Barsa Re Bhubaneswar

Chapter 1

Quarter Number Eight

The ceiling fan in Type II, Quarter No. 8 had two speeds that mattered. There was the speed it was set to, which was five, and there was the speed the voltage allowed, which in May of 1996 was something closer to two and a half. Bapa called the gap between them "the Electricity Board's share."

We lived on the fourth floor, the top floor, which meant that above our heads there was only the roof, and above the roof there was only the sun. By eleven in the morning the walls were warm to the touch. By two they gave off heat like a tawa left on the stove after the rotis were done. Maa hung wet bedsheets across the balcony door so that whatever wind came would come through water first. It did not help much, but it gave the flat a smell I still associate with summer: damp cotton, Lifebuoy soap, and the faint iron of the bucket.

I was eight that year. I know because that was the summer my eldest sister, Mamuni Nani, turned fourteen and announced that she was too old to sleep on the floor with the rest of us, and then slept on the floor with the rest of us anyway, because the floor was the only cool place in the flat. Four children and Maa lay on a cotton durrie in the front room like fish laid out at the Unit 1 market. Bapa slept on the cot near the window, with a transistor radio on his chest that he never remembered to switch off.

From the balcony you could see most of the world I knew. Directly below was the road that ran between our block and the next one, a strip of tar that went soft in the afternoons so that your chappals made a sound like a kiss when you lifted them. Beyond the last building, past the colony wall with its broken glass set into the top, was the forest. It was not called a forest. On paper it was government land, and some years later it would be cleared and turned into Janata Maidan, where politicians would hold rallies and families would come for the trade fair and eat cotton candy the colour of a nosebleed. But in 1996 it was trees, and thorn bushes, and a smell of things dying in the heat. Jackals called from it at night. Once, from the balcony, I watched four vultures sit on a dead cow for most of an afternoon, taking their time, like uncles at a wedding lunch.

On the other side, past the water tank, was more green. That was the Lab side, the research campus that everyone in the colony called RRL as if it were a word, and its trees were taller and older and darker. The older boys said a man had hanged himself there in the seventies. The older boys said a lot of things.

In those years Bhubaneswar was a town that went to sleep at nine. On Saturday mornings Bapa took me on the back of the Bajaj to Unit-1 market, where the vegetable women sat on gunny sacks under black umbrellas and called him Babu, and the fish smell came at you from the far end before you had even parked. On the way back we passed Master Canteen square, with the old railway station behind it, the platform roof the colour of a biscuit, and the cycle rickshaws waiting in a crooked line with their drivers asleep across the seats. Everyone I knew lived inside the same few kilometres. Everything else was paddy, or forest, or Cuttack.

* * *

Bapa worked at Survey of India. He made maps. That is how I explained it at school, and it was true, although it took me years to understand what it really meant. He did not draw pictures of the country with crayons. He sat in an office in a building with a long verandah and checked numbers that other men had brought back from the field, numbers about heights and distances and the exact place where one district ended and another began. He had a steel scale with a bevelled edge that he used for everything, including scratching his back. He wrote the number seven with a line through it, the European way, which he had learned from some senior officer decades earlier and never given up.

He went to office on a white Narmada scooter. Everybody else's father, it seemed, had a Bajaj Chetak, and I was mildly ashamed of the Narmada until Rohan's elder brother told me it was made by a company in Gujarat that also made fertilizer, which struck both of us as the funniest thing we had ever heard. After that I was proud of it. "Our scooter is made of khaata," I told people, and some of them believed me.

The scooter lived at the bottom of the stairwell under a plastic cover that had once been a hospital mattress protector. Every morning at 9:10 Bapa came down the four flights with his tiffin carrier in one hand and his helmet in the other. He never wore the helmet. He hung it on the hook below the handlebar the way some men hang a lime and chillies, for protection rather than use. He would kick the scooter twice, tilt it to one side, kick it again, and then, as the engine caught, he would look up at the balcony, where I was supposed to be waving. I was almost always there.

In the evenings, around six-fifteen, you could hear the Narmada before you saw it. It had a slight wheeze when it turned off the main road into the colony, a sound like an old man clearing his throat before saying something important. If I was playing cricket in the road I would stop, bat or ball in hand, and step aside. He never stopped. He would raise two fingers from the handle, a sort of salute, and ride the last fifty metres to the stairwell. Then he would climb the stairs, slowly, because it was four floors and because he was a man who did everything at the same speed, and Maa would have tea ready at the exact moment the door opened, which I believed for years was a kind of magic and later realised was just the scooter's wheeze.

* * *

The Fifth Pay Commission came that year, or was announced, or was talked about. I did not understand it, but I understood its effect on the adults. Men stood in groups at the bottom of the stairwells after office and said numbers to each other. They said "arrears" a lot. Mr. Panda from the second floor, who was in Accounts and therefore considered an authority, explained it to anyone who would stand still. "Basic is going up. DA will be merged. You will see. It will be like a second salary."

Bapa listened to these conversations with his hands behind his back and his chin slightly lifted, which was his way of being polite while thinking about something else. At home he said only, "Let it come first. Then we will see." When it did come, months later, he bought a pressure cooker, a Hawkins, the big one, and a steel almirah with a mirror on the inside of the door. Maa stood in front of that mirror for a long time the evening it arrived. I don't think she was looking at herself. I think she was looking at the almirah.

* * *

I should explain about the colony, because nobody who did not live in one will understand it otherwise.

Survey of India Colony was not a neighbourhood. It was an organism. Every block had eight flats, two per floor, and every flat knew what every other flat was cooking by the smell in the stairwell. The Mohantys on the first floor fried fish on Wednesdays. The Raos on the third, who were from Andhra and therefore considered somewhat foreign, made something with tamarind that clung to the walls for hours. Our flat smelled, I was told, of pakhala and mustard oil, which was true of most flats, and of Maa's sandalwood agarbatti, which was not.

Nobody had a telephone. There was one in the colony office, a black thing with a lock on the dial, and you could use it for emergencies if the office was open and if Behera, the clerk, was in a good mood, which he was not, ever. So news travelled by stairwell. If you failed a test, the third floor knew before your father did. If your mother raised her voice, Mrs. Panda would bring a bowl of something over that evening and stand in the doorway asking if everything was all right, her eyes moving around the room like a ration inspector's.

Maa hated it, I think, though she would never have said so. She had grown up in a village in the west of the state, near Sambalpur, where the houses were far apart and the gossip at least had to walk to reach you. In the colony it simply came up the stairs.

"Don't tell anyone outside," she would say to us, about almost anything. What we had for dinner. How much the almirah cost. That my second sister, Lipi Nani, had got a sixty-three in mathematics. "Ghara katha ghare rahe," she said. House talk stays in the house. We were raised as small diplomats, trained to answer every question from a neighbour with a smile and nothing.

I was good at it. I was good at being quiet in general. At home with my sisters I talked constantly, but outside the flat I said very little. I had perhaps two real friends, and one of them was Rohan, and the other was a boy named Sibu who moved to Cuttack in 1997 and whom I never saw again. With other children I mostly listened. Adults found this either charming or suspicious. "So shant," Mrs. Rao would say, patting my head. "So quiet. What is going on in there?"

A great deal, as it happened. But I didn't have the words for it yet.

* * *

My sisters went to the OSAP 7th Battalion school, a government school a little way down the road towards the TV centre, and I went to Kendriya Vidyalaya No. 1 in Unit 9. This was a source of some tension, although again no one said so. KV was considered the better school. It was the central government school, the one with English-medium classes and a uniform that included a tie, and admission depended on your father's posting and transfer history and a set of rules that Mr. Panda claimed to understand. I got in. My sisters, who were older and had been enrolled when we were posted elsewhere and the rules were different, did not, or could not be moved, or something. I never got a straight answer.

So every morning I watched them leave before me. Mamuni Nani and Lipi Nani, in their blue uniforms, blue skirts and blue shirts with a white belt, hair oiled flat and plaited and tied with blue ribbons folded into flowers. They walked to school in a group with six or seven other girls from the colony, no adult, just a line of blue moving along the edge of the road with the forest on one side. They carried their bags in front of them, hugged to their chests, because someone had told them it was more ladylike. They talked the whole way. From the balcony I could hear them laughing long after I could no longer see them.

My youngest sister, Chiku, was four that summer. She was not yet in school, and so she was mine. She followed me everywhere I was allowed to go and several places I was not. She called me Bhai with a long rising note, "Bhaaai," as if she were calling a cow in from a field. She was the only person in the family who never compared me to anyone. I don't think it occurred to her that you could.

* * *

The heat that summer had a personality. I don't know how else to describe it. It did not just make you hot; it made you stupid, and slow, and irritable, and then it made you sleep in the afternoon whether you wanted to or not. By noon the roads of Bhubaneswar were empty. Shopkeepers pulled their shutters halfway down and lay on the counters behind them. The radio read out advisories in Odia and then in Hindi: drink water, do not go out between twelve and four, cover your head. In 1998 the heat would kill more than two thousand people across the state, and the government would declare it a natural disaster, but in 1996 it was just summer, and summer was something you survived.

Maa had rules. No going downstairs between twelve and four. A glass of water with salt and sugar every two hours. A wet cloth on the head if you complained of a headache. Onions in the pocket if you absolutely had to go out, because an onion in the pocket would absorb the loo, the hot wind, before it reached you. I believed in the onion completely. I believed in it so much that I would put one in my shorts pocket even to go to the balcony, and by evening my shorts smelled like a dhaba.

The afternoons were the worst, because I could not sit still. This is the first thing I remember knowing about myself. Everyone else could lie on the floor in the heat and be still. My sisters read, or slept, or played a game with five stones that involved throwing one in the air and scooping the others before it came down. Chiku slept with her mouth open and a line of sweat in the crease of her neck. Maa lay with her arm across her eyes. And I lay on the durrie and felt my legs.

I mean that literally. I felt them. They wanted to go. They wanted to run down four floors and across the road and along the colony wall to the gap where the bricks had fallen, and through the gap into the forest, and keep going. My legs had opinions. They itched from the inside. I would turn over, and turn over again, and press my feet against the cool of the wall, and count the blades of the fan going round, and none of it helped.

"Kana hela?" Maa would say, without moving her arm. What happened?

"Nothing."

"Then lie still."

"I am lying still."

"You are lying like a fish on a hot pan."

I would try. I would lie still for a count of a hundred, and then my left leg would kick by itself, and Lipi Nani would say "Ow," and Maa would lift her arm off her eyes and look at me, and the look said: what is wrong with this boy.

It took me about twenty-five years to answer that question. Nothing was wrong with the boy. But it is a long book, and we will get there.

* * *

In the evenings, when the sun finally gave up and slid down behind the RRL trees, the colony came back to life all at once, as if a switch had been thrown. Doors opened. Women came out on the balconies to take the dry clothes off the lines and talk across the gap between buildings. Men came home on their scooters. Somebody's radio played Vividh Bharati. Somebody's pressure cooker whistled, three times, four. And the children poured down the stairwells like water down a drain, and the road between the buildings became a cricket ground.

I would be first down. I was always first down. I would take the stairs two at a time, then three, my hand sliding along the iron railing that was still warm from the day, and burst out of the stairwell into the evening air that smelled of dust and someone's frying, and my legs would finally, finally get what they wanted.

Maa would call from the balcony: "Before dark!"

And I would shout back, "Haan, Maa!" without turning around, and we both knew that "before dark" meant "roughly when the jackals start."

Nobody could call me home. There was no way to. Once I was down those stairs, I belonged to the road and the forest and whatever Rohan had decided we were doing that evening, and the only thing that would bring me back was the dark, or hunger, or the wheeze of a Narmada turning in from the main road at six-fifteen.

That was the world. Four floors, a road, a forest, a scooter. It was small. I didn't know yet how small. I only knew that I had too much in me for the afternoon, and that the evening was the only time I fit.

It would be thirty years before I understood that the road had been the only room big enough. By then they were getting ready to knock the building down.

Contents

Chapter 2

The Bowler

Rohan Patnaik lived in Quarter No. 14, ground floor, which was the best position in the whole colony for cricket purposes. His bedroom window opened straight onto the road, so if the ball went in, it was his mother who threw it back out, and his mother had a good arm.

He was a batsman. He had been born a batsman, the way some people are born left-handed. He had a stance before he had a bat. When he was six he stood at his front door with a rolled-up newspaper and took guard against an imaginary Wasim Akram, tapping the newspaper on the floor twice and then lifting it high behind his head, exactly like Sachin, and his father took a photo of it with a Hot Shot camera that the whole colony later saw, because his mother had it framed. Rohan liked the photo. He thought it showed promise.

I bowled.

Our pitch was the road itself, from the electric pole outside Block C to a line we had scratched on the tar with a stone. The wickets were three bricks stacked on top of each other at the batting end and one of Bapa's old Survey of India file boxes at the bowler's end, filled with sand so it wouldn't blow away. The boundary was the drain on one side and the colony wall on the other. Hitting it over the wall into the forest was out, because someone had to go and get it, and nobody wanted to go and get it, because of the snakes. Hitting a balcony was four. Hitting Mrs. Panda's balcony was out, and you had to go upstairs and apologise, which was worse than any snake.

We played with a tennis ball when we had one and a rubber ball when we didn't. In 1997, for one glorious month, we had a real leather ball that Rohan's uncle had brought from Calcutta, and we played with it exactly four times before Lipi Nani's friend got hit on the shin and her mother came to every flat in the block, one by one, and the ball was confiscated by a committee of mothers and never seen again. I believe it is still in an almirah somewhere in Survey of India Colony, wrapped in a petticoat.

Summer afternoons were pakhala afternoons. Maa soaked the rice the night before, and at two o'clock the whole of Block C went quiet behind bolted doors while we sat on the cool floor of the inner room and ate it with fried badi and a raw onion and a green chilli each, and the ceiling fan turned, and then, as often as not, stopped. Load-shedding. Nobody even complained any more. Maa handed out the palm-leaf fans without looking up, and we fanned ourselves and listened to the whole building groan at once, every floor, every flat, the same groan.

* * *

There were usually six or seven of us. Rohan. Me. Sibu, until he moved. The two Rao brothers, who argued in Telugu when they disagreed with a decision and in Hindi when they wanted everyone to hear. A small furious boy called Tukuna from Block A who could not bat or bowl but could field like a dog chasing a bus. And sometimes Pintu, who was thirteen and therefore too old for us, but who played anyway when the older boys wouldn't have him.

Everyone wanted to bat. This is the law of street cricket everywhere in India and probably the world. Batting is where you stand still and become famous. Bowling is where you run and run and run and somebody else becomes famous off your work. When we picked teams, there was always a long negotiation about the batting order, with appeals, counter-appeals, threats to take the bat home, and finally a compromise that satisfied nobody.

I never joined the negotiation. From the first time we played, I said the same thing.

"I'll bowl. You keep batting."

Rohan looked at me the first time I said it as if I had offered him my lunch money. "Pura over?"

"All of them. I'll do most of the bowling. You bat."

"You're mad."

"I like it."

"Nobody likes bowling, re. You run all the way there, you throw, and then I hit it, and then you have to go get it." He gestured down the road, towards the drain and the place where the road curved and the ball always ended up under somebody's scooter. "And then you walk all the way back. It's like being a servant."

"I like it," I said again, and went to mark my run-up.

He thought I was stupid. He said so, frequently, over the next ten years. "Saala, you take the donkey job every time." But he let me do it, because it meant he got to bat, and Rohan would have let the devil bowl to him if it meant he got to bat.

* * *

I want to be honest about why I did it, because for a long time I wasn't sure myself, and when I was finally sure, the answer surprised me.

Part of it was my legs. Bowling used them. Batting, in our road, was mostly standing at the bricks waiting for someone to deliver the ball, and I had enough standing still in the afternoons. Bowling meant twelve long strides from the file box, a jump, a whirl of the arm, a follow-through that took me halfway down the pitch, and then a sprint wherever the ball had gone. By the end of an evening I would be dripping, my vest stuck to my back, my legs finally quiet. I slept well on bowling nights.

But part of it was something else, something that I didn't have words for at eight and only half had at twelve. It was this: I knew I was not going to be the best at anything by avoiding the hard part. Nobody told me this. I worked it out from watching. The boys who only batted got good at batting in our road, against our bowling, which was not very good, and then the moment they played against older boys or in the school ground, they were out in two balls and came back sulking. The boys who bowled, the few who did, got stronger. Their shoulders got stronger, their legs, their lungs. They could run all evening. You could see it in them.

I didn't want to be famous in our road. I wanted to be strong. I had a body that was quick but light, wiry, the kind of body aunties described as "lean, but he eats," and I knew, the way you know things at eight without being able to explain them, that the only way it was going to change was if I gave it the hard job, every day, whether anyone noticed or not.

Nobody noticed. That was fine. That was, I think, the point.

* * *

After cricket, in the twenty minutes between the end of the game and the arrival of the jackals, we sat on the low wall outside Block C and traded cards.

Center Fresh was the chewing gum with the liquid in the middle, the one that squirted when you bit it, and in 1997 it came with cricket cards. Each card had a player's photo on the front, a little stiff and over-saturated, and on the back his statistics: matches, runs, wickets, highest score, best bowling. There were nearly two hundred of them in the set. We bought the gum for the cards and chewed it out of a sense of duty. Most of the gum ended up stuck under the wall, a grey archaeological layer that is probably still there.

Rohan had the best collection because his father gave him two rupees every day. I had a smaller collection but a better system. I kept mine in a Gold Flake cigarette tin Bapa had found in a field office in Koraput years before, and I sorted them by country and then by role. Batsmen at the front. Bowlers at the back. All-rounders in the middle, where they could go either way.

"Sachin," Rohan would say, holding up a card like a priest with a lamp. "Best batsman in the world."

"Lara," said the elder Rao brother, who supported the West Indies to annoy everyone.

"Lara is nothing in front of Sachin."

"Lara made 375."

"Sachin will make 400."

"When?"

"Soon."

And so on. There was no question of who was the best batsman. It was Sachin, it had always been Sachin, and the only people who said otherwise were people who wanted a fight. The real arguments were about bowling.

"Wasim," I said, every time.

"Wasim is Pakistani."

"So? He's the best."

"Srinath is faster."

"Wasim swings it both ways. Srinath only goes straight." I had no idea if this was true. I had never seen Srinath bowl except on the small Onida television in the Pandas' flat, through a fog of static, during a match whose result I have forgotten. But I had read the backs of the cards so many times that I could recite their figures like the times tables, and I knew that bowling was harder, and I knew that whoever was best at the harder thing deserved more respect.

"Bowlers don't win matches," said Rohan.

"Bowlers are the only ones who can win matches. A batsman can only make runs. A bowler can end the other team."

That shut him up for once. He looked at me with an expression I would come to know very well, a mix of irritation and reluctant interest, the face of someone who has just heard you say something they will think about later and never admit to.

* * *

We also had WWE cards, although we called it WWF then, and nobody knew anything about wrestling except what we saw in the cards and what a boy in Block F whose family had cable told us. Cable was an elite thing in the colony in those years. A handful of flats had it, wires slung from balcony to balcony like washing lines, and the rest of us had Doordarshan and an antenna on the roof that had to be turned by hand whenever a crow sat on it. The boy in Block F was called Bapi and his father was something important in the Accounts section, and he was the most popular boy in the colony for exactly as long as his family had cable, which was about eighteen months, after which his father was transferred to Guwahati and his authority went with him.

Bapi told us about the Undertaker, who could not die, and about a man called Stone Cold who drank beer on television. These things seemed impossible and therefore true. I had a card of the Undertaker that I kept separately, in my shirt pocket, for luck. It went through the wash twice and came out looking like a ghost of a ghost, which I thought was appropriate.

* * *

In the flat, each of us had a slab. This was a cement shelf built into the wall of the bedroom, the kind every government quarter had, a grey ledge about a metre long with a lip at the front. Four slabs, four children, one each. Mamuni Nani's was neat, with her books in order of height and a small plastic Ganesh at the end. Lipi Nani's was a mess. Chiku's was mostly a place where other people put things they didn't want, until she was old enough to object.

Mine was a shrine.

I cut cricketers out of everything. The Sportstar that Rohan's father bought, when Rohan had finished with it. The Sunday supplement of the Samaja, which carried sports photos so blurred that you had to guess who it was from the shape of the moustache. The back of a Bournvita tin that had a picture of Sachin with a glass of milk. I cut them out with Maa's tailoring scissors, which I was not supposed to touch, and stuck them to the wall above my slab with rice paste that Maa made for me, under protest, every few weeks. "If the landlord comes and sees this," she said, "we will have to pay."

"We don't have a landlord, Maa. It's government."

"Then the government will come and see this."

The government never came. By the end of 1998 the wall above my slab was a collage of Indian cricket, overlapping, edges curling, Azhar's wrists and Kumble's glasses and Sachin, always Sachin, in six or seven different poses, in the middle of it all. At the very edge, in the corner, half covered by a picture of Ajay Jadeja, was a small photo of Wasim Akram mid-delivery that I had cut from somebody's Pakistani magazine at the barber's. I kept it near the corner because I was not entirely sure Bapa would approve. He never mentioned it. I think he saw it on the first day.

* * *

There is one evening I remember more clearly than the others, though nothing much happened in it.

It was late in the summer of 1997, a week or two before the rains, the sky gone the colour of dal and the air so thick you could have spread it on bread. The others had gone home early because Tukuna's mother had come out and dragged him away by the ear, and that had somehow ended the game for everyone. Rohan went in to take his bath. The road was empty.

I stayed.

I put the bricks back up at the batting end. I took the tennis ball, which was going bald on one side, and walked back to the file box, and marked my run-up again with my heel. And then I bowled. At nothing. At three bricks in an empty road. I ran in, jumped, bowled, followed through, walked down the pitch, picked up the ball from wherever it had gone, walked back, and did it again.

I don't know how long I did it. It got dark enough that I couldn't see the bricks properly and had to aim for the pale square they made against the tar. The lights came on in the stairwells. Someone's radio was playing an old Odia song, Akshaya Mohanty, I think, the voice coming down through the evening like a slow kite. I bowled, and walked, and bowled. Nobody was watching. I wasn't practising for any match. There was no match.

I hit the bricks, finally, after what must have been fifty balls. The top one fell off with a small clack that sounded enormous in the empty road. I stood there in my follow-through, breathing hard, and looked at it.

Then I heard Maa's voice from four floors up. "Max! Andhaara hela! Upare aa!" It's dark. Come up.

I picked up the brick and put it back on the stack. I picked up the ball. I went up the four floors at a walk, for once, my legs heavy and happy.

At the top of the stairs, Bapa was standing in the doorway, in his vest and lungi, a glass of tea in his hand. I don't know how long he had been there. Our balcony looked straight down on the road. He might have watched the whole thing.

"Hit it?" he said.

"Once."

He nodded, as if this were a perfectly reasonable answer, and stood aside to let me in. He did not say well done, or what were you doing, or why do you waste your time throwing a ball at bricks in the dark. He just nodded. It was the nod he gave to a number when it checked out.

I didn't know then how long I would carry that nod. I'm still carrying it.

Three weeks later, at midnight, under the neem behind Block A, I heard Maa sing in a voice I had never heard her use. That was when I found out I was not the only one in Quarter Number Eight who was too much for the room.

Contents

Chapter 3

Swings

Maa started the poda pitha the night before Raja, after everyone had eaten, when the kitchen was finally hers.

She had soaked the rice in the morning, and the black gram with it, in two steel basins that sat on the kitchen floor all day under a plate, and every time I passed I lifted the plate to look, and every time she said "Leave it" without turning around. By the evening the rice had gone soft and chalky and the dal had swollen to twice its size. She ground them on the sil with the long stone roller, sitting on her heels, her sari tucked up at the knee, pushing the stone away from her and pulling it back, away and back, with a sound like somebody walking slowly on gravel. It took more than an hour. Nobody helped her. Nobody was allowed to; she said that the batter knew whose hands were on it.

I sat in the kitchen doorway and watched, because I couldn't sleep, and because the kitchen at night was the only room in the flat where nobody minded if my legs went.

"What does the batter know?" I said.

"It knows if you are in a hurry."

"Are you in a hurry?"

"Always," said Maa, and pushed the stone away.

Into the batter went grated coconut, and jaggery that she had broken off the block with the back of the big knife, and black pepper, and a little ghee, and pieces of coconut cut small, which were the best part, and which I was given one of for sitting quietly. Then she lined the big aluminium handi with turmeric leaves, and poured the batter in, and set it on the coal chulha that she used only for this and for nothing else all year, out on the balcony where the smoke could go. She put a tin plate on the lid and heaped live coals on the plate with the tongs. Fire under, fire above. Then she sat down beside it on a low stool and did not move again.

"How long?"

"All night."

"You'll stay awake all night?"

"Somebody has to," she said. "Go to sleep. In the morning it will be Raja."

I went to sleep on the durrie with my sisters, and the last thing I remember was the smell of the turmeric leaves charring, and the orange square of the balcony door, and Maa's shape on the stool against it, perfectly still, a woman keeping watch over something that could not be hurried.

Raja was also the only time of year the girls were let loose on the town. Mamuni Nani and her friends took a town bus to Unit-2 to buy glass bangles and mehendi cones, and came back flushed and late, and they were scolded and did not care. That year she came home with a cinema ticket stub from Keshari Talkies hidden in her bangle box, an Odia film with Uttam Mohanty on the poster, and made me swear on the Gita in the puja corner that I had not seen it.

* * *

Raja is three days in the middle of June, at the end of the hot season, just before the rains. The old people said that the earth was resting then, the way a woman rests, and that for three days nobody should dig, or plough, or grind, or cut, and that the girls of the house should do no work at all. No cooking, no sweeping, no washing. They should wear new clothes and put alta on their feet and eat sweets and chew paan and swing.

In the villages they tied the swings to the big mango trees and the banyans, high, with thick ropes and a plank, and the girls sang as they swung. In Survey of India Colony there was one tree that would take a swing, which was the neem behind Block A, and on the morning of the first day of Raja somebody's brother climbed it with a coil of coir rope over his shoulder while every child in the colony stood underneath and told him what he was doing wrong.

The plank came from Mr. Rao's packing crate. It had OM PRAKASH TRANSPORT stencilled on the bottom in red. Every year somebody suggested painting over it and every year nobody did.

My sisters had new frocks that year. Maa had bought the cloth at Unit 1 market in April and sewn them herself at night on the Usha machine, the treadle going like a heart under the table, so that for weeks I had gone to sleep to it. Mamuni Nani's was green with a white collar. Lipi Nani's was orange, because she had asked for orange, and then cried, because it was very orange. Chiku's was yellow with small red flowers, and she would not take it off for three days, and slept in it, and nobody made her.

That morning Maa painted alta on their feet. She sat each of them on the low stool in the front room in turn and held their feet in her lap and drew the red line around the edge of the sole with a matchstick wrapped in cotton, and then the flower on the top of the foot, and then a dot on each toe. Chiku kicked. Lipi Nani complained that hers was crooked. Mamuni Nani sat very straight and held her feet out and said nothing, and when Maa had finished, she looked at them for a long time, as if they belonged to somebody she was meeting for the first time.

"Your turn?" Maa said to me, holding up the matchstick, and laughed when I ran.

There was no cooking that day. That was the rule. The poda pitha came off the chulha at dawn, a great brown cake, black at the edges, and Maa cut it on the kitchen floor into pieces like bricks, and that was breakfast, and lunch was more of it, with chuda and curd and bananas, and the girls of the house did not lift a plate. My sisters sat on the cot like queens. Bapa, who had the day off, washed the steel tumblers himself at the tap on the balcony, very slowly, handling each one as if it might go off. Maa watched him do it with an expression I didn't understand at the time and would now describe as enjoyment.

"Not like that," she said. "Inside also."

"I am doing inside."

"You are doing outside twice."

He did inside. She did not get up to help. It was Raja.

* * *

By ten o'clock the queue at the neem had become a crowd. There was one swing and perhaps thirty girls, from five to sixteen, in new clothes, with red feet, and a committee of mothers had formed in the shade of Block A to decide who swung when and for how long. The boys had a role too, and it was the role of pushing. You stood behind the plank and when it came back to you, you caught the rope and pushed. That was all. Nobody thanked you. Nobody counted your turns. You were a piece of equipment.

I was very good at it.

I didn't know I would be. I had pushed Chiku on the little swing at the school once or twice, gently, the way you were supposed to. This was different. This was a heavy plank on long ropes from a high branch, and when you caught it at the back of the swing, at the moment it hung still, and put your whole weight into it, it went. It flew. The girl on it went up and out over the dead grass until she was level with the first-floor balconies of Block A, and her frock filled with air, and she screamed, and on the way back you caught it again, and pushed again, and she went higher.

The other boys pushed with their arms. I pushed with my legs, the way I ran in to bowl, three steps and then everything. I could feel the rope hum. I could feel the branch above us take the weight and give it back.

"Not so much, Max," said one of the mothers.

"Not so high, Max!"

"Max, that is enough. She is small."

So I pushed the small ones gently, and fretted, and waited, and when Mamuni Nani's turn came, at last, at nearly noon, I was standing behind the plank before anyone could tell me not to.

She was fifteen. She was going into Class X in a month, and everybody already spoke to her in the voice the colony used for children going into Class X, which was the voice you used for someone who was going into hospital. Mrs. Panda had asked her twice that morning, in front of everyone, how many hours she was studying. Mamuni Nani had answered politely both times. She always answered politely. She was the eldest. She ironed her own uniform and did her own hair and checked Lipi Nani's homework and walked Chiku to the bathroom at night. She was the one who knew where the ration card was. When Maa was ill once, for a week, with a fever, it was Mamuni Nani who cooked, at thirteen, standing on the low stool to reach the gas, and nobody remarked on it because it was so obviously what she would do.

She sat down on the plank in her green frock and tucked it under her knees and held the ropes. Her feet with the red alta hung down above the dust.

"Gently," she said to me, in her Class X voice.

I pushed her gently. Twice.

On the third time she came back to me, she turned her head, just slightly, as she hung at the top of the back swing, and said, very quietly, so the mothers couldn't hear:

"Higher."

So I ran.

I put everything into it. Three steps and both hands flat on the plank and my whole body behind it, and she went up and out, higher than anyone had gone all morning, higher than the first-floor balconies, the rope creaking at the top, and the mothers under the trees all said "Ei!" at once, and Mamuni Nani screamed.

I knew all the colony's screams by then and I had never heard this one from her. It had a laugh inside it, long and high and completely without dignity, and on the way back down she was still laughing, her plait flying, her head back, and as she passed me she shouted "Again!" and I caught it and ran again.

I don't know how long it lasted. Perhaps a minute. Then Mrs. Panda came out from the shade, fanning herself with the Samaja, and said "Enough now, enough, she is going into Class X," as if a girl going into Class X might fall off a swing and land somewhere in the middle of the syllabus. I caught the rope and held it, and the plank slowed, and stopped. Mamuni Nani got down. Her face was red and wet and her hair had come out of its ribbon on one side.

"Thank you, Aunty," she said politely to Mrs. Panda.

Then she walked past me, back towards Block C, and as she passed she put her hand on top of my head for a second, the way Bapa did, and pressed down, and took it away.

She didn't say anything about it, then or later. But that evening, when we were all sitting on the balcony chewing the paan that Maa had folded for us, the sweet kind, with gulkand and coconut and a clove pinned through it, Mamuni Nani spat red juice neatly over the grille into the drain, which Maa had told her a hundred times never to do, and looked at me, and grinned.

It was the last Raja she swung. The next year she had her boards, and the year after that she said she was too old, and after that she was in college, and then there was a job, and a husband, and two children, and a flat in Cuttack with a balcony full of tulsi pots, and a desk at the secretariat with three telephones on it. I asked her about the swing once, many years later. She said she didn't remember it. Then she said, "The green frock. With the collar. Maa made it." And then she changed the subject.

* * *

The women swung at night.

I had never known this. On the second night of Raja I woke up at some hour after midnight, needing to pee, and went out to the balcony because the bathroom door squeaked, and from the balcony you could see the back of Block A, and the neem.

There were women on the swing.

Not the girls. The mothers. Mrs. Rao and Mrs. Panda and Tukuna's mother and two or three others I couldn't make out, in the dark, under the tree, with no light but the moon and a little from the stairwell of Block A. They were taking turns. One of them would sit and the others would push, slowly, not high, and they were talking in low voices and laughing, the way I had never heard grown women laugh, and somebody was singing.

It was Maa.

I knew it before I could hear the words. I knew her voice the way you know the sound of your own door. She was on the plank in her old cotton sari, swinging slowly back and forth in the dark, her head tilted back, and she was singing a song in Sambalpuri, the language of her village, that I had never heard before. It went up and down in long slow curves, like the swing. The other women had gone quiet to listen. Mrs. Panda, who I had never seen quiet in my life, was standing with one hand on the rope, not pushing, just holding it.

I stood behind the grille in my vest and listened to my mother sing until the song was finished. Then I went back to bed without peeing, and lay awake, and in the morning I wondered if I had dreamed it.

* * *

I hadn't dreamed it. I asked Bapa, a few days later, on the scooter. He took me to the market on Sunday mornings sometimes, standing between his knees in front of the seat with my hands on the handlebar inside his hands, and on the scooter he would sometimes answer things he would never have answered inside the flat, I think because he did not have to look at you.

"Does Maa sing?"

The scooter slowed a little. Then it went on.

"Who told you?"

"Nobody. I heard."

He didn't say anything until we had gone round the roundabout at Ekamra and joined the traffic on the main road.

"Your Maa had a letter from the radio," he said. "All India Radio, Sambalpur. Before we married. They had heard her sing at a function at her college. They wanted her to come and do a test. For the folk programme, on Sunday mornings."

"Did she go?"

"Her father said no."

"Why?"

"In those days," Bapa said, and stopped, as if those three words were a whole sentence, which in our family they were. A bus went past us very close, blowing its horn. Bapa waited for it.

"She kept the letter," he said. "It is in her trunk. Don't ask her about it."

"Why not?"

"Because I am telling you not to."

I didn't ask her. Not then. But after that I listened, all the time. And I found that Maa sang constantly, under her breath, in the kitchen, so softly that you could only hear it if you sat in the doorway and kept very still, which was the one thing I was not good at. She sang over the grinding stone and over the gas. She sang while she folded the clothes and while she oiled Chiku's hair. She sang the same long curving song I had heard from the swing, and others, a whole village of songs, all at the level of breath, as if she were singing them to the food.

I used to sit in the doorway with my legs going and try to catch the words.

"What are you doing there?" she would say.

"Nothing."

"Then do nothing somewhere else."

But she didn't stop singing. She just turned a little more towards the wall.

It would be twenty-seven years before she told me the rest of it. That night I only knew it was a secret, and that now I had it.

Contents

Chapter 4

Brown Paper

Before the tree, there were the books, and before the books, there was the brown paper.

Every year, in the last week of June, Maa bought a roll of it from the stationery shop near the Unit 9 market, along with a packet of name labels, a bottle of Fevicol and, if it had been a good month, a strip of clear plastic that she would not let any of us touch until she had measured it twice. Then, on a Sunday afternoon, with the first rain falling outside and the whole flat smelling of wet earth through the open balcony door, the five of us sat on the floor and covered books.

This was a serious business. A KV textbook had to be covered so that the corners were sharp and the spine was tight and nothing bulged. You laid the book open on the paper, cut around it with two fingers of extra, folded the edges in, creased them with your thumbnail, and then did a thing at the corners, a sort of envelope fold, that Maa could do in one movement and I could not do at all. Mamuni Nani was nearly as good as her. Lipi Nani was quick and sloppy. Chiku, at five, was in charge of handing out the labels and licking them, which she did with tremendous concentration and too much tongue.

"Not like that." Maa took my book from me, unfolded my corner, and folded it again so that it lay flat as a blade. "If it is not neat, the teacher will think you are not neat."

"But I'm not neat."

"Then at least the book should be."

And then the label. A small white rectangle with a blue border and lines on it. Name. Class. Section. Subject. School. I wrote my name in my best handwriting, which was not very good, and then wrote CLASS IV-B, and then KENDRIYA VIDYALAYA NO. 1, BHUBANESWAR, and the letters got smaller and smaller towards the end until NESWAR was squashed against the border like passengers on a city bus.

The smell of a new textbook is a smell I would know in my sleep. It is a little like a ration shop, a little like a photocopier, and a little like something that has never been used, which is the hardest smell to describe because it is mostly the absence of other smells. I used to open each book in the middle and put my nose right into the fold and breathe in. Lipi Nani said it was disgusting. Then she did it too, when she thought nobody was looking.

The brown paper came from the stationery shop near Rajmahal square, where the owner kept a whole bale of it rolled behind the counter and cut it off by the arm's length for fifty paise. In June every shop there smelt of new books and naphthalene. You queued. You bought the Nataraj pencils, the Camlin box, the labels with the cartoon parrot on them. Then you walked home with the roll under your arm past the chhena poda thela that stood by the bus stop, and you did not have money for chhena poda, and you looked anyway.

* * *

Kendriya Vidyalaya No. 1 was on the other side of the Unit 9 market, behind the Ram Temple. You heard the temple before you saw the school. In the mornings there would be bells, and the smell of camphor and marigolds, and a loudspeaker playing bhajans slightly too loud and slightly out of tune, and then you would turn the corner and there would be the gate, and the long buildings with their red-oxide floors, and the ground where we had assembly in rows by height.

I was always near the back. Not because I was tall, though I was taller than average, but because I had learned that the back row of assembly was the safest place in the world. Nobody looks at the back row. You can move your feet in the back row, shift your weight, flex your toes inside your shoes, and no one sees.

Assembly was in Hindi and English. We sang "Hum Honge Kamyab" and a prayer whose words I knew perfectly and whose meaning I never once thought about. A senior read the news headlines from the paper. Someone from Class XII stood on a platform and said, "Thought for the day," and then said something about honesty or hard work, and we all clapped without listening. Then we marched to our classrooms in lines, past the noticeboard where the toppers' names were pinned, which I always looked at and never found myself on.

Going to KV in those years meant something. It meant your father was a central government employee. It meant you would wear a tie, a grey and blue striped one with an elastic band at the back, which made you look, to the boys in the OSAP school down the road, like a small bank manager. It meant English, more or less. It meant that if your father was transferred to Shillong or Jammu or Port Blair, there would be a KV there with the same syllabus and the same textbooks and probably the same tie, and you would sit down on the same wooden bench and pick up where you left off. Bapa liked that. It was the education equivalent of the steel almirah. It was safe.

The benches were wooden, long, made for two but usually holding three. They were scarred with the initials of every child who had sat there since independence. RK + SM. AJAY IS A DONKEY. A small carefully carved map of India that someone had spent what must have been weeks on, with Kashmir slightly too large. You were not supposed to write on the benches, and everybody did, with compass points and the backs of earrings and once, memorably, with a geometry divider that Tukuna's cousin had heated over a candle in the chemistry lab.

I sat on the third bench from the window. From there, if I turned my head slightly, I could see a neem tree outside and a slice of the sky, and if I turned it a little more, I could see the corner of the ground, which in the monsoon filled with water and frogs. I turned my head a lot. Teachers wrote it in my report card in several different ways over the years. "Attention wanders." "Must concentrate." "Is often looking outside." One of them, in Class V, wrote simply "Dreamer," which Bapa read out loud at the dinner table in a tone that suggested it was not a compliment.

* * *

The gel pen craze arrived in about 1998, and it hit us like a fever.

They came from somewhere, nobody knew where, maybe Delhi, maybe Calcutta, maybe Japan. They had transparent bodies and rubber grips and ink in colours that did not exist in nature: silver, gold, a pink that was almost orange, a green you could see in the dark. They cost ten or twelve rupees each, which was a fortune. You could not write your answers in them, because teachers only allowed blue or black, and anyway the ink ran out in about a week. They were completely useless. Everybody had to have one.

Rohan got the silver one first. He wrote his name on the back of his hand with it and showed everyone on the bus, holding his hand up like a man showing a wound. Then a girl in Section A got a set of ten in a plastic case, and that was the end of Rohan's reign.

I saved for a month. I gave up Center Fresh, which meant giving up cards, which was a real sacrifice. I bought a single gel pen in a sort of deep blue that had glitter in it, and I wrote, in very small letters, on the inside back cover of my Hindi notebook, where no teacher would ever look, the names of the eleven players I would pick for India. Then I wrote them again in a different order. Then I wrote my own name at the bottom, number twelve, the extra fielder, and looked at it for a while, and then I put the cap back on the pen.

The pen ran out in nine days. I kept it anyway, empty, in my pencil box, for years.

* * *

The tree happened in Class IV, in the second week of July 1997.

Our environmental studies teacher was a woman I will call Mrs. Das, because that is not her name and because she may still be alive and I have no wish to hurt her. She was tall and wore her sari pinned very tightly, and she had a way of holding a piece of chalk between two fingers like a cigarette. She was not a cruel woman, I think. She was a tired one. She had forty-four children in a room built for thirty and a syllabus that had to be finished by March, and she did not have time for anything that slowed her down.

That day the lesson was about trees. Why trees are important. Oxygen, shade, soil, rain, birds. Van Mahotsav, the tree-planting festival, which was coming up in the first week of July, and which we had already missed, but never mind. The school was going to plant saplings along the boundary wall, and each section would get two.

"So," said Mrs. Das, tapping the chalk on the board where she had written TREE PLANTATION in capital letters, "when is the best time to plant a tree?"

Hands went up. I don't know why mine did. I almost never put my hand up. But I had been thinking about this exact question, not because of the lesson but because of the balcony.

The year before, Chiku and I had planted a mango seed in a Dalda tin on the balcony. It was June, just before the rains. We put soil in the tin from the bottom of the stairwell and pushed the seed in and watered it once, and then the rains came, and we forgot about it, and it grew. It grew by itself. By August it was a little bright green thing with two leaves the colour of copper. We were very proud. Then in October the rains stopped, and we were still not watering it, because we had never had to, and it died. One morning it was just a brown stick in a tin.

I had thought about this a lot. I had decided that the rain had cheated us. The rain had made the plant think everything was easy, and it had made us think everything was easy, and when the rain went away neither of us knew what to do.

Mrs. Das pointed at the girl in the front row, who said, "Ma'am, monsoon, Ma'am."

"Correct. Why?"

"Because of rain, Ma'am. The soil is wet."

"Correct. Good." She turned to write MONSOON on the board, and then she saw my hand still up. "Yes?"

I stood up, because at KV you stood up to answer.

"Ma'am, I think we should plant in summer."

There was a pause. I could feel the class turning, forty-three heads, the scrape of a bench.

"In summer," said Mrs. Das.

"Yes, Ma'am. Because in the monsoon everything grows anyway. Even without us. Grass grows, weeds grow, everything. So it's not really planting. The rain is doing it." My face was getting hot. I had not planned to say this much. "But if we plant in summer, and we water it every day, then it's really ours. And it will be strong, because it learned when it was hard. And then when the rain comes it will just..." I didn't know the word. "It will just be extra."

There was another pause, longer this time.

Mrs. Das put down her chalk.

"Are you stupid?"

She didn't shout it. That was the thing. She said it in an ordinary voice, almost curious, the way you might ask someone if they had forgotten their umbrella.

"Why would anyone plant a tree in summer, when it is forty-five degrees outside, and you have to carry water every single day, when you can just wait one month and plant it in the monsoon and God will water it for you? Hm? Use your brain. Sit down."

Somebody laughed. Then several people laughed. Tukuna's cousin, from the bench behind me, said "Stupid" under his breath, in a delighted mutter, like a boy who has found a coin.

I sat down.

* * *

I didn't cry. I sat down and looked at my brown paper cover and the label with my squashed name on it, and I traced the edge of the label with my fingernail, around and around, until the bell went.

What I felt was not exactly hurt. It was something stranger. It was as if I had held out a thing I had made, something I had been carrying for a whole year, and someone had looked at it and not seen anything there. Not a bad thing. Nothing. As if I had held out my empty hand.

Because I knew I was right. That was the part I could not get past. I knew she was right too; I wasn't a complete fool, I understood that monsoon planting was easier and more sensible and what everyone did. But I also knew that what I meant was true, and that she had not heard what I meant. She had heard a boy say "summer" and stopped listening at the word.

I walked home with Rohan that afternoon and didn't say anything. He talked about a Center Fresh card he had got that morning, a Robin Singh, which he wanted to trade, and I said "Hmm" and "Accha" in the right places, and when we got to the colony I went up the four floors and didn't come back down for cricket.

"Kana hela?" said Maa, when I sat on the balcony with my knees up.

"Nothing."

"Fever?" She put the back of her hand on my forehead.

"No."

She looked at me for a while, and then she went back inside, and I heard her say something to Mamuni Nani in a low voice, and Mamuni Nani said, "How do I know? Ask him."

Nobody asked me.

* * *

That night, after the others were asleep on the floor, I took a notebook from my slab. It was a thin one, the cheap kind with a picture of a film actress on the cover that the market shops sold for two rupees, and I had bought it for rough work and never used it. I took out the dead gel pen from my pencil box and remembered it was dead, and took out an ordinary Reynolds instead. I went out on the balcony where the light from the stairwell came in yellow through the grille, and I sat on the floor with my back against the wall, and I opened the notebook to the first page.

I didn't know what I was going to write. I don't think I had ever written anything that wasn't for school. I sat there with the pen for a long time, while the jackals started up in the forest and a scooter went past on the main road and the night went quiet in the way it only does at the top of a building.

Then I wrote, in letters that sloped down to the right:

I am not stupid. I just think about it differently.

I looked at it. It looked like something written by somebody else. I underlined it twice.

Then, because it seemed wrong to leave it alone on the page, I wrote underneath, smaller: Mango tree died in October. Next time water it.

I closed the notebook and put it under my slab, behind the textbooks in their brown paper, where nobody would find it.

The school planted its saplings along the boundary wall that week, in the rain, as planned. Section B got a gulmohar and a neem. I watched the peon dig the holes. By the next summer, the gulmohar was dead and the neem was the height of my knee, and the peon used to water it out of a bucket in May, grumbling, every afternoon at three.

That June the rain came early. It didn't stop for four days, and I found out what the building did when it was frightened.

Contents

Chapter 5

When It Rained

In Bhubaneswar the rain did not visit. It moved in.

In Odisha the monsoon came off the Bay of Bengal in great slow systems that sat on top of the state like a hen on eggs. When it started, it kept going. Two days, three days, sometimes four. The sky went the colour of a slate in the first hour and stayed that colour until you forgot the sun had ever existed. The drops were enormous. They hit the balcony railing like small stones and burst, and the sound on the roof above us, directly above us, because we were on the top floor and there was only one slab of concrete between my head and God, was like being inside a drum that somebody was beating with both fists.

I loved it for the first day. Everyone did. The heat broke all at once, like a fever, and the whole colony came out onto their balconies to watch. The smell came up from the earth, that smell, the one that has a scientific name I would learn years later in a college lecture hall and immediately forget because the name was so much smaller than the smell. Children ran into the road in their vests and stood with their mouths open. Mothers shouted at them to come in and then stood watching them with their own faces turned up.

By the second day I was nervous. By the third I was frightened.

When the power went, which in the monsoon was every evening, Maa lit the hurricane lantern and the mosquito coil in the same movement, one match, and the two smells together became the smell of rain for me for the rest of my life. Kerosene and green coil smoke. We did homework on the floor in the round of yellow light while the Doordarshan Odia news, if the power came back for it, told us how many centimetres had fallen at the Bhubaneswar observatory, and Bapa wrote the figure down.

* * *

The thing I was frightened of was drowning. Not me, personally. The building. I had seen a programme on Doordarshan, a documentary or maybe a news report, about floods somewhere, Bangladesh perhaps, or Bihar, with people sitting on the roofs of their houses with water all the way up to the gutters, and a cow floating past on its side. I had seen it once, for perhaps a minute, and it had lodged in me like a splinter.

From our balcony, after three days of rain, the road below was a river. Not a deep one. It came up to the knees of the men who waded through it with their trousers rolled and their shoes in their hands, but it moved, brown and fast, carrying leaves and plastic and once a whole slipper, which I watched sail past with great seriousness, like a ship going to war. Water poured off the edge of our roof in a sheet. Water came out of the drainpipes in arcs. Water ran down the inside wall of the stairwell where a crack had opened years before and never been fixed, and collected on the landings, and Mrs. Panda put a bucket under it and then complained to Maa that the bucket was always full.

I lay on the floor at night and listened to it and did sums. The road was one foot deep. If it rained for one more day, two feet. The ground floor was about three feet above the road. Then the first floor. Then the second. I worked out, using a method that had nothing to do with science and everything to do with fear, that we had perhaps nine days before the water reached the fourth floor.

"Maa," I said into the dark. "What if it doesn't stop?"

"It will stop."

"But what if it doesn't?"

Maa sighed. She was lying on her back with Chiku tucked into her side. "Then we will go to the roof."

"And then?"

"And then we will wait for the Survey of India to come and measure it."

Lipi Nani laughed out loud. Maa laughed too, quietly, and after a moment I did, and the laugh took some of the splinter out. But I still lay awake for a long time, listening to the water on the roof, and in the morning, before anyone else was up, I went out onto the balcony to check the road. It was still a river. It was not deeper. I measured it against the steps of Block D and wrote the number in my diary: Day 4. Third step. Same as yesterday.

That was the second thing I ever wrote in it. I think it is the first time I used it to hold something I could not hold myself.

* * *

The rains turned the forest into something else.

On dry days, the forest beyond the colony wall was thorny and grey and full of rustling. In the monsoon it went green so fast you could almost watch it. Creepers came up over the wall. The empty colony playground, the one that nobody maintained, filled up with grass as high as my chest, and the cricket moved permanently to the road. Frogs came out in hundreds, and the sound of them at night was so loud that it sometimes drowned the rain. Snakes came out too, looking for dry ground, and every monsoon someone in the colony found one somewhere it should not be. In 1997 it was a rat snake in the Raos' bathroom, which Mr. Rao killed with a broom while Mrs. Rao stood on the dining table and shrieked in Telugu. In 1998 it was a krait in the coal shed behind Block B, and nobody killed that one. They called a man from somewhere in Saheed Nagar who came with a stick and a sack, and the entire colony stood in a wide circle and watched him, and he picked it up as if it were a dupatta and dropped it in the sack and went away without a word, and for a week afterwards every boy in the colony walked around with a stick.

Rohan and I used to go to the gap in the colony wall in the evenings, when the rain eased, and look through. We never went in during the monsoon. We were brave but we were not stupid. We just looked. The trees dripped. Mist lay low on the ground between them. Sometimes, far in, you could see a pair of eyes, low down, catching the last light. Jackals, we told each other. Always jackals.

"One day I'm going to go all the way through," Rohan said once. "To the other side."

"What's on the other side?"

"The TV centre."

"You can go to the TV centre on the road."

"That's not the point, re."

I knew it wasn't. That was what I liked about him. Rohan understood that there were things you did because they were the hard way, he just didn't understand it about bowling.

* * *

The monsoon was also the season of Doordarshan.

We did not have cable. We had a black and white Weston television in a wooden cabinet with sliding doors that Bapa had bought before I was born, and in 1997 we got a colour one, a BPL, on instalments, which was the second-biggest event of the year after the almirah. The antenna was on the roof, tied to the water tank with wire, and in the rain it swung, and whenever it swung the picture on the BPL turned to snow and the sound turned to a roar like the sea. Then someone had to go up to the roof and turn it. That someone was me.

"Max! Antenna!"

I would go up the last flight of stairs to the roof door, which had a padlock that was never locked, and out into the rain, and grab the cold wet pole and turn it a few degrees, and shout down the stairwell, "Now?"

From inside, faintly: "No!"

Turn. "Now?"

"Little more!"

Turn. "Now?"

"Haan, haan, haan! Stop! Don't touch it!"

And I would stand there in the rain, soaked through, holding the pole absolutely still, while three floors below my family watched television. Sometimes I stood there for the whole of a programme. Once, during a cricket match, I stood there for most of an innings, and Lipi Nani brought me an umbrella and a glass of tea and stood with me, and we listened to the commentary coming up faintly through the window of the Pandas' flat below, and that was one of the best afternoons of my childhood. We didn't even see the match.

The programmes I remember are not always the ones I should. There was Shaktimaan, of course, which started in September 1997 on Sunday afternoons and which every child in India watched in total silence, as if in church. Shaktimaan was a man in a red and gold costume who spun around very fast and then flew, and at the end of each episode he gave a little speech about being a good person, about not telling lies, about saying sorry, and we listened to these speeches with an attention we never gave our teachers. Some children in the country jumped off buildings thinking Shaktimaan would save them, and there were reports in the papers, and after that the show added a warning. Maa read me the report from the Samaja and made me promise that I would never jump off the balcony. I was insulted. I was nine. I knew he was an actor. I also, secretly, was not completely sure.

And then there were the English shows, the strange ones that appeared on Doordarshan in the late afternoons with no explanation and no dubbing, as if somebody in Delhi had found a box of tapes and decided to play them. A cartoonish thing called Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, about an American teenager who went inside a computer and fought monsters, which I understood perhaps one sentence of in four and loved completely. A show about an American family where a boy called Cory had a teacher who lived next door, and the teacher was always right, and the boy was always learning something. Boy Meets World. I didn't know what half the words meant, but I knew the shape of it. It was about a boy who kept getting things wrong and a grown-up who kept believing he would get them right anyway.

I watched that show with a feeling I could not name. Years later I would recognise it as envy.

* * *

School did not stop for rain. KV did not believe in rain. On the third day of a downpour we would still put on our uniforms, still knot our elastic ties, still carry our brown-papered books in plastic bags to keep them dry, and still wade to the bus stop at the end of the colony road with our shoes in our hands. The school bus, when it came, was full of wet children and smelled of wet children, which is a smell like a dog that has been reading.

At the gate, after school, there were the vendors. They were there in rain and heat and anything else, under polythene sheets tied between bamboo poles. There was the samosa man, whose samosas were small and triangular and so hot inside that the first bite was a gamble every time. There was a man who sold boiled chana from a big aluminium pot with chopped onions and green chilli and a squeeze of lemon, in a cone of newspaper that went soggy before you were halfway through. There was the jhal muri man, who could make a paper cone with one hand.

And there was the Pepsi man.

He did not sell Pepsi. That is, he did not sell the drink that came in a glass bottle with a blue label. What he sold, and what every child in Bhubaneswar called Pepsi, was a long thin tube of plastic filled with coloured sugar water and frozen solid in an icebox on the back of his bicycle. Orange, red, green, a kind of brown that was supposed to be cola. Fifty paise each, or one rupee for the long ones. You bit the end off and sucked, and the colour came out first and the ice stayed behind, so that by the end you were holding a tube of nearly white ice and your tongue was the colour of a traffic signal. We ate them in the rain. We ate them in May at forty-four degrees, when they melted faster than you could suck and ran down your wrist to your elbow. Maa said they were made with tap water and would give us typhoid. They probably were. None of us got typhoid, or if we did, we blamed something else.

The real Pepsi, the glass-bottled one, was a treat for weddings and guests. When an uncle visited, Bapa would send me down to the shop at the corner of the main road with a cloth bag and the exact money, and I would come back up four floors very slowly, holding the bag in front of me with both hands, the bottles clinking against each other. Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and an orange one, Mirinda, which Chiku called Miranda, and which we all called Miranda after that, until the name stuck so hard that years later I was genuinely surprised to see it spelled correctly on a can.

You opened them with the opener that hung on a string from a nail in the kitchen. The cap came off with a little gasp, and a breath of cold smoke came out of the neck, and then you drank, and the fizz was so strong in those years that it went straight up the back of your nose and made your eyes water. Lipi Nani claimed that once, during a laughing fit at a cousin's wedding, Mirinda had come out of her nose. Nobody believed her, but we asked her to tell the story at every wedding afterwards, and she always did, and every time it got more orange.

* * *

One night in August 1998, during a long rain, the power went off at about nine, which was normal, and did not come back, which was less normal. Bapa lit the kerosene lantern and hung it from the hook in the front room, and its light made everything gold and shadowy and enormous. The rain on the roof was so loud that we had to speak up to hear each other. Chiku was frightened and sat on Maa's lap. Mamuni Nani was studying for her Class X exams and kept reading by the lantern, her lips moving, as if the rain were just a kind of silence.

I sat on the balcony with my diary.

I could not see the road. I could barely see the next building. The lantern behind me threw my shadow out through the grille and into the rain, a long thin boy, broken into squares. I wrote, with the notebook almost on my nose to see: Day 3. Can't see the step. Bapa says the drain will take it. Rain is not angry, it is just a lot.

I don't know where I got that last line. I think Bapa said something like it, earlier, without meaning anything by it. I wrote it down because I liked it. I liked that you could be a lot without being angry.

Behind me, Bapa said, "Max. Come inside. You'll get wet."

"I'm already wet."

There was a pause, and then he came out, in his vest, and stood beside me at the grille with his hands behind his back, looking at the rain he could not see. He did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, "When I was young, in the village, we used to sit out in this. On the verandah. Bapa used to say it is the only time the land gets to drink properly."

"Didn't you get scared?"

"Of rain?"

"Of it not stopping."

He thought about this seriously, the way he thought about everything. "It always stops," he said. "That is the one thing I know about rain. The question is only what you have done before it stops."

I didn't understand that for a long time. I wrote it down anyway.

Contents

Chapter 6

The Bus West

We left for Mamu's village every year on the second day of the summer holidays, never the first. The first day, Maa said, was for washing.

She washed everything. Every bedsheet, every curtain, every towel, every shirt we owned and several we didn't, which had been left behind by cousins the previous year. By evening the balcony and the roof were draped like a ship under sail, and the flat smelled so strongly of Nirma that Chiku sneezed every time she went past the bathroom. Then she ironed what needed ironing, with the heavy iron that had to be heated on the gas, and folded everything into two tin trunks and a VIP suitcase with a broken wheel, and sat on the suitcase to close it while Bapa did the latch.

"We are going for three weeks," Bapa said, watching. "Not three years."

"In the village there is no Nirma."

"There is Nirma in the village. I have seen it."

"Not the right Nirma."

He gave up. He always gave up on Nirma.

Before the bus west, every year, there was the town. We went to the Lingaraj once before every long journey, because Maa believed in starting things properly, and I remember the bells more than the god. You came out of the lanes of the old town by Bindu Sagar, past the men selling marigold strings and the boys selling plastic Jagannaths, and the bells began before you could see the temple, a whole crowd of them, none of them in time with any of the others. Inside, the stone was cold under your feet even in May. Outside again, Bapa bought a leaf cup of dahibara aloodum from a thela by the tank, one cup, four spoons, and we ate it standing up with the curd running down our wrists.

* * *

The bus left from the Baramunda bus stand at six in the morning, which meant leaving the flat at five-fifteen, in the dark, in a cycle rickshaw piled so high with luggage that the rickshaw-wallah had to stand on the pedals to get it moving. Bapa rode behind on the Narmada with Lipi Nani on the back, holding the suitcase across her lap. The rest of us were in the rickshaw, and the rickshaw-wallah sang to himself, an old Sambalpuri song, I think, because he had found out where we were going and decided to be friendly.

The bus stand at that hour was its own country. Buses with names painted on their foreheads in curly letters: Maa Samaleswari, Jay Jagannath, Bhagaban, Laxmi Travels. Men on the roofs throwing luggage up and tying it down with rope. A tea stall with an enormous kettle that never stopped boiling. Conductors shouting destinations like auctioneers: "Sambalpur-Bargarh-Sambalpur-Bargarh!" and "Angul-Angul-Angul!" so that the place names lost their meaning and became chants.

Bapa always booked seats in advance, which was rare and slightly embarrassing, because the conductor had to clear them for us and people who had been sitting there gave us looks. "We have small children," Bapa said, though by then only Chiku was small, and he said it in the voice of a man reading out a government circular, and nobody argued.

I always got the window. I don't remember ever asking for it. It was just understood that Max had to be next to a window or he would be climbing out of one.

* * *

The journey to the west was eight or nine hours, depending on the road and the driver and how many times the bus stopped to let somebody off at a crossing in the middle of nowhere, where there was nothing but a tea stall and a banyan tree and a dirt track disappearing into fields.

The road went through everything. First the edges of Bhubaneswar, the new colonies, half-built houses with iron rods sticking out of their roofs like hair. Then Cuttack, briefly, the river wide and brown and low because it was summer. Then the long road through Dhenkanal and Angul, where the land changed. The paddy fields thinned out. The ground turned red and stony. Hills appeared, low and blue in the distance, and forest came down to the road in places, sal trees with their big leaves and their straight grey trunks, and once, I swear it, an elephant, far off, standing in a clearing, though nobody else on the bus saw it and Lipi Nani said it was a rock.

"It moved," I said.

"Rocks don't move."

"This one did."

"Then it was a moving rock."

In 1998, the summer the heat killed all those people, we made the trip anyway. I remember the bus stopping in a town I don't know the name of, around noon, and the driver getting out and simply lying down in the shade under the bus. Nobody argued. The conductor lay down next to him. Some of the passengers got down and lay down too, and for an hour the bus sat there on the side of the road with its engine off and fifteen people sleeping underneath it like puppies under a cart. Bapa did not lie down. He stood in the shade of a tamarind tree with his hands behind his back, looking at the road ahead, and he did not look worried, exactly, but he did look like a man who was checking something.

* * *

I could not sit still on the bus. Of course I could not. Nine hours. My legs had complaints by the end of the first hour and formal grievances by the third. I shifted. I swung my feet. I put my knees up against the seat in front, until the man sitting there turned around. I counted electric poles. I counted cows, then goats, then dogs, then gave up on dogs because there were too many. I made up a game where I had to see a red thing before we passed the next milestone, or something bad would happen, and then spent forty kilometres in mild terror because there were no red things in western Odisha in 1998.

Maa had a rule. Every time the bus stopped for more than five minutes, I was allowed off. "Go," she would say, "but stay where I can see you," and I would jump down the steps and run. Not anywhere. Just run. Up and down beside the bus, around the tea stall, to the banyan tree and back. People watched me, amused. A boy running in circles at a bus stop in the heat, for no reason. One old man at a dhaba near Angul said to Bapa, "Your son has a horse inside him."

Bapa said, "Yes." Just that.

I liked that. I liked the idea of having a horse inside me. It seemed to explain a great deal.

* * *

Mamu's village was past Sambalpur, off the main road, along a track that the bus did not go on, so the last six kilometres were by bullock cart if Mamu had arranged one, or by a jeep that took eleven people and their luggage if he hadn't. The jeep was better. The jeep had no doors and the driver drove it like he was trying to escape from it.

And then there it was. A cluster of houses with tiled roofs around a pond, a temple to the goddess with a red flag on a bamboo pole, mango trees, tamarind trees, a huge peepal at the edge of the village where the old men sat on a cement platform all day doing nothing that I could see. Mamu's house was mud-walled and long, with a verandah all the way along the front and a courtyard behind with a tulsi plant in the middle on a little altar, and a well, and a cowshed, and a kitchen with a mud stove where my Maiji, Mamu's wife, cooked on wood and complained about it and would not have used gas if you had given it to her for free.

My cousins came out of the house like bees from a hive. There were seven of them. Or nine, depending on the year and how you counted, because some were Mamu's children and some were Mausi's, who lived in the next village and sent hers over for the summer, and some were from somewhere else entirely and nobody was quite sure how they were related, and nobody asked. They grabbed us. They grabbed the bags. They grabbed Chiku and carried her off somewhere and we didn't see her again for two days, except at meals.

"Bhubaneswar babu!" they called me, the city boy. I loved it. In Bhubaneswar I was the quiet one, the dreamer, the boy at the back of the assembly. In the village I was a celebrity. I had been to the Oberoi, or at least past it. I had a television that was colour. I had a Center Fresh card of Sachin, which I brought every year in its Gold Flake tin, and which my cousin Bulu held in both hands as if it were a relic from the temple.

* * *

In the village, nobody told me to sit still.

That was the whole thing. That was what I loved. We woke at five when the roosters started and the light was still grey, and went to the pond to bathe and swim, and the water was cool and green and full of things that touched your legs, and we screamed and splashed until Maiji shouted at us from the bank. We climbed the mango trees and ate raw green mangoes with salt and chilli powder that Bulu carried in a twist of paper in his pocket, and the sourness went up into your skull and made your eyes squeeze shut. We played cricket in a dry paddy field with a bat made from a coconut branch and stumps made from sticks, and here, too, I bowled, and here, too, my cousins thought I was mad. "You could bat, Bhubaneswar babu!" "I like bowling." "Arre, he likes running."

We went out with the cattle in the afternoon heat, to the edge of the forest, where the cowherd boys let us ride on the backs of the buffaloes. We stole jamun from someone's tree and our tongues went purple for a day. We lay in the shade of the peepal and listened to the old men talk about the price of paddy and the district collector and a tiger that had been seen in 1971 and had grown larger with every summer since.

In the evenings, there was no electricity, or very little, and the whole village sat out on verandahs and charpais under a sky so full of stars that it looked like spilled salt. Maiji told ghost stories. Mamu smoked a bidi and corrected her. Maa, who in Bhubaneswar was quiet and careful and always aware of the third floor listening, laughed out loud in the village. She laughed until she cried. She spoke in Sambalpuri, which she never spoke in the colony, a softer and more rolling language, full of words I half knew. "Kenta achis?" How are you? "Bhal achhe." I'm well. She was a different woman there. I think, looking back, she was the original one.

* * *

That was the summer, 1998, when I watered something for the first time on purpose.

There was a small guava sapling near the well in Mamu's courtyard that someone had planted in March and then forgotten about. By the time we arrived in May it was a thin stick with five or six leaves, the leaves curling at the edges and going yellow. Nobody was watering it. In the village, you did not water things in May. There was not enough water. The well was low, and every bucket went to the house and the cattle and the tulsi plant, which was a goddess and therefore came first.

"It's going to die," I said to Bulu.

"So?"

"So someone should water it."

"In this heat? It will die anyway. Wait for the rain. Rain will come next month and everything will grow." He was eleven, a year older than me, and very sure of himself.

I didn't say anything. I remembered the mango tree in the Dalda tin. I remembered Mrs. Das and her chalk.

The next morning I got up before the others and drew half a bucket from the well. The rope burned my hands. The bucket was heavy and swung, and I spilled half of what I had drawn on my feet, and then I carried what was left across the courtyard and poured it very slowly around the base of the guava sapling, watching the dry earth take it in and darken.

I did it every morning for three weeks. Bulu laughed at me, then got bored of laughing. Maiji saw me on the third day and said nothing, just looked, and on the fifth day she left a small brass pot by the well that was easier to carry. Maa saw me and said, "Why are you doing this?" and I said, "Because otherwise it will die before the rain comes," and she looked at me for a long moment and said, "Hm," which in Maa's language could mean a hundred things.

By the time we left, the leaves were green. Not many. Seven, maybe eight. But green, and flat, and new ones coming at the tip.

On the last morning, standing by the jeep with the luggage piled on the roof, I asked Bulu to keep watering it until the rain came.

"Why?"

"Just do it."

"What will you give me?"

I gave him my Robin Singh card. It was a good card. He looked at it, and at me, and back at the card, and said, "Okay," with the expression of someone who has got the better end of a deal with an idiot.

I don't know if he did it. I asked him in a postcard, and he wrote back about other things, about a match and a new calf and a wedding. But the next summer, when we went back, the guava tree was up to my shoulder. It had fruit on it the year after. By the time I was in college, it was taller than the cowshed.

Maiji used to send us a bag of guavas from it every winter, by whoever was travelling to Bhubaneswar. "From Max's tree," she would say on the phone, years later, when there were phones. "Max's tree is giving very sweet ones this year."

I never told her about Mrs. Das. She would not have understood why it mattered so much. Or she would have, completely, and I would not have been able to stand it.

* * *

We went to Puri, too, some years, but only for a day or two, and it was a different kind of trip. Sixty kilometres by bus, two hours, the road lined with coconut palms. The sea, which I saw for the first time at six and which frightened me so badly that I would not go nearer than ten feet from where the foam stopped. The temple of Jagannath, with its crowds and its smells and the pandas grabbing Bapa's arm. Khaja from a shop on Grand Road that came in a cardboard box tied with string and was gone before we got back to Bhubaneswar. Puri was a holiday. It was nice. But it was the kind of nice where you have to keep your shoes on and stay where your mother can see you.

The village was where the horse got to run.

On the bus home every year, nine hours east, back towards the heat and the four floors and the third bench from the window, I sat with my forehead against the glass and watched the hills shrink and go flat and turn back into paddy and then into half-built houses. And somewhere around Dhenkanal, every year, I felt it happen. A kind of folding. Something in me that had been opened out for three weeks folding itself back up to fit.

I never told anyone about the folding. I didn't have a word for it. I only knew that the closer we got to Bhubaneswar, the smaller I had to be.

That October I would lose my little sister in a crowd of ten thousand people, and for a while I would not know if I was going to find her.

Contents

Chapter 7

Pandal Lights

Lipi Nani practised her dance in the bathroom because it was the only room with a door that locked.

This was the autumn of 1998. She was thirteen, and she had been chosen, along with five other girls from the colony, to dance at the cultural programme on the evening of Saptami, on the stage the Puja committee built every year in front of the community hall out of bamboo and planks and a red cloth that had been red once. The dance was to a film song. Everybody knew which film song, because for three weeks before the Puja you could hear it coming out of the community hall every evening on a tape recorder that ran slightly slow, so that the singer sounded as if she were singing from the bottom of a well.

In the bathroom, Lipi Nani had no tape recorder. She sang it herself, under her breath, and counted, and stamped. The bathroom was about the size of a cot. The floor was wet. Every evening for three weeks we heard, from behind the door, "Ek do teen char, ek do teen char," and a stamp, and a bucket going over, and a word that Lipi Nani was not supposed to know.

"She will break her head," said Maa.

"She will break the bucket," said Bapa, who had bought it.

"Let her," said Maa, after a moment, which surprised all of us.

Lipi Nani was the loud one. Every family has one and in ours it was her. Mamuni Nani was the eldest and behaved like it, and Chiku was the youngest and was forgiven everything, and I was the boy and was the problem, and Lipi Nani was in the middle of all of us with her elbows out. She argued with Bapa, which nobody else did. She argued with the vegetable man. She once argued with a conductor on a town bus for so long about the fare that he let us off at our stop for free just to get her out. She was quick at everything and finished nothing, and she laughed so loudly that the Raos on the floor below sometimes laughed too, through the ceiling, without knowing what at.

She was also the one who noticed things. I didn't understand that about her for years. When I had been standing too long outside the Pandas' window in the rain, it was Lipi Nani who brought the umbrella. When Chiku had a nightmare it was Lipi Nani she went to, not Maa, because Lipi Nani would not make her explain it. When I came home from school with my face shut, Lipi Nani was the one who said, at dinner, loudly, about something completely different, "Max, tell them about the boy in your class who ate chalk," so that everyone would laugh and nobody would ask me anything else.

There was no boy in my class who ate chalk. I invented him that night, because she had told me to, and I kept him going for two years.

Puja in those years meant walking. Nobody had a car. You took a cycle rickshaw as far as Kalpana Square, if you were rich, and then you walked, from pandal to pandal, through Saheed Nagar and Unit-3 and back, with the loudspeakers playing the same Odia bhajans and the same Hindi film songs a quarter of a second apart, so that the whole city seemed to have an echo. Every lamp post had a poster on it, a goddess on one and Sidhanta Mahapatra glaring with a pistol on the next.

* * *

The colony's Puja was small. A clay Durga, about my height, with her ten arms and her lion and the buffalo demon at her feet looking more surprised than wicked, set up under a shamiana in front of the community hall. A priest from Old Town who came on a cycle. Bhog at lunchtime on Ashtami, khichdi and a mixed vegetable and kheer, served on sal-leaf plates to everyone in the colony sitting in long rows on durries, the children first, the Section Officers' wives serving, with Mrs. Panda in charge of the kheer and nobody brave enough to ask for a second ladle. And in the evenings, the programme.

But the real Puja was outside the colony gate.

Every evening during those four days the whole of Bhubaneswar went out. Families walked the city from pandal to pandal until after midnight, the children holding hands in chains, the fathers in front, the mothers at the back with the youngest on their hips, buying gupchup and balloons and plastic whistles and those paper fans that open into a circle. The big pandals were at Saheed Nagar and Unit 3 and Nayapalli, and they competed with each other the way the big cricket nations did, by being enormous. One year Saheed Nagar built a pandal that was a copy of a temple in Rajasthan. Another year it was a ship. The lights were the best part. Whole streets roofed over with strings of coloured bulbs that blinked in patterns, and arches of light shaped like peacocks, and like Durga riding her lion, and once, I promise, like Sachin Tendulkar playing a cover drive, with the bat going back and forth in three positions, over and over, forever.

We went on Ashtami night, all six of us, on foot. Rohan came too, and his elder cousin, and the Rao brothers, and by the time we were on the main road we were a chain of eleven people, with Bapa at the front walking at exactly the same speed he walked to the office, his hands behind his back, and Maa at the back with Chiku.

Chiku was six. She had a new pair of plastic sandals, pink, with a flower on the strap that lit up when she stamped. She had been stamping since five o'clock. She was holding Maa's hand on one side and Lipi Nani's on the other, and every time she saw a balloon she pulled both of them towards it like a small strong dog.

The crowd at Saheed Nagar that night was something I can still feel in my ribs. The road between the stalls was solid with people, end to end, moving very slowly in one direction towards the pandal, and the noise was the noise of a hundred loudspeakers all playing different things, devotional songs and film songs and a man selling a vegetable cutter who had a microphone and the stamina of a god. You couldn't see the ground. You couldn't see your own feet. You moved because the people around you moved, and you held on to whoever's hand you had, and above you the lights went peacock, Durga, peacock, Durga, peacock.

At some point between the gupchup stall and the pandal gate, Chiku let go.

* * *

Nobody saw it happen. That's the thing about a crowd like that. Lipi Nani said afterwards that Chiku had pulled her hand free to point at something, and that she had grabbed for it and caught a different child's hand, and held it for a few steps without noticing, and when she looked down it was a boy in a red shirt she had never seen in her life. Maa said that she had let go of Chiku's other hand for one second to fix the end of her sari, which had come loose. These are the two things that are always true about a lost child. Everybody let go for one second.

Lipi Nani screamed. It was a terrible scream. It cut through the vegetable-cutter man and the loudspeakers and the whole road turned to look. Bapa turned round. I had never seen his face do what it did then. It went grey, all at once, as if something had drained out of it from the top.

"Stay here," he said to all of us. "Nobody move." And he went into the crowd, back the way we had come, pushing, which he never did, calling her name in a voice I didn't know he had.

Maa stood very still where she was with both hands pressed flat against her mouth.

And I ran.

I didn't decide to. In the family version, told at weddings for twenty years, I am very brave and very clever. I wasn't either. My body just went. Everyone was told to stay and stand still and my legs had never been able to do that in my life, and so they did the only thing they knew, which was go.

I was small enough, at ten, to get through a crowd that Bapa couldn't. I went under elbows and between hips and round the backs of stalls where the generators were roaring. I didn't go back towards the gupchup stall, the way Bapa had gone. I went sideways, to the edge of the road, where the stalls stopped and there was a ditch and a wall and a bit of dark, because I knew Chiku. I knew her the way I knew my own legs. She would not have stood still and cried, the way lost children did in the films. She would have gone towards the thing she had been pointing at.

She had been pointing at the lights. Not the peacock or the Durga. At the end of the street there was an arch I'd seen too, smaller than the others, of a cow. A white cow made of bulbs, with its head going up and down, eating grass made of green bulbs.

She was standing underneath it.

She had one pink sandal on. The other one was gone. She was not crying. She was looking up at the cow with her mouth open, perfectly happy, with blood running quite freely from her bare foot into the dust, where she had stepped on something, and two strange women were bending over her asking her name in Odia, and Chiku was ignoring them both.

"Chiku!"

She looked round. She saw me, and her face lit up as if I were also made of bulbs.

"Bhaaai," she said, in the long rising voice. "Look. A cow."

I picked her up. She was heavy. I had never carried her that far before, and I carried her all the way back through the crowd, with her arms round my neck and her bleeding foot banging against my shorts, and she talked about the cow the whole way, and I didn't hear a word.

* * *

Maa did not say anything when she saw us. She took Chiku from me and held her so hard that Chiku complained, and then she held her a little away and looked at her, all of her, from the top of her head to her feet, the way you check a parcel that has come back through the post.

It was Lipi Nani who saw the foot.

She was still crying. She had been crying the whole time, Rohan told me later, in loud hiccupping gasps, saying "It's my fault, it's my fault" to anyone who came near. But when she saw the blood, she stopped. Just like that. Her face changed. She knelt down in the dust right there on the road in her good Puja salwar and took Chiku's foot in her hand and turned it to the light from the stall.

"Glass," she said. "There's still a piece. Somebody hold her."

Maa held her. Lipi Nani pulled the glass out with her fingernails. Chiku shrieked. Then Lipi Nani took the dupatta off her own shoulders, the new one, the one she had argued about for a week, and tore a strip off it with her teeth, and bound the foot, tight and neat, and tied it off at the ankle.

The stall owner had been watching. He was an old man selling plastic toys. He leaned over the counter and looked at the bandage and then at Lipi Nani.

"You are a doctor?" he said, in Odia, not entirely joking.

"No," said Lipi Nani, wiping her face with the back of her wrist and leaving a stripe of Chiku's blood across it. "Not yet."

I heard her say it. I don't think she heard herself.

Bapa came back about ten minutes later, alone, with the face still grey, shoved forward through the crowd by a man from the Puja committee who had heard the name being called and had sent word. When he saw Chiku in Maa's arms he stopped walking. He stood in the road with people going round him on both sides like water round a post. Then he came over and put his hand on Chiku's head and left it there.

"Who found her?"

"Max," said Lipi Nani.

He looked at me.

"I told you to stay," he said.

"I know."

He kept looking at me for a long moment, the grey slowly going out of his face, and something else coming into it that I couldn't read.

"Hm," he said.

We did not see the pandal at Saheed Nagar that year. We walked home, the whole chain of us, Bapa carrying Chiku now, Chiku asleep on his shoulder with her bandaged foot hanging down and her one remaining sandal still lighting up every time it knocked against his arm.

* * *

Lipi Nani danced on Saptami as planned. She was the best of the six. I'm not saying that because she was my sister. She was the only one who didn't look at the other girls to see what came next, and when the tape slowed down in the middle she slowed down with it, perfectly, as if it had been meant, and the whole colony clapped on the beat. Chiku watched from the front row with her foot on a pillow, like a minister.

A week later it was Kumar Purnima.

Kumar Purnima is the full moon after Dussehra, the brightest moon of the year, and in Odisha it belongs to the unmarried girls. They wake before the sun and bathe and wear new clothes and offer fruit to the sun in the morning, and in the evening they make an offering to the moon, a little lamp and puffed rice and coconut and seven kinds of fruit on a plate, and they pray, the grandmothers say, for a husband as handsome as Kartikeya, the god of war, who is the handsomest of all the gods. And then they stay up half the night playing games. Cards, and a dice game called puchi, and a game with cowrie shells.

On our balcony that year there were Mamuni Nani and Lipi Nani and Chiku, who was too young but had insisted, and three girls from the floor below. The moon came up over the RRL trees enormous and orange and then went white and small and so bright it threw shadows of the grille across the floor. The girls put out their plates. They lit the lamp. They folded their hands.

I was not supposed to be there. Boys weren't. I was sitting just inside the door in the dark with my back against the wall and my legs going, and they all knew I was there, and they let me stay, which was a kindness I didn't recognise as a kindness until much later.

"What are you asking for?" said one of the girls from downstairs, to Lipi Nani, giggling. "Kartikeya?"

Lipi Nani took a long time to answer. She was looking at the moon. The light made her face very white, and older, and serious in a way it almost never was.

"No," she said. "I don't want a husband who's a god. I want a job where I'm the one who knows what to do."

The girls from downstairs laughed. Mamuni Nani didn't. She looked at Lipi Nani sideways in the moonlight for a long time, and then she reached over and fixed the end of Lipi Nani's dupatta, the torn one, which she was still wearing, which Maa had hemmed along the ragged edge so that it looked nearly intentional.

Then they played cards until two in the morning, and Lipi Nani cheated, loudly, and won.

I wrote in the diary that night, sitting on the slab by the light coming through the balcony door, which was moonlight, the whole page silver:

Chiku found a cow. Lipi Nani found Chiku's foot. I found Chiku.

And under it, after a while:

Bapa said stay. I didn't. It was right.

I looked at that for a long time. It was the first time I had ever written that I was right about something. I crossed out It was right and wrote I think instead. And then I put the line back, under the crossing out, so that both were there.

Contents

Chapter 8

The Bench Mark

There was a small arrow cut into the corner of Block C, low down on the plinth, about a hand's width above the ground, on the side that faced the road. I had walked past it perhaps ten thousand times. It was a broad arrow pointing upwards, three short cuts in the stone, with a horizontal line across the top of it, like a tiny bed. Somebody had painted it white once. Most of the white had gone. Pintu's dog used it, regularly, as a dog will use the corner of any building, and none of us ever thought about it at all.

"Do you know what that is?" Bapa said.

It was a Sunday in December 1998. We were standing in front of it at seven in the morning, both of us in sweaters, with our breath showing. He had woken me at six and said, "Come. Wear shoes. Proper shoes," and I had followed him down the four floors without asking where, because on the rare mornings Bapa wanted me with him for something, I didn't want to give him time to change his mind.

"An arrow," I said.

"It is a bench mark."

He crouched, which took him a moment even then, and put his finger on the line across the top.

"This line is a height. An exact height above the sea. Somebody measured it, very carefully, a long time ago, all the way from the coast, and cut it here. Every height in this colony is measured from this line. The water tank. The drains. The road. When they built Block D, they started from here."

I looked at it. It looked like an arrow.

"How high is it?"

He told me, to three decimal places, without looking anything up. Then he stood up and dusted his knees.

"There are thousands," he said. "All over India. On bridges, on temples, on railway stations, on milestones. Your grandfather's school had one. Wherever there is a government building, look at the corner." He looked at the arrow for a moment longer, with an expression I knew from the way he looked at the Narmada when it had been washed. "Our people put them there. Most of them are older than me. Some of them are older than the British."

"Our people?"

"Survey of India," said Bapa, and turned, and walked towards the scooter, and I understood that I had just been told something important and would not be told it twice.

There were other trips with Bapa that year. Once, for no reason he would give, he took the whole family to Khandagiri and Udayagiri on a Sunday, and while the girls fed the monkeys and lost a packet of groundnuts to them, he stood in front of the Hathigumpha inscription and read out the dates of Kharavela as if they were levels. I climbed up to the top cave on my own, where the rock was worn smooth by two thousand years of people climbing up to the top cave on their own, and looked out at the whole flat green town with the Lingaraj tower sticking up out of it like a staff held still.

* * *

I didn't know what Bapa did.

That sounds strange to say, about a man I lived with in two rooms for twenty years. But it was true of most of the children in the colony. Our fathers went to the office in the morning, on scooters or cycles or in the department bus, and came back in the evening, and what happened in between was a closed room. We knew the names of their bosses, because they were said at dinner with a particular tightness. We knew the words: section, circle, party, sheet, field season. We knew that some of them went away for weeks in the winter to places with names like Koraput and Malkangiri and came back thin and dark with stories they didn't tell. We knew that they made maps. But if you had asked me, at ten, what my father's hands did between ten in the morning and five in the evening, I couldn't have told you.

That Sunday, I found out.

He took me first to the office, which was empty except for a watchman who saluted him and a dog who didn't. It was a long low building with deep verandas and green shutters and a smell, when Bapa unlocked his section, of old paper and ink and something chemical underneath. Long wooden tables with sloping tops. Glass-fronted almirahs. Lamps on hinged arms. And on every table, under sheets of tracing paper weighted down with brass weights shaped like little flat-irons, the maps.

I had seen maps. We had an atlas at school with India in pink. These were different. These were the size of a bedsheet and they were all lines, thousands of fine brown lines curving round each other in loops like the grain of wood, and blue lines for water, and black for roads, and tiny symbols, crosses and dots and little combs, scattered everywhere, and numbers, very small, written in a hand so neat it didn't look like a hand.

"Contours," said Bapa, and put his finger on a loop. "Every point on this line is the same height. Here is a hill." He moved his finger inward, loop inside loop, to a small closed circle with a number in it. "Here is the top."

I stared at it. Something went click in my head that has never quite clicked back. All those loops. A whole hill, flattened onto paper, and you could still see it, if you knew how to look. You could see where it was steep, because the lines crowded together, and where it was gentle, because they spread apart. You could see where the water would go.

"Who drew it?"

He didn't answer straight away.

"This one, I did the field work. Nineteen eighty-four. Not the drawing. The drawing is done by the draughtsmen." He moved the brass weight a little, though it didn't need moving. "The field work is walking."

"You walked all of this?"

"With a party. Six men. Four months." He looked at the sheet. "The heights, yes. All of them, I walked."

There was a man at the next table, on Monday mornings, I would learn later, a senior draughtsman called Mohanty Babu, who used to say to the new boys that if they wanted to see what a clean field book looked like they should ask for one of Buda's. I learned this from Mohanty Babu himself, at Bapa's retirement function, nine years later. Bapa never told me. He was standing two feet away when Mohanty Babu said it, and he looked at the floor and said, "Hm."

* * *

From the office we went out of the city on the scooter, towards Jatni, with a long wooden box strapped to the carrier behind me and a tripod tied along the side of the scooter with jute string so that it stuck out like a lance. The road went into paddy fields. The paddy was cut and stacked and the fields were bare and gold in the early sun, and the air smelled of straw and smoke. There was a canal running beside the road on a raised bank, and a small old bridge across it, and on the corner of the bridge's parapet, painted white, an arrow with a line across the top.

"There was a complaint," Bapa said, unstrapping the box. "The canal people say the water is not going where it should. Somebody has told them the bench mark is wrong. Somebody has told them maybe the bridge has sunk." He set up the tripod in the road, pushing each leg into the ground with his shoe. "So. We check."

"On a Sunday?"

"The canal people are in a hurry," he said. "And on Sunday there is no traffic."

In the box was the instrument. I had imagined something like a telescope, brass, from an old film. It was greyish green, solid, about the size of a large loaf, with a small eyepiece at one end and a little glass bubble set into the top, like the bubble in a spirit level. He screwed it onto the tripod. Then he spent what felt like ten minutes, though it was probably two, turning three little knobs underneath it, a fraction at a time, his eye an inch from the bubble, until the bubble sat exactly in the middle of its ring and stayed there.

"Now it is level," he said. "Now it is telling the truth."

Then he handed me the staff.

The staff was a long wooden pole, taller than me, that pulled out in sections until it was taller than Bapa, painted white and marked all the way up in black and red, in a pattern of blocks like a ladder made of the letter E. He showed me how to hold it. Feet together. Pole on the exact centre of the mark, the very bottom touching the top of the line. Both hands flat on the sides. Upright. Perfectly upright. Not leaning forward, not leaning back. There was a small bubble on the staff too, on a bracket at the side, and the bubble had to be in its circle.

"And then?"

"And then you do not move."

I looked at him. He looked at me. I think he knew exactly what he was asking.

"How long?"

"Until I say."

* * *

I had never in my life stood still on purpose.

I stood on the parapet of a canal bridge in the paddy fields near Jatni with a white pole in my hands and the sun coming up on the side of my face, and I looked at the little bubble, and I held it in its circle, and I did not move.

It was the hardest physical thing I had ever done. Harder than four floors with a bucket, which I didn't know about yet. The staff wanted to fall. It wanted to lean forward towards Bapa, or back towards the canal, and the bubble drifted the moment I stopped watching it, and when I corrected it I corrected too much and it drifted the other way. My legs wanted to go. My left leg especially. It always wanted to go first. I could feel it start up in the thigh, the old engine, and I pressed my foot into the stone and said to it, in my head, not now.

Thirty metres away, Bapa bent to the eyepiece. He didn't call out. He wrote something in a small book with a pencil, and bent again, and wrote again. A man on a cycle came along the canal bank with milk cans on the back and stopped and watched us for a while, and said something to Bapa, and Bapa answered without taking his eye from the instrument, and the man nodded, and rode on.

"Okay," Bapa called. "Next."

And then we did it again. And again. He moved the instrument. I moved the staff. We went along the canal bank in short hops, from the bridge to a stone at the corner of a field, and from there to a culvert, and on, towards another arrow on another old structure nearly a kilometre away that he called the second mark. Every hop, I stood still. Every hop, it got a little easier, and then, around the sixth or seventh time, it got much harder again, because I was tired and hungry and the sun was up properly now and the novelty had gone. I could feel the slide coming, the thing that later in my life would come at forty-five minutes every time, regular as a train. I didn't have a word for it then. I just felt the bubble getting harder to hold.

"Bapa. How many more?"

"Until it closes."

"What does that mean?"

He came over to me, then, walking down the bank with the book in his hand, and squatted on the edge of the culvert and showed me the page.

It was ruled into columns. At the top of each column, abbreviations in capitals I didn't know. Down the columns, numbers, row after row, in that small neat hand, every seven crossed through the middle with a short line.

"Why do you cut your sevens?"

"So that nobody reads it as a one." He tapped a seven. "On a field book, if a one becomes a seven, a canal goes the wrong way. A bridge is built half a metre too low. Somebody's field floods." He said it the way you would say that the sun rose in the east. "So. You cross the seven. Every time. Even when you are tired. Especially."

Then he showed me how it worked. You started from a height you knew, the arrow on the first bridge. You went out, step by step, measuring how much higher or lower each next point was than the last one, adding and subtracting, carrying the number forward in the book, until you reached the second arrow, whose height you also knew. And then you turned round and did the whole thing again, all the way back, to where you started.

"Why back?"

"Because going out, you can make a mistake and not know. Coming back, if you have made a mistake, the numbers will not agree. You will arrive at the first bridge and the book will say it is in the wrong place." He closed the book on his finger. "If you come back to where you started and the numbers agree, then it is closed. Then you can trust everything in between."

"And if they don't agree?"

"Then you go out again," said Bapa, "and come back again. Until they do."

* * *

We closed at about one o'clock. I remember the moment because Bapa, who had been bent over the book on his knee doing sums for a long time, stopped, and looked at the page, and looked across the paddy at the first bridge, and said, "Two millimetres."

"Is that bad?"

"Two millimetres in two kilometres," he said. "It is good." And then, after a moment, half to himself: "The bench mark is fine. The bridge has not sunk. The canal people have dug their canal wrong." He almost smiled. He did, actually. I saw it. "They will not like this."

We ate the lunch Maa had packed, sitting on the parapet of the first bridge with our legs over the canal. Rotis and aloo bhaja in a steel tiffin, wrapped in a cloth, and two bananas, and water from a plastic bottle that had been a Bisleri bottle once and was now just a bottle. The canal was low and green and there were small fish in it. A kingfisher sat on the far parapet and looked at us.

Bapa didn't talk while he ate. He never did. But when he had finished, and wiped his fingers on the cloth, he looked down at the staff lying in the road beside the tripod, and then at me.

"You held it still," he said.

I didn't say anything. I didn't trust myself to.

"Every time."

"Mostly."

"Every time," he said, as if correcting a figure. Then he stood up, slowly, and began packing the instrument back into its box, and that was the end of it.

* * *

I went out with him twice more that winter, on Sundays, and once the next winter, to a temple wall in Old Town where a new road was going to be cut, and after that never again, because I was in Class VI and then VII and the Sundays filled up with tuition, and then the cyclone came and afterwards nobody had Sundays for anything.

But I never walked past the arrow on the corner of Block C again without seeing it. I started finding them everywhere. On the railway station at Bhubaneswar, on the platform side, very low. On the corner of the post office at Unit 2. On the old bridge on the way to Mamu's village, on the Sambalpur road, where I made the whole bus wait while I climbed down to look, and Lipi Nani called me mad out of the window. I used to put my finger on the line across the top, the way he had. Here is a height. Somebody measured this from the sea.

And I started writing my sevens with a line through the middle. A teacher marked one of them wrong in a test that spring. Circled it in red and wrote What is this? in the margin. I kept doing it anyway.

That night, after the canal, I wrote in the diary:

Held the staff. Bapa's book closed. 2 mm.

And under it, slowly, because I was trying to get it right:

If you go out and come back and it agrees, you can trust everything in between.

I didn't know what I meant by it. I was ten. I think I thought it was about canals.

In the new year, Tukuna came running from Block A with a rumour, and for one afternoon the whole colony forgot to be careful.

Contents

Chapter 9

Outside the Oberoi

The rumour reached Survey of India Colony on a Thursday, which was the day the milkman came late, and so it is possible the milkman brought it.

"The Indian team is coming," Tukuna announced at the bottom of the Block C stairwell, out of breath, with the authority of someone who had run the whole way from Block A to say it. "To Bhubaneswar. They are staying at the Oberoi."

"Which team?"

"The Indian team, re! Cricket! Azhar, Sachin, everybody!"

There was a silence. The Rao brothers looked at each other. Rohan, who was sitting on the wall peeling the skin off a groundnut, stopped peeling.

"Who told you?"

"My uncle's friend drives a taxi from the airport."

This was considered unimpeachable. Taxi drivers knew everything. They were the cable television of the pre-cable world.

We had no tickets to anything, and no money, and no plan, except Rohan's, which was to be there. We were back from school by one. The team was said to be leaving for the stadium at four. Maa's rule was home before the street lights came on, which in January was half past five. That gave us, Rohan calculated on his fingers, three and a half hours of being there, minus the walk, minus the time it would take me to lie to Maa about where we were going.

* * *

I have tried, since, to find out exactly what the team was doing in Bhubaneswar that year, and I cannot. I have looked in old newspapers and on the internet. I asked a cricket statistician once, a friend of a friend, who sent me a long email about fixtures in 1999 and concluded, very politely, that he couldn't find it either. Maybe it was a few of the players, not the whole team. Maybe it was a benefit match, or a promotional event, or a stopover. Maybe it was a different year. Maybe the taxi driver was wrong about some of it and the colony filled in the rest.

I don't care. I know what I saw. Or I know what I believe I saw, which, as I have learned in later life, is a slightly different thing and often more useful.

* * *

The Oberoi was in Jaydev Vihar, about a kilometre from the colony, along a road that in those days was straight and empty and lined with trees, with almost nothing on either side. It was the only real luxury hotel in Bhubaneswar, a long low building in the old Odisha temple style, with carved stone and a sloping roof and gardens that you could see over the boundary wall, so green they looked painted. We went past it on the school bus. We went past it on the Narmada when Bapa took us to Saheed Nagar. We had never been inside. Nobody we knew had been inside, except Mr. Panda, who claimed to have attended a wedding reception there in 1993 and described the toilets in such detail that we knew he was not lying.

Across the road from the colony, the other way, workers were building something big that year. A foundation had been dug, an enormous pit, and then pillars had gone up, and every afternoon we could see tiny men on bamboo scaffolding, carrying bowls of cement on their heads, climbing up and down like ants. Someone said it was going to be another hotel. Someone said it was a government building. Someone said it was going to be a shopping complex with a lift. A lift! We stood at the colony gate and watched the scaffolding go up, the women in their saris carrying bricks in stacks of eight on their heads, and imagined lifts.

"When that is finished," Rohan said, "Bhubaneswar will be like Bombay."

"Bombay has the sea."

"So does Puri."

"Puri is not Bhubaneswar."

"It's close enough, re."

That was what the city felt like then. It felt like it was waiting. Like the whole place was a scaffold, with something enormous about to be revealed, and nobody quite knew what it would be.

* * *

We went on the Saturday. Rohan, me, the two Raos and Tukuna. Five boys, aged between ten and twelve, with no permission from anyone. We told our mothers we were going to play cricket in the school ground, which was technically on the way.

We walked. Nobody had a cycle except the elder Rao, and he wasn't allowed to take it out of the colony. So we walked down the long straight road to Jaydev Vihar in the late morning, in the heat, in our chappals, with the trees on either side and the road shimmering ahead of us like water. Rohan had brought his bat, for reasons he couldn't explain. "In case Sachin wants to sign it." It was a cheap bat from the sports shop at Unit 2 market, with a rubber grip that had come half off, and the idea of Sachin Tendulkar signing it was so absurd and so wonderful that none of us laughed.

I had brought my Gold Flake tin. Inside it, at the top, was the Center Fresh card of Sachin. I had also brought, in my shirt pocket, the Wasim Akram cutout from the corner of my wall, though I had no idea why. Wasim was not coming. Wasim was in Pakistan. But I felt I ought to have him there.

When we were still a few hundred metres away, we heard the crowd.

* * *

I had never seen so many people in one place in Bhubaneswar outside of Rath Yatra. They filled the road in front of the hotel gate, spilled across onto the opposite side, climbed the trees, stood on the roofs of autorickshaws, sat on the boundary wall until the security men pulled them off and they climbed back on further down. Boys, mostly. Young men. A few fathers with small children on their shoulders. Police, in khaki, with lathis, looking bored and anxious at the same time. A man selling peanuts in paper cones, who must have had the best day of his life. Somebody had a transistor playing a commentary from some other match entirely, and nobody cared.

And everyone was looking at the same place. The hotel driveway, beyond the gate, which curved away between the gardens towards the entrance, which we couldn't see.

We pushed in. That's the only word for it. Five small boys, pushing in. I was the quickest and the thinnest, and I went first, and I found gaps between legs and under elbows that nobody else could see, and the others followed me in a chain, holding the backs of each other's shirts. The heat in the middle of the crowd was ferocious. The smell was sweat and hair oil and peanuts. Somebody's elbow hit me in the ear. Somebody stepped on Tukuna and he yelped and then pretended he hadn't.

After maybe twenty minutes, we were near the front. Not at the front. There were three or four rows of bigger boys in front of us, and in front of them a rope, and in front of the rope a line of police. But near.

"Can you see?" Rohan shouted in my ear.

"No."

"Get on my shoulders."

"You get on mine."

"You're lighter."

He was right. He crouched, and I climbed on, my knees on his shoulders and my hands on his head, and he stood up with a grunt, wobbling, the bat still in one hand, and suddenly I was above the crowd.

* * *

I could see the driveway. I could see the gardens, the fountains, the long low building with its carved stone. I could see a white Ambassador car with a red light on top, parked to one side. I could see men in safari suits standing near the entrance with walkie-talkies. I could see the doorman in his turban.

I could not see a single cricketer.

We waited. Rohan's shoulders shook under me. The crowd surged and settled, surged and settled, every time a car came down the driveway or a door opened or somebody shouted. It was always nothing. A waiter. A man with a file. A woman in a sari who was probably somebody's wife and who looked at the crowd with an expression of polite terror.

"Anything?" Rohan shouted.

"No."

"My neck is breaking, re."

"One more minute."

And then a door opened at the end of the building, a side door, not the main entrance, and three or four men came out together, walking fast, heads down, towards a bus I hadn't noticed parked in the shade.

The crowd made a sound. It wasn't a cheer. It was something lower, rising, like water starting to boil.

I saw a man in a blue tracksuit, short, with dark curly hair. I saw him for perhaps three seconds. He was walking quickly and talking to the man beside him, and he did not look at the crowd at all, and then just before he went up the steps of the bus he did. He turned his head and looked, for a moment, directly at the wall of us. And he lifted one hand. Not a wave, exactly. Just a hand, open, held up, the way you might acknowledge someone across a road.

Then he was inside the bus, and the door shut, and the crowd went mad.

"SACHIN!" Everyone was screaming it. "SACHIN! SACHIN!" The rope went down. The police shouted and swung their lathis at nothing. The crowd pushed forward, and Rohan staggered, and I grabbed his hair to stay on, and he shrieked, and we both went over sideways into the elder Rao brother, and all three of us ended up on the road in a pile with legs going past our faces.

Somebody stepped on my hand. I didn't feel it until later.

* * *

"Did you see him?" Rohan said, much later, when the bus had gone and the crowd had thinned and we were sitting on the kerb under a tree, all five of us, filthy and bruised and euphoric. "Did you actually see him? Tell the truth."

"I saw him."

"What did he look like?"

I thought about it. I wanted to tell it right. "Short."

"Everybody knows he's short."

"He looked at us."

"He looked at us?"

"He put his hand up. Like this." I showed him.

Rohan looked at my hand, open, held up. He was silent for a moment. He had seen nothing. He had been underneath me the whole time, with his face in the back of a stranger's shirt, holding me up.

"You're sure it was him?"

"I'm sure," I said, and I was. I was absolutely sure, and I remain sure, against every piece of evidence the statistician sent me, because some things you just decide to keep.

Then I said, "Sorry you didn't see."

He shrugged. "Next time you hold me up."

"Okay."

"Promise."

"Promise."

He picked up his bat. Nobody had signed it. There was a footprint on the blade, a big one, from a sandal, perfectly clear in the dust. He looked at it for a long time, and then he said, "Maybe this is his footprint," and we all laughed until Tukuna got the hiccups.

Rohan never cleaned that bat. He kept it until it fell apart, years later, and even then he kept the blade.

* * *

We walked home in the late afternoon heat, down the long straight road, past the scaffolding where the ant-men were climbing down for the day. My hand had started to hurt. Two of my knuckles were swollen and blue. I held it against my chest and didn't say anything.

At the colony gate, Mrs. Panda was waiting on her balcony. I don't know how she knew. She always knew.

"School ground, hah?" she called down. "Very nice cricket you played. Your mother is looking for you."

Maa was not looking for me. Maa was sitting on our balcony four floors up with Chiku in her lap, and she had obviously been sitting there for some time, and when I came up the stairs and in through the door with my hand against my chest and my shirt torn at the shoulder, she did not shout. She looked at my hand. She looked at my face. She said, "Show me."

I showed her. She turned my hand over gently, pressing the knuckles one by one, watching my face to see when I winced.

"Not broken," she said finally. "Go and wash. I'll put haldi."

I went to wash. When I came back she had the turmeric paste ready in a small steel bowl, warm, and she put it on my knuckles with two fingers and wrapped them in a strip of old sari.

"Did you see him?" she said, without looking up.

I stared at her.

"Mrs. Panda's nephew was there. He came back an hour ago. The whole colony knows."

"I saw him," I said.

She tied the knot. "Good," she said. "At least it was worth it."

* * *

Bapa, when he came home and was told, said nothing at dinner. He ate his rice and dalma and fish curry in his usual order, from the left side of the plate to the right, and he wiped his fingers and drank his water. Then, as he stood to go and wash his hands, he paused beside me.

"Which hand did he lift?"

"His right."

He nodded. "Right-handed," he said, and went to the sink.

Later that night, I took the Gold Flake tin out from under my slab and opened it and looked at the Center Fresh card of Sachin, the stiff over-coloured photo, the statistics on the back that I knew by heart. Then I opened my diary and wrote, under the light from the stairwell:

Saw Sachin. 3 seconds. He looked. Rohan held me up the whole time and saw nothing. Next time I hold him.

I looked at that last line for a long while. Then I took out the Wasim cutout from my shirt pocket, flattened it, and stuck it into the diary, on the same page, with a little rice paste from the kitchen. It is still there. It has gone brown and soft, and Wasim's face has worn away almost entirely, so that only his arm is left, coming over, about to let go of the ball.

That October, the sky found a single note and held it.

Contents

Chapter 10

Two Days in October

There had already been one storm that month. People forget that.

In the middle of October 1999 a cyclone had come in further south, near Gopalpur, and Bhubaneswar had caught the edge of it: a day of wind and rain, some trees down, the power gone for a night. It was bad enough that school closed, which made it a good storm in my opinion. When it was over, the adults in the colony stood at the bottom of the stairwells and said what adults always said. "We were lucky." "It turned." "It was nothing." Mr. Panda told everyone that Bhubaneswar was protected by Lingaraj and would never be hit directly, and nobody argued with him, because it was a comforting idea and because he was in Accounts.

Ten days later, on the twenty-eighth, the radio started saying "super cyclone."

None of us had heard the word "super" used about weather before. Super was for Superman, for Super Commando Dhruv in the comics, for the Super Market that had opened near Unit 3 with a sliding glass door. It did not sound like something to be afraid of. It sounded like an exaggeration.

Bapa was afraid of it. I could tell because he went out on the Narmada on the evening of the twenty-eighth and came back with kerosene, two big cans of it, and candles, and a sack of rice, and a bag of chuda and gur, and three packets of Parle-G, and a box of matches for every room. He carried it all up the four floors in two trips, and on the second trip he stopped on the third-floor landing for a long time to catch his breath, and I watched him from the top of the stairs and pretended I wasn't watching.

"Bapa, is it going to come here?"

"It will come somewhere."

"Here?"

"Fill the buckets," he said. "All of them. And the drums. And the big handi."

* * *

It started on the morning of the twenty-ninth. A Friday. I remember it was a Friday because there would have been school, and there wasn't.

At first it was only wind. A strong wind, warm and wet, coming from the sea side, from the east, and pushing the clouds so low and fast over the colony that it looked as if the sky were being dragged somewhere against its will. The trees in the forest beyond the wall bent and straightened, bent and straightened. The clothes lines on the balconies snapped and sang. Maa went from balcony to balcony in the flat taking things in, the clothes, the pots, the Dalda tins with the tulsi and the chilli plant, while the wind tried to take them first.

Then the rain came, sideways.

I had seen a lot of rain. I had lain awake through four-day monsoon systems doing sums about the building drowning. This was not that. This was rain that did not fall. It travelled. It came across the gap between the buildings horizontally, in sheets, like something being thrown, and it hit the side of our block with a noise like gravel shovelled against a wall. It came in through the gaps around the balcony door. It came in through the ventilators above the windows, which had no glass, only a grille, and which nobody had ever thought of as a problem. Water ran down the inside of the walls. Maa and my sisters stuffed rags and old saris into every gap, and the rags turned dark and heavy and started to drip, and they wrung them into buckets and stuffed them back.

By the afternoon the power had gone. By evening the wind had changed its voice.

* * *

That is the thing I remember most. The sound.

People who were in it describe it in different ways. A train that never passes. A jet engine. Ten thousand people screaming. To me it sounded like the sky had found a single note and decided to hold it. It went on and on, a deep roaring, and then, every so often, it rose, it got higher and more furious, and the whole building seemed to brace itself, and you could hear things outside breaking, tearing, a crack like a gunshot and then a long groaning collapse, and then it would sink back to the note again. Hour after hour. All night.

We sat in the inner bedroom, the one with the smallest window, all six of us, on the floor, with one kerosene lantern turned low. Bapa had pushed the steel almirah across the bedroom window and wedged it there with the cot. Maa had Chiku in her lap, and Chiku was seven by then and too big for a lap and didn't care. Mamuni Nani, who was seventeen and in her last year of school, was holding Lipi Nani's hand, and Lipi Nani was holding mine. I don't think any of us decided to do that. Our hands just went there.

"What was that?" Lipi Nani said, every time there was a crash.

"A tree," said Bapa, every time.

Once he said, "A roof." He said it quietly, and nobody asked whose.

The building shook. The fourth floor was the top floor, there was nothing above us but the roof and the water tank, and the wind had the whole height of the block to lean on, and it leaned. The lantern swung on its hook. The water in the steel buckets in the corner moved in little rings.

I thought of the antenna on the roof. I thought of the water tank. I thought, very clearly, that the roof was going to come off, the whole slab, just lift up and go like the lid of a tiffin box, and then we would be sitting in the open in the dark in this.

"Bapa," I said. "Will the roof come off?"

He didn't answer straight away. That frightened me more than anything else that night. Bapa always answered straight away. If he didn't know, he said "I don't know," and he said it immediately, as if not knowing were a fact like any other.

Then he said, "This is a government building. It was built to a specification. I have seen the specification." He paused. "They used good steel in those days."

I have no idea if he had ever seen the specification. I have no idea if they used good steel. But Maa laughed, a short frightened laugh in the dark, and Lipi Nani laughed, and the roof stayed on.

Then the window went.

Not the roof. The window in the girls' room, across the passage, the one nobody had thought to block because it faced Block D and Block D was supposed to shelter it. There was a crack, and then a sound like a whole steel thali full of glass being emptied onto a floor, and then the wind was inside the flat. It came down the passage and blew the lantern out. In the dark everyone was shouting at once. Bapa was shouting for the torch. Maa was shouting names, all four of us, in order of age, the way she called us for dinner.

"Mamuni. Lipi. Max. Chiku."

Three of us answered.

The torch came on. Maa's lap was empty. Chiku's shawl was on the floor where she had been, and the door to the passage was open and banging, and through it came the rain, sideways, and a noise like the sea.

I have never seen Bapa move the way he moved then. He went down that passage into the wind with the torch held in front of him like a staff, and I went after him, though Maa caught at my shirt, because my legs had decided before I had. The girls' room was a box of wind. The curtain was straight out flat, and the glass on the floor was moving, sliding about by itself. Chiku was not in it.

She was in the bathroom. She had gone to the bathroom in the dark, by herself, because she was seven and she had been told to say when she needed to and she hadn't wanted to bother anyone, and when the window went she had climbed into the big plastic bucket under the tap and pulled the lid of the other bucket over her head. Bapa found her by the torch on her feet. She looked up at him from under the lid and said, "I didn't touch the water."

He carried her back with the lid still on her head. Then he and I pushed the girls' cot up against that door and he held it while I wedged it with the trunk of winter clothes, and none of us said anything about it until morning. In the morning Maa made him eat first, which she never did.

* * *

At some point, very late, I couldn't bear sitting any more.

My legs had been bad for hours. Not just restless. Frantic. They were full of the noise, I think, full of the fear, and they had nowhere to go. I had been pressing my feet against the floor and my knees together, and counting, and holding Lipi Nani's hand so hard that she eventually said, "Ow, Max, ow," and pulled it away.

I got up.

"Sit down," said Maa.

"I need to go to the bathroom."

"Take the torch. Come straight back."

I took the torch. I didn't go to the bathroom. I went to the front room, the one with the balcony door, and I stood in the middle of it in the dark with the torch switched off, and I listened.

The balcony door was bolted top and bottom and had a chair jammed against it, and the rags along the bottom were soaked, and water was coming in under them in a thin steady stream that ran across the floor and around my feet. The door was rattling in its frame. Not a little. It was banging, again and again, as if someone were outside trying to get in. Through the gap at the top, where the frame had warped years ago, I could see a sliver of the outside. It was not dark. That surprised me. The sky had a kind of light in it, a dirty grey-orange, and against that light I could see shapes moving, flying past, things I couldn't identify. Leaves. Branches. A sheet of tin, spinning end over end, that went across the gap between the buildings like a playing card and was gone.

I stood there and watched it. I wasn't brave. I was so frightened I couldn't feel my hands. But standing up, standing there in the water, I could breathe again. My legs were quiet. I don't know how to explain it except that my body had decided that if it couldn't run, it would at least stand where it could see the thing it was afraid of.

Bapa came up behind me in the dark. I didn't hear him over the noise. I just felt his hand on my shoulder, heavy and warm.

He didn't tell me to come back. He stood with me, and we watched the gap at the top of the door together, the grey-orange light and the things flying through it.

After a long time he leaned down and said, close to my ear, so I could hear: "It always stops."

"I know."

"The question is what we do after."

"I know, Bapa."

He squeezed my shoulder, once, and went back to the others. I stayed a little longer. Then I went back too, and sat down next to Lipi Nani, and she took my hand again without saying anything, and I held it more gently this time.

* * *

It did not stop that night. It went on through the next day, Saturday the thirtieth, a little weaker but not much, the wind dropping and rising, the rain coming and going in great dark walls. We had chuda and gur for breakfast and lunch and dinner, soaked in water from the buckets. We used the bathroom by torchlight with a bucket of the stored water for flushing, and Bapa measured how much was left with his steel scale, dipping it into the drums and reading the wet line like a gauge, and said, "Two more days. If we are careful." He wrote it down. He wrote everything down that weekend, in a small notebook he kept in his shirt pocket. Water. Kerosene. Rice. The times the wind seemed to get stronger. I didn't know then that he was doing the same thing I did in my diary. I only knew that he looked calmer when he was writing.

We had no radio. The transistor's batteries had died on the first night, and nobody had thought to buy more. So we didn't know what was happening anywhere else. We didn't know that the storm had come ashore near Paradip, on the coast, about a hundred kilometres east of us, with winds of more than two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. We didn't know about the surge, the wall of seawater that had gone miles inland across Jagatsinghpur and Ersama and the villages there, and taken everything. We didn't know that Bhubaneswar had been cut off from the world, its phones dead, its roads blocked, its power lines on the ground in every street. We didn't know that it would become one of the deadliest storms ever recorded in India, that thousands of people, around ten thousand, were dying or already dead within a few hours' drive of where we sat eating chuda by lantern light.

We only knew the noise. And then, at some point on the evening of the thirtieth, we knew that it was quieter.

Not quiet. Just quieter. The note had dropped. The crashes had stopped. The door had stopped banging and was only shivering in its frame. The rain was still falling, but falling now, downwards, the way rain is supposed to.

Nobody said anything for a while. We just sat and listened to it get quieter.

Then Chiku, who had been asleep in Maa's lap for hours, sat up, rubbed her eyes, and said in a perfectly ordinary voice: "Is it finished? Can I go to the balcony?"

Maa started to cry. I had never seen her cry before. Not once. She cried with no sound at all, just tears, her face completely still, and she held Chiku and rocked, and Bapa put his hand on the back of her neck and left it there.

"Not yet," he said to Chiku. "In the morning."

* * *

In the morning, we went out onto the balcony.

I will try to describe it, though I have tried before and never got it right.

The forest was gone. Not all of it. But the forest as I knew it, the wall of green beyond the colony boundary that had been there my whole life, the place of jackals and vultures and the low eyes in the monsoon dusk, was a field of broken wood. The trees were down. Hundreds of them. They lay in every direction, crossed over each other like spilled matchsticks, their roots in the air with the earth still clinging to them. Some were snapped halfway up, the trunks splintered white and raw. The ones still standing had no leaves. Not one. They stood bare and grey against the sky like it was the middle of a winter we had never had.

The colony road was a river again, but a river full of things. Branches. Tin sheets. A door. Somebody's Dalda tin, with a chilli plant still in it. An electric pole lay across the road at an angle, its wires trailing in the water. Two of the big trees by the colony gate were down, one of them on top of the gate itself, crushing it flat. The roof of the colony office had gone, and the black telephone with the lock on its dial was somewhere in the wreckage, and Behera the clerk, I learned later, stood in the ruins on the Monday morning and wept.

The scaffolding across the road, where the ant-men had been building their maybe-hotel, was gone. Just gone. Not fallen. Gone. Only the concrete pillars were left, grey and bare.

On the balcony of the next block, Mrs. Rao was standing in her nightie with her hands over her mouth. Below us, on the third floor, I could hear Mrs. Panda crying and Mr. Panda saying, "It's all right, it's all right, it's all right," over and over, as if he were trying to convince the building.

I stood at the grille with my family and looked at it. Nobody spoke.

The sky over the forest, over what had been the forest, was clean. Washed. The palest blue. It was the kind of sky you only get after something enormous has passed, and it was beautiful, and I hated it for being beautiful.

Then Bapa said, "Max. Get the buckets."

"What?"

"The buckets. All of them. The tank on the roof has probably gone. There will be no water. We need to find water." He was already putting on his chappals. "Come."

Contents

Chapter 11

Water

There is a tube well at the bottom of the hill behind Block F, near the edge of the RRL boundary. I say "is" because I went back to look for it twenty years later and found it still there, painted green now, with a little cement apron around it and a sign with a politician's name. In November 1999 it was the most important object in Survey of India Colony.

The overhead tanks on every block had either been damaged or emptied, and without power there was no pump to fill them again. The municipal supply had stopped. The ponds and the drains were full, but full of a brown water with things floating in it that nobody wanted to think about. Somebody said the tube well behind Block F still worked, and by the time Bapa and I got there with our buckets on that first morning, there were already thirty people in a line.

It was a hand pump. You worked a long iron handle up and down, and after eight or nine strokes the water came, cold and clear and smelling faintly of iron, in a gush that filled half a bucket and then slowed to a trickle so that you had to pump again. One person pumped, another held the bucket. The line moved slowly. People talked in low voices about what they had heard. Cuttack was cut off. Puri was cut off. The airport was closed. There were no trains. On the coast, something terrible had happened, though nobody knew what, and the rumours were so big and so bad that people repeated them and then shook their heads as if to say they didn't believe them, and then repeated them again.

When our turn came, Bapa pumped and I held. Then I pumped and he held. Four buckets, two each.

Then we had to carry them up.

For weeks after the cyclone the town ate whatever it could get. The Unit-1 market came back before almost anything else, the vegetable women on their gunny sacks with half as much to sell at twice the price, and Bapa paid it without arguing, which frightened me. The jamun tree behind Block B had come down across the colony road, and for one whole week every child in the colony climbed over it to school with purple fingers and purple tongues, and nobody scolded anyone for it.

* * *

Four floors. I had run those stairs ten thousand times. I had never carried anything heavier than a cloth bag of Pepsi bottles up them. A full steel bucket of water is about fifteen kilos. I was eleven, wiry, the boy aunties called lean-but-he-eats. On the first flight I thought it was fine. On the second my arms began to shake. On the third the handle was cutting into my fingers, and the water was slopping over the rim onto my feet and the steps, and my shoulders were on fire. On the fourth I had to stop at every landing and put the bucket down and stand with my hands on my knees.

Bapa was behind me with his two. He was forty-six that year and had a bad knee, and he was breathing in a way I had never heard before, a deep scrape at the bottom of every breath. He did not stop at the landings. He kept going, slowly, one step at a time, his face completely set.

We got to the top. Maa took the buckets at the door and poured them into the drums. We stood in the doorway, both of us dripping, both of us blowing like buffaloes.

"How many more?" I said.

Bapa looked at the drums. He looked at his notebook. "For six people. Drinking, cooking, washing, bathroom." He did the sum. "Twelve buckets a day. If we are careful."

Twelve buckets a day. Four floors. Every day until the power came back, and nobody knew when that would be.

I looked at Bapa's knee.

"I'll do it," I said.

"We'll both do it."

"No. I'll do most of it. You do the drinking water." I didn't know where this came from. "You do the pumping. I'll carry."

He looked at me for a long moment. I think he wanted to argue. I think he was too tired to.

"Six," he said finally. "You do six. I do six."

"Eight and four."

"Seven and five."

"Okay." And I took the empty buckets from Maa and went back down the stairs before anyone could change their mind.

* * *

I carried water every day. Not gladly. Some days I hated it. Some mornings my arms still hurt from the day before, and my fingers had blisters across the middle joint that burst and wept and had to be wrapped in strips of cloth, and I lay on the floor at five in the morning when Bapa touched my shoulder and thought, very clearly, why me. Why should I do this. Mamuni Nani and Lipi Nani are older. Why is it the boy. Why is it always the boy who takes the heavy job.

And then I got up and did it. Every time. Because I knew the answer, even then, even before I could have said it. It was the same answer as the bowling. Nobody was going to make me stronger. Nobody was going to hand me a body that could carry things, or a self that could get up at five in the morning when it hurt. The only way was through. You took the heavy end. You did it until it stopped being heavy, and then you noticed that it had stopped being heavy, and then you took something heavier.

Some of the other boys in the colony carried water. Most of them did it with a lot of complaint, and some of them did it with none, and Rohan did it for exactly two days and then developed a mysterious back pain that kept him in bed until the power came back. I didn't blame him. I teased him about it for twenty years, but I didn't blame him.

My sisters carried too, it should be said. Smaller buckets, handis, the brass kalsi on the hip the way Maa had learned in the village. Chiku carried a little plastic jug, full to the brim, up four floors with her tongue between her teeth, concentrating so hard that she once walked straight past our door and up to the roof. It was all of us, in the end. But I took the most. I made sure of that.

* * *

Something happened to the colony in those weeks.

It is hard to describe. The same people who had spent years watching each other through half-open doors, counting each other's purchases, gossiping about each other's children's marks, stood in line together at the tube well in the dark and passed buckets. Mrs. Panda, who had never once said a kind word to Maa that didn't have a hook in it, came up the stairs on the third day with a pot of khichdi made on a kerosene stove and stood in our doorway and said, "Your son has carried water for my husband twice. I saw him." And put the pot down and left before Maa could answer.

I had carried water for Mr. Panda twice. I hadn't thought anyone noticed. His knee was worse than Bapa's and he was too proud to say so, and I had seen him on the second-floor landing with a bucket, not moving, and taken it from him without saying anything. Mrs. Panda had seen it from somewhere. Of course she had. She always knew.

Mr. Rao, who was an engineer in some department, rigged a hand-cranked dynamo from somebody's cycle to charge a car battery, so that the block could run one bulb in the stairwell at night. The elder Rao brother and I pedalled it for an hour each evening, in turns, and for that hour the stairwell glowed a weak orange and people sat on the steps under it just to be in the light.

The men of the colony went out with axes and saws in the second week to clear the road. Bapa went with them. He came back each evening with sawdust in his hair and his hands torn, and said nothing about it, and Maa put Boroline on his palms after dinner without being asked.

Nobody knew anything from the outside. There were no newspapers for days. When they came, they came in a bundle, a week of them at once, and Bapa read them by lantern light in a silence that made the rest of us go quiet too. He read about Ersama. About the villages. About the surge and the bodies and the children. He read some of it aloud and then stopped reading aloud. He folded the paper very carefully, the way he folded maps, and sat for a while looking at the lantern.

"We were lucky," he said.

Nobody argued with him this time.

* * *

The first time I went to school after the cyclone, it was a different school.

KV had been closed for weeks. When it reopened the ground was still full of fallen branches piled in heaps for collection, and the boundary wall had come down in two places, and the roof of the chemistry lab had a hole in it the size of a car. Half the trees along the drive had gone. The neem outside my classroom window, the one I had spent years looking at instead of the blackboard, had lost a whole limb, the big one on the left side, and stood lopsided, a raw yellow wound where the branch had been.

But it was standing.

At lunch I went to the boundary wall, the one where the school had planted saplings in the monsoon two years before. Section B's neem, the one the peon had grumbled over all through that first May. I hadn't thought about it in months. I half expected it to be gone.

It was there. It was about as tall as me now. It had lost most of its leaves and a few of its top shoots, and one side had been flattened by a fallen branch, but the trunk was straight and the roots were in the ground. Along the wall, the other saplings, the ones that had been planted in the same rain and then left to God, were mostly gone. Snapped, or pulled out, or flattened. A few twigs. A gap.

The peon was there, by chance, sitting on the broken wall eating his lunch out of a steel box. He saw me looking.

"That one," he said, pointing his chin at the neem. "Strong one."

"Why did it survive?"

He shrugged. "Roots," he said. "I had to water that one every day in the summer, the first year. Every day, in the heat, because it was looking like it would die. So the roots went down looking for the water." He made a gesture with his hand, fingers pointing down, going deep. "The ones that only got rain, their roots stayed on top. Lazy roots. Wind comes, pulls them out like hair."

He went back to his lunch.

I stood there for a long time. Then I went back to class, and sat on my bench, and looked out at the lopsided neem through the window, and didn't hear a word of the lesson. Mrs. Das was not my teacher any more. She had been transferred, somebody said, to Rourkela or Jharsuguda. I was glad. I don't think I could have sat in her class that afternoon without standing up and saying something I would have been punished for.

That night I wrote in my diary, by the lantern:

School neem survived. Peon says because it was watered in summer. Roots go down looking. Lazy roots get pulled out.

And then, underneath, after a long time, pressing so hard that the pen nearly went through the page:

I was right.

I didn't write anything else for a week. I didn't need to.

* * *

The power came back to our block on a Tuesday evening, without warning. Every light in the flat came on at once, every switch we had left on and forgotten, and the fan began to turn, slowly at first and then faster, and the BPL television in the front room blinked on to a snowy, roaring screen. The whole colony cheered. You could hear it from every block, every balcony, a sound I have never heard before or since, hundreds of people cheering for a light bulb.

Chiku ran from room to room switching things on and off and on again, shrieking with joy. Maa sat down on the floor of the kitchen and laughed. Bapa stood under the fan in the front room with his face turned up, his eyes closed, the air moving his thin hair.

And I went to the balcony and looked out at the colony. Lights in every window. Lights in the stairwells. Beyond the boundary wall, where the forest had been, there was only darkness and the shapes of the broken trees.

Tomorrow, I thought, I won't have to carry water.

And then, to my own surprise, I thought: I'll miss it.

I didn't understand that for years. I think I understand it now. For a few weeks after the cyclone, I had known exactly what I was for. The task had been simple, and heavy, and mine, and every day I could see the drums fill up and know that I had done it. Nobody had compared me to anyone. Nobody had asked my marks. The question had been only: can you carry it up four floors. And the answer had been yes.

It was the last time, for a long time, that the answer would be so simple.

Contents

Chapter 12

Rath

The bus to Puri left the Baramunda stand at four in the morning, and at a quarter to four there were already people sitting on its roof.

It was July 2001. I was thirteen. We had been to Puri before, for a day here and there, the sea and the temple and the khaja in its cardboard box. We had never gone for Rath Yatra. Bapa did not like crowds. Bapa said Rath Yatra was a festival for people who wanted to be in the newspaper the next day under the heading "Stampede." Every year he watched it on Doordarshan instead, sitting on the floor in front of the television with his tea going cold, very upright, his hands folded, and when the chariots began to move he would touch his forehead, once, and then pick up the tea again as if nothing had happened.

That year Maa said we were going.

She said it at dinner in June, in an ordinary voice, while serving the dal. "This year we will go to Puri for Rath."

Bapa looked up. "The crowd..."

"I made a promise," said Maa. "In October. On the night." She put a spoonful of dal on his rice and moved on to Lipi Nani's plate. "I said if the roof stayed on, we would all go and pull the rope. All six. The roof stayed on."

There was nothing to say to that. Nobody said anything. Bapa ate his rice from left to right and, the next morning, went to Baramunda on the scooter and booked six seats.

We went to Puri on the town bus from the old bus stand, standing, because you always stood on the Rath Yatra buses, with a sack of something soft against my back for two hours and a woman's basket of rasagolas from Pahala balanced on my head for part of the way, because she asked, and because I was tall. The bus stopped at Pahala anyway. It always stopped at Pahala. The whole bus smelt of syrup until Puri.

* * *

There were seven of us on the bus in the end, because Mamuni Nani brought a girl from her college hostel whose family was in Balasore and who had nowhere to go for the holiday. Her name was Smita and she was very quiet and wore glasses held together at one hinge with thread, and Maa took one look at her and gave her the window seat and the first banana. That was Maa's way with strays. She fed them first and asked their names later.

Mamuni Nani was nineteen and in the second year of her BSc, at a women's college in the city, and she had changed. I didn't know how to describe it then. She carried a cloth bag with books in it everywhere she went, even to Puri, and she read on the bus in the dark by the light of the street lamps going past, one line at a time. She spoke to Bapa now almost as an equal, about prices and the secretariat exam and a cousin's marriage negotiations, in the low practical voice of the front room. She had stopped spitting paan over the grille. She hadn't sat on a swing since the summer I pushed her.

Lipi Nani was sixteen and had just done her Class X and was going to do science, because she had decided she was going to be a nurse and nobody had been able to talk her out of it. Mrs. Panda had tried. Mrs. Panda had said, on the stairs, in front of everyone, "Nursing? Why nursing? With your marks you can do anything." And Lipi Nani had said, "Yes, Aunty. I can do anything. So I am doing nursing," in a voice so pleasant that Mrs. Panda went up the stairs without another word, and Maa, who had heard all of it from the kitchen, laughed so hard she had to sit down.

Chiku was nine and wanted to be an astronaut, a vet, a bus conductor, and a policewoman, depending on the hour.

And I was thirteen and too big for the seat, my knees jammed against the back of the one in front, my legs going the whole two hours to Puri so that the man sitting in front of me turned round three separate times to look.

* * *

I have been in crowds since. I have been in airports at Christmas and in a stadium in Sydney. Nothing has ever been like Bada Danda on the morning of Rath Yatra.

Bada Danda is the Grand Road, the wide street that runs from the temple of Jagannath to the Gundicha temple, about three kilometres, and on that day it was a river of people from wall to wall, end to end, so dense that from the roof of the dharamshala where we had paid somebody to let us stand you could not see the road at all. Just heads. Hundreds of thousands of heads. More. The newspapers said a million. Above them, at the temple end, in the haze, the three chariots, each one as tall as Block C, made of wood and painted and draped in red and yellow and black and green cloth, with great wooden wheels taller than Bapa, and horses carved on the front, and at the top of each one a flag. Jagannath's was the biggest, with sixteen wheels. Balabhadra's was in front, and Subhadra's in the middle, and from each one ran four thick ropes as long as the road, and the ropes were lying on the ground, waiting.

The noise was something you felt in your teeth. Cymbals and conch shells and drums, and a sound from the crowd underneath all of it, a kind of continuous roar with words in it. "Jai Jagannath." Over and over, a million people saying it in a million voices at once, so that it stopped being words and became weather.

Bapa stood at the edge of the dharamshala roof with his hands behind his back and looked at it all for a long time, and I saw his lips move.

"So," said Maa, when the chariots had been brought out and the priests had done what the priests did and the king of Puri had swept the chariot floors with a gold broom, which we could not see but heard about all day afterwards. "Now we go down."

"Down?" said Bapa.

"To pull."

"Into that?"

"I said all six," said Maa. "I didn't say all six from a roof."

* * *

We went down as a chain. Bapa at the front, then Mamuni Nani, then Smita, then Lipi Nani, then Chiku, then me, then Maa at the back, all holding hands, the way we had at Saheed Nagar, except that this time Maa had tied the end of her sari to the end of Chiku's dupatta in a knot, and Chiku had complained, and Maa had said "One more word," and Chiku had not said one more word.

The crowd took us immediately. You didn't walk in it so much as get carried. It smelled of sweat and marigolds and dust and the sea. Somebody's elbow was in my ear. Somebody's umbrella was in my back. I was taller than most of the people around me by then, and I could see over their heads in glimpses, and what I could see was the rope of Balabhadra's chariot, thick as my wrist, coir, black with handling, rising and falling over the heads of the people ahead like a sea serpent, and a hundred hands on it.

"There!" I shouted. "There, Bapa, left!"

Bapa couldn't see. But I could, and so for the first time in my life I was at the front, in a manner of speaking, shouting directions over the heads of my family, and Bapa, without turning round, did what I said. Left. Left. Now straight. And then, all at once, the crowd shifted and opened, and the rope was there in front of us at waist height, and every one of us put our hands on it.

It was rough and hot from the sun and wet from a thousand other palms. I put both hands on it. Next to me Chiku had hers on it too, one hand, the other still tied to Maa, and beside her Lipi Nani, and Maa's two hands right behind mine, and in front of us all, Bapa, with his two hands flat on the coir as if he were steadying a staff.

Then someone far ahead blew a whistle, and the shout went up, and everyone pulled.

Nothing happened.

Then it moved.

I felt the chariot move through the rope. A huge, slow give, from very far away, as if the whole road had breathed out. Thousands of people pulling. And one of them was me. And my pulling counted. Not much. A hair's width. But I could feel exactly how much of it was mine, the way you can feel your own heartbeat in a crowd of drums.

I pulled until my arms were shaking. I pulled with my legs, the way I pushed the swing, the way I ran in. I had never been anywhere where too much was exactly the right amount. Everyone around me was doing too much. Old women were doing too much. A man with one arm beside Bapa was doing too much. That was the whole point. That was what it was for.

"Jai Jagannath," said Bapa, quietly, to the rope.

He was crying. I don't think he knew. I didn't say anything. Maa, behind me, had seen it too, and she reached past me and put her hand over his on the rope for a moment, and left it there, and then took it back.

* * *

Chiku saw the man fall at about eleven o'clock.

By then we had come out of the crowd, at Maa's command, and were standing in the shade of a building near the Gundicha end, drinking water from a man with a steel drum and a single steel tumbler who was giving it away free and would not take money, though Bapa tried twice. The heat had come down hard. It was the end of the hot season, and the humidity came off the sea and lay over the town like a wet cloth, and people in the crowd were going down. You could see it happen from where we stood. Somebody would just sit down in the road, suddenly, as if they had decided to, and the people around them would make a small space, and somebody would shout.

One of them was a man of about sixty, in a white dhoti, who went down quite near us, against the wall, slowly, folding at the knees like a deck chair. His wife screamed. People stopped and stood round in a circle and looked, the way people do.

Chiku untied herself from Maa's sari. I didn't see her do it. Nobody did. One minute she was next to me with her steel tumbler, and the next she was through the circle and kneeling beside the man in the dust, nine years old, with her yellow frock spread out round her.

By the time I got through, there was a young man there too, from a stall across the road with a red cross painted on a cloth banner: a first-aid camp, the kind the Red Cross and the colleges put up all along Bada Danda every year. He wasn't much older than Mamuni Nani. He had a stethoscope round his neck and a bag of glucose and ORS packets and a plastic bottle with a tube coming out of it. He knelt, and checked the man's pulse at the wrist, and lifted one of his eyelids, and loosened his kurta, very fast, very calm.

"Hold this," he said, without looking, and held out the bottle.

Chiku took it.

He told her to hold it up. Higher. Up above her head. Not to move. She held it up with both hands, her arms straight, and did not move, while he did something with the man's arm that I didn't watch, and the clear stuff in the bottle began to go down, slowly, drip by drip, in a little chamber in the tube.

She held it for twenty minutes. I timed it later from what Maa said. Twenty minutes, at nine, in that heat, both arms above her head, without putting it down once. Her arms shook. Her face went red and then white. Maa came and stood behind her and offered to take it, and Chiku said, without turning round, "He said not to move," and Maa stepped back.

The man in the dhoti opened his eyes after about ten minutes and said something in a dialect from the south of the state, and his wife cried and touched Chiku's feet, which made Chiku jump so badly that the bottle wobbled and the young doctor said, sharply, "Steady," and she steadied.

When it was over and they had taken the man to the camp on a stretcher made from a bedsheet and two bamboo poles, the young doctor wiped his hands on his trousers and looked down at Chiku properly for the first time.

"Good," he said. "You didn't move."

"No," said Chiku.

"What's your name?"

She told him. He was already turning away to the next one, somebody else down in the road further along, his bag over his shoulder.

"You'll be good at this," he called back. And then he was gone into the crowd, and we never knew his name.

Chiku stood where she was for a while, looking at the place where he'd gone. Then she turned round to Maa, and her face was very serious.

"I'm not going to be a bus conductor," she said.

* * *

We stayed the night in the dharamshala, in one room with two cots and a durrie and a fan that made a noise like a cough, and in the evening we went down to the sea.

The beach at Puri at night after Rath was full of families, all of them as tired as we were, sitting on the sand in groups with their shoes off. The sea was rough and grey and loud and came in in long lines of white that you could see in the dark. There were fishermen's boats pulled up on the sand, and a man selling roasted corn on a brazier, and the smell of the corn and the salt and the smoke.

I was still frightened of the sea. I had been since I was six. I stood ten feet back from where the foam stopped, as always, with my toes in the dry sand.

Maa walked straight into it.

I had never seen her do that. On every other trip she had sat on the sand with Chiku and the bags and watched the rest of us. That night, she tucked her sari up at the knees, and gave Mamuni Nani her bag, and walked down the beach and into the water as if she were walking into the kitchen. The first wave came up round her ankles and she didn't stop. The second came to her knees and she stood in it with her sari wet to the thigh and her arms out a little from her sides, for balance, and her face turned to the dark where the sea was coming from.

She stood there a long time. We all watched her. Even Bapa.

Then she turned round and looked straight at me, ten feet back on the dry sand, and held out her hand.

I don't know what made me go. I think it was that she didn't say anything. If she had said "Come, don't be scared," I would have stayed where I was. But she only held out her hand, and waited, the way she waited over the poda pitha, a woman who had all the time in the world and also none.

I walked down the sand and into the foam and took her hand. The next wave came and hit me in the thighs and I nearly fell, and she held on, and I didn't. The water pulled back past my legs, hard, sucking the sand out from under my feet, and I could feel the whole sea in it, the size of it, pulling. Maa held on.

"It always comes back," she said, in my ear, over the noise. "Every time. You only have to know that."

We stood there together until the others came down too, one by one, Lipi Nani shrieking, Chiku on Bapa's shoulders, Mamuni Nani holding her books up out of the spray, Smita with her mended glasses in her hand. Bapa came last, in his trousers, rolled to the knee, his thin white shins in the black water, frowning at it as if it might be the canal people's fault.

In the dharamshala that night, on the durrie, with the fan coughing, I wrote:

Pulled the rope. It moved. Some of it was me.

Chiku held the bottle 20 min.

Went in the sea. Maa held on.

And then, because Bapa had been crying and I had seen it and I didn't know where else to put it:

Bapa said Jai Jagannath to the rope.

That was all. I didn't write anything about it. I just wanted it to be somewhere.

Two years later, on Mishra Sir's roof, a girl asked to borrow my geometry box, and I said yes before she had finished asking.

Contents

Chapter 13

Geometry Box

Mishra Sir's tuition was held on the roof of his house in Unit 3, under a tin shed, at six in the morning, because Mishra Sir said the brain was cleanest before the sun had touched it.

There were twenty-two of us in the batch in 2003, from four different schools, on three long benches facing a blackboard that was nailed to the water tank. Mishra Sir taught mathematics and physics and had a reputation that went across the city. He was short and bald and wore a white half-sleeved shirt with three pens in the pocket, in a plastic pen-guard, and he could do a long division on the board with his back turned to it while looking at you. It was said that he had turned out two IIT rankers and a girl who was now in America. Every parent in Survey of India Colony knew his fees by heart, and his phone number, and the names of the IIT rankers, and his wife's maiden name, for reasons I never discovered.

Bapa had enrolled me in January, after my half-yearly marks. He had read the report card on the balcony, front and back, and folded it, and the next morning he had driven to Unit 3 on the Narmada and come back with a printed receipt. That was all. Nobody discussed it. I was fifteen and in Class IX and from then on I got up at five-fifteen six days a week and cycled two and a half kilometres through the dark to sit on a roof.

I hated it until the second week of February. Then a girl from Sai International sat down at the end of my bench, because her bench was full, and asked if she could borrow a pencil.

Mishra Sir's tuition was in Unit-4, a twenty-minute cycle from the colony, past the Ravi Talkies square where the new posters went up every Friday and the old ones were pasted over, layer on layer, so that the wall by the cinema got thicker every year like a tree. We cycled in a pack of six. In the kendu season we stopped at the tree outside the Forest Department nursery and ate them with our fingers black, and arrived at tuition with the cycle bells still ringing from the stones.

* * *

Her name was Rojalin.

She had short hair, which was unusual, cut at the jaw, and a red cycle with a basket on the front, and a way of frowning at a problem with her whole face, eyebrows and mouth and nose all pulled in towards the middle, as if she were trying to see it through a keyhole. She was the best in the batch at physics and the worst at keeping her things. She lost erasers, pens, calculators, a whole notebook once, a dupatta in the wind off the roof, which went down into Mishra Sir's neighbour's mango tree and stayed there for a week. Her father was a bank manager. They had come from Sambalpur two years before. She said the Sambalpuri words the way Maa did, with the same tilt, and the first time I heard her say one, to herself, under her breath, over a problem she couldn't do, I nearly fell off the bench.

The pencil was the first thing. Then it was an eraser. Then, in the third week, her geometry box went missing from her cycle basket while she was buying a cucumber from the man at the corner, and she sat down on the bench at six in the morning with her face pulled in to the middle, and Mishra Sir had already started on the construction of triangles, and I pushed mine along the bench to her without looking at her.

It was a Camlin box. Blue tin, with a picture of a compass on the lid. Inside, the compass, and the divider, and the two set squares, and the protractor, and a small ruler, and a pencil, and a sharpener with a broken edge, and my name scratched into the inside of the lid with the point of the divider, in Class VI, in capitals.

She looked at it. She looked at me.

"What will you use?"

"I'll share," I said, and then didn't, because sharing meant leaning towards her, which I couldn't. So I did the whole construction of triangles that morning freehand, without a compass, drawing circles with a pencil by eye, and Mishra Sir came round and looked at it and said "What is this, an egg?" and the whole roof laughed.

She didn't laugh. She was frowning at me with her whole face.

At the end of the class she held the box out to me.

"Keep it," I said. "Till you get a new one."

She kept it for nine months.

* * *

I told nobody. That is not the same as nobody knowing.

Rohan knew in about four days. He went to Mishra Sir's too, in the seven-thirty batch, the one for boys who were already good, and he passed me on the stairs every morning coming up as I was going down, and on the fourth morning he stopped and looked at me and said, "Who is she?"

"Who is who?"

"Saala, your face is like a tomato. Who is she?"

I didn't tell him. He found out anyway, of course. He found out her name and her school and her father's bank and the colour of her cycle, and then, because he was Rohan, he decided to help.

Rohan's help was a terrible thing. He was very handsome by then, at fifteen, with his father's height and a moustache coming in that he was proud of and the confidence of a boy who had been opening the batting for the school team since Class VII. He knew how to speak to girls. He just walked up and spoke to them, about anything, as if it were nothing, the way he took guard. It was a skill I did not have and couldn't imagine having. I had spoken, by then, to perhaps six girls who weren't my sisters, and all of those conversations had been about homework, and in two of them I had said nothing at all.

"Just talk to her," he said.

"About what?"

"Anything. Physics. Ask her about the inclined plane."

"I don't need to ask her about the inclined plane."

"That," said Rohan, "is not the point of the inclined plane."

He also tried, once, to talk to her on my behalf, outside Mishra Sir's gate, while I watched from behind a parked auto. I couldn't hear what he said. I saw her listen to him, politely, with her cycle between her knees, and frown, the whole-face frown, and then look past him, directly at the auto, directly at me, and I ducked so fast I hit my head on the handlebar.

Rohan came back shaking his head.

"What did she say?"

"She said, 'Why is he behind the auto?'"

"What did you say?"

"I said you were checking the tyre." He looked at me with a kind of exhausted affection. "Saala, you are hopeless. You bowl at bricks for three years and you can't walk ten feet to a girl."

He was right. I couldn't.

* * *

The thing that changed it was the science exhibition.

Every year in November, the KV held a science exhibition in the big hall, for all classes, and every section had to put in at least three models. That year our physics teacher, Mr. Behera, a gentle tired man who had once wanted to do research in Bombay and told us so, often, picked me for one, I think because nobody else in Section B had volunteered and I happened to be looking out of the window when he asked.

"What will you make, Max?"

I didn't know. I said the first thing that came into my head, which was the canal at Jatni.

What I built, over three weeks, on the balcony of Quarter No. 8, out of cardboard cut from boxes the grocer gave me, was a hill. A contour hill. I took one of Bapa's old discarded sheets, which he had brought home once to wrap something in, and chose a small hill on it, a closed set of loops, and traced each loop onto a separate sheet of cardboard, and cut them out with Maa's tailoring scissors, and stacked them up, each one on top of the last, like a pile of rotis getting smaller towards the top. Fourteen layers. Then I covered the whole thing in newspaper and paste, and painted it green and brown, and painted the contour lines back onto the outside so that you could see the steps.

Then I made it rain.

I punched holes in the bottom of a Dalda tin and hung it over the top of the hill on a wire bent from a coat hanger, and when you poured water into the tin, it rained on the hill. And the water ran down. It ran down exactly where the contour lines said it would, crowding into the steep places and spreading out in the gentle ones and gathering, at the bottom, in the valleys, into two little streams that ran off the edge of the board into a steel tray.

It took me three weeks. Every evening after school. Chiku helped with the paste. Lipi Nani, home from Cuttack for the Puja holidays, said it looked like a cow pat, and then painted the streams blue for me with Maa's nail polish, very carefully, late at night, when she thought I had gone to bed.

Bapa didn't say anything at all while I was building it. Not one word in three weeks. He came home on the Narmada and walked past it on the balcony every evening and did not look at it, and I thought he hadn't noticed.

On the last night, when it was finished, I was lying on the durrie and I heard him go out onto the balcony. I heard him stand there for a long time. Then I heard him pour water into the Dalda tin, slowly, the way he had poured water into the instrument box once, and I heard it rain.

In the morning there was a small square of white paper stuck to the corner of the board with a piece of tape. On it, in his small neat hand, was the scale. 1 : 50,000. Contour interval 10 m. And the name of the hill, and the number of the sheet it was from, and, at the bottom, a tiny broad arrow with a line across the top.

He never mentioned it. Neither did I.

* * *

The judges did not like my hill. They were three teachers from other schools, and they spent four minutes on Section B and most of that on a model of a nuclear reactor made by a boy called Abinash, which lit up and had a small fan and explained nothing. They looked at the hill. One of them asked me what it was. I tried to explain, about the contours, about the water, about how you could see where the water would go if you only knew how to read the lines. I explained it badly. I explained it too fast, the way I always did, my words falling over each other, and my legs going, and halfway through I could see the judge's face go polite and distant, the face that people make for a boy who is not going to finish his sentence.

They moved on. Abinash won.

Mr. Behera came and stood beside my hill afterwards and looked at it for a long time.

"It works," he said. "That's the main thing. The reactor doesn't work. Yours works."

"They didn't understand it."

"No," said Mr. Behera. "That's quite common." He sighed, a long tired Bombay sigh. "You'll find that."

I was taking the tin down off its wire, ready to pack it all up, when I heard someone say, behind me:

"Can I?"

It was Rojalin. The exhibition was open to the public in the afternoon and half the schools in the city had come round, in lines, in their different coloured uniforms, and she was there with a group from Sai, in her maroon blazer, with her short hair, holding a paper cone of jhal muri. She was looking at the hill.

I held out the Dalda tin. I didn't say anything. I couldn't have.

She put down her jhal muri. She took the jug of water off the table and filled the tin, carefully, frowning with her whole face, and held it over the top of the hill. It rained. The water came down onto the cardboard and found its way, the way it always did, down the steep side in a rush and the gentle side in a spread, and gathered, and ran into Lipi Nani's two blue streams, and off the edge of the board into the tray.

She watched the whole thing. She watched until the tin was empty and the last drop had gone off the edge.

"It goes where the lines say," she said.

"Yes."

"Every time?"

"Every time."

She looked at the small white label in the corner, Bapa's label, with the scale and the arrow. Then she looked at me. It was the first time she had looked at me properly, not past me, not at the auto, for nine months.

"Your sevens are funny," she said. "In the box. On the lid. You cut them."

"So nobody reads them as a one."

She thought about that seriously. Then she nodded, as if it checked out, and picked up her jhal muri, and her group was moving on, a teacher calling the Sai children into a line, and she went.

That was all. That was the whole thing. Six sentences, at a science exhibition, over a cardboard hill. I have been in boardrooms in four countries and been told I had done good work by people whose names were on buildings, and I can tell you that nothing anyone has ever said to me has gone in further than "It goes where the lines say."

* * *

Her father was transferred to Jammu in December.

She told me on the roof, at the last class before the winter holidays, at six in the morning, in the cold, with the mist so thick that Mishra Sir's blackboard on the water tank was only a dark square. She just said it, as she sat down. "My father is transferred. Jammu. We go on the twentieth."

I said, "Oh."

That was the only thing I said, in the entire class, in the entire morning. Mishra Sir did quadratic equations. I don't remember any of them.

At the end, when everyone was getting up and pulling on sweaters and the cycles were rattling down in the lane below, she held out the geometry box.

I took it. I didn't open it. I put it in my bag and cycled home, all two and a half kilometres, very fast, in the mist, with my face burning in the cold, and I didn't open it until I was on the balcony.

Everything was there. The compass and the divider and the two set squares and the protractor. The pencil, sharpened. The sharpener with the broken edge. And folded small, under the protractor, a sheet torn out of a physics notebook.

On it she had drawn, in pencil, with my compass, very neatly, a small hill. Five contour lines, one inside the other, each with its height in tiny figures. 10. 20. 30. 40. 50. And at the bottom, beside it, a broad arrow with a line across the top. And under that, in her round Sai handwriting:

So you know where the water goes. I.

Every seven, in every number on that page, had a line through the middle.

* * *

I don't know what happened to her. I have never looked. People do that now; you can find anyone in a minute. I never have. I think I like her where she is: on the roof of a house in Unit 3 at six in the morning in the mist, frowning with her whole face at a quadratic, fifteen years old, forever, with my geometry box.

Maa knew, of course. Maa always knew. She came out onto the balcony that morning while I was sitting on the floor with the sheet in my hand and she looked at me, and at the paper, and at the box, and she didn't ask me anything.

She went back into the kitchen. A few minutes later she came out again with a steel plate. On it were four pieces of the coconut from the poda pitha, the best part, that I was only ever given for sitting quietly. It was December. There was no poda pitha in December. She must have cut it from a coconut that morning, for this, and roasted it on the tawa with a little jaggery.

She put it down beside me on the floor and went back in. From the kitchen, very softly, at the level of breath, I heard her start to sing.

I put the sheet inside the first diary, the thin one with the film actress, between the two pages where I had written about the mango in the Dalda tin. It is still there. The pencil has gone faint. You can still see the arrow.

Contents

Chapter 14

Marks

"Ninety-one," said Mrs. Panda. "Ninety-one percent. In the boards. Her photo is in the Samaja."

She was talking about her niece, who lived in Cuttack and whom none of us had ever met, but who had been held up to every child in Survey of India Colony for two years as an example of what was possible if you only applied yourself. Maa nodded and said, "Very good, very good," and went on cleaning rice on the steel thali in her lap, picking out the small stones with a fingernail. Mrs. Panda stood in the doorway a while longer, waiting for Maa to say something about my marks, and when she didn't, she said, "And Max? Half-yearly results came?"

"They came," said Maa.

"And?"

"He passed."

Mrs. Panda waited. Maa picked out another stone.

"Hm," said Mrs. Panda, and went downstairs.

* * *

I passed. That was the truth about me between the ages of twelve and seventeen, from the first year after the cyclone to the day I finished Class XII. I passed everything. I never failed a subject. I never came near the top either. My marks lived in the sixties and low seventies like a family in a two-room flat, comfortable enough, nothing to boast about, never likely to move.

And everybody around me, it seemed, was moving.

Rohan was the first to go. In Class VIII he suddenly got serious. I don't know what happened. Perhaps his father sat him down. Perhaps he simply grew up a year before I did. He stopped coming down for cricket on weekday evenings and started going to tuition at a place near Unit 4 that had a sign saying JEE / AIEEE / OJEE FOUNDATION COURSE and a man at the door who checked your fees receipt. His marks went from the seventies to the eighties to the nineties. In Class X he got ninety-two in the boards and his photo was in the Samaja, a small one, smiling with his mouth closed because he had braces.

"Saala, I didn't even know you could study," I told him.

"Neither did I," he said, and grinned, and the braces flashed.

Mamuni Nani finished her BSc and got a government job in the state secretariat on her first attempt at the exam, which in our family was received as if she had walked on the moon. Lipi Nani went to nursing college in Cuttack and wrote us long letters about the hostel food. Even Chiku, the baby, the one who had carried water up four flights with her tongue between her teeth, came home from her school with report cards that made Maa put them in the almirah, in the special drawer.

My report cards did not go in the special drawer. They went in the ordinary drawer, with the electricity bills.

* * *

It's important to say that nobody was cruel to me. My family loved me. That has to be clear, because the story I am about to tell could sound like a story about a boy whose family didn't, and it isn't. Maa made me luchi on Sundays and saved me the biggest piece of fish. Bapa took me to the Kalinga Stadium to watch a Ranji match and bought me a Gold Spot at the interval. My sisters fought with me and defended me in equal measure, and when a boy in Class IX called me "Fail-Pass Max" in front of Lipi Nani's friend, Lipi Nani found out his name and spoke to his elder sister and he never said it again.

They loved me. They just didn't know what to do with me. And they worried, all the time, quietly, in a way I could feel through the walls.

I could feel it at dinner when the conversation turned to someone else's son who had cleared an entrance exam. I could feel it when relatives visited and the first question, always, before "how are you" and sometimes before "hello," was "Which class? What percentage?" I could feel it in the particular quality of Bapa's silence when he signed my report card. He never shouted. He never said I was a disappointment. He read every mark, slowly, from top to bottom, as if checking a survey sheet for errors, and then he signed his name at the bottom in his careful hand with the seven that had a line through it, and handed it back to me, and said, "Next time."

That was all. "Next time." Two words. I would rather he had hit me.

* * *

The world changed around us in those years, faster than anything had changed before.

Cable came to our flat in 2001, finally, a wire through the balcony grille, and with it a hundred channels. Chiku discovered Cartoon Network and a show called Junior G that came on in the evenings, about a boy with powers, and watched it with the same holy silence we had given to Shaktimaan. In 2002 a new sports channel started showing WWE, and suddenly every boy in the colony knew the Rock's catchphrases and was doing them at each other on the stairs, and the old cards I had in the Gold Flake tin, the ones from the nineties, became antiques overnight. The construction site across the road, the one whose scaffolding the cyclone had taken, rose again, and got finished, and became an office building with glass windows that reflected the colony back at itself. The forest beyond the wall started to be cleared, slowly, the broken trees dragged away, the ground flattened, until there was a wide dusty space where the jackals had been, and people started calling it Janata Maidan and holding rallies there.

Mobile phones arrived. Not for us. For a few men in safari suits, at first, who walked around the Unit 9 market talking into big plastic bricks very loudly so that everybody would know. Then for doctors. Then for Rohan's father, who got one in 2003 and treated it like a small, beloved animal.

And the conversation changed. In the nineties, safe had meant a government job. Now, suddenly, safe meant engineering. Or medicine. Everyone was going to be an engineer. Odisha had started opening engineering colleges everywhere, in every town, colleges in buildings that had been warehouses a year before, and every family in the colony wanted their son in one. The question was no longer "What will you be?" It was "Engineering or medical?" As if there were nothing else. As if those two doors were the only doors in the whole building, and every other door was a wall.

* * *

I tried. I want that on the record too.

In Class XI I took science, PCM with biology, because that was what you did, and I went to tuition at the same place near Unit 4 that Rohan had gone to, where the man at the door checked my receipt. I sat in a room with sixty other students and a ceiling fan that didn't work, and a teacher who wrote integrals on a green board so fast that the chalk screamed, and I tried to follow.

I couldn't. Not because I couldn't understand. I would understand the first step, and the second, and then somewhere around the third my mind would slide sideways, like a cycle on wet mud. I would find myself looking at the window. At a crow on the wire outside. At the girl two rows ahead who had a habit of twisting a pencil into her hair. At the shape of a cloud. And then I would look back at the board and the teacher would be four steps further on, and the integral had become something else entirely, a long tangle of symbols that I could no longer find the beginning of.

And my legs. My legs were still there. Sixteen years old, nearly six feet tall now, and still they twitched and bounced under the desk, still they wanted to go. I ran in the mornings before tuition, around the colony and down the long road towards Jaydev Vihar, past the Oberoi gate where I had once sat on Rohan's shoulders, and back. I ran until my lungs burned. It helped for an hour. Then I sat down at the desk and the horse woke up again and kicked at the walls.

Everybody else could sit. That was the thing I could not get over. I would look around the tuition room, at the sixty heads bent over sixty notebooks, and every one of them seemed to be still, completely still, like water in a bucket. I was the only one rippling. I thought: they have something I don't. Some part of the brain, some wire, some switch. They were born with it, and I wasn't, and that is why they are moving forward and I am standing here.

I thought: I'm lazy.

I thought it so often that it stopped being a thought and became a fact, like my height or my blood group. Max is tall. Max is B-positive. Max is lazy. If I had only tried harder, I told myself, if I had only sat still, if I had only had the discipline Rohan had found in Class VIII, I would be moving too. The problem was not my brain. The problem was my character. I was the boy who wanted to bowl because he could not sit and bat.

That is a terrible thing to believe about yourself at sixteen. I believed it for about nine years.

* * *

I wrote in the diary less in those years. It was a different diary by then, the third or fourth; the thin one with the film actress on the cover had filled up long before, and I had moved through a Classmate notebook and a spiral-bound one with a broken spine, and they all lived together under my slab, behind the books, in a plastic bag that had once held a sari. I wrote less because I didn't like what I was writing. When I opened the diary, the pen went to the same places. Couldn't focus again. Tuition test, 11 out of 30. Rohan got 28. What is wrong with me.

One entry from that period says, in its entirety: Bapa said "next time." There is no next time. There is only this time, again.

I'm not proud of that one. But I don't tear it out.

* * *

The entrance exams came in the spring of 2005.

I won't go through them all. I took the state engineering exam, and the national one, and the medical one because Maa asked me to and I couldn't say no to her face. I sat in exam halls in Cuttack and in a school in Nayapalli whose name I've forgotten, with a clipboard and two HB pencils and an admit card that had my photo stapled to it, a boy who looked surprised. I filled in bubbles. I filled them in well, at first. Then, in every exam, somewhere around the forty-minute mark, I felt the slide begin. The paper went soft. The questions looked back at me like strangers. I looked up at the clock on the wall. I looked at the window. I looked down at the paper and found I'd lost my place.

The night before, the rumour went round the colony that the entrance ranks would be in the newspaper supplement in the morning, and that the corner shop on the main road would have it first, by six. At five Bapa was already up, shaved and dressed in his office clothes on a Sunday, sitting on the cot with the radio off. Maa made tea nobody drank. At a quarter to six I got on the cycle. Nobody told me to go. Nobody told me to come back.

The results came in May. The heat was terrible that year, nearly as bad as the year of the bus stopping and everybody sleeping underneath it. I found my results in a newspaper supplement at the shop on the corner of the main road, the same shop where I had bought Pepsi bottles in a cloth bag. I ran my finger down the list in the shade of the shop awning for a long time.

My rank in the engineering exam was so far down that the colleges I could get into were the ones in the warehouses. My rank in the medical exam was not a rank. It was a number with five digits.

Rohan's rank was eleven hundred and something. He got into a good engineering college in Rourkela, computer science, and his father distributed sweets to every flat in the colony in little cardboard boxes. Our box was rasgullas. I ate one, standing at the kitchen window, and it was very good, and I hated it.

* * *

That night Bapa and I sat on the balcony after everyone else had gone to bed. He had his glass of tea, though it was late. I had nothing. The air was hot and still, and the place where the forest had been was flat and dark, and on the other side of it the lights of the new office building glowed in a long row.

"What do you want to do?" he said.

It was the first time anyone had asked me that. Not "what will you do," not "engineering or medical." What do you want.

I didn't have an answer ready. I had never needed one. I sat there for a long time.

"I like living things," I said eventually. It came out sounding stupid. "I like how they grow. I like the trees. I like... I don't know. Biology was the only one where I wasn't always looking out the window."

He didn't say anything. He drank his tea.

"There is a course," I said. "Biotechnology. In a college here. BSc. It's new. Not many people do it."

"Biotechnology," he said, slowly, testing the word.

"It's science," I said quickly. "Real science. Genetics, microbes, plants. It's the future, some people say."

"Some people say," he repeated.

"I know it's not engineering."

"No," he said. "It is not engineering."

The silence went on so long that I thought he had fallen asleep. Then he set his glass down on the floor, very carefully, the way he did everything.

"Do it properly," he said. "Whatever it is. Do it properly."

And he went inside.

I stayed on the balcony until the sky started to go grey. I didn't cry. I sat with my back against the wall where I had written the first line in the first diary, with the stairwell light coming through the grille, and I tried to feel what I was supposed to feel, which was relief. He had said yes. He had not shouted. He had not said, as some fathers in the colony would have said, that I had wasted his money and shamed his name.

But I had heard what he hadn't said. I had heard the silence between "It is not engineering" and "Do it properly." It was the length of every rasgulla in every cardboard box in Survey of India Colony. It was the length of the whole long straight road to the Oberoi.

I heard that silence for years.

In July the college began. Within two years I would fail a paper for the first time in my life, and I would not tell Bapa for nine days.

Contents

Chapter 15

Oh, That's Interesting

"Biotechnology," said my Bada Bapa, Bapa's elder brother, at a wedding in Bargarh in December 2005. "Oh. That's interesting." And he tilted his head, slightly, to one side, the way you might look at a painting you have been told is valuable.

I heard "Oh, that's interesting" perhaps two hundred times over the next three years. I started keeping count in the back of my diary, the way I had once kept count of the water on the steps of Block D. It was said by uncles and aunties and neighbours and my sisters' in-laws and once by a ticket collector on a train to Sambalpur who asked what I studied and seemed genuinely sorry for me. It always came with the tilt. I came to think of the tilt as the gesture of my generation's parents when confronted with anything that was not engineering or medicine: a slight angling of the head, as if the thing you had said had arrived at an unexpected slope.

Some of them followed up. "So what job will you get?"

"Research, maybe. Pharma. Agriculture."

"Hm. Government?"

"Maybe."

"Hm." The tilt deepened. "And Rohan, he's in Rourkela, no? Computer science?"

"Yes."

"Very good. Very good boy."

* * *

The college was on the outskirts of the city, past Patia, in a building that was still being finished when I joined. On my first day there was no glass in the windows of the second floor, and the corridors smelled of wet cement and paint, and a group of labourers was laying tiles in the principal's office while the principal stood in the doorway in a tie, giving a welcome speech to the new batch about the bright future of the biotechnology sector in India.

There were thirty-eight of us. Most were from Bhubaneswar or Cuttack, a few from Berhampur and Balasore, two from Bihar. Most, like me, had not got the rank they wanted. You could tell on the first day who knew it and who was pretending. The ones who knew it sat at the back. The ones who were pretending sat at the front and asked a lot of questions.

And then there were the ones who had chosen it. Four or five of them. They had got decent ranks in the entrance exams and turned down engineering colleges to come here, because they actually wanted to do biotechnology, and their parents had let them. They were the ones who already knew what a plasmid was. They sat in the second row and took notes in three colours. One of them, a girl from Cuttack called Sneha, had read a book by an American scientist about the double helix over the summer holidays, for fun, and talked about Rosalind Franklin as if she were a friend who had been treated badly.

I sat in the fourth row. Not the front, not the back. Exactly in the middle of the classroom, the way my marks had always sat in the middle of every list.

* * *

I loved some of it. That surprised me.

I loved the labs. The first time I put a drop of pond water on a slide and saw, under the microscope, a whole world of moving things, little transparent creatures spinning and sliding and bumping into each other, I forgot where I was. I forgot to write anything down. I sat at that microscope for so long that the lab assistant, an old man called Sahu who had worked in some government institute for thirty years before retiring to this, came and stood behind me and said, "What are you looking at, baba? There's nothing there."

"There's everything there," I said, without looking up.

Sahu was silent for a moment. Then he laughed, a dry pleased laugh, and patted my shoulder, and went away. After that he always let me stay late in the lab.

I loved the plant tissue culture, where you took a little piece of a leaf, a scrap the size of a fingernail, and put it in a jar of clear jelly with the right hormones, and waited, and after a few weeks it became a whole plant. A whole new plant from almost nothing, from a scrap. I watched those jars on the shelf in the culture room every day like a man watching a cricket score.

I loved the idea of it. Of all of it. That living things had a code, and that the code could be read, and that a boy from a fourth-floor quarter could learn to read it.

The problem was everything else.

* * *

The problem was the theory classes, the long hours in rooms with ceiling fans, where professors read from notes they had written decades earlier and copied onto overhead projector sheets that had gone yellow at the edges. Biochemistry. Biostatistics. Molecular biology with its endless diagrams of enzymes, each one a sort of tangled ribbon with arrows coming off it. I would sit down at nine-thirty in the morning with my notebook open and my pen ready and the absolute determination that this time I would follow it all, and by ten the slide would begin.

It was the same slide as in tuition. The same as in the exam halls. The words on the projector would start to drift away from each other. The professor's voice would go flat and far, like a radio in another room. I would find myself thinking about the jars in the culture room. About the pond water. About the guava tree in Mamu's courtyard, which Maiji had said on the phone was taller than the cowshed now. About running. I would look down and find I had written half a sentence and then drawn, in the margin, a very detailed picture of a bowler's run-up.

My first semester marks came back in February. I had passed every subject. I had passed four of them by less than five marks.

Sneha was first. One of the boys from the back was second.

I went home that afternoon and didn't tell anybody my marks, and nobody asked, and the not-asking was worse than anything.

* * *

By the second year I was sure.

So what did that make me? If the people below me weren't trying, and I was, then I was the dumbest person who was actually trying. That was the logic. I wrote it in my diary in the form of a syllogism, the way we'd been taught in a logic elective, with a line underneath and a "therefore," and then I looked at it and felt sick.

There was more. There was always more. Rohan came home from Rourkela for the Durga Puja holidays in my second year with a laptop, a real one, that his college had made compulsory, and he showed it to me in his flat on the ground floor, the same flat where his mother used to throw the cricket ball back out of the window. He showed me a program he had written. It did something with numbers that I didn't understand. He explained it twice. He was patient, the way you are patient with a child.

"You should learn some coding, re," he said. "Even for biotech. It's all going to be computers."

"Hm," I said. And then, because I couldn't stop myself: "Are you okay? At college?"

He looked surprised. "Why?"

"I don't know. It's hard, no?"

"It's okay." He shrugged. "Some subjects are hard. I just sit and do it. You know me."

I did know him. That was the trouble. I had known Rohan since we were six. I had bowled to him ten thousand times. And somewhere between the road outside Block C and the ground floor flat with the laptop in it, he had learned to just sit and do it, and I hadn't. He had become a batsman in every part of his life. He could stand still at the crease and wait for the ball and hit it.

I was still running in from the file box. Still bowling, still chasing the ball down the road, still walking back. Except now there was no ball, and there was no road, and I didn't know what I was running at.

* * *

The worst part was Bapa.

He had retired by then, in 2007, after thirty-four years at Survey of India. They gave him a shawl, a steel plate with his name engraved on it, and a box of sweets, and there was a function in the office hall with speeches, and he came home and put the steel plate in the almirah, in the special drawer, on top of Chiku's report cards. A few months later the family moved out of Type II Quarter No. 8, because retired men did not get to keep government quarters, and into a rented flat in Nayapalli, two floors up, with a smaller balcony that faced another building.

I hated the new flat. I hated that I couldn't see the place where the forest had been. I hated that my slab was gone, the cement shelf with Sachin and Azhar and Wasim on the wall above it, and that some other family's son would be sticking his own heroes there now, with rice paste, if he was lucky.

Bapa didn't complain about the move. He never complained about anything. But he was different after retirement. Smaller somehow. He had been a man who left the house at 9:10 every morning on the Narmada, and now he was a man who sat on a small balcony in Nayapalli reading the Samaja from front to back, including the advertisements, and doing the crossword in pencil, and waiting. I didn't know what he was waiting for. I was afraid I did.

The Narmada had stopped running a year before he retired. The company that made it had gone out of business back in the nineties, and nobody had spare parts any more, and one day the engine simply wouldn't catch. Bapa kicked it for twenty minutes, tilted it, kicked it again, and then stood back and looked at it for a long time with his hands behind his back. Then he sold it to a scrap dealer for six hundred rupees. I wasn't there. Chiku told me later. She said he didn't say a word as the man wheeled it away. He just raised two fingers, the old salute from the handlebar, and then put his hand in his pocket and went upstairs.

I thought about that a lot. I thought: he served something faithfully for thirty years and it ended with a shawl and a scrap dealer. And then I thought: and what am I going to give him? What is his son going to be?

I didn't know. I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know. I wrote it in the diary like that, three times in a row, and then I closed the diary and went out and walked.

I walked for two years. I didn't know I was walking towards a chair.

Contents

Chapter 16

The Walks

From the rented flat in Nayapalli to the edge of the old colony was a little under four kilometres, if you went by the main road, and a little over five if you went the way I went, which was through the back lanes, past the Ram Mandir in Unit 9, past the gate of my old school, along the edge of Janata Maidan and down the road towards the 7th Battalion and the TV centre, and back.

I walked it almost every evening in my second and third years of college. Sometimes twice. I didn't plan to. I would finish dinner, and help Maa with the dishes, and sit on the small balcony for a few minutes looking at the wall of the building opposite, and then I would feel it come up through my legs, that old pressure, and I would say "I'm going for a walk," and Maa would say "Take the torch," and I would go.

She never asked where. I think she knew.

* * *

I walked fast at first. Then slower, once the noise in my head had settled into something I could hear over. It was always the same noise, more or less. A set of questions that went around and around like the fan in Quarter No. 8, at whatever speed the voltage allowed.

Will I get a job.

Will anyone give a job to a boy with sixty-two percent in biotechnology from a college with no glass in its second-floor windows.

Did I ruin it. Was the moment I said "biotechnology" on the balcony the moment I ruined it. Should I have taken the warehouse engineering college. Should I have taken a drop year and tried again, like Tukuna, who took two drop years and got into a dental college in Bhubaneswar and was now, according to his mother, a doctor.

What happens to Bapa's pension if something goes wrong. Who looks after Maa and Bapa when they are old, if Max has no job. Chiku is still in school. Lipi Nani is going to get married next year, and weddings cost money, and the boy's family is from Cuttack and has already mentioned, politely, twice, what their nephew's wedding cost.

Did I put the whole family in danger by being who I am.

That last one was the one I walked the longest for.

* * *

The city had changed so much by then that some evenings I barely recognised it. Janata Maidan was a real maidan now, a great flat field of dust and dry grass with lamp posts around it and a stage at one end for rallies. In December there was a trade fair there with a giant wheel, and the whole of Bhubaneswar went, and the smell of fried things and diesel generators drifted for kilometres. In the place where I had once watched four vultures take an afternoon over a dead cow, there was a stall selling plastic toys from China and another selling Kashmiri shawls.

The road to the 7th Battalion, the single road with the forest pressing in on both sides that my sisters had walked in their blue uniforms, was wider now and lined with shops. Mobile phone recharge. Xerox and lamination. Hair salon (Gents). A dhaba with a hand-painted sign promising Chinese and Mughlai and South Indian, all three. Cars, real cars, Marutis and Indicas and a few Scorpios, had replaced the cycle rickshaws, and they honked constantly at each other and at me.

The forest on the Lab side was still mostly there. They had fenced it, and some of the old trees had been cut for a new building, but there was still a long stretch where the tall trees came down to the boundary wall and the road went dark under them. I used to slow down there. I used to stop sometimes, and stand with my hand on the wall, and listen. No jackals any more. But at night you could still hear something moving in there, a rustle, a branch, and I liked that. I liked that something wild had held on.

* * *

I always passed the colony. I never went in.

I would stand at the gate, the new one, the one they had put up after the cyclone crushed the old one, and look in at the blocks. They looked smaller than I remembered. Everything does, people say, but it's true. The road between Block C and Block D where we had played cricket was so narrow now in my eyes that I couldn't imagine bowling down it. The electric pole was still there. The line we had scratched on the tar was long gone, paved over twice. On the fourth floor of our old block, Quarter No. 8, there was a new family; I could see their clothes on the line on the balcony, a man's shirts and a woman's saris and a child's school uniform, a blue one, KV blue, hanging upside down by the hem.

I wondered if the child had a slab. I wondered what they had stuck on the wall above it.

One evening, a man came out of the colony gate on a motorcycle and slowed when he saw me.

"Arre," he said. "Max?"

It was Pintu. The thirteen-year-old who used to play with us when the older boys wouldn't have him. He was twenty-three now, with a moustache and a gold chain and a Hero Honda, and he worked at the State Bank branch in Unit 3. He had moved back into the colony, it turned out, because his father had a quarter on the ground floor of Block A and Pintu had a government job of his own now. He had come all the way back to the place he started, and was very pleased about it.

"What are you doing these days?" he asked. "Engineering, no?"

"Biotechnology."

He tilted his head. "Oh. That's interesting."

Two hundred and one. I counted it in the diary that night.

* * *

But underneath all of it, all the time, was the walking. The questions. And the belief, by then as solid as the steel almirah, that I was lazy and stupid and had been all my life, and that everyone around me had known it for years and been too kind to say so.

* * *

One night in my third year, I walked further than usual. I don't know why. I passed the colony gate and kept going, along the road towards Jaydev Vihar, the long straight road that I had walked with Rohan and the Rao brothers and Tukuna in 1999 to see Sachin.

It wasn't straight any more, exactly. It had flyovers and side roads and a petrol pump. The Oberoi was still there, at the end, behind its wall and its gardens, but there was a big mall now opposite, with a multiplex and a McDonald's whose golden sign hung in the night like a second moon. Students from the engineering colleges were standing outside the McDonald's eating fries out of red paper boxes and laughing very loudly.

I stood across the road from the Oberoi gate. The place where the crowd had been. The place where I had sat on Rohan's shoulders and seen a man in a blue tracksuit lift his hand.

There was nobody there now. A security guard in a grey uniform sitting on a plastic chair by the gate, looking at his phone. A car going in. The gardens behind the wall, dark, lit here and there with small lamps at the foot of the trees.

I thought: he wasn't lazy. That boy. Whatever he was, he wasn't lazy.

It was the first time the thought had come. It didn't stay. It went away almost immediately, the way the first drops of a monsoon go away into hot earth without leaving a mark. I walked home and went to bed and woke up the next morning and was lazy again, and stupid again, and fourth from the bottom.

But it had come. I wrote it down, the next night, very small, in the corner of a page, almost as if I were hiding it from myself.

Outside the Oberoi. That boy was not lazy.

* * *

Bapa was waiting up when I got home that night. He was sitting on the small balcony in Nayapalli with the light off, in his vest and lungi, and he didn't say anything as I came in, and I nearly didn't see him.

"Bapa? Why are you awake?"

"It is late," he said.

"I was walking."

"I know." A pause. "Every night, you are walking."

I stood in the doorway to the balcony. I didn't know what to say.

"When I was your age," Bapa said, "I used to walk also. In the village. In the evenings. Along the canal, there is a road. Five kilometres to the next village and five back." He was looking at the wall of the building opposite, not at me. "Bapa used to say, that boy is walking to Cuttack and back every night, he will wear out his chappals and then what."

"What were you thinking about?"

He was quiet for a while.

"Whether I would get a job," he said. "Whether I would be able to look after Maa. Whether I was good enough." He moved his hand, a small gesture, the hand of a man who had spent thirty-four years checking numbers. "Same things."

I sat down on the floor of the balcony beside his chair, with my back against the wall. I didn't say anything. Neither did he. The building opposite had a light on in one window, a kitchen, a woman washing something at a sink. Somewhere a dog was barking. It was the most Bapa had ever told me about himself, and I could feel how much it had cost him, and I didn't want to waste it by speaking.

After a long time, he said, "You will find it."

"Find what?"

"Whatever you are walking for." He got up, slowly, his bad knee clicking. He put his hand on my head for a second, the way he used to when I was small, and then took it away. "But you will not find it walking. At some point you will have to sit."

He went inside.

I stayed on the balcony until I heard him begin to snore. Then I took out my diary and wrote down what he had said, exactly, word for word.

At some point you will have to sit.

I didn't know yet that he was going to be right. I didn't know yet what would make me.

Contents

Chapter 17

The Sitting

The thing that made me sit was a failure. It usually is.

In the fifth semester, in December 2007, I failed Biostatistics. Not barely. Properly. Twenty-three out of a hundred, where the pass mark was forty. It was the first subject I had ever failed in my life. My name was on the noticeboard outside the department office with a small "R" next to it in red ink, which meant re-appear, which meant a supplementary exam in July, which meant that if I failed again I would not get my degree on time, and would have to do the semester again, and would graduate a year behind everyone, a year behind Sneha and the boys from the back and the girl with the laugh like a bicycle bell.

I stood in front of that noticeboard for a long time. Other students came and looked and went away. Some of them looked at me. Nobody said anything. The red "R" sat next to my name like a drop of blood.

I didn't go for a walk that night. That was the first sign that something had changed, though I didn't know it. I went home on the bus and walked up the two floors to the flat in Nayapalli and put my bag down, and Maa looked at my face and said, "Kana hela?" and I said, "I failed a subject," and she put down the vegetables she was cutting and came and stood in front of me and put both her hands on my face.

She didn't say anything. She just held my face for a second, and looked at me, and then she went back to the vegetables.

Bapa, when he came in from his evening walk to the market, was told by Maa in the kitchen in a low voice. I heard him say, "Hm." Then he came out and sat on his chair on the balcony and opened the Samaja and read it, and didn't say anything to me all evening, and at dinner he ate from left to right and drank his water and washed his hands, and as he passed me on his way to bed, he stopped.

"July?" he said.

"July."

He nodded. And then he said, not "next time," but something else.

"Then you have six months."

* * *

The textbook for Biostatistics was a thick blue book by an Indian author with a long name, printed on paper so thin you could see the next page through it. I had owned it for five months. I had opened it, I estimated, perhaps eight times. I took it out of my bag that night and put it on the little table in the corner of the room I shared with nobody now, since my sisters had gone, and I looked at it.

I didn't open it. Not that night. That night I opened the diary.

I wrote for three hours. I have the pages still. They're not pretty. I wrote about the red R and about the noticeboard and about Sneha's three colours. I wrote about Rohan's laptop and the rasgullas in the cardboard box and the silence on the balcony when I'd said "biotechnology." I wrote about Mrs. Das. I had never written about Mrs. Das before, not properly, not in eleven years; I had written that first line, I am not stupid, and then never gone back to the room where it happened. That night I went back. I wrote the whole scene, the chalk, the forty-three heads turning, "Are you stupid," the laugh, the boy who muttered it behind me like he'd found a coin. I wrote what I had meant to say, and what I had said, and what she had heard.

And then I wrote about the neem by the school boundary wall, the one that had survived the cyclone. The peon and his steel lunch box. Roots go down looking. Lazy roots get pulled out.

And I wrote, at about two in the morning, with my hand aching:

What if I am not lazy. What if I am a summer plant that everyone keeps waiting to grow in the monsoon.

I looked at that for a long time. It was a strange sentence. I didn't really know what I meant by it. But I could feel that it was true in some way I hadn't yet worked out, the way you can feel a ball is going to swing before it leaves your hand.

* * *

My body was built to move. It had always been. The horse inside me, the old man at the dhaba near Angul had called it. The legs that kicked in the heat on the floor of Quarter No. 8. The boy who bowled every ball. The boy who stood up in the cyclone because he couldn't sit through it. I had spent my whole life trying to be still like the others, and failing, and calling the failure laziness. But the stillness the others had, Sneha and Rohan and the sixty heads in the tuition room, wasn't something they had and I didn't. It was something that came easily to their bodies and didn't come easily to mine.

That didn't mean I couldn't have it. It meant I had to build it. Like the roots of the neem. Not given by the rain; made, every day, in the heat, by someone carrying water.

And the other thing I worked out was this: the slide, the moment when my mind went sideways off the problem and out the window, wasn't the end. I had always treated it as the end. The moment I felt it, I gave up. I looked up at the clock, or the crow, or the girl with the pencil in her hair, and I thought, there it goes, I've lost it again, I'm lazy, and I stopped. But what if the slide was just the place where it got hard? What if it was the moment the batsman steps out of his crease and you have to decide whether to bowl the next ball anyway?

What if, at the slide, I just didn't stop?

* * *

The first night I tried it, it was awful.

I sat down at the little table at nine with the blue Biostatistics book and a notebook and a pencil. I had decided on one problem. Just one. A problem from the end of chapter four about confidence intervals, which I had looked at once in September and closed the book on. I read it. I read it again. I started to work it, and got through two lines, and then I felt it come: the slide, the softening, the drift.

My legs started to go. My eyes went to the window. There was nothing to see out of the window except the wall of the building opposite, but my eyes went there anyway, as if there might be something.

I made myself look back at the problem.

It was physically painful. I don't know how to describe it to someone whose mind doesn't do this. It was like holding a heavy bucket out at arm's length. Every part of me wanted to put it down. I could feel the muscles in my neck and shoulders tighten. My leg was bouncing so hard under the table that the pencil rolled off onto the floor.

I picked it up. I looked at the problem.

At eleven I got up and walked around the room ten times. Not out of the flat. Just around the room. Then I sat down again.

At one in the morning, I still hadn't solved it. I had filled four pages with crossings-out. I had walked around the room maybe fifty times. Maa had got up once to use the bathroom and seen the light under my door and said nothing, and I'd heard her go back to bed.

At about ten to two, it opened.

I don't know what else to call it. It opened, the way a door that's been stuck for years suddenly gives when you've stopped expecting it to. I was staring at a formula on the page, the same formula I had been staring at for an hour, and suddenly I could see what it meant. Not just what to do with it. What it meant. Why it was shaped the way it was. Why the square root was there and what the little n underneath it was doing, and why it had to be there, and what would happen if it wasn't. I saw the whole thing at once, like seeing the colony from the balcony after you've only ever seen it from the road.

I solved the problem in about four minutes.

Then I sat there, at two in the morning, with my hand on the page, and I wasn't happy, exactly. I was too tired to be happy. I was something closer to frightened. Because if this was what had been on the other side of the slide all along, then I had spent eleven years walking away from it.

I opened the diary and wrote one line.

I sat through it. That's all it was.

* * *

I did it again the next night. And the night after that.

It got easier. Not quickly. It was like the water in the cyclone weeks; on the first day the bucket nearly broke my arms, and on the tenth day I noticed I had climbed two flights without stopping. I learned things about how I worked. I learned that I had to run in the morning before I could sit at night, a proper run, five or six kilometres, until the horse was tired. I learned that I could sit for about forty-five minutes before the slide came, and that when it came I had to stay for another ten or fifteen minutes no matter what, and that if I stayed, it usually opened. I learned that if I got up after that and walked around the room, ten times, and drank a glass of water, and sat down again, I could do another forty-five. I learned to write down, in the diary, every night, exactly where I had felt the slide and what had happened when I'd stayed through it, so that I could see the pattern.

There was a pattern. There was always a pattern. I was, it turned out, very good at seeing patterns, once I sat still long enough for them to show up.

I knew. Now I knew.

* * *

In July 2008 the rains came early and heavy, the way they used to in the old days, and on the morning of my supplementary Biostatistics exam it had been raining for two days. I took the bus to the college in a plastic raincoat with my admit card in a polythene bag. The road past Patia was flooded to the ankles. The college's second floor still had no glass in some of its windows, and the rain blew in onto the corridor floor in grey sheets.

I sat at a desk in an exam hall with sixteen other re-appear students, and the invigilator handed out the paper, and I read it.

I felt the slide at about forty minutes. Right on schedule. The paper went soft. The question in front of me looked back at me like a stranger.

I stayed.

I stayed for ten minutes, staring at it, my leg bouncing under the desk, my hands cold. I didn't look at the window. I didn't look at the clock. I read the question again, one word at a time, the way you carry a full bucket. And it opened.

I got eighty-one.

When I saw the mark on the noticeboard, I didn't shout. I didn't run. I stood there with the rain blowing in through the glassless window behind me and I read it three times, the way Bapa read every mark on my report cards, slowly, top to bottom, checking it for errors. There were no errors.

I went home. Bapa was on the balcony with the Samaja. I told him.

He put down the paper.

He looked at me for a long moment, his face doing nothing, the way it always did nothing. Then he said, "Eighty-one."

"Eighty-one."

He nodded. It was the nod. The one he'd given me at the top of the stairs in Quarter No. 8 when I was nine years old and had knocked one brick off a stack in an empty road in the dark, after fifty balls.

"Hit it," he said.

"Once," I said.

And then Bapa, who never laughed, laughed. A short surprised bark, as if it had come out of him without permission. And I laughed too, and Maa came out of the kitchen with her hands wet and said, "What? What is it?" and neither of us could tell her.

My final year marks were the best I'd ever had. Not the best in the batch. Sneha was still first. But I was seventh, out of thirty-eight, and my final-year lab project, on tissue culture of a medicinal plant from the western Odisha forests, got the highest mark in the department. Sahu, the old lab assistant, shook my hand at the end of the viva and said, "I told you. There is everything there."

He hadn't told me that. I had told him. But I let him have it.

Four months later I was sitting in a cubicle with a headset on, and the sitting had only just begun.

Contents

Chapter 18

The Hard End of the Pitch

Nobody hired biotechnologists in 2008. It was the year the banks in America fell over, and somehow, in a way I never fully understood, that meant the pharmaceutical company in Hyderabad that had shortlisted me for a junior research post sent a two-line email in October saying the position had been "put on hold due to market conditions." The seed company in Pune never replied at all. The state government research institute in Bhubaneswar had a vacancy, one, for which four hundred people applied.

I had my degree. I had my eighty-one and my seventh rank and my lab project. I had learned to sit. And I had no job.

The walks came back, briefly, that winter. Not as bad. I knew how to sit now, and I knew that the walks were not the same as thinking, and so I used them differently; I walked to tire out the horse and then came home and sat and wrote out, carefully, every option I had, with the costs and the odds, the way Bapa would have checked a survey sheet. It was a short list. Most of it was crossed out.

At the bottom of the list, almost as an afterthought, was a line I had copied from a newspaper advertisement. A big technology company, one of the American ones, was hiring for its support centre in Bangalore. Night shifts. Any graduate. Good English required. Training provided.

I looked at that line for a long time.

It was not biotechnology. It was not research. It was not, in any sense anyone in Survey of India Colony would have recognised, a career. It was a call centre. That was what people called it. I could already see the tilt of Bada Bapa's head.

I applied.

* * *

I took the Konark Express to Bangalore in February 2009, twenty-six hours, with a trolley bag that had belonged to Mamuni Nani's husband and a steel tiffin carrier of Maa's chhena poda that I finished before Vijayawada. Bapa came to the station. He stood on the platform with his hands behind his back while I found my berth, and when the train started to move he walked alongside the window for a few steps, and then he stopped and raised two fingers, the old salute, and I raised two fingers back, and then he was gone behind a pillar.

Bangalore in 2009 was cool and green and confused, a city that had grown too fast and hadn't caught up with itself. It rained for an hour in the afternoons and stopped, politely, as if embarrassed. I found it very strange. I shared a two-bedroom flat in a place called BTM Layout with four other boys from the training batch: two from Kerala, one from Bihar, one from Assam. We cooked rice in a rice cooker and ate it with pickle from five different states and argued about cricket in English, which was the only language we all had.

The work was this. Big companies, businesses, used the software that my employer made. When it broke, or when they couldn't make it do what they wanted, they called. Someone had to pick up the phone. That someone, at three in the morning Bangalore time, was me.

The training lasted six weeks. Then they put me on a floor with two hundred other people in headsets, rows and rows of them under white lights, and I picked up my first call, and a man in Ohio shouted at me for eleven minutes because his email server was down and his company was losing money every second it was down and did I have any idea, any idea at all.

I didn't. I put him on hold, which you were not supposed to do, and asked the team lead, who sighed and showed me a screen I hadn't been trained on. I took the man off hold. I fixed it. It took forty minutes. At the end he said, grudgingly, "Okay. Thanks," and hung up.

I sat there with the headset on, my hands shaking slightly.

Then the phone rang again.

* * *

There is a thing that happens on every support floor in the world, and it happened on ours in the first month. The calls sort themselves. The easy ones, password resets and licence questions and people who have forgotten to plug something in, are quick and pleasant and make your numbers look good, because you are measured on how many you close and how fast. The hard ones are slow, and ugly, and full of angry people, and you can spend six hours on a single one and close nothing, and your numbers look terrible.

Everyone wanted the easy calls. Everyone avoided the hard ones. There were tricks for it; you learned them in the first two weeks from the people who had been there longer. You could be "on a break" when you saw a certain kind of ticket come into the queue. You could transfer a call to another team before it got complicated. You could, if you were very good at it, make sure that the hard ones always landed on somebody else.

I didn't do any of that. I took the hard ones.

So I sat. Night after night. Six hours on a single ticket, sometimes, with my legs bouncing under the desk and the slide coming at forty-five minutes and me staying through it, staying, staying, until the problem opened. I kept a notebook beside my keyboard, a fresh diary, and wrote down every hard problem I'd solved and how, so that the next time I would know. By the end of the first year it was three notebooks. By the end of the second it was six.

My numbers were bad, the first few months. My team lead, a kind tired man from Mangalore, called me in and said, "Max, you're closing half what the others close. What's going on?"

"I'm taking the hard ones."

"Why?"

"Someone has to," I said. And then, because it was true: "And I like it."

He looked at me the way Rohan used to look at me on the road outside Block C. Irritation and reluctant interest.

"You're mad," he said.

"I know."

He left me alone. Six months later, when the hard tickets started coming to me by name, because the customers had started asking for me by name, he put me up for a promotion. It lasted until the night the bank went down.

Contents

Chapter 19

Trunk Call

Bapa still called it a trunk call. Even in 2010, even to a mobile phone. "Did you make the trunk call to your Mamu?" he would say to Maa, about a call she had made from her own Nokia, sitting on the cot, in a few seconds. In his head a call to anywhere outside the city was still a thing you booked in advance at the post office and waited for on a wooden bench, and paid for by the minute, and kept short.

So when I called home at five in the morning on a Tuesday in August, from the roof of a building in BTM Layout, the first thing he would have thought, when Maa's phone rang on the shelf beside the almirah, was that somebody had died.

Nobody had. I just hadn't been able to think who else to call.

* * *

The trouble had started on a Friday.

I had been on the floor eighteen months by then. The hard tickets came to me by name. My team lead had put me up for promotion in the spring, and the promotion had been approved, and the letter was supposed to come at the end of the quarter, and I had already told Maa, who had told Mrs. Panda, who had told the entire colony, which by then was the old colony, scattered all over the city in rented flats, but still connected by a network of telephones and weddings that worked faster than anything my employer had ever built.

On the Friday night a bank in Singapore lost its email.

Not a small bank. Not a small loss. Forty thousand people in offices across Asia came to work on Monday morning, their time, which was Sunday night ours, and found nothing. No mail, no calendars, no messages. The system that held it all, which ran on our company's software, had fallen over in the night and would not get back up.

It landed on me. Of course it did. I was the one who took the hard ones.

I sat with it for thirty-one hours. It was mostly sitting in a cold room under white lights with a headset on, reading logs, while people in Singapore and Seattle and Dublin joined the call and left the call and shouted on the call and went quiet on the call. Somewhere around hour nineteen I found something. A setting. A single value in a configuration that was wrong. I was sure it was the cause. I explained it on the call, carefully, the way I had learned, and the people in Seattle agreed, and the bank's own engineers agreed, and at hour twenty-two, with my sign-off, they changed it.

Hour twenty-two was half past six on Monday morning in Bangalore. In Singapore it was nine, and forty thousand people were sitting down at desks. On the call somebody had put up a clock, a plain digital one in the corner of the shared screen, counting the minutes since sign-off, and nobody mentioned it, and everybody watched it. 00:04. 00:09. I watched it with my hand flat on the desk so it wouldn't shake.

At the same minute, I worked out later, Maa would have been lighting the lamp in the puja corner in Nayapalli, and Bapa would have been on the balcony with the Samaja, reading the front page for the first time, before the second time. I didn't think of them then. I thought of nothing except the clock.

At 00:17 a voice from the bank said, very quietly, "We're seeing something on the payments side."

Nobody said anything for four seconds. I counted them.

And everything got worse.

The value I had found was wrong. But it wasn't the cause. It was a symptom of something else, deeper down, and when they changed it, the something else came loose and took a second system with it. For about four hours on Monday morning, Singapore time, the bank lost not only its email but a piece of the system its traders used to talk to each other. I didn't understand how much that cost. Somebody told me later. I'm not going to write the number down.

They fixed it in the end. Not me. A man in Seattle who had written part of the original software, who was woken at three in the morning his time and joined the call in his pyjamas and found the real problem in forty minutes. He was very kind about it. He said on the call, to everybody, "Max's find was real. It just wasn't the root." I have always remembered that he said that. It didn't help.

* * *

The review was on the Wednesday after.

Nobody called it a punishment. Nobody in a company like that ever calls anything a punishment. It was called a post-incident review and it was held in a glass room with a long table and my team lead and his manager and a woman from Dublin on a screen at the end, and everybody was polite, and at the end of it my name was on a document under a heading that said Contributing Factors, and my sign-off at hour twenty-two was described, accurately, as premature.

The promotion was put on hold. That was the phrase. On hold, the same phrase the company in Hyderabad had used, in 2008, about a job I never got.

My team lead walked me out of the glass room. He was a good man. He put his hand on my shoulder at the lift and said, "It happens to everyone, Max. Everyone who takes the hard ones. It's the price." And I nodded and said "Yes" and went down in the lift and walked out of the building and didn't stop walking until I was three kilometres away, standing at a bus stop on Hosur Road in the rain, with no idea which bus.

I didn't go to the office the next night. I called in sick. I had never called in sick. I lay on the mattress in the room in BTM Layout with the fan going, and I didn't eat, and I didn't sleep, and the horse inside me, which I had spent five years learning to sit with, came back and ran, round and round, all night, the same circuit.

Premature. Contributing factors. On hold.

Stupid, said Mrs. Das, from 1997.

Next time, said Bapa, from the top of the stairs.

* * *

There had been five of us in the flat, in the beginning. By that August there were two. The boys from Kerala had moved to a better place in Koramangala, together, when they were both promoted. The boy from Bihar had gone to Pune. On the Monday after the bank, the boy from Assam, Dhruba, who had been my closest friend on the floor, packed two bags and went home to Jorhat, for good. He had been offered a job in his uncle's tea business. He said he was tired of the nights. He hugged me at the door and said, "Come to Assam. Drink real tea. Leave this," and then the auto was honking in the lane and he was gone.

So on the Tuesday, at five in the morning, I was alone in the flat, and had been awake for two days, and I went up the stairs to the roof, where the water tanks were and the washing lines and somebody's pigeons in a cage, and I sat on the parapet in the grey light with the phone in my hand, and I dialled home.

It was half past five in Bhubaneswar, too. Same time zone. I don't know why that surprised me. I think some part of me felt they must be very far away, the way the people in Seattle were far away.

Maa answered on the second ring. She was always up at five. She would have been in the kitchen, lighting the gas.

"Max?"

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

There was a silence on the line. Not a long one. I heard the gas click, and catch. I heard her put something down on the counter, a steel tumbler, from the sound of it.

"Have you eaten?" she said.

That was the first thing. Not what happened, not why are you calling, not is everything all right. Have you eaten. I started to cry. On the roof in BTM Layout, at five-thirty in the morning, at twenty-two years old, with the pigeons watching, and not quietly either.

She didn't say anything. She let me. I could hear her breathing, and the gas, and behind her, very faintly, the sound of the Nayapalli morning, a pressure cooker going in the next flat and a man calling out for old newspapers in the lane. She waited the way she had waited over the poda pitha. When I had finished, or nearly, she said it again.

"Have you eaten?"

"No."

"Since when?"

"Sunday."

"Hm," said Maa, who had been married to Bapa for twenty-nine years and had learned the word from him, and could say a great deal more with it than he ever did. "Then first you eat. There is curd?"

"I think so."

"Rice?"

"There's rice."

"Then you put curd in rice and salt and you eat it. All of it. Then you sleep. Then you talk." She paused. "Wait. Your Bapa is here."

I hadn't heard him come in. I heard, then, the phone change hands, the muffled business of it, Maa saying something low that I couldn't catch. And then his breathing on the line. He breathed through his nose, always, a slow even sound, like somebody working a pump.

"Max," he said.

"Bapa."

"Maa says you have not eaten."

"I'll eat."

"Good." A pause. "What is it?"

* * *

I told him. I don't know why I told him and not Maa. I think it was because it was a thing about measurement. About being sure and being wrong. It seemed like his kind of thing.

I told him all of it, sitting on the parapet, in the order it happened, the bank and the thirty-one hours and the setting and the sign-off at hour twenty-two and the man in Seattle in his pyjamas and the glass room and the words. Premature. Contributing factors. On hold. I told it badly. I went too fast and I went back and repeated things and I lost the thread twice. He didn't interrupt me once.

When I finished, he was quiet for so long that I thought the line had dropped. I said "Bapa?" and he said "I am here," and was quiet again.

Then he said, "Koraput. Nineteen seventy-nine."

I didn't say anything.

"My first line in charge. I was twenty-six. A levelling line, from Jeypore, up into the hills. Forty kilometres. Four men and me. Six weeks." He spoke slowly, the way he read out the specification of a government building. "Six weeks of walking. Every evening, sums. Every morning, out again. And at the end, we came to the last bench mark, at the top, on a railway culvert. And the numbers did not agree."

"By how much?"

"Forty-one centimetres."

I knew enough, by then, from the canal at Jatni, to know what that meant. Two millimetres was good. Forty-one centimetres was a disaster.

"I had made a mistake," Bapa said. "Somewhere. In six weeks. One number. I didn't know where. I went through the book every night for a week. I couldn't find it." The line hissed. "My officer was a Bengali man, very strict. Mr. Sengupta. He came up from Jeypore in the jeep and looked at the book, and he wrote a note in my file. I have seen it. One line. Field book of this officer not reliable."

I sat very still on the parapet.

"What did you do?"

"I walked it again."

"All of it?"

"All forty kilometres. Back down to Jeypore and up again. Six more weeks. The men were very angry. It was the monsoon by then. Leeches." He made a sound that on anybody else I would have called a laugh. "And in the fourth week I found it. A seven. In my own handwriting. On the eleventh day of the first walk. I had written a seven and in the evening, by the lantern, very tired, I had read it as a one. And carried it forward. For the whole line."

"That's why you cross them."

"That is why I cross them."

The sun was coming up over the water tanks of BTM Layout. The pigeons in the cage had started to move about. Somewhere below, a pressure cooker went, the same as in Nayapalli, the same sound in every city in India at that hour.

"Mr. Sengupta," Bapa said, "after the second walk, he came again in the jeep, and looked at the book again. And it closed. Eight millimetres. And he did not take the note out of my file. They don't take notes out. He wrote another note, under it. Also one line."

"What did it say?"

Bapa was quiet for a moment.

"Officer re-ran the line on own initiative. Closed."

* * *

He didn't tell me what it meant. He wasn't a man who told you what things meant. He said, after a while, "So. You made a mistake. The man in Seattle found it. Good. Now you know something you did not know on Friday." And then: "The note will be in your file. Let it be. Write the second note."

"How?"

"The same way," said Bapa. "Go out again. Come back again." He breathed through his nose. "But first eat curd rice. Your Maa is standing here looking at me."

I laughed. I hadn't thought I could. It came out wet and strange, but it was a laugh.

"Bapa."

"Hm."

"Why didn't you ever tell me? About Koraput?"

The line was quiet for a long time.

"You didn't need it," he said finally. "Until now."

Then he gave the phone back to Maa, and Maa said, "Curd rice. Now. Then sleep. Call me in the evening," and hung up before I could say anything, because a call to Bangalore was still, in her bones, a trunk call, and you kept it short.

* * *

I ate the curd rice. All of it. I slept for fourteen hours. I went back to the office on Thursday night and took the first hard ticket in the queue, and the one after that, and the one after that.

I didn't take any more of the bank's calls, for a while. Nobody asked me to. But I asked if I could read the man in Seattle's notes on what he'd found, the real root, and he sent them, all of them, with a kind email at the top, and I sat with them for three weeks of nights, between tickets, until I understood not only what he'd found but how he'd found it, and why I hadn't. I wrote it all out in the notebook by my keyboard. Eleven pages. At the top of the first page I wrote, in capitals, the thing I had got wrong, and under it the thing I should have asked before I signed off, which was a very simple question, which was: If I change this and I'm wrong, how will I know?

Going out, you can make a mistake and not know. Coming back, the numbers tell you.

It became, later, the first thing I taught anybody who joined a team of mine. Before you sign off on anything, how will you know if you're wrong. Ask it every time. Even when you're tired. Especially.

The promotion came through in February, five months late, with a different manager's signature on it. In my file, I'm sure, the note is still there. Premature. I've never asked to see it. I know what's under it.

That night, on the roof in BTM Layout, I had written only:

Called home. Maa: have you eaten. Bapa: Koraput, 1979. 41 cm.

He walked it again.

And after a long time, at the bottom of the page, small:

He has a note in his file too.

Contents

Chapter 20

Give It to Max

I'll go through the next years quickly, because they're the part of the story that's least interesting to tell and was the hardest to live.

I was promoted. Then promoted again. I moved from the phones to a team that handled only the worst problems, the ones that came from the biggest customers, the banks and the airlines and the governments, where a broken system could mean a hundred thousand people unable to do their jobs. I moved from Bangalore to Hyderabad and back to Bangalore. I learned to speak in meetings. This was harder than anything I'd ever done, harder than Biostatistics; the boy who had spoken to two people in the whole of Survey of India Colony had to stand in a room of strangers, some of them in suits flown in from Seattle, and say "This is what went wrong, and this is what we're going to do." I wrote what I was going to say in the diary the night before, every time, and practised it on the balcony of whatever flat I was living in, to the wall opposite.

Somewhere around year six I stopped being the person who fixed things and became the person who looked after the people who fixed things. Then the person who looked after the customers who were too big for anyone else to look after. Contracts with numbers in them I would not have been able to say out loud in Bapa's flat without someone asking me to repeat it. I flew to places I had only seen on the cards in the Gold Flake tin. Sydney, where I went to the Sydney Cricket Ground on a Sunday and stood in the empty stands and thought about Rohan. London. Seattle, where it rained the Bangalore way, briefly and politely, and I missed Bhubaneswar so much I went back to the hotel and called Maa.

I took the hard job every time. Every escalation no one wanted. Every customer who had made three other managers quit. Every night call from a different time zone. It became, in the end, what I was known for; people would say, in meetings I wasn't in, I was told later, "Give it to Max, he'll sit with it." I liked that. I liked it more than any title they gave me.

Bapa never once said he was proud of me.

* * *

I want to be fair to him. He came to visit me in Bangalore in 2014, with Maa, and I took them to see the office, the big glass building with the security gates and the cafeteria with food from every state in India. Maa walked around it with her mouth slightly open, touching things. Bapa walked behind her with his hands behind his back, looking at everything, the way he had looked at the specification for a government building in 1999, if he had ever seen it.

In the cafeteria he said, "How many people work here?"

"In this building, about four thousand."

"And you are in charge of how many?"

"Directly? About sixty. Indirectly, more."

He nodded. He ate a dosa from left to right.

On the way out, at the security gate, he stopped and looked back up at the glass building, at the logo on the top of it, for a long moment.

"This is not biotechnology," he said.

"No, Bapa."

"Hm," he said. And that was all.

I lay awake that night in my flat with my parents asleep in my bedroom and me on the sofa, and I felt eleven years old. I felt like I had carried twelve buckets up four floors and he had looked at the drums and said, "Hm."

I wrote in the diary: Twenty-six years old. Still waiting for Bapa to say it.

And then, under it, because I had learned by then that the diary was where I had to be honest even when I didn't want to be: Maybe he never will. Maybe that's his language. Maybe "hm" is the whole sentence.

I didn't believe that. Not yet.

* * *

Rohan, for what it's worth, had his own road.

He went from his engineering college in Rourkela to a software company in Pune, then to one in Gurgaon, then to an MBA, then to a bank in Singapore, where he did something with money that he explained to me once over a long phone call and that I still don't understand. He married a girl from Cuttack whose mother had once been Lipi Nani's teacher. He had two children, both girls, both of whom he taught to bat in a Singapore condominium car park with a tennis ball and a set of plastic stumps.

He called me at two in the morning one night in 2017, my time, after a bad day, and talked for an hour about nothing, about cricket and old cards and the footprint on his bat, and then, near the end, he said, "Do you remember when you used to bowl and bowl and I used to just bat?"

"I remember."

"I used to think you were the biggest idiot in Bhubaneswar."

"I know. You told me. Every day."

He laughed. Then he was quiet for a long time, so long I thought the line had dropped.

"I think about that," he said. "I think I got good at standing there. And you got good at running in." He didn't say anything else. I didn't need him to.

"You still have the bat?" I said.

"The blade. In a cupboard."

"Keep it."

"Obviously, re."

* * *

In 2021, at thirty-three, I left.

It surprised everyone. I had a good job, a big title, a flat in Bangalore with a balcony that looked out on a rain tree. Maa cried on the phone. Bapa said, "Hm." Mamuni Nani told me, in her secretariat voice, that I was being irresponsible. Lipi Nani asked if I was sick.

Only Chiku, who was a doctor by then, in Delhi, and the only one in the family who had always known exactly what she wanted, said, "Bhaaai. Finally." In the long rising voice she had used when she was four, calling a cow in from a field.

I had seen something, in those last years at the big company. I had seen that the machines were learning to talk. Not like the old software, which did only what you told it and broke when you asked it anything else. These new systems could read and write and reason, more or less. They could answer the easy calls. Soon, I could see, they would answer most of the hard ones too.

The people around me were afraid of it. I understood that. But I sat with it, the way I sat with everything, and after a while it opened, and what I saw on the other side was not a threat. I saw a tool for people like me. For boys at the back of the assembly. For the ones with horses inside them, who couldn't sit through the lecture but could sit through a problem if someone would only let them come at it their own way. For the people on the support floor at three in the morning, drowning in tickets.

I started building. Small things at first, with two friends from the old job, in a rented room above a bakery in Indiranagar that smelled of cardamom buns all day. I wrote code, badly at first, the coding Rohan had told me to learn on his laptop in 2006, sixteen years late. I sat through it. It opened.

It was the hardest thing I had ever done. Every week something broke. Every month we nearly ran out of money. There was nobody to escalate to; I was the escalation. There was no one to give the hard job to.

I loved it more than anything I'd done in my life.

Then, one evening in February 2024, my phone lit up with Chiku's name, and when I answered she said only, "Come. Now."

Contents

Chapter 21

Field Book

Chiku took the call from the hospital before any of us did, because Chiku was the one whose number Bapa had written, two years earlier, on a slip of paper that he kept folded in his wallet behind his pension card, under the words In case.

It was February 2024. He had gone for his evening walk in Nayapalli, the same slow circuit round the park he'd done every evening since he retired, with the stick, and on the far side of the park, by the temple, he had sat down on a bench and not been able to get up. A man selling peanuts had seen him. The man had found the slip in his wallet and called the number on it, and the number was a phone in Delhi, in the pocket of a doctor doing a ward round in the cardiology department of a government hospital, who excused herself from a patient's bed, listened for thirty seconds, and said, in a voice the peanut seller described later to everyone in the park as "like a police officer," exactly what he was to do next.

By the time Maa knew, he was in an ambulance. By the time I knew, in Bangalore, in a meeting about a customer in Ohio, Chiku had already spoken to the duty doctor at the hospital on the Cuttack road, and to a senior cardiologist there who had been two years ahead of her in medical college, and had booked herself on the morning flight.

"It's his heart," she said to me on the phone. "It's not the end. I don't think it's the end. Come anyway."

The last flight from Bangalore had gone at ten past eight. It was seven-forty. I was in an auto on Hosur Road by seven forty-five, refreshing a booking site on my phone with my thumb, and the auto was in a jam under the Silk Board flyover that did not move for twenty-two minutes, and I watched the flight close on the screen, and then I sat there with the horns going and booked the six a.m. instead.

In Bhubaneswar, at that hour, the ambulance was at Rasulgarh, Chiku told me later, stuck behind a wedding procession with a brass band, and the driver was leaning on the siren and the band was playing louder to compete. Lipi Nani was in a hired car from Cuttack coming the other way across the Mahanadi bridge. Mamuni Nani was still in the secretariat, in a meeting with a minister, and had her phone face down on the table and did not see the first three calls.

Chiku saw all of it. She was the one standing in the emergency entrance under the tube light when the ambulance came in, and she was the one who walked beside the trolley, reading the monitor upside down.

At two in the morning she phoned me again. I was lying awake on my bed in Bangalore with my shoes on.

"They've done it," she said. "Two stents."

"So he's fine."

She didn't answer straight away. Chiku always answered straight away. It was the thing that made her a doctor.

"Chiku."

"I don't know, Bhai," she said. "His pressure dropped on the table. They brought it back. I watched them bring it back." I heard her breathe. "I'm his daughter tonight. I'm not his doctor. I don't know."

I sat up in the dark and put my feet on the floor and kept them there until it was time to leave for the airport.

* * *

I got there at eleven the next morning and the first person I saw, in the corridor outside the cardiac unit, was Lipi Nani, in her nurse's white, with her hair pinned up and a lanyard round her neck from the hospital in Cuttack where she was a nursing superintendent now, giving instructions to two of the hospital's own nurses in a voice that had made bus conductors give up. They were nodding. They didn't work for her. It didn't matter. She was the one who knew what to do.

"He's stable," she said, as soon as she saw me, before I could ask. "Blockage. Two arteries. They put in stents last night. He's sleeping. Maa is in the canteen. Mamuni Nani is doing the forms. Chiku is with the cardiologist. You," she looked me up and down, "have not eaten."

"I ate on the flight."

"That's not eating." She took me by the elbow, exactly the way she had taken Chiku's foot on the road at Saheed Nagar, and steered me down the corridor towards the canteen. "Go. Maa wants to see you."

Mamuni Nani was at the reception desk in the lobby with a plastic folder and three phones. One was hers, one was Bapa's, and one was a secretariat phone, which had rung twice since I walked in, and which she answered both times with the words "Joint Secretary," in a voice so flat and calm that I understood, for the first time, what the department must be like with her in it. She waved at me without looking up. When I got closer, I saw that she had filled in every form in that folder in block capitals, with every seven crossed.

* * *

Maa was in the canteen at a steel table with a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, and when she saw me she stood up and held my face in both her hands, the way she had held Chiku's at Saheed Nagar, and turned it slightly to the light.

"You're thin," she said.

"I'm fine, Maa."

"Your Bapa will be fine. Chiku says." She sat down again. "Chiku says, so it's true."

She was sixty-two. She had gone grey all at once, in her fifties, and stopped dyeing it the year Bapa retired, and her hair was white now and pulled back in a small bun that she still pinned with the same two black pins she'd used in Quarter No. 8. She was still small and still straight-backed and still had the hands. Her hands had never changed. Square and strong, with short nails and a burn scar across the back of the left one from a kadhai in 1994, and the skin on the tips of her fingers hard from forty years of grinding and peeling and pinching the edges of pitha shut.

I sat with her. We didn't say much. She asked about the company. She asked if I was eating. She asked if I had a girl, which she asked every time, and I said no, which I said every time, and she said "Hm," every time.

Then she reached down into the cloth bag at her feet, the same kind of cloth bag she'd always had, and took out something wrapped in a plastic sleeve, and put it on the steel table between us.

It was a letter. An old one, on thin blue paper gone soft, folded in three, with a printed letterhead at the top in Odia and English. All India Radio, Sambalpur. The date was 1979. It was addressed to her, by her maiden name, care of her father, in a village I had spent every summer of my childhood in.

"Your Bapa told you," she said. "Years ago. I know he did. He told me he told you."

"He told me not to ask."

"Yes. Because I told him to tell you that." She smoothed the plastic flat with her square hand. "I brought it because I thought, if something happens to him, I don't want to be the only one who knows where it is."

I read it. It was three short paragraphs. They had heard her sing at the annual function of the Women's College. They would be glad if she could present herself at the station on a given date for a voice test, for possible inclusion in a programme of folk songs on Sunday mornings. Travel would be reimbursed. It was signed by a programme executive whose name was printed underneath in English.

"Why did Dadu say no?"

Maa looked at the letter for a long time.

"He didn't say no," she said. "That is what your Bapa thinks. That is what everyone thinks. My father said, if you want to go, go. He gave me the bus fare. I had the bus fare in my hand." She turned the cup of tea round on the table, once. "I didn't go."

"Why?"

"Because I was frightened." She said it plainly, the way Bapa said a number. "Of the station. Of the microphone. Of the people from Sambalpur town. I was a village girl, seventeen. I thought they would laugh. I thought I would open my mouth and nothing would come. So I told my father I didn't want to. And he said, all right. And then two years later I married your Bapa, and came to Bhubaneswar, and I told everyone my father had said no, because that was easier than saying I had been frightened."

I didn't know what to say.

"You were always the opposite," Maa said. "You were never frightened of going. You were only frightened of waiting." She folded the letter back into its sleeve. "I used to watch you on the balcony, your legs going, and think, that boy would have taken the bus. That boy would have taken the bus the same morning, without the fare." She almost smiled. "I was so angry with you, sometimes. And I didn't know why."

She put the letter back in her bag.

"Don't tell your sisters," she said. "Ghara katha ghare rahe."

* * *

I took the night shift.

That was how my sisters put it, and it was the right word. Chiku had to be in Delhi again in two days, Lipi Nani had a hospital to run, Mamuni Nani had a department, and Maa, everyone agreed, without telling her, was not to sit up. So I sat up. I was the one who was used to nights.

The cardiac unit at night was dim and blue and full of small sounds. Machines breathing. A drip somewhere ticking into its chamber, the way it had in the bottle Chiku held at Puri. A nurse at the station with a cup of tea and a phone, scrolling. Bapa was in the bed nearest the window, propped up on two pillows, with a line in the back of his hand and wires going from his chest to a screen above the bed where a green line drew the same small mountain range again and again, forever.

He slept until about two. Then he opened his eyes, and looked at the ceiling for a while, and then turned his head and found me in the chair.

"You came."

"Of course I came."

"Your company?"

"It can run without me for a few days."

He thought about that. "Hm," he said. And then, after a while: "Water."

I gave him water, from a steel tumbler with a bent straw, holding it for him because his hands were weak. He drank, and lay back.

"Chiku was here," he said.

"She's sleeping at Lipi Nani's."

"She spoke to the doctor in English. Very fast. He was frightened of her." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "I was also frightened of her."

I laughed. Quietly, because of the nurse. He watched me laugh.

* * *

I don't know how long we talked. Hours. It was the first time. I have tried since to think of a single conversation before that night, in thirty-five years, that was longer than ten minutes, and I can't. Not the canal. Not the trunk call. Those were him telling me things. This was the first time we talked.

He asked about my work. Not the title, not the money. What I actually did all day. I tried to tell him. The machines that could read and write. The people at three in the morning drowning in tickets. The boys at the back of the assembly. He listened with his eyes on the ceiling.

"Like a level," he said at the end. "The machine. It is an instrument."

"Yes. Exactly like that."

"And you are the one who reads the staff."

"Something like that."

"Hm." He thought for a long time. "That is a good job."

He had never said that. Not about anything I had done. I sat in the blue light with it in my lap and didn't move, in case it went away.

Then he said, to the ceiling, "Burla."

"What?"

"Burla. The engineering college. Near Sambalpur. Nineteen seventy-one." He breathed through his nose, slowly. "I got admission. Civil engineering. I had the letter."

I had never known this. Nobody had ever said it, not Maa, not Bada Bapa, not anyone in the colony who knew everybody's everything.

"What happened?"

"My father died. In the August. Before the term." His voice was even. "I was the second son, but Bada Bapa was already married, with children, and the land was small. Somebody had to earn. There was an exam for Survey of India. Field assistant. I sat it in the October. I joined in seventy-three." The green line went up and down. "Thirty-four years."

I sat very still.

"I was going to build bridges," Bapa said. "Instead I measured where other people should build them." He was quiet. "It is also a good job. I am not complaining. I was good at it. But."

He didn't finish. In our family, "but" was a whole sentence too.

I understood, then. All of it, at once, the way the contours on the map had clicked, all those years ago, into a hill. Rohan's father's sweets. The long silence on the balcony when I said "biotechnology." It is not engineering. Twenty years of "Hm." He had not been disappointed in me. Or not only. He had been standing at the edge of a bridge he never built, watching his son walk away from it too, and he hadn't had the words to say: I know what it costs.

"Bapa," I said. "I didn't know."

"No. I didn't tell you." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me. "I didn't know how to tell you things. You were always moving. Like a bubble that will not settle. I would look at you, and you would already be somewhere else. I was frightened for you." He said it the same way Maa had said it in the canteen, plainly, as a measurement. "I thought, this boy will not wait for anything. And the world makes you wait. So I said, next time. Next time. I thought I was teaching you to wait."

"You were."

"No," he said. "You were teaching yourself. I was just saying next time."

* * *

Near four, he slept again, for a while. When he woke the second time the window had gone from black to a very dark blue, and somewhere outside on the Cuttack road the first trucks were going past, and the nurse had changed.

He was quieter now. Tired. But he said, without opening his eyes, "The diaries. You still keep them?"

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"All of them. I have twenty-eight, I think. Maybe more."

He nodded slowly against the pillow.

"Good," he said. "I also kept."

I thought he meant his field books, which he had kept, dozens of them, in a trunk under the bed in Nayapalli, though he was supposed to have handed them in. I said so. He didn't answer. He only lay there, with a very faint expression on his face that I would only understand much later, in the rain, standing in a pool of brown water by a young mango tree.

Then he said, "Tell me about the school tree."

"What school tree?"

"Your Maa says there was a tree. At the KV. And a teacher. When you were small. Your Maa says you came home and you didn't speak for a week." He opened his eyes. "I never asked. I am asking."

So I told him. At four in the morning, in the cardiac unit, twenty-seven years later. About Mrs. Das and the chalk and the forty-three heads turning. "When is the best time to plant a tree?" My hand going up. In summer, Miss. Because then you have to water it. "Are you stupid?" The laugh. The boy who muttered it behind me like he had found a coin. The neem the peon watered out of a bucket every afternoon in May, grumbling, that grew. The gulmohar planted in the rain that died.

He listened to all of it without moving. The green mountains went up and down on the screen.

When I had finished, he was quiet for a long time.

"In my village," he said finally, "my father planted every mango tree in our yard in Baisakh. In the hottest month. Never in the rains." He breathed. "He used to say, a tree planted in the rain is lazy. It never has to look for water, so it never learns where the water is. Its roots stay near the top. And then one bad year, it falls." He turned his head and looked at the window. "He carried water from the river every day. Two pots, on a pole, on his shoulder. Two kilometres. For two summers. Seven trees. Every one of them is still standing."

I couldn't speak.

"I had forgotten that," Bapa said. "Until you said. Summer roots, he used to call it."

He looked at me then. It was nearly light.

"Your teacher was wrong," he said. "You were right."

He closed his eyes. And then, almost asleep, so quietly that I nearly didn't hear it over the machines:

"I should have said. In 1997."

* * *

He came home a week later, thinner, slower, with a new stick and a plastic box of tablets divided into the days of the week that Chiku had labelled in red marker with every seven crossed. He sat on the balcony in Nayapalli and read the Samaja from front to back and said "Hm" to Maa and did the crossword in pencil. He did not refer to anything we had said in the cardiac unit, not once. I didn't either. We didn't need to. It had been said. It was in the book.

On my last night before I flew back to Bangalore, I sat on the floor of the bedroom in Nayapalli by the light from the balcony door and wrote it all down. Every word I could remember. It took eleven pages.

At the end I wrote:

Burla, 1971. Koraput, 1979. Sambalpur, 1979. Both of them had a bus fare once.

And then:

Dadu planted in Baisakh. Summer roots.

And at the bottom, after a long time:

He said it. Twenty-seven years. I didn't need it to be 1997. It was enough that it was now.

Contents

Chapter 22

Summer Planting

The letter came to my parents' flat in Nayapalli in March of last year, and Maa read it to me over the phone in the voice she used for official things, which was the voice of a woman reading out a ration card.

Survey of India Colony was being redeveloped. The old Type II blocks, built in the sixties and seventies, had been declared unsafe; there would be new towers, eight floors, with lifts. Residents were being shifted in phases. Block C would be among the first to come down, at the end of June, after the current occupants moved out.

"They are writing to all the old allottees," Maa said. "In case anyone wants to collect anything. As if we left anything." She paused. "Your Bapa read it twice."

"What did he say?"

"He said, 'Good steel. They used good steel in those days.' And then he went for his walk."

* * *

I flew to Bhubaneswar on the second of April.

The airport was new and glass and air-conditioned, and the road from it was a six-lane highway with flyovers stepping over the old squares one after another towards Cuttack. Bhubaneswar had become a city that had flyovers and malls and a cricket stadium where international matches were played, and a stretch along Jaydev Vihar where the restaurants had English names and valet parking. The Oberoi was still there, behind its wall, its gardens. They had renamed it some years ago. I still call it the Oberoi. Everyone over forty does.

Bapa was seventy-two. He had become, in the last few years, a smaller version of himself, the way old men do, as if he were being slowly folded for storage. His knee was worse. He walked with a stick now, a plain wooden one that he hated and leaned on anyway. But he still sat on the balcony every morning with the Samaja and his tea, and he still read it from front to back including the advertisements, and he still did the crossword in pencil.

"How long are you staying?" he said, when I had put my bag down.

"Until the monsoon."

He looked at me over his glasses. "Your company?"

"It can run without me for a while. I've built it so it can." This was mostly true. I had two very good people who had told me, in almost exactly these words, to go away and stop hovering. "I can work from here. Laptop."

"Hm," said Bapa. He went back to the Samaja.

I went into the bedroom to unpack. Under my clothes, in a plastic bag that had once held a sari, were the diaries. All of them. Twenty-nine, at last count, from the thin one with the film actress on the cover to a leather one with my company's logo on it that someone had given me at a conference. I had brought them all. I didn't know why, exactly. It had just seemed like the right time for them to come home.

* * *

The estate officer at the colony office was a young man in his late twenties with a moustache he was clearly still deciding about. The office had been rebuilt after the cyclone, a squat pink building, and was going to be demolished too, in a later phase. On the wall behind his desk was a framed photograph of the colony from the air, taken in what looked like the early eighties, and I stood and looked at it for so long that he cleared his throat.

"You want to plant a tree," he said, reading the note I had written.

"Near Block C. In the strip between the road and the colony wall. Where the new towers won't go." I had looked at the redevelopment plan, which was pinned to the noticeboard outside. "There's going to be a garden there, according to the plan. A green belt. I'd like to plant one tree in it now. I'll look after it. I'll pay for it."

He looked at me, and then at the note, and then at me.

"Sir," he said, politely, "it is April."

"I know."

"It is thirty-nine degrees. It will be forty-four by May. You will have to water it every day. Twice a day." He spread his hands, reasonable. "If you wait until the monsoon, end of June, you can plant it then and the rain will do everything. Everybody plants in the monsoon. Van Mahotsav is in July. We are doing a whole drive. You can plant with the drive."

I smiled at him. I couldn't help it. I think he thought I was mad.

"I'd like to plant it now," I said. "I'll water it. Every day."

He looked at me for a while longer, and then shrugged, and signed the note, and stamped it with a rubber stamp that he had to breathe on twice before it worked.

On the way out I looked at the demolition schedule on the noticeboard again. Block C. 30 June. I counted on my fingers in the corridor. Eighty-three days. I wrote the number inside the cover of the diary, and every night after that I crossed it out and wrote the next one underneath.

"Your wish, sir."

On the way out, I paused at the door. "Is the tube well still there? Behind Block F?"

He looked surprised. "Yes. It's still working. How do you know about that?"

"I carried water from it once."

* * *

I bought the sapling from a nursery near Khandagiri, where a woman with betel-stained teeth and a Bluetooth earpiece walked me up and down rows of black polythene bags until I found what I wanted. A mango. A local one, not a grafted hybrid, about two feet tall, with a dozen dark leaves and a stem as thick as my thumb.

"For the garden?" she said.

"For the colony."

"Plant in July," she said, with total certainty, putting it into the auto for me. "Now it will burn."

"I'll water it."

She looked at me the way everybody had always looked at me. "Your wish," she said.

* * *

I planted it on the morning of the eighth of April, at six, before the sun had climbed over the RRL trees.

I had chosen the spot the evening before. It was straight out from the corner of Block C that faced the road, where, a hand's width above the ground, under forty years of whitewash, the broad arrow was still cut into the plinth with its line across the top. I had crouched and put my finger on the line, the way he had in 1998, and then I had paced out twelve steps from it towards the colony wall, a bowler's run-up, and pushed a stick into the ground.

The strip of ground between Block C and the colony wall was hard as a floor. Dry red earth, packed, with tufts of dead grass and a crushed Frooti carton and a piece of blue plastic from somebody's old school bag. I had brought a crowbar and a shovel from a hardware shop in Unit 2, and I dug a hole about two feet deep and two feet across, and it took me an hour, and by the end of it my shirt was black with sweat and my hands were raw. I filled the bottom of the hole with compost from the nursery and some water, and set the sapling in it, and cut away the polythene bag with Maa's tailoring scissors, which I had borrowed without telling her, again, thirty years later.

Then I pressed the earth in around it with my hands.

I was on my knees in the dirt, patting the soil down, when I heard the tap of the stick behind me.

Bapa was standing at the edge of the road in his white kurta, leaning on the stick. I had not heard him come. He must have taken an auto from Nayapalli, at six in the morning, without telling anyone. Maa told me later he had got up at four-thirty and sat dressed on the balcony for an hour, waiting for it to be light enough.

"You did not wait," he said.

"No."

He looked at the sapling for a long time. Then he looked up at the block behind it. Block C, Type II. Four floors. The balcony at the top on the left, Quarter No. 8, with a new family's washing on the line, the last family who would ever live there.

"Hm," he said.

Then he looked down at the corner of the plinth, at the arrow, and then out along the line of my twelve paces to the sapling, and I saw him measure it, without meaning to, the way he measured everything.

"That goes when the building goes," he said, about the arrow. That was all.

He lowered himself, slowly, painfully, onto the low wall at the edge of the road, the same wall where we had sat as boys trading Center Fresh cards, with a grey archaeological layer of gum still stuck under it, I was almost sure. He put the stick across his knees.

"Water," he said.

"I'm going to get it now."

"From the tube well?"

"Yes."

"I will pump," he said.

"Bapa, your knee..."

"I will pump," he said again, in the voice he had used for the specification of a government building. "You carry."

* * *

We did it every day. For eleven weeks.

Every morning at six, and every evening at six, through the whole of the summer. I would pick him up from Nayapalli in an auto, or later, when the auto driver got used to us, the auto would just come, and we would go to the colony, and walk, slowly, with his stick, to the tube well behind Block F. He would pump. I would hold the bucket. Then I would carry it, two buckets each trip, across the colony and around Block D to the strip of ground by Block C, and pour them slowly around the base of the mango, and watch the dry red earth drink, and go back.

Eight buckets in the morning. Eight in the evening. Bapa kept count in a small notebook he carried in his kurta pocket. At the top of the first page, I saw once over his shoulder, he had written BM. Block C. and the date, and drawn the arrow, and every seven in the column was crossed.

The residents watched us. Of course they did. It was Survey of India Colony. The families who were still there, waiting for their shifting date, stood on balconies in the evenings and called to each other across the gap between buildings. "That is the old man from Quarter No. 8. And his son. The one who went to Bangalore." "What are they doing?" "Watering a tree." "In May?" "In May." "Why?" Somebody, I never found out who, started putting out a plastic chair for Bapa by the tube well, every morning, so that he could sit and pump. Then a cushion appeared on the chair.

Maa came with us only once. It was a Sunday evening in the middle of May, the hottest week, and she said at lunch that she wanted to see this famous tree that everyone in Nayapalli was talking about, and came in the auto with her cloth bag on her knees. She stood by the mango while I poured, and looked at it for a long time, and then at Block C, and then she sat down on the low wall beside Bapa, in the last of the light, and began, very softly, to sing. The swing song. The long slow one that went up and down in curves. She didn't sing it at the level of breath this time. She sang it out loud, the way she had sung it once under the neem behind Block A, at night, when she thought nobody was listening. On the balconies of Block D the women who had been calling to each other went quiet. Somebody turned off a television. Bapa sat beside her with his stick across his knees and looked straight ahead and did not move at all, and I stood by the tree with an empty bucket in each hand until she had finished.

"For the roots," she said, when I asked her afterwards in the auto why she had. And then, looking out of the side of the auto at the traffic: "And because there was nobody to be frightened of."

The heat came on. By the end of April it was forty-two. By the middle of May it was forty-four, and the radio was reading out advisories again, and the roads at noon were empty, and the onion-in-the-pocket was still, I discovered, a thing that mothers in Bhubaneswar insisted on. The mango sapling drooped in the afternoons. Some days its leaves curled at the edges and went pale, and I would stand over it in the evening, sweating, and feel the old fear, the mango in the Dalda tin, the brown stick in October.

Then I would water it, and in the morning it would be standing up again.

By the middle of May it had put out new leaves at the tip. They were the colour of copper, soft and limp, the way new mango leaves are, like something not yet sure of itself. Bapa leaned on his stick and looked at them for a long time.

"Copper," he said.

"Yes."

"In the village we used to say, copper leaves mean the roots have found something."

* * *

Rohan came from Singapore in the last week of May, with his wife and his two daughters, to see his mother, who still lived in Bhubaneswar, and to see me.

He was forty pounds heavier than the boy on the road outside Block C. He had grey at his temples and an expensive watch and an accent that had picked up something Singaporean in the vowels. When he got out of the car at the colony gate and saw me, he spread his arms and said, "Saala, you're still doing the donkey job," and hugged me so hard my back cracked.

He had brought the bat.

Not the whole bat. The blade, the old cheap blade from the sports shop at Unit 2, cracked down the middle and bound with insulating tape, with the footprint still on it. Faded, but you could see it if you knew where to look. He'd had a new handle fitted in Singapore, a proper one, so that you could hold it.

"For one over," he said. "Before they knock it down."

So we played one over. On the road between Block C and Block D, at six in the evening, in the heat, with the electric pole and a stack of three bricks I'd taken from the demolition pile for wickets, and a tennis ball I'd bought from the shop at the corner of the main road, the one where I used to buy Pepsi bottles in a cloth bag. Rohan's daughters stood at the drain and fielded, screaming. His wife filmed it on her phone. Some of the residents came out on their balconies and watched, and a few of the boys from the colony, KV boys in their blue shirts, home from tuition, stood in a row by the stairwell and laughed at the two old men.

Bapa sat on the low wall with his stick across his knees.

I marked out my run-up with my heel. Twelve paces. I was thirty-seven years old and had not bowled properly in nearly ten years, and when I ran in for the first ball something in my left hamstring said something unprintable, and the ball went a yard wide of the bricks and Rohan didn't even swing.

"Wide!" shouted his elder daughter.

"Bowl properly, re!" shouted Rohan.

I walked back. I marked it again. I ran in.

I won't tell you about all six balls. He hit two of them. One of them went off a balcony, the Raos' old balcony on the third floor of Block D, which was four, and I had to go and get it from the stairwell myself. One of them he missed completely and it went past the bricks by a whisker and his daughters screamed as if the house were on fire.

The last ball, I hit the bricks.

I didn't knock them over. I clipped the top one. It slid off the stack with a small clack, and fell, and lay on the tar.

There was a short silence. Then Rohan's daughters went mad, and the KV boys by the stairwell cheered ironically and then, I think, a little bit genuinely, and Rohan stood at the crease with the old blade in his hands and looked at the brick on the ground.

"Saala," he said softly. "After twenty-five years."

I walked down the pitch, breathing hard, my hamstring on fire, and picked up the brick and put it back on the stack.

From the low wall, Bapa said, "Hit it?"

"Once," I said.

He nodded.

Later, as the light went, Rohan and I stood by the colony wall at the edge of Janata Maidan. There was a new boundary wall there now, higher, painted with a government slogan about clean cities, and you couldn't see over it. Rohan stood on his toes and tried.

"What's there now?"

"The maidan. Parking. A stage."

"I want to see."

I looked at him. He looked at me. Forty pounds heavier and a bad back.

I crouched.

"You're mad," he said.

"I promised. Next time I hold you."

He laughed so hard he had to put a hand on the wall. Then, with enormous difficulty and a great deal of swearing in Odia and Singaporean English, he climbed on, and I stood up, my knees screaming, my hamstring gone completely, and for about four seconds Rohan Patnaik, Vice President of something at a bank in Singapore, sat on my shoulders and looked over the wall at Janata Maidan in the dusk.

"Anything?" I gasped.

"No," he said. "Nothing. Just a field." A pause. "It's beautiful, re."

Then my knees went and we both fell over sideways onto the dead grass, and his wife's phone caught all of it, and I'm told it has been watched in Singapore something like four hundred times.

* * *

I was asked to speak at KV No. 1, in the first week of June, at a small function the school was having for old students. Someone had found out I had a company. I didn't want to do it. I wrote what I would say in the diary the night before, and practised it on the balcony in Nayapalli to the wall of the building opposite, and then I put the page away and didn't use it.

The school had a new building now, with a smart board in every classroom and a lift that didn't work. The benches were still wood. Somebody had carved a small map of India into the one in the front row, with Kashmir slightly too large.

I told them about the road and the bricks. I told them about carrying water. I didn't tell them about Mrs. Das. I didn't need to. I just said that once, a long time ago, in this school, I had been told I was stupid for a reason I still thought was a good one, and that I had believed it for a long time, and that I had been wrong to believe it.

Afterwards, the children filed out in lines by height, and I saw, near the back, a boy of about nine. Tall for his age. His leg was going under the bench like a sewing machine. He was looking out of the window at a neem tree, a big lopsided one with a scar on its left side where a branch had gone, a very long time ago.

I went over to him as he stood up to leave. His teacher frowned, but let me.

"What's your name?"

He told me. He looked terrified.

"You like running?"

He nodded.

"You find it hard to sit?"

He went red, and looked at the floor, and nodded again.

I crouched down, so I was at his height.

"You're not lazy," I said. "Okay? You're not stupid either. You just have a lot in you. It will take you longer to learn to sit. That's all. It's not a bad thing. It just means when you learn it, you'll be very strong."

He looked at me for a long moment, the way I must once have looked at Bapa at the top of the stairs. He didn't say anything.

Then he went out with the others.

I don't know if it mattered. I'll never know. I wrote his name in the diary that night, and under it: Water him.

* * *

Ten days.

The family in Quarter No. 8 moved out on the twentieth of June.

I asked them, a week before, if I could see the flat. They were a nice couple from Ganjam with a son at KV, and they had no idea who I was or why I cared, but the wife made tea and the husband showed me around as if I were a prospective buyer. It was so small. That was the first thing. Two rooms and a kitchen and a balcony, smaller than my hallway in Bangalore. I couldn't believe six people had lived there. I couldn't believe four children and a mother had slept on that floor.

The slab was still there. The cement shelf, in the bedroom, grey and bare. The wall above it had been whitewashed so many times that there was no trace of Sachin or Azhar or Wasim. But when I put my hand flat on the wall and moved it slowly, I could feel, under the paint, small rough ridges, like scars. Old rice paste.

The boy had stuck stickers of a cartoon I didn't recognise on the edge of his slab. I was absurdly glad.

I went out to the balcony.

The grille was the same. The hook for the lantern was the same. The view had changed completely: towers in the distance, a flyover, the glass of the office building across the road reflecting the afternoon. Janata Maidan behind its painted wall. But the RRL trees were still there on the other side, tall and dark.

And directly below, in the strip of ground between Block C and the colony wall, there was a young mango tree, three feet tall now, with copper leaves at the tip, and a ring of dark wet earth around its base from that morning's water.

I took the first diary out of my pocket. The thin one with the film actress on the cover, her face worn almost away. I opened it to the first page and read it standing at the grille where I had written it, twenty-eight years before.

I am not stupid. I just think about it differently.

Mango tree died in October. Next time water it.

I stood there for a long time. The wife from Ganjam brought me another cup of tea and went away again without saying anything. I think she could tell.

* * *

The storm came on the night of the twenty-third of June.

It was not a cyclone. It was the kind of storm Odisha gets before the monsoon proper, a kalbaisakhi, the old people call it, though the name belongs to an earlier month. The sky went brown in the evening and the wind came up all at once, out of nowhere, hot and then suddenly cold, and the power went, and the rain came sideways for an hour, and the city's new glass buildings rattled in their frames the same way the old concrete ones always had.

Seven days. I had written it inside the diary cover that morning.

I was in the flat in Nayapalli. I stood on the small balcony with the grille hot under my hands even in the wind, and watched the trees in the lane bend over, and thought: the mango. The power went at nine-fourteen. The whole of Nayapalli went dark in one breath, and the only light left was the lightning, which came every few seconds now and showed me the lane in flashes, the coconut palms bent flat, a plastic chair walking down the middle of the road by itself.

I phoned the colony watchman. It rang and rang. I phoned again. Then the line went dead in that particular way, with no ring at all, and I stood there with the phone against my ear listening to nothing.

I counted the gusts. I couldn't help it. One. A gap. Two, harder, and a sound from somewhere down the lane of a tin sheet tearing off a roof. I thought of the sapling as I had left it that evening, the ring of wet earth, the copper leaves at the tip. Eleven weeks of roots. Was eleven weeks enough? I didn't know. Nobody knew. That was the whole point of planting it in April.

It was three feet tall. It had been in the ground for eleven weeks. A tree that size in the wrong kind of wind could be torn out like hair.

I was putting on my shoes when Bapa came out of the bedroom in his vest and lungi, with his stick.

"Where are you going?"

"To the colony. To check on it."

"In this?"

"Yes."

He looked at me for a moment. Then he went back into the bedroom, and came out in his kurta, with a torch.

"Bapa, no. Stay. Your knee."

"I will come," he said. And because I knew that voice, I didn't argue.

* * *

We went in an auto whose driver was either very brave or very greedy, through streets full of broken branches, with the rain coming in through the open sides and soaking us both. At the colony gate we got out and walked, Bapa with his stick and my arm, me with the torch, the wind shoving at us, the rain loud on the tin roofs of the sheds, the dark full of noise.

I shone the torch on the strip of ground by Block C.

The mango was flat.

My heart stopped. It was bent over almost to the ground, its leaves pressed into the mud, the wind holding it down like a hand.

Then the wind dropped for a second, and it came up.

It came up slowly, shaking off the water, and stood, swaying. And then the wind came again and pushed it down, and it went down, and the wind dropped, and it came up again.

We stood there in the rain and watched it. Down. Up. Down. Up. Every time the wind let go, it stood.

Bapa's hand was on my shoulder. I don't know when he had put it there. It was heavy and warm and shaking slightly, from cold or from age or from something else.

He leaned close to my ear so I could hear him over the noise.

"Roots," he said.

"Yes."

"Summer roots."

"Yes, Bapa."

We stood there for a long time, until the wind went down and the rain began to fall properly, downwards, the way it was supposed to. Then I took him home.

* * *

The monsoon arrived four days later, on schedule, on the twenty-seventh of June. Heavy and slow and enormous, off the Bay of Bengal, the way it always had. It rained for three days without stopping. Drops like small stones. The roads turned to rivers. I lay awake at night in the flat in Nayapalli, listening to it on the roof, and I did not do any sums about drowning.

On the third morning, it eased, and I went to the colony with Bapa.

The mango was standing in a pool of brown water, every leaf shining, the copper ones at the top already turning green. The ground around it was soft and black. All along the colony wall, along the strip where the green belt would go, there were new things growing: grass, weeds, little bright seedlings of everything, coming up out of the mud by themselves, in their hundreds, the way things do in Odisha in the rain.

The mango stood a head above all of them.

"Now you don't have to water," said Bapa.

"No."

"The rain will do it."

"The rain is extra," I said.

He turned and looked at me. It took him a long time, with the stick. He looked at my face as if he were checking it against a survey sheet.

Then he took the small notebook out of his kurta pocket. Not this summer's notebook. An older one. Its cover was soft and grey and torn at the corner. He opened it carefully, his hands shaking a little, and held it out to me.

It was dated November 1999.

It was a list of days. One line for each, in his careful hand, with the seven that had a line through it. Water. Kerosene. Rice. And next to each day, under a column headed simply M., a number. The number of buckets I had carried up four floors.

Agreed 7, it said at the top of the column, in pencil, underlined.

Underneath, day after day after day, for five weeks: 8. 8. 9. 8. 10. 8. 9.

Never seven. Not once.

I looked up at him. I couldn't speak.

"I kept it," Bapa said. "In the almirah. In the drawer."

The special drawer.

I also kept, he had said, in the blue light of the cardiac unit, and I had thought he meant his field books.

He took the notebook back from me and closed it and put it in his pocket. He looked at the tree. He was quiet for a long time, leaning on his stick, the rain starting again lightly, falling on both of us.

"I used to say to you," he said, "next time."

"I remember."

"I was wrong." He said it simply, the way he said everything, as if it were a number that had finally checked out. "It was always this time. You were always doing it this time. I just did not know how to measure it."

He put his hand on my head, the way he used to when I was small, for a second, and took it away.

"You were right," he said. "About summer."

* * *

They brought Block C down on the second of July. I didn't watch. I've been told it took most of a day, and that the steel inside was very good, and that the machine operator had trouble with it.

The mango is still there. Maa sends me a photo every month on WhatsApp, always from the same angle, always slightly blurred, with no message. It is taller than me now. The new towers are going up behind it, eight floors, with lifts. The children who will live in them will have a tree in the green belt that someone planted in the wrong season, and nobody will remember who, and that is fine. That was always fine.

I went back to Bangalore at the end of July, to the room above the bakery that we've long since outgrown, to the work, to the hard calls nobody else wants. I still run in the mornings. I still sit at night. I still feel the slide come at forty-five minutes, every time, regular as a train. I still stay.

The night I got back, I sat on the balcony of my flat, the one with the rain tree, with the first diary and the last one side by side on my knees. It was raining. Bangalore rain, polite, brief, already stopping.

I opened the last diary to a clean page. I thought for a long time about what to write. Some kind of ending. Something that would tie it all together, the boy and the bricks and the buckets and the tree.

In the end I only wrote one line.

Watered it. It held.

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