Chapter 60: Knock

"Bhaiya," whispered Tara. "Bhaiya, Bhaiya, Bhaiya."

She was whispering so quietly I had to press the phone against my ear until it hurt. Whispering and laughing at the same time, the way you laugh in a cinema hall when you're trying not to wake the person next to you.

"I got it. I got your message. Out of Kota. Coming. I got it at five and I've been sitting here holding the phone for an hour and a half, Bhaiya, I didn't sleep, I couldn't, I kept reading it. Coming. You wrote coming." A breath. "I know it's not two o'clock. I know the rule. I don't care about the rule. Shout at me later."

"I'm not going to shout at you."

"You always shout at me."

"Not today," I said.

I was standing at the edge of the dhaba, under the end of the tin roof, with my back to thirty-eight people and a troop of langurs and the whole grey forest of the Mukundra hills. I'd got up off the charpai without deciding to. Ira was watching me. Bunty was watching me. I didn't care. I stood there with the phone against my ear and my other hand flat against a wooden post, because my legs had done something strange when I heard her voice and I wanted something to hold.

"Why are you whispering?"

"Dadi's asleep. And Merin. Merin's asleep against Dadi's bed with her rabbit book. And the battery's at four per cent, Bhaiya, four, the power hasn't come since Thursday and I've been so careful, and I didn't want to use it up being loud." She laughed again, very softly. "And there are sounds outside. In the mornings. I don't like to be loud in the mornings."

"Four per cent," I said. "Then listen. Don't talk. Listen."

"Okay."

"I'm out of Kota."

"I know. You wrote it."

"I'm out of Kota. I'm fifty-two kilometres south, on a hill, at a dhaba with no chai. I'm on a school bus with a boy from Indore who can drive anything and a girl from Pune who can find any road in India with a compass. There are thirty-eight other people on it. It's called Rani." I took a breath. "And Tara. I've got insulin. Four vials. Fresh, cold, in a box. For Dadi."

A silence on the line.

"From the physics teacher?" said Tara.

"From the physics teacher."

"Who sends his regards."

"Who sends his regards."

"Bhaiya," said Tara, and her whisper cracked down the middle. "Bhaiya, you're really coming."

"I'm really coming," I said. "Nine hundred kilometres. A few days. I don't know how many. But I'm coming. I've started, and I'm coming, and I promised."

· · ·

I want to tell you what it felt like, because I'd lost two things by then, and I was afraid, in a calm, arithmetical way, that I'd lost this too. That I'd stand at the end of that tin roof and hear my sister say you're really coming and look for the thing in my chest and find another clean empty shape where it ought to be.

It was there.

It was more than there. It came up through me from my feet the way the heat comes up off a road in May, and filled everything, and spilled over, and I stood at the edge of a dhaba in the Mukundra hills at twenty-five to seven in the morning, with blood dried on my face and my hands like a dead man's, grinning like an idiot at a wooden post.

Joy. That was its name. I'd had it so rarely that I'd almost forgotten what it was called.

They hadn't taken that one. Not yet.

"Bhaiya? Are you there? Did it cut?"

"I'm here."

"You went quiet."

"I'm smiling," I said. "You can't hear smiling on a phone."

"I can hear it," said Tara. "Your voice goes funny. Like when you used to pretend you weren't pleased about my marks."

· · ·

Dadi woke up. I heard her.

A long, slurred, sleepy sound from the side of the room, the sound she made every morning when the light came through the window and she remembered where she was. And then, out of the good side of her mouth, very tired and very fond:

"Rabba. Who is it? Who's on the phone at this hour?"

"It's Bhaiya, Dadi! It's Kabir!" Tara's whisper went up a notch. "He's out of Kota, Dadi, he's coming, he's on a bus—"

"Give."

A rustle. The phone moving. Breathing, close and slow, the breathing of an old woman who has had a stroke and doesn't like telephones.

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"Puttar," said Dadi.

"Dadi."

"Roti kha raha hai?"

On the first Monday, on the stairs of Gayatri Residency, she'd asked me that, and I'd lied, and she'd said jhooth, your ears go red, through nine hundred and fifty kilometres of telephone wire. I thought about lying again. It would have been easy. It always is.

"No, Dadi," I said. "Not yet. But I will."

Dadi was quiet for a moment. Then she made a sound I hadn't heard since before the stroke, since before my mother died. A sort of short, rough chuckle, like a door being pushed open.

"Sach," said Dadi. "Truth. First time." And then, to Tara, in Punjabi, not quite out of my hearing: "Your brother's ears have stopped going red."

The phone rustled again.

"Bhaiya?" Tara. "Bhaiya, she laughed. Did you hear? Dadi laughed."

"I heard."

"She hasn't laughed since—"

She stopped.

· · ·

I heard her stop. I knew the sound of my sister stopping in the middle of a sentence; I'd known it since she was four. She'd stopped because she'd heard something, and she was listening to it, and the whole of her had gone still, the way it went still when she was little and she heard Papa's scooter turn into the lane.

"Tara?"

"Bhaiya," she whispered. "What time is it?"

I looked at the phone. 6:40.

"Twenty to seven."

"Twenty to seven," said Tara, very slowly.

And then I heard it too. Through the phone. Through nine hundred kilometres of wire and air. A sound I had heard every morning of my life from the age of six until the day I left for Kota.

Three knocks. On the door of our quarter.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Slow. Heavy. Patient. The knocks of a tired man at the end of a night shift, standing outside his own front door with a milk packet in his hand.

And a voice. Through the door, through the phone, low and rough and achingly familiar, a voice that had said exactly these words, in exactly this tone, every single morning of my sister's life:

"Tara. Tara, utho."

· · ·

"Bhaiya!" Tara's whisper went up and broke. "Bhaiya, it's Papa! It's Papa, he's home, he's come home from the plant, he's at the door, Bhaiya, it's Papa—"

I stood at the edge of the dhaba with my hand flat on the wooden post.

I knew.

I knew the way I'd known in Room 603 when I looked at Bhandari sir's chest. The way I'd known on the night of the warden, when the key turned from inside the locked room at one in the morning and the knock came on our door. Three-oh-four! Attendance! I'd written it in the Ledger as pattern number five, on the first Monday, with a hand I couldn't keep steady, and underlined the last three words twice. A door between you and a habit is a wall. (Don't open it.) I'd watched a cook light dead stoves and a delivery man push a cart that wasn't there and a physics teacher write an equation on a blackboard for a hall full of the dead. I'd built my whole life, for thirteen days, on knowing that.

In a habit loop, they don't hunt. They knock, and they wait, and they move on.

Unless you open the door.

"Tara," I said. "Don't open the door."

"What?"

"Don't open the door."

"But it's Papa—"

"Tara, listen to me—"

"Bhaiya, it's Papa, I can hear him, it's his voice, he's come all the way from the plant, he's come home—" She was up. I could hear her up, moving, the phone swinging, the floor creaking under her bare feet. Towards the door. "Bhaiya, why are you saying—"

"Tara, LISTEN."

I'd never shouted at her like that. Not when she broke my calculator. Not when she read my Ledger at ten. Not when she cried on the platform at Durg the day I left for Kota and held onto my bag and wouldn't let go. Never.

She stopped. I heard her stop. Somewhere between Dadi's bed and the front door of a two-room quarter on the first floor of a block in the steel plant township of Bhilai, my sister stopped walking.

"It's the first thing I ever told you," I said. "On the first Monday. Don't open the door for anyone. Remember? You wrote it down. You did the opposite of everything else I said, and you were right, every single time. You were right about Annamma aunty and Rao uncle and Sahu bhaiya and Mrs. Pillai and the clay pot. You were right about all of it." My voice wasn't steady. I didn't know my voice could do that any more. "This one, I wasn't lying. This is the only one. Please. Don't open the door."

Silence on the line. Four per cent of it.

And then, through the door of our quarter, through the phone, through nine hundred kilometres, in exactly the tone he'd used every morning of her life, in the holidays, on Sundays, on the morning after my mother's funeral, my father said the rest of it.

"School ke liye late ho jayegi."

You'll be late for school.

· · ·

It was the middle of the summer holidays. There was no school. There hadn't been for weeks.

The dead don't know that. They don't know anything. They only know what they did most.

"Bhaiya," whispered Tara.

It was a different whisper. Very small. Very far away. The whisper of a girl of thirteen standing in the middle of a dark room with her back to her grandmother's bed and her face towards the door, understanding something.

"Bhaiya. There's no school."

"I know."

"He knows there's no school. He knows. He was here when the holidays started. He signed my report card."

"I know."

"Then why is he—"

The phone beeped in my ear. Once. The battery warning. One per cent.

"Tara," I said, as fast as I'd ever said anything. "Get away from the door. Go to Dadi. Stay with Merin and Dadi, stay quiet, keep the bolt on, he'll wait and then he'll go, they always go, they knock and they wait and they go, I promise, Tara, I promise, I'm coming, I'm—"

The line went dead.

Not cut. Dead. Three little tones, call ended, and then nothing. Her battery. Four per cent and one per cent and then the end of it, in a quarter in Bhilai, at nineteen minutes to seven in the morning, with my father on the other side of the door.

I called her back. It didn't ring. The number you have dialled is switched off.

I called her back again.

Switched off.

· · ·

I stood at the edge of the tin roof with the phone in my hand.

Behind me, I could feel them watching. Thirty-eight people on charpais. Ira, on her feet now, very still. Bunty, with a dhaba spoon still in his hand.

I put the phone in my pocket. I turned round.

I didn't say anything to them about it, then. I didn't need to. Bunty read my face by the long scenic route, every stop, every turning, and got to the end of it faster than I'd ever seen him get anywhere, and put the spoon down on the charpai very carefully, as if it might break.

Ira didn't need any route at all. She'd always been able to read me. That had always been the whole problem.

I looked at Bunty.

"Drive," I said.

· · ·

I've told you I'd tell you the truth. Here it is, the last of it, for this part.

Fear's been gone since a Friday night on the fifth floor of a hostel nobody finished building, eight days ago, when I filled in stop for a man who was already falling. I've checked. I've leaned out of windows. I've walked through ten thousand of the dead with my hands in my pockets.

Grief's been gone since a little before one o'clock this morning, in Room 12, Block B, when I matched the living man's routine instead of the dead man's present, and a tear stopped halfway down my cheek. I've checked that too. I looked at my teacher on a stage under a dome and felt nothing at all.

So I don't know what it was.

I don't know what it was that made my hands shake, standing at the end of a tin roof at a dhaba in the Mukundra hills, at eighteen minutes to seven on a Saturday morning, nine hundred kilometres from a locked door, when I told Bunty to drive.