Part 3 of 7 · 14 minThe Register

For a long time there was only one cross in the margin of the old register. It sat beside a column of Annamma's handwriting, neat blue letters, which he could not read and never tried to. The cross was in pencil, pressed so hard that it had come through on the next page. After it came a stretch of margin with nothing in it at all.

Everything that follows he learned the way he had learned his work at the Centre, by watching and by getting it wrong. There were only crowds, and the bell, and his hands, and each rule showed itself to him once and after that never changed.

The first was the crowd.

He knew already that an empty road undid him. What he did not know was the number. He learned it at a ferry landing, on a winter morning in his first year, when he was nothing at all, a coldness over the wet stone steps, while people came down to wait for the boat. A woman with a basket of brinjals. Two schoolteachers sharing one umbrella. A man leading a goat. At thirty-nine there was no bell and no bicycle and no hands. The goat did not count.

Then an old man came down the steps, knotting his head cloth as he walked, and there were forty. The bell rang by itself, tring-tring. The bicycle was under him, black and cold, the steel box tied on the carrier with its strip of cycle tube. Last came the hands, holding the glass syringe as if they had never put it down. A baby at the top of the steps woke and began to scream, and nobody could make it stop.

He had swabbed four arms when the ferry came in. It took twenty-two people and left eighteen on the steps, and the cotton dropped through his fingers on to the stone, and he went out like a lamp in a draught. The baby at the top of the steps stopped crying in the middle of a breath. From that morning he stood at the edge of every crowd and waited for the heads to come to forty.

Now, you might ask why forty. Nobody knows. But that was how many men came down the canal bund one Tuesday in 1976 with yoke poles and the iron weights of the market scales, and a thing like that leaves its measure behind.

The second was the witness.

For most of a year the needle gave nothing. At a village fair he covered three hundred arms in one morning, swab, needle, press, the sharp smell of spirit going ahead of him through the stalls, and at the end of it the barrel was as empty as when he began. Nobody flinched. Nobody looked at him. Every child at that fair looked at him, and every child was pulled away by the wrist and told to stop staring at nothing. He put his needle to one small arm, out of habit, and it stopped a hair from the skin and would not go further.

Then he rang the bell to clear his way through a knot of people, and an old washerman turned round, looked him full in the face and said, "Which department, sir?"

That arm gave.

After the washerman there were others, and he listened to them, because listening was all he had ever had. The washerman had been carried off by a river in flood as a boy, and years later had been struck by lightning under a tamarind tree, and had walked home from both. They all told it. Each one of them had been missed twice. The old people have a word for it, prana-gandam: a danger to life written in a person's stars, which either takes that person or is missed. Only the people who stood where he had once stood could see him, or hear the bell, or feel the needle. The rest gave him nothing and lost nothing, and he went through them the way rain goes through a net.

The third was the dose.

He had stood behind Annamma for eight years and watched her draw so much for a child and so much for a grown man, her thumbnail on the markings. So once, with a young schoolmaster at a wedding, he drew only to the first mark on the barrel and meant to stop there. He set his thumb against the steel ring of the plunger. The plunger rose anyway, under his thumb, slow and even, like water finding its level in a well, and the barrel filled to the top with that pale stuff, the colour of lamp-light on ghee. He pushed against it. It did not move until the needle was in his own left arm.

The schoolmaster rubbed the cold dot above his elbow, yawned in the middle of the wedding meal, told his wife he would go home early, and was dead in his sleep before dawn. There is no half. The plunger fills itself.

The fourth was the burning.

A young life kept him for one whole season, from the first rain to the last. An old life kept him a few weeks. Then brown spots came up on the backs of his hands. In the lid of the steriliser box, the face that looked back had grey at the temples. The fingers that held the syringe began to shake, so that the needle wrote little circles in the air before it went in. One full barrel, and the spots went, the grey went, the shake went, and he was twenty-nine again, the moustache neat, the pock marks on the left cheek where they had always been.

He learned early not to wait for the shaking. He took whenever a head turned at the bell, filled or empty, spring or winter.

There was one stretch of margin in the register he did not look at long. The crosses ran down the pages thick and regular, week after week, year after year, and then they stopped. After that came page after page of Annamma's blue handwriting with nothing beside it at all.

That was the year the whole country stayed home. He came to a market town on its market day and the bund was bare, the shutters were down, and a dog was asleep where the fritter stall should have been smoking. The temple had a lock on its gate. The cinema hall had a chain through its door handles. Where people did gather, outside a ration shop, they stood far apart in circles drawn on the ground with lime, eleven of them, fourteen, and not one line in the whole district came to forty.

The last life in him ran out in the third month, and there was nowhere to stand and take another. First the shaking. Then the spots. Then the syringe slipped through his fingers, and after that there were no fingers. What was left hung over the empty roads, thinner than breath on glass and counted heads that were not there. It did not end. It could not. It waited.

Then, one dawn, lorries backed into a vegetable market and men began to unload them. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty. Tring-tring. He stood among the crates and turned his hands over for a long time, while every baby in that market cried.

Now, you might ask why a man who was filled at Pedavanka in November should be at work again in December. That empty margin is the answer.

The last thing he learned was how to find them without reading a word.

He read skin. The cross-cut of a snakebite on an ankle, where somebody had once slashed it with a blade and sucked. The shiny patch of an old burn. The long ruled line down a chest, where a surgeon had opened a heart. He read vows. A head shaved in a month when no festival asked for it. A little silver offering held in a fist on the way to a temple. A thick black thread tied on an arm long ago and never cut. Most of all he read talk. People who have been missed twice cannot keep it to themselves. They tell it at tea stalls and bus stands and weddings, to anybody on the next bench, the same story in the same words, again and again, as if telling it were a way of paying for it. He stood beside them through the telling. He had never needed to read. He needed only to be near.

Then the bell. Whoever turned was his. Children always turned. They did not count.

This is how the work looks.

The district bus stand, the last week of December, six in the morning. The fog was so thick that the buses came in with their headlights on and their conductors walking in front, shouting the names of villages. Diesel, wet dust, tea boiling with ginger. Two hundred people in shawls and woollen caps. He gathered beside the enquiry window, bell, bicycle, hands, and began with the benches. Swab, needle, press. The cold of the spirit went down the benches ahead of him and nobody noticed it. A baby on the far platform woke screaming and was shifted to the other shoulder, and then another woke, nearer, and then a third.

At the end of a bench sat a man of forty or so, thin in the way of people just out of a hospital bed, with a cloth bag of medicine strips between his feet. He unwound his muffler to drink his tea. At the base of his throat was a small sunken scar, round as a shirt button.

The man was talking to the one beside him. "Venkata Rao," he said, and shook hands. "Bank. Fourteen days in the big hospital. I touched a wire in the strong room and my heart stopped. And this," he touched the scar, "this is from when I was three. The doctor cut my throat to let me breathe, my mother said. Twice now. God must have work for me."

He brought the bicycle round behind the bench and rang the bell.

Venkata Rao turned. He saw a lean young man in a white half-sleeve shirt, with a steel box on his carrier and old pock marks on his left cheek, and he did what people do in front of a man from the government with a needle. He put down his glass.

"Hold out your arm. It won't hurt."

"After fourteen days of them, what is one more?" said Venkata Rao, and pushed up his sleeve.

The barrel filled. Suryam pressed the cotton down, and emptied the barrel into his own arm while a bus was being called. Venkata Rao slept all the way home with his head against the window bars, and blamed the hospital for his tiredness, and did not wake the next morning.

The hill temple, early in January. Here the queue was the crowd: two thousand people folded back and forth between steel railings up the side of the hill, moving one step at a time, smelling of camphor and coconut water and jasmine. He went up it fold by fold, and the babies cried on every fold he passed.

He read her from a long way off. A woman near sixty, her head newly shaved and pale with sandal paste. In her fist she held a silver leg no longer than a finger, to be dropped in the hundi, the temple's offering box. High on her other arm was a black thread so old it had sunk into the flesh, with a copper amulet gone green. Somebody had tied that on a child who was not expected to live. The woman behind called her Subbamma, and asked who was minding the flower basket at the foot of the steps.

"My daughter-in-law," Subbamma said. "When I was small the fever took all my brothers and left me. Last year the lorry took my stall and left me my leg. I can give the god one day's sales."

He brought the bicycle up behind her and put his thumb on the bell.

"Amma, look! That uncle has a needle. He is poking everybody!"

It was a girl of five or six, standing on the lowest rail, her arm out straight and her finger pointing at the middle of his chest. "He has marks on his face. He is going to poke that grandmother next!"

Heads turned. Twenty faces looked where the finger pointed, and looked through him at the railing and the hillside beyond. Subbamma had begun to turn as well. He took his thumb off the bell. Then he put two fingers into his shirt pocket, took out a peppermint in its twist of paper, and held it out to the child across the rail.

The girl screamed.

Her mother slapped the pointing hand down. "Is this how you behave in God's queue? Pointing at elders! There is nobody there."

"There is. He is giving me a sweet."

"One more word and you get no sweet from anybody."

The girl pushed her face into her mother's sari and cried without a sound. The line laughed a little and moved up one step. Subbamma clicked her tongue at the children of these days and faced the front. Nobody asked the child what she had seen. The peppermint went back into the pocket.

He waited. One fold of the railings, then another, until the girl had been carried round the bend and into the inner hall. Then he rang. Subbamma turned, and her hand went up to her bare head, as if to cover it before a stranger.

"Hold out your arm. It won't hurt."

"Is it free, son?" she asked, and held it out.

She dropped the silver leg in the box, stood before the god for the space of four breaths, went down the hill very tired, and lay down early beside her basket.

The cinema hall, on the first morning of Sankranti, the harvest festival, with a big star's new film opening. Drums. Cracker smoke. A painted cutout of the hero forty feet high, hung with marigold garlands, and a thousand young men whistling under it. He gathered at the cycle stand.

This one he read with his ears. The ticket window was a half-moon hole in an iron grille, and behind it a man of thirty or so tore tickets and talked without stopping. "Ramesh, four together!" somebody shouted, and Ramesh said, "Careful with my change, brother, I have died twice already." At twelve he had gone under at a bathing ghat and been pulled out by his hair. At twenty-nine the old projection room had caught fire with him inside, and he had come down the drainpipe with his shirt burning. "Third birth," he told each of them. "Third birth, first show."

Suryam stood by the window through eleven tellings. The story did not change by a word. He rang the bell. In all that drumming Ramesh looked up at once.

"Hold out your arm. It won't hurt."

"Health department? On a release day?" Ramesh laughed. His hands lived in that hole all day, so he put his arm out through it, among the fists pushing money in. He went home before the second show.

Count them. For Venkata Rao, a doctor who knew about the fourteen days wrote cardiac arrest. For Subbamma there was no doctor, and the village secretary wrote natural death. For Ramesh, a young man with nothing in his history, the doctor wrote cause not known. Three papers in three offices in three districts, under three different words. In each place it was one death, and one death in a town is what happens every night. Nobody will ever lay those three papers side by side. It is nobody's work to do so.

That evening he stood at the cycle stand while the second show went in, and took the register out from under the strip of tube, and drew one cross in the margin with the stub of pencil, pressing hard. Then he turned back through the old pages. Past the empty stretch. Past fifty years of Annamma's blue handwriting, which said whatever it said. The margins were thick with crosses, grey with pencil down both edges of every page. Every one of them had been closed the same way. The bell, a head turning, an arm held out.

In fifty years not one of them had run.

The first who would was a cattle broker, and he was a month away yet. He would be standing among the bullocks at Rayalagudem, when the fair was held at Shivaratri.