The problem of names at Shanti Bhavan was not unusual. Many children arrived without them, or with names that were contested, uncertain, or simply not believed by the staff. The administrative response was practical: the children were given numbers for the records and nicknames for daily use. The numbers were official. The nicknames were human.
The five boys had accumulated a collection of both.
The oldest — the one who had been found on the steps, with the scar on his left hand — was called Bade in the dormitory, meaning simply the big one, although he was not particularly big. He had a stillness to him that the other children read as size. He did not run when other children ran. He did not shout when other children shouted. He watched things with dark, careful eyes, and when he moved it was with a deliberateness that made even the adults take him slightly more seriously than they might otherwise have taken a child of seven or eight.
The second boy — the one who had come from the north, the one whose speech had been strange — was called Sarpanch by the older children, meaning village headman, meant as a joke about how seriously he took himself. He was precise and practical in everything he did: the way he folded his clothes, the way he ate his food, the way he organized the shelf beside his bed so that each of his small possessions occupied exactly the space assigned to it. He was not humourless, but his humour was dry and took a moment to arrive, like an echo from a distant wall.
The third boy — one of the two who might or might not be twins — was the loudest of them, and the fastest. He was called Bijli by the staff, lightning, because he could not seem to sit still. He was curious about everything in the way of someone who suspects the world is full of interesting things and resents every moment spent not finding out what they are. He was forever climbing things he was not supposed to climb and opening things he was not supposed to open and going places he had been specifically told not to go.
The fourth boy — the other possible twin — was almost opposite in temperament. He was quiet and observational, and he had a quality that the staff found slightly unnerving without being able to say exactly why. He seemed always to know things before he was told them. He seemed always to be looking slightly past whatever was directly in front of him, as if seeing something else in the same space. The older children called him Drishti, meaning vision or sight. The staff called him by his administrative number when they had to call him anything.
The fifth boy — the youngest, the one left by the old woman in the rain — was called Chota, little one, by the others, though by the time he was old enough to be aware of it the name had become affectionate rather than merely descriptive. He was sensitive in the particular way of children who have learned to read the emotional weather of a room before they can read words. He cried more easily than the others and was not ashamed of it. He laughed more easily too. He attached himself to the group of four with the single-minded devotion of someone who has found the thing they were looking for and intends never to lose it.
Together, they were five. This was not an arrangement any of them had chosen or planned. It had simply happened, the way water finds the shape of the ground it runs over — gradually, inevitably, without drama. By the time the oldest was eight and the youngest was five, they were already as comprehensible a unit as the orphanage had ever seen: eating together, sleeping in their corner of the dormitory together, defending one another in the minor conflicts of institutional childhood with a loyalty that was not loud but was absolute.
The staff noticed this. Most of them found it touching. A few found it unsettling, though they would have been hard pressed to say why. Something about the way the five boys moved together, something about the quality of their shared silence — it had a weight to it that seemed disproportionate to their age.
Suresh Lal, who administered without seeing, saw none of this. In his records, they were five numbers: B-7, B-9, B-10, B-11, B-12. In the column marked Name, he had written Unknown for all five. In the column marked Date of Birth, he had written approximate dates, arrived at by the doctor's best guesses. In the column marked Family History, he had written the same word, five times: None.
None. It was the most accurate word in the records. It was also, the boys would eventually understand, not quite the truth. They did not have none. They had each other, which was something, and they had whatever it was that connected them to the dark shape in the trees at the end of the lake, which was something else entirely.
But names. Names were what they did not have.
And without names, a certain kind of story cannot begin.
So the house waited, and the lake waited, and the locket on the kitchen table sat in the dark of the abandoned kitchen, and the five boys grew, and the world turned, and the day of the volunteer drew closer.
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*End of Chapter Two*