He went to Manali first.
This was not a plan — Raju did not make plans in the conventional sense, did not sit down with a map and a list of considerations and arrive at a reasoned conclusion. He went to Manali because the road pointed that way and because the road pointing that way was enough and because what he needed in the weeks immediately following the house was not a destination but a direction. Any direction. Movement itself as the thing rather than where the movement was going.
He spent three weeks in Manali. He found work — the same kind of work he had always found in mountain towns, the informal economy of people who needed things moved or guided or explained, the work that existed for people who were comfortable in transit and who could be useful to others who were not. He worked and he walked and he sat in tea shops in the evenings and drank tea and looked at the mountains and did not think about the house.
He thought about the house constantly.
Not as a choice — as a condition, the way a bruise is a condition rather than a decision, present without being summoned, felt when you press on it and sometimes when you don't. He thought about the basement and the blue-green light and his hand extended toward the water and Dev's hands on his jacket and the specific quality of wanting something so completely that the wanting had overridden everything else, all the protocols and all the knowledge and all the twenty years of knowing himself well enough to know what he was capable of.
He had not gone through the gap.
He had not gone into the water.
He had wanted to, completely and without reservation, and he had not.
He did not know what that meant about him. He spent three weeks in Manali trying to work it out and arrived at the end of the three weeks with a partial answer and a direction and he pointed himself toward Pune.
---
Sagar's door opened on a Tuesday afternoon in June.
Sagar looked at him. At the bag over his shoulder, the dust on his jacket, the specific quality of someone who has been in motion for several weeks and has arrived at a particular door by a route that was not straightforward.
He stepped back.
Come in, he said.
He made tea without asking whether Raju wanted it. Raju sat at the kitchen table — the same table Sagar had described to him on the phone, the one where he had told Anjana everything before the house, the one where Anjana had said come back and that is all I am asking. Raju sat at it now and felt the weight of all the things that had happened at this table and at the other table and in the house and in the corridor and he wrapped both hands around the cup of tea Sagar set in front of him.
Sagar sat across from him.
They did not speak for a while.
This was not uncomfortable. They had always been able to not speak — all five of them had this quality, the dormitory corner and the hill having built something that did not require words to be sustained. Raju sat with his tea and Sagar sat with his and the kitchen was quiet in the way of a kitchen in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon and outside Preethi was at nursery and Anjana was at the pharmacy and the ordinary afternoon went about its ordinary business around the two of them.
Then Raju said: the two steps.
Sagar looked at him.
Raju said: I know about the two steps. Dev told me.
Sagar was quiet.
Raju said: I am not saying this to — he stopped. He tried again. I am saying it because I know. Not because I am judging it. Because I know exactly what it felt like and I know exactly why two steps happened and I want you to know that I know.
Sagar looked at his hands. Then at Raju.
He said: you stopped at the ledge.
Raju said: Dev grabbed my jacket.
Sagar said: I stopped because Milan said my name.
Raju said: yes.
Sagar said: we both stopped.
Raju said: yes. We both stopped.
A silence. Not empty. The silence of two people who have confirmed something that needed confirming and who do not need to say anything else about it.
After a moment Sagar said: the protocols. I have been rewriting them.
I know, Raju said. Dev told me that too.
Sagar said: they are better now. They account for things the first ones did not account for.
Raju said: I know.
Sagar said: I don't know if there will be a next time.
Raju said: I know. But you wrote them anyway.
Sagar said: yes.
Raju said: that is the most Sagar thing I have ever heard and I mean that completely sincerely.
Something moved in Sagar's face. Not quite a smile — the thing that existed in Sagar's face in the vicinity of smiling, the controlled, dry arrival of something warm.
He said: I know you do.
Raju stayed for the afternoon. When Anjana came home she found them at the kitchen table with the notebooks open between them and Raju asking questions about the protocols with the focused curiosity of someone who needs to understand how something works before he can stop thinking about it. She made dinner. She fed them both. She did not ask Raju where he was staying and she did not ask him how long he was in Pune because she had understood from thirty seconds of looking at him that neither question had a clean answer.
He slept on their sofa.
He left in the morning.
---
Dev was in his office when Raju found him.
Not the archive room — his actual office, the one with his name on the door and a window that looked out onto the courtyard of the humanities building, the courtyard where students sat and read and moved between classes with the specific quality of people whose concerns were still the right size for the available vocabulary. Dev was at his desk with three notebooks open and the memory card in a small plastic case beside them and the expression he wore when he had been thinking very hard about something for a long time and was still thinking.
He looked up when Raju appeared in the doorway.
He said: I thought it would be you.
Raju said: not Milan?
Dev said: Milan will not leave Nainpur yet. Not Hari — Hari will not come here. Sagar has Anjana and Preethi and the protocols to rewrite. You are the one who moves.
Raju said: yes.
He came in. He sat in the chair beside the desk — the chair that had a stack of books on it which he moved to the floor without asking and Dev did not protest because students moved his books all the time and he had long ago accepted this as one of the costs of having an office.
He looked at the three open notebooks. At the memory card in its plastic case.
He said: the photographs.
Dev said: I have not looked at them yet.
Raju said: why not.
Dev said: because looking at them requires a specific kind of readiness and I have not yet had the specific kind of readiness. He paused. Soon.
Raju said: all right.
They went for a walk. The university campus in the evening, the light going warm and long across the lawns, students moving between buildings, the ordinary life of an institution going about its institutional evening. They walked and Dev talked about the writing — what he had written so far, what remained to be written, how the exchange mechanism needed to be explained in a way that was both accurate and usable by someone who had not spent three years in an archive room.
Raju listened. This was what he did on this visit — he listened, which was not always his nature but which the visit required and which he gave completely, the same quality of complete attention he gave to everything that actually mattered to him.
At some point he said: is it over. For us. Are we done with it.
Dev was quiet for a moment. They were at the edge of the campus now, the boundary between the university and the ordinary town, the place where the institution's particular quality of contained purpose met the town's particular quality of uncontained ordinariness.
Dev said: I don't think it works that way.
Raju said: no. I didn't think so either.
Dev said: the cycle is disrupted. The entity is diminished. What Hari said yes to was used and the using of it was interrupted by the blade and the channel being partially blocked. The entity needs time to rebuild. Time in its terms — which is not our terms.
Raju said: how long.
Dev said: twenty years. Maybe more. Maybe less if something else disrupts the recovery.
Raju said: and the next group.
Dev said: yes. The next group. Which is why the book matters. Why the cylinder matters. Why the protocols Sagar is writing matter.
Raju looked at the boundary between the campus and the town. At the ordinary street beyond it.
He said: we did something. Even with everything. We did something that mattered.
Dev said: yes. We did.
Raju said: I need to hear that sometimes.
Dev said: I know. So do I.
They stood at the boundary for a moment. Then they turned and walked back into the campus.
---
Milan opened the door on a Thursday afternoon in August and looked at Raju and stepped back without saying anything.
This was how it had always been. The door opened before the question was asked. Raju had been grateful for this his whole life — the specific relief of a person who sometimes arrived places without warning and who needed the door to simply open rather than to explain himself on the threshold.
He came in.
The room above the hardware shop was the same room Milan had described in passing over years of phone calls — the shelf of books, the table with the lamp, the photograph on the wall of five boys on a shelf of rock, slightly out of focus. It was smaller than Raju had imagined and more itself, the way places always were when you finally saw them rather than imagined them.
The locket was around Milan's neck. Not in his pocket — around his neck, on a thin cord, resting against his shirt in the place above the pocket where it used to live. Cold, visibly, in the way that a cold thing has a different quality of light than a warm thing. He wore it on the outside. Raju noticed this and did not mention it.
Parvati sent food. This happened without anyone arranging it — she appeared at Milan's door at six with a tiffin carrier and a look that indicated she expected the carrier to be returned clean and the food to have been eaten, which were the only expectations she was going to express. She handed it to Raju since he was nearest the door, looked at them both with the expression of someone who understands more than she is going to say, and left.
They ate.
They talked about ordinary things — the NGO, a family Milan had been helping with a land dispute that had been resolved that week, Raju's weeks in Manali and the work he had found there, the mountains and the specific quality of mornings at altitude. The ordinary texture of lives being lived. They covered it for a while with the care of people who understand that the ordinary texture of things is not avoidance but maintenance — you keep the ordinary going because without the ordinary there is nothing to return to.
Then the ordinary ran out.
Raju said: how are you actually.
Milan was quiet for a moment. He looked at the table — not the locket, not the photograph on the wall, just the table.
He said: I don't know yet.
Raju said: that is an honest answer.
Milan said: it is the only one I have.
Raju said: all right.
He did not push. He did not offer the kind of comfort that required Milan to receive it, the kind that put a burden on the person it was meant to help. He simply said all right in the specific tone that meant I heard you and it is enough and we do not need to go further than that right now.
They sat for a while.
Then Raju said: do you go near the lake.
Milan said: not often. Once a year maybe. I walk the lakeshore path on the day.
Raju said: on the day.
Milan said: yes.
He did not say the anniversary. He did not need to. Raju understood what the day was. He thought about Meera — the dhokla and the buffet and the woman who knew exactly where things should be and was not embarrassed to say so. He thought about the passage between the kitchen and the hallway and what had been said there. He did not say any of this.
He said: she would have — he started and stopped. He said: she was — he started and stopped again.
Milan said: yes.
Raju said: I know I didn't —
Milan said: you don't need to.
Raju looked at him. At the stillness of him. At the locket cold against his shirt.
He said: all right.
He slept on the floor that night. Not Milan's floor only — he had a sleeping bag from his bag, the lightweight kind he always carried, the preparation of someone who has slept in enough places to know that preparation is worth the weight. He laid it out on Milan's floor and he slept and Milan did not sleep or slept in the intermittent way he had been sleeping, and in the morning Raju was already up when Milan came out of the bedroom.
They walked.
Not toward the lake — just through the town, in the early morning when the market was setting up and the temple was open and the clinic was still dark because it was not Thursday. Through the ordinary streets of the ordinary town. Two people walking together in the early morning, the specific quality of walking beside someone you have known your whole life, the way it changes the quality of the walking without changing anything about the walking.
On the second morning Milan said: go see Hari.
Raju had been expecting this. He had been expecting it since he arrived, knowing it was coming, knowing Milan would say it and that it would be his instruction to himself as much as to Raju — permission given by the person who needed to give it.
He said: I know.
Milan said: he needs someone to go to him. He will not call yet. He will call when he is ready and he is not ready yet and someone needs to go to him before he is ready.
Raju said: I know.
Milan said: you are the one who goes to places.
Raju looked at him. At the specific precision of that — you are the one who goes to places. Not the one who travels, not the one who moves. The one who goes to places. The distinction was exactly right and it was exactly Milan — seeing the thing underneath the surface of the thing and saying it simply.
He said: yes. That is what I am.
He left the next morning.
He pointed himself north.
---
*End of Chapter Thirty Three*