; Pintu had seen it. That splitting up was the one thing you never did. That everyone who wants to go meant everyone.

"It does," I said. "It means everyone who wants to go. They don't."

"They're scared."

"They're right to be. They've got a choice and they've made it." I looked at Bhoot in the moonlight, at the thirty faces at her grilles, looking at us. "Malhotra sir's price was whoever wants to go. It was never whoever I want to take."

Ira looked at me for a long time. Then she turned round on the step, and came down, and went along Bhoot's windows one by one in the moonlight, and spoke to every single one of them through the grille. Every one. Their names, their numbers, the names of their families, where they'd be. She wrote it all down by the light of the torch under her dupatta, in her small square handwriting, on the back of the graph-paper map.

Then she came back to Rani and stood at the bottom of the steps with her face set, and said, "Go, Hariram ji. Go safely," and he touched her head, the way you'd touch your daughter's, and went.

We watched Bhoot turn round on the tarmac road in the moonlight, slowly, an old yellow bus with no horn, and go back north towards the bypass and the white suns of the checkpoint and the city. Thirty people and a driver, to stand at the wire at first light with their hands up, and wait.

I let them go. I want that written down. I didn't stop them, and I could have, I think, with the right words. I've always known the right words.

Ira didn't speak to me for the next forty kilometres.

· · ·

We came out onto Jhalawar Road at a quarter to four, four kilometres south of the bypass, exactly where Ira's pencil had said we would.

National Highway 52. Six lanes, then four, empty in the moonlight from one end to the other. Abandoned cars at angles on the shoulders. A truck on its side in the median with its load of melons spilled and rotting. No people. Nobody living, nobody dead. Just the road, running south between the fields towards a dark line of hills on the horizon.

Bunty turned on the headlights.

It was the first light Rani had shown in two hours. Two long white beams went out down the highway in front of us, and lit up the white line in the middle of the road, and the cat's eyes, and the green sign on a gantry over the lanes that said JHALAWAR, and a number of kilometres, and an arrow pointing straight ahead.

Somebody at the back of the bus started clapping. Then everybody was clapping, thirty-eight people in the dark, and Bunty put his foot down, gently, and Rani went up to forty, and fifty, and sixty, and no more, because Hariram ji had told him sixty and he'd promised.

I sat on the front seat with the bandage under my nose and looked at the road.

· · ·

I thought about Malhotra sir.

On purpose. The way I'd pressed the bruise on the fifth floor to see if it still hurt. I thought about the red diary and the Maggi wrapper and the friction speech on the terrace, and a man in a white shirt sitting at a desk in Room 12 with a handkerchief to his nose saying I want to see if my habit's any good. I thought about him on the stage of the Main Hall under the dome, with a fresh stick of chalk broken in half, teaching ten thousand of the dead the work done by a force along a path.

Nothing.

I knew I should feel something. I knew it the way you know an answer's wrong when the units don't match. I could see the exact shape of the place where it ought to be, in my chest, under my ribs, the size of him. Clean edges. Like the space a book leaves on a shelf.

I thought about Rohan, standing in the yard with his hands up and his eyes open, in front of a wall that was starting, at one end, to move. Go. I'm paying.

I knew I owed him. I knew it precisely. I could have told you the exact amount.

Nothing.

· · ·

The road climbed. The fields fell away on either side, and the hills came up out of the dark to meet us, low and black and covered in scrub and dry forest, and the highway began to wind up into them in long curves. Mukundra Hills. Darrah. The ghat. Fifty kilometres south of Kota.

Over the hills to the east, the sky was going grey.

Not light yet. Just less dark. The colour of ash at the bottom of a chulha, and then, along the very edge of the hills, a thin line of something paler, something that would be gold in an hour.

Somewhere nine hundred kilometres beyond those hills, it was getting light over Bhilai too. Over the plant, and the township, and a two-room quarter on the first floor where a girl of thirteen was asleep against a wall beside her grandmother's bed with a wet cloth in her hand.

I took my phone out of my pocket and turned it on.

Twenty-two per cent. One bar. Then two.

I typed four words, with fingers I couldn't feel, and sent them before I could think about it.

Out of Kota. Coming.

The phone thought about it for a long time. Then, at the top of the screen, very small, it said: Sent.