Chapter 59: Ledger Snapshot

Bunty stopped Rani at half past five, at a dhaba on the ghat, because he said if he drove one more kilometre without a cup of chai he'd drive her into a tree.

There wasn't any chai. There wasn't anybody. It was one of those dhabas you see on every highway in India, a long tin roof on poles, a row of charpais under it with their strings sagging, a hand pump, a painted sign with a picture of a steaming glass and the words PURE VEG — TRUCK PARKING — 24 HRS. Somebody had left in a hurry. There were steel glasses on the counter with tea dried in the bottom, and a calendar on the post that said May, and a radio on a shelf with its cord hanging down, and in the dust of the parking area, the tyre marks of a lot of trucks going south, all at once, a long time ago.

But the hand pump worked.

Thirty-eight people got off Rani in the grey light and queued for it, without anyone telling them to, the way people queue for a hand pump in a village, and drank, and splashed their faces, and filled every bottle they had, and sat down on the charpais under the tin roof and didn't say anything for a long time.

The hills were all round us. Low and dark and close, covered in scrub and dry trees, the forest grey in the half-light, with the road winding up through them behind us and down through them ahead. Mukundra. Darrah. I'd seen the name on maps all my life, on the green signs on the highway going home. I'd never stopped.

Somewhere in the trees a peacock screamed, the way they do at dawn on the edge of Rajasthan. A troop of langurs sat on the wall at the back of the dhaba and watched us with their black faces, very seriously, like a panel of examiners.

"Bhaiya," whispered Bunty, sitting down heavily on the charpai next to mine. "Even the monkeys are judging apan."

"They're judging your driving."

"Apan's driving," said Bunty, with enormous dignity, "was flawless."

It had been. I told him so. He went red, and lay down on the charpai with his arm over his eyes, and was asleep in about four seconds.

· · ·

Simran gave me back the Ledger.

She'd held it on her lap the whole way from the yard, both arms round it, the way Ananya had held Sushila aunty's tiffin carrier across a field. She held it out to me now across the gap between the charpais, very carefully, as if it might spill.

"Didi said to give it to you," she said. "When you were awake properly. Are you awake properly?"

"I think so."

"You don't look awake properly." She looked at my face. Then, before I could take it, she leaned over and wiped something off my cheek with the end of her dupatta, briskly, the way you'd wipe a child's face, and showed me. It was dried blood. "You look like a horror film," said Simran. "A bad one. With a cheap ghost."

She gave me the book. Then she went back to her own charpai and lay down next to Ananya and put her arm over her, and was asleep almost as fast as Bunty.

I sat on the edge of my charpai with the Ledger on my knees in the grey light.

I'd done this every Sunday afternoon for two years. After the test. After the ranks came out on the app. I'd sit on my bunk in Room 304 with the Ledger on my knees and write down the week. What I'd sold. What I'd bought. Who owed me. Where I'd landed, and how close it was to where I'd aimed.

I called it the snapshot. I'd never told anyone that.

I slipped the rubber bands off. I turned to a clean page, near the back, after COSTS. And I wrote it.

· · ·

SNAPSHOT. Saturday. Day 13. 5:40 a.m. Darrah ghat.

Rank (Rank Raj): 12 of 12. "Low value."

Last mock: 1,847 of 1,903.

Range: ? Load: 3. Grip: weak. Speed: slow. Depth: Habit x 3. (Gopal Maharaj. The delivery man, gas agency. Malhotra sir.)

Distance: 52 of 950 km.

Assets: Bus 14 (Rani). Diesel approx. 200 L. 38 passengers + driver + navigator + me. Kartik's pens, one month. 4 vials of insulin for Dadi, in the cold box in Ira's bag. Gel packs going soft. One red diary, inside my shirt. One Maggi wrapper, pressed.

Owed to me: Bunty — 5 rupees (35 of 40). Rohan Sethi — paid.

I owe: Sushila aunty — can't pay. Malhotra sir — can't pay.

Shubham Rawat — mess, paid till June.

Unknown: Tara. Ira.

Costs: Fear — gone. Friday night, Day 5, approx. 9:16. Section A. Grief — gone. Friday night, Day 12, 12:47. Section C. Echo: 6:55, wants to go to class.

This copy was taken from the author's official posting without permission; reading that chapter where it was published supports their work.

I looked at it for a long time.

It was a good snapshot. It was clear and complete and in order, the way all my snapshots had always been. You could have handed it to a stranger and they'd have known everything about the last thirteen days that mattered.

They'd have known none of it. That was the thing. I sat there in the grey light and looked at the page and saw, for the first time in six years of keeping that book, the shape of everything that wasn't on it. There was no line for a man with chalk on his trousers going through a dustbin after class. No line for two steel lids. No line for a boy saying go in an empty yard with his hands up. No line for a girl with her hand on my face on the floor of a bus.

There was no column for any of it. There never had been.

The answer to the friction problem is not in this letter, he'd written. You'll have to work it out yourself.

I hadn't worked it out. I knew that much. But I thought, sitting on a charpai at a dhaba in the Mukundra hills at twenty to six in the morning, that I'd found out where to look.

· · ·

I went back to the line that said I owe, because something about it was wrong, and I couldn't see what.

Malhotra sir — can't pay.

His name was written the way I'd written it in Room 12, small, in pencil, under Sushila aunty's. I wanted to write it again, properly. In capitals, the way his name had been written in UNKNOWN for two years. I don't know why. It just seemed like the kind of thing he'd have wanted done properly, the way he washed his plate.

I put the pencil to the page. M.

My hand shook.

I stopped. I looked at it. My right hand, holding the pencil, over the page, in the grey light. It was shaking. Not the cold; it had been cold all night, and it had been steady all night. Not tiredness. Not the blank; I knew what the blank felt like now, the white room, the chandeliers. This wasn't that.

It was shaking the way a hand shakes when you write a name you can't bear to write. I'd seen it happen to other people. To Bunty, writing Shubham on the cover of a notebook. To my father, once, signing a form at the Sector 9 hospital.

I didn't feel anything. I want to be very precise about this, because it's important, and because I've thought about it every day since. I looked at that man's name, the first letter of it, on the page, and inside me there was nothing at all, the clean empty shape of the place where grief had been. I knew exactly who he was. I felt nothing.

And my hand shook.

I didn't know why. I still don't, completely. I sat there with the pencil over the page and the M shaking on the end of it, and I couldn't make it stop, and I couldn't make it make sense.

A hand came down on my shoulder.

Ira had sat down on the end of my charpai at some point, without my noticing, which nobody had ever managed to do. She didn't say anything. She'd been silent since the crossroads, since Bhoot, forty kilometres of silence. She just put her hand on my shoulder, from behind, and left it there, warm, through the stiff dry cotton of Bunty's borrowed shirt.

My hand went on shaking.

I wrote the name anyway. All of it. In capitals. MALHOTRA SIR. The letters came out like somebody else's handwriting, the way they had on the last page in the sample room, a week and a lifetime ago.

Ira's hand didn't move.

· · ·

Bunty woke up at six, because a langur dropped a dhaba spoon on his stomach.

He sat up on the charpai with a howl, and the langur fled up the tin roof, and every one of the thirty-eight people under it woke up too, and Bunty sat there in the grey light with the spoon in his hand and his hair standing straight up and a look of total betrayal on his face.

"Bhaiya," he said. "Bhaiya. Listen."

"No."

"Listen. Apan has a joke. It's the best one. Apan dreamt it."

"Bunty, nobody wants—"

"Why," said Bunty, to the whole dhaba, holding up the spoon like a microphone, "did the Kota student cross the road?"

Silence. Thirty-eight people and a tin roof and a troop of langurs.

"To get to the other cutoff," said Bunty.

There was a pause.

And I laughed.

I hadn't known I was going to. It came up out of me the way the crying had come up out of me in Room 12, from somewhere I didn't have a column for, with no warning, and I couldn't stop it. I laughed until I had to put the Ledger down on the charpai. I laughed until my nose started bleeding again, which made Simran shriek, which made me laugh harder. It was the stupidest joke I'd ever heard in my life. It didn't even make sense. The other cutoff. I sat on a charpai at a dhaba in the Mukundra hills with blood running into my mouth and laughed like a madman, and Bunty stared at me with the spoon in his hand and his mouth open, and then his face crumpled up and he started laughing too.

Ira, on the end of my charpai, put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook.

Then the honk came out.

· · ·

When it was over, and everybody had stopped, and the langurs had come back down to the wall to look at us with deep disapproval, Bunty came and sat down on my charpai between me and Ira.

He'd gone quiet. Bunty quiet is a thing you notice, like a generator stopping.

He put his hand into the pocket of his shorts, and took out a thin folder of pink slips, bent into the shape of his leg from three days of being carried there, and put it on top of the Ledger on my knees.

JAI AMBE CATERERS — GAYATRI RESIDENCY MESS.

Received from K. Anand.

Month: August.

Every month. Since the August before last. The last one for June, paid in advance, on the Friday before the test.

I looked at them for a long time.

"Bhaiya," said Bunty. "Apan found them. In your trunk. In 304. When apan was packing your things."

"When?"

"Since Wednesday," said Bunty. "The first Wednesday. Before the library. Before Arjun." His round face was very serious. "Apan's known since Wednesday, bhaiya. That you were lying. About everything. That you'd never have let go of apan on the ladder. That you never let go of anyone." He swallowed. "Apan should have said. Apan was waiting for the right time. Papa says there's no right time with people like you. You have to make one."

I didn't say anything.

"So," said Bunty Chaurasia. "Apan is making one."

I looked down at the receipts on my knees, and at the snapshot under them, at the line that said Shubham Rawat — mess, paid till June, and at the line above it, and the line below it, and the name in capitals that had made my hand shake.

I didn't feel grief. I can't any more. I've told you.

But there was something. I didn't have a name for it, or a column. It sat in my chest next to the empty place where grief used to be, warm and stupid and enormous, and I looked at Bunty, and Bunty looked at me, and neither of us said anything, because for once in my life there wasn't anything that needed to be said.

· · ·

At 6:31, my phone rang.

It was in my pocket, on airplane mode, the way it always was. Except that I'd turned airplane mode off at ten to five on the road up into the hills to send four words, and forgotten to turn it back on. The first time in thirteen days I'd forgotten a rule.

It rang. On a charpai at a dhaba in the Mukundra hills, with thirty-eight people and a troop of langurs watching, it rang, loud and cheap and ordinary, the default ringtone, the one I'd never bothered to change.

I took it out.

Tara.

Two p.m. and nine p.m. That was the rule. Two minutes. The rest of the time, airplane mode.

It was 6:31 in the morning.

She was early.