Bagad Billa

Fiction. Folk horror involving the disappearance of children (implied, nothing graphic). Suited to teen and adult readers.

Nights of the telling. Himachal Pradesh, monsoon 1978.

I. The Telling

1Dry Thunder

18:55

By lamp-lighting the lower bazaar had gone quiet the way it did before weather. Shutters came down one after another along the lane, and the stray dogs crept under the bus shelter. From Dadi’s front window Meera counted eleven shut. The twelfth was Chaman’s tea stall at the bend, where the lane curved under the old deodar, and its lantern burned alone.

“Twelve,” she told her brother. “That’s the last light in the whole bazaar.”

“Dadi says lights draw him,” said Tinku. He had a gap where his front tooth had been, and he whistled through it when he was thrilled. “Sit, sit. She’s starting.”

It was the first night of thunder since the rains began, and the front room had filled the way it always did. Dadi sat by the sigri with her grey pattu pinned at the shoulder by a brass pin. Rita, their cousin, was tucked under her elbow with a corner of the shawl in her fist. Along the far wall, pretending they had come only for the warmth, sat the bazaar boys: Pappu the halwai’s son, thirteen and loud, in a khaki cap with a broken peak; Debu the cobbler’s boy, twelve, who copied whatever Pappu did; and Munna, ten, whose hands were forever in somebody’s pocket. Dadi paid them in roasted maize, and they paid her in sneering.

Dadi lifted the brass tongs and tapped the rim of the sigri three times. Ting, ting, ting. The coals woke up red.

Listen, children. I tell this one plain, because it is true.

“He is not a cat,” said Dadi, “though he wears a cat’s shape, the way a thief wears a shopkeeper’s face. His eyes burn like coals that someone has blown awake, and they can find a child through any fog. His jaw is iron, wider than this doorway, and made to lift a boy by the collar, the way your mother lifts a kitten.”

She showed them with her thumb and fingers, closing them slowly. Rita hid her face in the pattu. Even Debu laughed, a beat too loud.

“Where does he take him?” Tinku breathed. He asked it every time, and every time Dadi lowered her voice to answer.

“Into the dark. He does not say, and nobody he has taken has come back to tell it.”

Tinku let out a long, happy sigh, like a child handed his favourite sweet. Meera had asked him once why he loved it so. He had said, “Because it’s so big, Didi, and it’s never in here.”

Pappu stretched his legs out and yawned. “The Billa is for babies. My father says the old women made him up so we won’t rob the shops.”

“Your father is a wise man,” said Dadi. “He also keeps his sweets under three locks at night.”

The children howled. Pappu went red beneath the cap and got to his feet. “I’m going to Chaman’s for tea.”

“Stay until the thunder finishes.”

“There isn’t even rain.” He jerked his chin at the window. Thunder cracked over the Dhauladhar, long and dry, and not a drop followed it.

“Dry thunder is only noise,” Dadi said. “Go where you like.” But Meera saw her tap the tongs once against her knee.

19:30

Meera waited for his feet on the forty-seven stone steps down to the lane. She had counted them since she arrived: forty-seven, with a bend at the twentieth. The sound never came.

Dadi went on, and the children rocked and shrieked. She told them how the tin roofs rattled when he walked along them, and Tinku begged for the part about the jaw again.

Through the half-open door Meera could see the top step, lit yellow by the lantern behind her. Pappu sat there with his knees drawn up and his chin on his arms. He had gone no farther than the doorstep, and his cap was tilted toward the room, the way a dog tilts toward a voice it pretends not to know.

Meera said nothing. She wasn’t sure why.

20:50

The thunder dragged itself across the hills, thinned, and stopped. Dadi lowered the tongs and began to count, touching each head in the air with one finger. “Meera. Tinku. Rita. Munna. Debu.” Her finger found the doorway. “Pappu. Six.” She pressed a hand to the pattu over her chest. “Six,” she said again, to nobody, and the tongs she set down weren’t steady.

Pappu left last, whistling.

Before bed Dadi checked the kitchen door, the one with the crooked latch and the wooden peg jammed through it, and pressed it with her palm. From the far side of the wall came a long dry scrape, tin dragging on brick, the lean-to shifting in the wind. Tinku’s eyes went wide with joy.

Listen. That is the Bagad Billa sharpening its claws on the bricks outside.

Dadi did not look up. She was counting again under her breath, the same six in the same order, one finger lifting for each, and Meera watched her through her lashes until sleep took her.

2Coals at the Bend

15:30

Kerosene for the lantern was Meera’s errand, which meant forty-seven steps down and the whole lane to cross. Tinku came too, carrying Dadi’s brass thali for Gopal’s jalebis and drumming it with a spoon. The kerosene-seller had already filled her bottle.

By day the lower bazaar was another country. Gopal’s oil spat and sang over the jalebis. Bishna the cobbler hammered at a heel. A toy-seller hung paper kites from a nail, and the smell of wet wool and frying sugar rolled up the lane. Only the bend was wrong. Beside the old deodar stood a new shed of corrugated tin, so bright in the thin afternoon sun that Meera squinted. Lala Ramsaran had raised it in March, for his gunny sacks.

Tinku’s spoon rang on the thali, and the ring ran down the lane and came back off the far shutters. Every head turned, even Chaman’s at the bend, a full hundred paces off.

Bhagwanti sat on the bench outside the tea stall, old and bent over a glass she wasn’t drinking. She looked at the new tin and muttered, “A roof on the stone. And nobody pours the oil.”

“What stone?” said Tinku.

“Bhagwanti, drink your tea,” Chaman said, too quickly, and she did.

Behind Lala’s shop, where the lane met the old brick wall, Pappu and Debu squatted over a red-handled pocketknife. Debu flicked it open and shut. “My uncle brought it from the plains.”

“I’ll bet you your knife,” said Pappu, “that you won’t touch the Billa’s wall after dark.”

Meera had seen the wall before. Four deep scores ran down the bricks at the height of a small boy’s shoulder, pale where the red had flaked away. “My knife?” Debu said. “Say it again.”

Munna, behind them, slid a lump of jaggery from Gopal’s counter into his shirt and was gone before anyone looked.

19:20

The rain came at last, not as a shower but as a wall, and the slate roof roared. Dadi’s front room smelled of woodsmoke and wet cotton. Pappu sat close to the door with his cap pulled low. The brass tongs rang on the sigri three times.

Listen. The bazaar by day is sweets and kites, and the bazaar by night is his.

“Every shutter in that lane is a tooth,” Dadi said, “and the lane is his throat. He walks the tin roofs, and the roofs drum. He walks the gutters, and the dogs go quiet. At the back of Lala’s shop he has a wall, and there he sharpens, and every monsoon the marks go a finger deeper.”

“Ghoghad is only the grumble in the cloud,” she added. “He comes, and he announces. It is the Billa who carries.”

Tinku shrieked with pleasure. Rita pulled the pattu over her head. Even Munna stopped chewing, his jaw hanging open with a lump of jaggery in it.

“Does he eat the bricks?” Tinku asked.

“He eats whatever is outside when the thunder is still going. Remember it, all of you.” Dadi tapped the tongs on her knee. “Nobody leaves this room until the thunder is finished. Nobody.”

“Not even Pappu?” Tinku said, and the room howled again. Pappu showed his teeth, and Debu didn’t laugh. He was looking at his own hand, which was opening and closing around nothing.

20:40

The thunder rolled off east. In the lull Meera slipped to the window to get away from the heat of the sigri and the shrieking. Rain streaked the glass. Down in the lane the lights were all out, even Chaman’s lantern, and the bazaar was a long black trough with the deodar standing at its end.

At the bend, low to the ground, something burned.

There were two points of dull red, a hand-span apart, steady. Too low for a lantern and too steady for a lamp swinging on a bicycle. She leaned until her forehead touched the cold glass. They didn’t flicker. They didn’t move. They looked straight up the forty-seven steps at the window and at her.

Then both went out together, the way eyes go when they close.

“Come away from the glass,” said Dadi, behind her. Her voice was mild. She didn’t ask what Meera had seen.

Meera said, “It’s cold there,” and came away. She sat down by Tinku, who was whistling a made-up tune through his tooth gap, happy and loud and well fed. She told herself it was a bicycle lamp, or the shine of rain on a tin roof, and it nearly worked.

Listen. That is the Bagad Billa sharpening its claws on the bricks outside.

Tinku clapped. Meera clapped with him, a half-beat late, and kept her eyes on the dark glass until the thunder was done.

3The Third Shutter

18:40

The rain was louder than the first night of rain, and the slate roof drummed so hard that Dadi had to lift her voice. She coughed once, a dry little catch in the throat, and waved Rita’s worried face away. The tongs rang three times against the sigri.

Listen. This happened to a boy named Ghanu, in the year I was twenty-six.

“Ghanu liked bets,” Dadi said. “One stormy night the other boys dared him to touch the third shutter from the bend. He laughed at his mother. He laughed at the thunder. He took a lantern, and the lantern came back down the lane on its own, still burning, hanging from nothing.”

Tinku had stopped breathing with delight. Rita gripped the pattu with both hands. Pappu sat with his cap pulled low and his knees pulled high, and he had not touched his maize.

Meera noticed the empty place on the wall at the exact moment the thunder paused. There was a ring of maize husks on the floor, and a warm dent in the mat. Debu’s place.

“Dadi.” Her voice came out small.

Dadi was already counting, one finger lifting, her lips moving. “Meera. Tinku. Rita. Munna. Pappu.” The finger stopped in the air. “Five.”

The room froze. Rain filled the silence. Then Dadi was on her feet with the lantern, at the door, down the first of the stone steps, shouting into the roar. “Debu! Debu, come up!” Her voice was big and rough and carried down all forty-seven steps, and then the rain ate it.

“He went for the knife,” Pappu said from the floor. His voice cracked. “I bet him his own knife. I told him he wouldn’t. I told him.”

Dadi stood on the top step a long moment. Then she came back in, dripped on the floor, sat, and took the tongs in a hand that shook. She never looked at the children. She looked at the door.

“I’ll finish Ghanu,” she said, and she finished him, louder than before, and she told it to the door.

22:15

The thunder did not finish until past ten. Dadi sent the others home in a line, Pappu among them with his cap in his hands, and sat by the open door with the lantern until morning.

05:40

Meera was at the window before the light came. By the time she reached the lane, half the bazaar was at the third shutter. Debu’s mother was on her knees in the mud. Bishna the cobbler stood over her with his hammer still in his hand, as though he had forgotten to put it down. Lala Ramsaran stood back with his arms folded.

A scrap of grey cloth hung from the step of the third shutter. It had a button on it, still on its thread, and it had been torn, not cut.

Behind Lala’s shop, on the old brick wall, four new scores ran down beside the old four, at the height of a small boy’s shoulder. They were pale and raw. The old red had come away in curls on the ground.

“Rain, rocks, and the khad,” said Sub-Inspector Negi, wiping his boots on the shutter step. He had come down from the thana on a bicycle. “That stream rises a foot in an hour. Boys fall in. We’ll look downstream at the bridge. Don’t crowd her.”

“He wore a shirt like that,” said Bishna, looking at the scrap, and nobody answered him.

Meera turned away and saw a glint in the gutter below the step, a small red thing half buried in silt. A second later she saw Munna see it too. His hands, as ever, were in his pockets, and his eyes were on the gutter.

19:05

The children came again that evening, five of them. Their mothers sent them with a hot brass pot of rice and a word, relieved to know where they were. Dadi tapped the tongs three times and began, and the old room filled with its usual heat.

“Dadi,” said Tinku, when she paused. His hands lay in his lap, and he looked at them. “Where did Debu go?”

“Into the dark,” she said. It was the same answer she had always given, in the same low voice, but it landed flat in the room like a dropped plate.

Tinku didn’t clap. Nobody did.

Listen. That is the Bagad Billa sharpening its claws on the bricks outside.

II. The Line

4The Hour After Thunder

14:00

The cloud came down the hill after lunch and sat in the bazaar. By two o’clock Meera could not see the foot of the forty-seven steps from the top, and by three the deodar at the bend had been rubbed out of the world. Sound went wrong. Gopal’s frying hissed from nowhere. A dog barked, and the bark seemed to start inside her own ears.

Pappu came up out of it with his cap in his hands. He hadn’t spoken to her without a sneer all July. “Meera. That night, when Dadi was shouting on the step. I got up off the floor, behind her, and looked past.”

She waited.

“At the bend there were two coals. They came up the way coals do when you blow on them. I know that’s what Dadi says. I haven’t got other words.” He swallowed. “She was looking right at them, Meera. She never said.”

16:30

Master-ji Verma arrived on the veranda with his black umbrella and chalk dust on one sleeve, and Dadi gave him tea in the good glass. “A tendua,” he said, stirring. “A leopard off the Dhar. They come down after dogs in the rains, and the Forest Guard has been told. Debu went into the khad, and a leopard may have found him after.”

“And the other thing?” said Dadi.

“There is no other thing, Dadi.” He said it gently, as to a child. “I’d ask you not to teach them there is. Fear of the wrong animal is dangerous too.”

“Master-ji, you have your animal and I have mine,” said Dadi. “Mine has kept this house full every stormy night.” Master-ji shook his head, finished his tea, and went off into the white.

19:00

The Murphy radio on the shelf crackled through its bulletin: roads, a wedding, the price of apples. Then the voice said, “Heavy rain is expected over the Dhauladhar side in the coming days,” and Dadi reached over and switched it off before the next sentence.

The cloud was against the glass. Rita sat with her fist in the pattu, and Tinku and Pappu had edged close to the sigri. Munna, who had said nothing all day, was cleaning his nails with a splinter. The brass tongs rang three times.

Listen. When the cloud comes down, it drinks every sound, so in a fog you must keep talking, or you forget you are not alone.

“My mother told me that,” said Dadi. “In a fog the Billa doesn’t need to hunt. He walks the lane with his mouth open, and the quiet walks in. A boy calls for his mother, and the fog swallows the call. A boy turns to listen, and there is only fog.”

The children loved it. Tinku made himself a fog with his sleeves, waving them and whispering “Mother, mother” in a tiny voice until Rita shrieked. Even Pappu laughed, though he laughed more at Rita than at the tale.

The thunder came in slow bundles. Between each one Dadi started a new sentence before the old one ended, and Meera, who counted everything, began to count that too. Dadi never let a gap open. She laid word on word like bricks and never paused for breath where Meera could see it.

23:35

The last thunder walked away down the valley at midnight’s edge, and the cloud went still.

Meera hadn’t known quiet could be so heavy. Rain had stopped. The roof had stopped. The sigri ticked as it cooled, and even that seemed too loud. Tinku and Rita slept in a heap, and Pappu lay curled on the far mat with his cap over his face, and Munna with his sleeve.

Dadi sat with the tongs in her lap and her mouth slightly open. She was looking at the black window. For the first time Meera saw how thin her throat was, how the cords stood out in it.

“Meera.” It was hardly a voice. “Say something.”

“What, Dadi?”

“Anything. Quick. Don’t stop.”

Meera knew no stories the way Dadi did, only what school had given her. So she said the one thing she knew by heart. She counted the steps. “One. Two. Three.” She counted them as she had the first day, in the voice she used for counting, flat and even, and she went on past the bend at twenty, past thirty, past forty, while Dadi’s eyes stayed on the glass and her lips moved along without sound.

“Forty-six,” Meera said. “Forty-seven.”

Dadi breathed out. She nodded once. She said nothing else, and neither did the window.

That will do, beta. One day I will teach you to tell it properly.

5Oil and Thread

11:00

Bhagwanti took the back way to the bend, behind the sacks and the gutter, and Meera followed with Tinku by the hand. Where two sheets of the new tin overlapped there was a gap as wide as a door. The old woman held the sheet aside with her shoulder and said, “Look quickly.”

Under the tin, in the roots of the deodar, sat a stone no bigger than a bread-box. Somebody long ago had pressed two black pebbles into its face for eyes. Tatters of red thread, grey with years, hung from the roots, and a tin dish at its foot was dented and rusted and full of rain.

“Every stormy night, at lamp-lighting,” Bhagwanti said, “a drop of mustard oil in the dish and a thread tied on. My mother did it. Hers did it. Lala’s father let us. Now the tin is on top, and my knees won’t lift it.”

“What does the oil do?” said Meera.

“It says we haven’t forgotten.” Bhagwanti let the sheet fall. The bend went dim again. She never said who had been remembered.

Lala Ramsaran was waiting by his shutter with his arms folded. “Old woman, you’ve no business back there.”

“Lala-ji,” Meera said, with her heart going, “please, could you lift one sheet? Just on stormy evenings. Just for a minute.”

“There’s three hundred kilos of rice under there. Rain gets in, I lose my year.” He looked at her kindly, which was worse. “Your Dadi tells good stories, beta. Let them stay stories.”

19:10

That night the thunder was slow and fat, and the children sat three deep in front of the sigri. Munna sat nearest the door. Pappu sat beside him, closer than a friend sits. Tinku asked for the one about the goat, and the brass tongs rang.

Listen. This is Santosh’s tale, who was nine years old in the year the rains broke the bridge.

“Santosh had a goat with a bell,” Dadi said. “One night the goat slipped its rope. Santosh said, ‘It is only down the lane.’ Her mother said, ‘Wait for the thunder to stop.’ But a goat is a goat, and a girl is a girl. She went out with a torch, and the bell led her on, ting, ting, and the bell went round the bend and round the shutters and under the deodar.”

“And the goat came home in the morning,” Tinku whispered, “all by itself.”

“With the bell still dry,” said Dadi. “And the girl did not.”

Rita whimpered with joy. Tinku bounced. Meera, watching the room because she had begun to watch the room, saw that Munna’s eyes weren’t on Dadi. They were on the black window, and his lips were moving. He was counting paces. She remembered the red glint in the gutter, and how his eyes had gone to it at dawn.

Munna rose, bent double, as though to ease a cramp. Pappu caught his sleeve. “Don’t.”

“It’s still there,” Munna hissed. “I looked this morning. Silt covers it and nobody looks down. A ten-rupee knife. Debu’s dead, who needs it?” He twisted free and was through the door and gone, chappals slapping on the stone steps.

“Munna!” Pappu was after him to the top step. Dadi was after them both, her pattu slipping. “Munna! Come up!” Their voices went down into the rain together, and then there was only Pappu, and Dadi, and the rain.

Dadi counted with her finger shaking in the air. “Meera. Tinku. Rita. Pappu.” She stopped. “Four.”

22:20

The thunder finished near ten, and nobody slept. Pappu sat on the top step with his head on his knees. Tinku, who for once had no question, pressed against Meera’s side.

Sleep, all of you. I am counting.

05:30

By the third shutter there was a blue rubber chappal, wet, on its side. There was nothing else. Munna’s mother stood with a sack of onions at her feet, and she screamed at Lala, and at Negi when he came on his bicycle, and at the sky.

“The khad,” said Negi, wearily. He didn’t look at the bricks. Behind Lala’s shop four more fresh scores stood pale beside the rest. Twelve now.

Meera went to the front of the crowd. “Lala-ji. Please. Lift the tin.”

Lala looked at the chappal, and then at the sky, and then at his shed. “On the word of a girl and a story,” he said, almost to himself. “No.” He turned and went inside, and the shutter came down behind him with a bang.

6How Far a Voice Goes

10:00

It was the kind of rain that hung in the air instead of falling. Meera had a plan, and she had needed three days to get brave enough to say it out loud to Pappu.

“Tinku sits on the top step,” she told him. “He knows the goat story by heart. He tells it in Dadi’s voice, loud, like in the room. You and me walk down and listen. We find where the words stop.”

“Why?”

“Because Debu and Munna both stopped somewhere.”

Pappu looked at the lane for a long moment. Then he took off his cap, which for Pappu was a kind of oath.

They went down the forty-seven steps with Tinku’s voice following them, high and delighted and exactly Dadi’s: “And the bell went round the bend.” At the foot of the steps the words were as clear as in the room. They walked along the lane, and Meera counted. Thirty-eight paces brought them to the public tap, where the women filled their brass pots and where the lane opened toward the bazaar.

At the tap the words thinned. “...round the shutters, and ting...” Meera took one more pace past the tap, and the words were gone. Only a murmur remained, the shape of a voice with nothing in it.

“There,” she said. She chalked a cross on the wet stone. “That’s the end.”

Pappu counted on without being asked. A hundred and twelve paces more to the third shutter, a hundred and twelve paces of wet lane with the shutters leaning over it. Nine paces past that, the deodar and the tin and the stone beneath the tin.

“Debu was out here,” he said, flatly. “Munna too. Past the cross.”

“Ghanu’s lantern came back down the lane,” Meera said. “On its own.”

Up on the step Tinku, bored, was beating Dadi’s thali with the spoon. Ting, ting. They heard it clearly at the third shutter, and at the bend, and Meera tried a thing she hadn’t planned. She cupped her hands and shouted back up the lane, “Say the words with the thali! Slow! Together!” Tinku’s voice came down, ragged and bright, a word to every beat. “The. Goat. Slipped. Its. Rope.” She heard it at the bend as thin as thread, but every word was whole.

“A shout doesn’t go that far,” she said slowly. “A beat does. A story with a beat.”

Pappu had gone pale under his cap. “Meera. The first night. The night Debu was laughing. I sat on the top step. I heard every word of the tale.” He swallowed. “I’m not brave. I just didn’t want to sit with the babies.”

“It’s not a brave thing. It’s a hearing thing,” she said. “Maybe he takes the ones the story can’t reach.”

15:00

Dadi was at the kitchen chulha, turning maize over the coals. Meera stood in the doorway and said it all at once. “Dadi, do you tell the tales to keep him out or to keep us in?”

The maize hissed. Dadi’s hand paused above it. Her cough came, small and dry, and she waited for it to pass. She said, “Eat your bhutta,” and pressed a hot cob into Meera’s palm.

“The tap, Dadi. The cross on the stone. Past it, he...”

“Eat,” said Dadi, and turned the cobs, and did not say another word.

19:40

That night the storm sat on the roof like a cat on a mouse-hole, and Dadi, after the tongs, took a deep breath.

Listen. Tonight’s is a funny one, and funny ones are true as well.

“The Bagad Billa once chose a schoolmaster,” she said. “A thin man with a black umbrella, who walked home late with his chalk-dusted sleeve. The Billa came out of the fog with his iron jaw wide, and he reached for the collar. And the schoolmaster opened his umbrella in the Billa’s face.”

Tinku fell over backwards. Rita laughed so hard that she hiccuped. “And then,” said Dadi, and her voice cracked and recovered, “the schoolmaster pointed with his chalk and said, ‘Spell your name, Billa.’ And the Billa, who had never been to school, ran all the way up the hill.”

The room shook. Pappu laughed hardest, the first big laugh since Debu, loud and cracked, and he kept laughing even when it had turned a little wet. Meera laughed too. She looked up across the sigri and found Dadi watching her, not laughing, with the face of someone who has been seen.

Listen. That is the Bagad Billa sharpening his claws on the bricks outside. He is afraid of umbrellas tonight.

7The Bicycle Lamp

18:30

The wind was getting up when the bicycle came. They heard it first, a rattle and a thud on the stone steps, and then a boy of fourteen appeared in the doorway with a bicycle on his shoulder, its wheels still ticking. Kuldeep was the bus conductor’s son. He wore bell-bottoms soaked to the knee, and a dynamo lamp was clamped to his handlebar, a small brass eye.

“Pappu!” He set the bicycle down in the entrance, dripping. “Your father says come home. The roof’s leaking and he needs hands for the pots. Come on, I’ll take you down the lane. Two minutes.”

“No,” said Pappu.

“No?” Kuldeep looked at the sigri, the straw mat, the little ones, the pattu. He grinned. “Scared of Dadi’s pussycat?”

“Stay,” Dadi said. She wasn’t loud. “Until the thunder is finished. You too, Kuldeep. There is roasted maize.”

“I’m not a baby. I’ve a lamp and two wheels.” He thumped the handlebar. “The Billa has four legs, and I’ve seen what four legs do on a wet hill. They slip.” He winked at Rita, who looked away. “I’ll tell your father you’re in good hands.”

He wheeled the bicycle out, and they heard it jolt down all forty-seven steps, bump by bump. Meera and Pappu were at the window before the last bump.

18:50

The lamp showed in the lane as a yellow wobble, then a steady yellow line. The dynamo whined faintly. He was pedalling hard, standing on the pedals, and he rang the bell once for sheer bravado, and the ring reached them clear and bright. A garden wall came up into the light and went by.

“That’s the tap,” Pappu said, very quiet. “He’s at the tap.”

The lamp passed it. The yellow line jerked, swung up into the rain, swung down and lay along the ground, and went out.

Nothing else. No shout, no crash, no ring. Meera strained for any sound under the thunder, and the rain gave her nothing but itself.

Dadi didn’t come to the window. She sat with her back to the glass and her eyes shut, and her lips were moving. Meera couldn’t tell whether she was praying or counting.

“A dynamo lamp stops when the wheel stops,” said Pappu. His voice didn’t sound like his. “It stops. That’s all it is.”

“Then he’d have shouted,” said Meera.

19:30

Behind them Dadi had already tapped the tongs. She was sitting close to the kitchen door tonight, and her voice was flat, the voice of someone who had said these words for fifty years and meant to say them for fifty more.

Listen. This is the oldest one, the one my mother gave me.

“There was a girl of thirteen with a brother of seven,” Dadi said. “On stormy nights her mother told them stories to keep them in. The girl was clever, and bored of it. She wanted to see the eyes the stories talked about. One night, while her mother slept, she lifted the latch for one look.”

“What happened?” Tinku breathed, delighted and afraid.

“The little brother ran past her legs, laughing. He thought it was a game.”

Rita’s mouth made a small round O. Tinku asked, “Where did he go?” and Dadi said, “Into the dark,” and Tinku sighed with the old pleasure. Then he frowned. “And the girl?”

“The girl grew old, Tinku. She told stories every stormy night, so that nobody else would lift a latch.”

“Did the Billa ever get her?”

“No. She stayed in the room.”

Meera noticed Dadi’s hand. It had gone to the wall behind her, to the kitchen door, and her thumb moved on the crooked brass latch with the wooden peg, round and round, smooth as river stone, as it must have moved a thousand nights.

Pappu stared at the black window. The lane was a long dark mouth. Nobody saw a lamp come back up it, and they watched until the thunder finished, and the lane stayed black.

Listen. That is the Bagad Billa sharpening its claws on the bricks outside.

III. The Count

8The Latch

08:00

Kuldeep’s bicycle stood at the bend, propped neatly against the tin shed with its stand down. The front wheel had been folded flat as a plate. The dynamo lamp lay on the stones, its glass in the gutter. There was no scrap of cloth, no sandal, nothing else at all.

Behind Lala’s shop four more scores stood pale on the brick. Meera counted sixteen and wished she hadn’t.

The conductor, Kuldeep’s father, came down in his khaki with his cap in his hands and said nothing. Sub-Inspector Negi wrote in his notebook and said “the khad” in a voice that had given up. “A leopard breaks things too,” said Master-ji. “Leopards don’t fold wheels flat,” said Bhagwanti from her bench, loud enough for the whole lane.

Debu’s mother and Munna’s mother stood side by side at the third shutter. They had stopped screaming, and Meera found that worse. Neither looked at the other, and neither moved, as though the lane might give something back if they stayed polite.

12:00

At noon Lala Ramsaran climbed the forty-seven steps, which he had not done in ten years, and stood at Dadi’s kitchen door with his breath sawing. “Tell me what to do.”

“Lift the tin,” Dadi said. “Light the oil at lamp-lighting.”

“And who stands out there while it burns? Bhagwanti’s knees are gone. I’m no use outside after dark.” His hand went to his throat. “Nobody is.”

Dadi had no answer. He went away down the steps with one hand on the rail.

14:30

When he had gone, Dadi sat on the low kitchen stool with the crooked latch at her back and told Meera all of it. She didn’t tell it as a tale. There were no tongs and no refrain, only a plain voice that kept stopping to cough.

“The oil is older than me. My mother’s mother began it. The voice is what my mother added, after Tara.”

“Tara?”

“My brother. Seven years old. It was the rains of twenty-one, and I was thirteen and I wanted to see the eyes. I lifted this latch.” Her thumb found the peg. “He ran past my legs, laughing. In the morning there was one shoe on the step. My mother said the khad. The sub-inspector of those days said the khad.”

“And the tap?”

“My mother and I paced it the next day. She told me a story at the foot of the steps, and I walked away until I couldn’t hear her. That is where he starts. The oil keeps him sleeping at the stone, if somebody lights it before the rain-dark comes. The voice holds the ones inside the room. Mine, now.”

“And dry thunder?”

“He doesn’t wake for dry thunder. He wakes for rain-dark.” She tried to smile. “I made the tales longer every year, and funnier, and bloodier. A child leans toward a long tale, and leaning is staying. I only knew that a frightened child runs, and a listening child stays.”

“Debu didn’t listen.”

“No. Debu was bored.” Dadi closed her eyes. “I have never been able to make a tale long enough for a bored boy.”

“Why didn’t you tell Lala-ji, tell everyone, after Debu?”

“Because a woman who says it plainly is a madwoman, and a woman who is believed must say who lifted the first latch.”

Meera made herself ask it, in Tinku’s words. “Where does he take them, Dadi? Really?”

“I do not know, beta.” The old voice was very low. “Fifty-seven years, and I have never known. Into the dark is all I’ve ever had. I told it plain, the way I said. I only left out the end.”

23:55

The sigri was ash. The little ones breathed in the dark, and the cloud outside pressed a cold white face against the glass. The thunder was long finished and the silence had come, the heavy hour after, and Meera lay awake counting steps.

Listen, Meera. My voice is going, and every year the tale is longer to cover it.

She heard it from the cot and said nothing. She counted the forty-seven again, and then once more, until her own breath was the only sound left in the house. “Teach me, Dadi,” she said into the dark. After a long time the cot answered, “Yes.”

9A Hoarse Throat

09:00

Ten days had gone by since the kitchen, and now Dadi’s voice had gone in the night. She woke with a whisper, a leaf dragged along a floor, and when she tried to raise it, she coughed until Rita fetched water. Meera made ginger-and-honey tea on the chulha and held the glass to her lips.

Tinku had switched on the Murphy while nobody watched, and the forecast came clear through the static. “Very heavy rain tonight over the Dhauladhar and the valley below. A cloudburst cannot be ruled out.” On her cot, Dadi shut her eyes.

12:30

Pappu was waiting at the foot of the steps when Meera went down for kerosene. He had a bundle under his arm: a bottle of mustard oil from his father’s kitchen, matches wrapped in oilcloth, his Eveready torch, and an iron lever as long as his arm that Bishna had lent him without asking why.

“I’ll lift the sheet and light the dish,” he said. “You keep the words coming. Thali and all.”

“Pappu, that’s past the cross. That’s far past.”

“A hundred and fifty-nine paces from the foot of the steps. I counted.” His chin shook, and he lifted it. “He took Debu while I sat there with my cap pulled down, listening to a story about Ghanu. I’m going to do this one thing.”

Meera unwound the red wool from one of her plaits and tied it round his wrist. “For the thread,” she said, and he nodded.

“I can’t tell it properly,” Meera said. “Dadi has a hundred voices. I have one.”

“One’s enough if it’s loud,” said Pappu. “Rita knows the goat. Tinku knows the umbrella. Everybody knows one.”

15:30

Dadi gave Meera the lesson she had promised, a whisper at a time, with Meera’s ear almost against her lips. “Begin with the eyes. They always want the eyes. Give them the jaw in the middle and the question near the end, and never, never the answer.”

“And the tongs?”

“Three taps. Never two, never four. Three is how the house knows.” Dadi coughed and waited for it to pass. “If your voice goes, hand it to the next child, and make them say the line after you. Do not let a gap open, Meera. A gap is a door.”

Meera practised on the top step with Pappu standing below, nodding, saying nothing and not meeting her eye. She couldn’t tell whether he was learning the tale or learning how to leave it.

19:05

The cloud came down on the stroke of lamp-lighting, and the rain came with it, not falling but thrown. The slate roof boomed. Dadi sat up in the pattu and lifted the tongs, and her hand shook. She tapped once, twice, and the third tap barely rang. Her mouth opened, and no tale came.

Listen. Louder, beta.

It was no more than breath. Meera took the tongs from her gently and tapped the rim three times herself. She had never heard the sound from this side. It was sharper than she remembered.

“Listen,” she said, and her voice came out loud and stiff. “This is the Bagad Billa, and it is true.” She told the goat tale in the wrong order. She forgot the bell until the middle and lent the goat an umbrella from some other night. “That’s not how Dadi tells it,” said Rita, and Tinku said, “It’s better,” and they both laughed, and stayed.

Tinku, who had been given the thali to hold, hugged it in both arms and was plainly saving his umbrella for later. Rita whispered the goat’s lines under her breath, a half-beat ahead of Meera’s. Meera noticed, and filed it away.

A laughing room, Meera thought, was a full room. She felt her voice go out of the door and down the forty-seven steps, and she hoped it was enough.

Then she looked at the far mat. Pappu’s cap lay folded on it, a promise, and the mat beside it was empty.

Dadi’s hand rose. One finger, two, three. “Three,” came the whisper. “Meera. Tinku. Rita.” The finger shook in the air, hunting for a fourth head that wasn’t there. “Pappu?”

Meera picked up the thali and the spoon.

10Count the Heads

19:15

Meera beat the thali with the spoon, one stroke to every word. “The. Goat. Slipped. Its. Rope.” Tinku caught the beat at once and shouted the next line in his thin high voice, and Rita came in on the third, hoarse with terror. Behind them Dadi’s tongs rang on the sigri, unsteady but unbroken, keeping the time. Nobody said stop. Nobody would have dared.

Meera took the top step with the lantern behind her. The lane lay below, black and open-mouthed, and the rain came sideways. At the bend a small yellow torch swung.

“He’s there,” Tinku shouted between beats, and went on.

She saw the beam climb the tin shed and hold on the gap where two sheets overlapped. Thin over the rain came the shriek of iron on iron as the lever bit. A sheet rose. Under it a second light bloomed, a flame no bigger than a thumbnail, shaking. He was late, she knew: the rain-dark was a quarter-hour old, and the lever had slipped twice in the wet. It held. The oil. The red wool, tied somewhere in the roots.

“The. Bell. Went. Round. The. Bend.” The voices poured from the door behind her, two children and a whisper and the tongs, and thunder patted the roof overhead with a great flat hand.

19:50

The coals came up behind the deodar, slowly, the way a sleeper rises toward a light in his face. Two of them, a hand-span apart, climbing through the rain until they stood higher than a man’s head. They didn’t blink. They looked at the little flame and at the torch, and then, with terrible patience, at the lit window behind her.

Four long drags of something hard went down the brick wall behind Lala’s shop, iron on brick.

“Run, Pappu,” Meera said quietly, and kept the beat. “Run.”

The torch broke from the bend and came up the lane in great jolts, past the third shutter, wild. Behind it the coals came down low and fast, level with his collar. Rita’s voice cracked, and Meera shouted over her. “The. Bell. Went. Round. The. Shutters.” Tinku took the next line. The tongs rang. The torch passed the tap.

The beam jerked backward, caught by something behind it, and a rip of cloth carried up the lane over the rain. The coals stopped at the tap, over the place she had chalked, and stood. Then the torch came on, up the forty-seven steps, and Pappu fell through the door on his hands and knees. His shirt hung open at the neck, bleeding thread. The collar was gone. He was alive.

“It’s lit,” he gasped. “It stayed lit, Meera.”

22:40

The thunder lasted until nearly midnight. Meera’s throat ran raw and went numb. Tinku and Rita passed the thali from hand to hand and told the goat, the umbrella, the fog in turn. When Meera’s voice failed, Rita took it up. When Rita’s failed, Tinku. Dadi’s tongs never stopped. No gap opened all night. Somewhere on the far side of the hill the cloud finally burst and fell on someone else’s roof.

00:10

The last thunder rolled off into the valley, and the silence came down, the hour after. Pappu slept or pretended to against the wall. The sigri ticked.

And out of the dark a voice said, thin as a thread, “...and the rope lay empty in the lane.”

It was Debu’s, and it was early: Meera had not reached that line.

A second voice answered. Munna’s. “...and ting, ting, under the deodar.” Then a third, bigger and cheerful and cracked, Kuldeep’s, ringing out the next line a breath before Tinku’s lips had shaped it. Three voices, patient and word-perfect, telling the tale along with them out of the dark.

“Didi,” Tinku whispered. “They’re telling it right.” He wasn’t afraid. He was delighted. He had always wanted to know where they went.

Dadi lifted one finger after another, and counted heads the way she always did. Meera, Tinku, Rita, Pappu. Four. Then she held up her other hand and counted the voices. Three. Seven fingers stood in the lantern light, and her face was wet. She had never once stopped counting them.

Slowly she lifted her thumb. Eight. She held her breath for it. The dark gave her nothing. She had been listening for that one for fifty-seven years, and for Ghanu and Santosh longer still.

Meera took the tongs and tapped the rim three times. Her throat was raw. She told it again, from the beginning, and the dark told it with her.

Listen. That is the Bagad Billa sharpening its claws on the bricks outside.