‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. Has there been a disaster at the Pul Mela? Hundreds dead?’ The last query was pronounced with scornful disbelief.
‘Yes, Sahib, there has been,’ said the man. ‘I heard the rumour, then heard it on the radio. It is certainly true. Even the official estimate is in the hundreds.’
‘All right — take it,’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth. ‘But mind — no blood on the seats — no blood on the seats. I won’t have it. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, Sir. Rest assured that we will return it to you within a week. Your address, Sir?’
‘Everyone knows my address,’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth airily. And he stepped out on to the street, waving his cane. He was going to requisition a taxi — or some other car — to take him home.
11.25
L.N. Agarwal was not popular with the students of Brahmpur. He was disliked both for his authoritarian ways and for his manipulativeness on the Executive Council of Brahmpur University. And the pronouncements of most of the political parties on the university campus were virulently anti-Agarwal in tone.
The Home Minister knew this, and his request for student volunteers to help with the aftermath of the disaster was therefore phrased as a request from the Chief Minister. Most of the students were not in Brahmpur, since it was the vacation. But many of those who were there responded. They would almost certainly have responded even if the request had been signed by the Home Minister.
Kabir, being the son of a faculty member, and therefore living close to the university, was one of the first to hear of the appeal. He and his younger brother Hashim went to the central control room that had been set up in the Fort. The sun was about to set over the city of tents. Apart from the lights and cooking fires there were a number of larger fires here and there, where bodies were being cremated. The loudspeakers continued their endless litany of names, and would continue to do so throughout the night.
They were allocated to different first-aid centres. The other volunteers were exhausted, and glad to be relieved. They could get some food and a couple of hours’ sleep before they were called back to duty again.
Despite everyone’s efforts — the lists, the centres, the stations, the control room — there was more confusion than order. No one knew what to do with the lost women — mostly aged and infirm, penniless and hungry — until the Congress women’s committee, impatient with the indecisiveness of the authorities, took them in hand. Few knew where to take the lost or dead or injured in general, few knew where to find them. Unhappy people ran from one end of the hot sands to the other only to be told that the meeting place for pilgrims of their particular state was somewhere else. Injured or dead children were sometimes taken to the compound for lost children, sometimes to the first-aid centres, sometimes to the police enclosure. The instructions on the loudspeaker appeared to change with the person who was temporarily manning it.
After a long night of assisting at the first-aid centre, Kabir was staring blankly ahead of him when he saw Bhaskar being brought in.
He was carried in very tenderly by a fat, melancholy, middle-aged man. Bhaskar appeared to be asleep. Kabir frowned when he saw him and immediately got up. He recognized the boy as his father’s mathematical companion.
‘I found him on the sand just after the stampede,’ explained the man, setting the boy down on the ground where there was a little space. ‘He was lying not far from the ramp, so he’s lucky not to have got crushed. I took him to our camp, thinking he would wake up soon enough and I could take him home. I’m fond of children, you know. My wife and I don’t have any. . ’ He drifted off, then returned to the subject at hand. ‘Anyway, he woke up once, but didn’t respond to any of my questions. He doesn’t even know his name. And then he went off to sleep again, and hasn’t woken up since. I haven’t been able to feed him anything. I’ve shaken him, but he doesn’t react. He hasn’t drunk anything either, you know. But, through the grace of my guru, his pulse is still beating.’
‘It’s good you brought him here,’ said Kabir. ‘I think I can trace his parents.’
‘Well, you know, I was going to take him to a hospital, but then I happened to be paying attention to that horrible loudspeaker for a minute or two — and it said that those lost children who had been taken under protection by individuals should be kept in the Mela area, otherwise tracing them would be impossible. And so I brought him here.’
‘Good. Good,’ sighed Kabir.
‘Now if there is anything I can do — I am afraid I will be leaving tomorrow morning.’ The man passed his hand over Bhaskar’s forehead. ‘He doesn’t have any identification on him so I don’t really see how you’ll trace him. But stranger things have happened in my life. You are looking for a person, not even knowing who they are, and then you suddenly find them. Well, good-bye.’
‘Thank you,’ said Kabir, yawning. ‘You have done a great deal. Well, yes, you can do one thing more. Would you take this note to an address in the university area?’
‘Certainly.’
It had struck Kabir that he might not be able to get through to his father by phone, and that a note to him would be useful. He wrote a few lines — his handwriting was something of a scrawl because of his tiredness — folded it in four, wrote the address on top, and handed it over to the fat man.
‘The sooner the better,’ he said.
The man nodded and left, humming mournfully to himself.
After he had done his rounds, Kabir picked up the telephone and asked the operator for Dr Durrani’s number. The lines were congested, and he was asked to try a little later. Ten minutes later he got through, and his father happened to be at home. Kabir informed him of the situation and asked him to ignore the note he would be getting.
‘I know he’s your friend, the mini-Gauss, and that his name’s Bhaskar. But where does he live?’
His father was at his absent-minded worst.
‘Oh, hmm, er—’ began Dr Durrani. ‘It’s very, er, difficult to say. Now what is his last, er, name?’
‘I thought that you might know,’ said Kabir. He could imagine his father scrunching up his eyes in concentration.
‘Now, er, I’m not exactly sure, you see, er, he comes and goes, various people, well, leave him here, and then we talk, and then, er, they come and pick him up. He was here last week—’
‘I know—’
‘And we were discussing Fermat’s conjecture about—’
‘Father—’
‘Oh, yes, and an, er, interesting variant of the Pergolesi Lemma. Something along the, er, lines of what my young colleague, er, I have an idea — why don’t we, er, er, ask him?’
‘Ask whom?’
‘Yes, Sunil Patwardhan, er, wouldn’t he know about the boy? It was his party, I believe. Poor Bhaskar. His, er, parents must be perplexed.’
Whatever this meant, Kabir realized that he would probably get more sense out of this new lead than out of his father. He got in touch with Sunil Patwardhan, who recalled that Bhaskar was Kedarnath Tandon’s son and Mahesh Kapoor’s grandson. Kabir phoned up Prem Nivas.
Mahesh Kapoor picked up the phone at the second ring.
‘Ji?’
‘May I speak to the Minister Sahib?’ said Kabir in Hindi.
‘You are speaking to him.’
‘Minister Sahib, I am speaking from the first-aid centre just below the eastern end of the Fort.’
‘Yes.’ The voice was like a taut spring.
‘We have your grandson, Bhaskar, here—’