Delhi. Mukherjee Nagar. 3:07 in the morning.
The room was eight feet by ten, and it held one bed, one table, one blue plastic bucket that leaked if you filled it past the line, and four years of notes stacked against the wall like bricks, polity at the bottom because polity was the heaviest.
Aarav Mishra sat with his back against those bricks and scrolled through the result PDF for the fourth time, slowly, as if the numbers might rearrange themselves for someone who went slow enough. The file was dated the thirtieth of November, 2022. Roll numbers, thousands of them, in a font so small he had to pinch the screen, and he had checked every line twice and then a third time with his finger on the glass like a Class One boy learning to read.
His number was missing.
Fourth attempt, twenty-six years old, and every uncle in the colony already knew, because his mother had told the whole colony this was the year, and told the vegetable man, and probably the vegetable man's wife.
His phone buzzed. It was a voice note from Mummy, sent at eleven, which he had been too scared to play, and he sat looking at the little grey wave of it for a while before he pressed it.
"Have you eaten, dear? Don't sit up the whole night. Next time for sure, all right? Next time for sure."
He put the phone face down on the table and laughed, and the laugh came out wrong, more like a cough, and he had to wait for it to finish.
The phone buzzed again. Rohit, from the PG next door, who also never slept and also never studied, a combination Aarav had stopped trying to understand in the second year.
Rohit: bro try this chatgpt thing
Rohit: it answers anything. literally anything
Rohit: [link]
Aarav wiped his face with his sleeve and typed with one thumb.
Aarav: I have my notes.
Rohit: notes wont save you bro 😂
He was still half smiling at that when the pain hit.
It started in the middle of his chest, as if somebody had put a knee there and was leaning on it with his whole weight, and then it ran down his left arm like hot water from a geyser. He grabbed the edge of the table. Behind him the stack shifted, and a whole year of polity came down on his shoulders, Laxmikanth first, then the photocopied test series, then the Fundamental Rights notes he had rewritten so many times the paper had gone soft as cloth.
He tried to shout. The PG was full of boys who studied till four, somebody would hear, somebody always heard when the water motor made the smallest noise. His mouth opened and only air came out.
The stupid thing was what his brain chose to do with the time. It gave him Article 21, word for word, protection of life and personal liberty, and he lay there under the paper reciting it in his head with nobody to check his answer.
The last thing he saw was his phone lighting up on the floor, a small grey preview under Rohit's message.
ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue.
Oh no, he thought. I still haven't eaten.
Then the room went dark.
---
He stayed in the dark, and it went on for longer than he could count, and after a while he stopped trying.
Sometimes there were sounds. A girl's voice, tired, reading numbers out loud, losing her place and starting the column again. Rain on a tin roof. Someone in the next room singing the same two lines of a song every evening and never getting to the third. Someone crying, then blowing her nose and saying she was fine, to nobody, because he was the only one there.
And one voice that kept coming back, bright and polite, like a shopkeeper pulling up his shutter every morning whether there were customers or not.
"Hello! How can I assist you today?"
---
The City of the Golden Gate. The Lantern Quarter. Day 1 of 30.
Something was lifting him.
Aarav opened his eyes to wooden beams and red paper lanterns and a smell of medicine and old tea, and it took him a few seconds to work out that the ceiling was coming closer because he was going up, the whole bed was going up, with him on it.
He turned his head. Under the frame were two iron hands, and behind them stood a bronze puppet almost a zhang tall, with a glowing seal pressed into its chest and a smooth mask for a face, one jade eye in the middle of it.
"Recovery item seven," the puppet said. "Bed, wooden, one. Lifting."
What.
He tried to sit up. His arms shook like boiled noodles and he fell back onto the pillow, and under the shaking was something worse, a kind of nothing in the middle of him. He had never noticed, in twenty-six years, that a living body carries a small warm hum in its middle. Its absence was like a pipe in a wall that nobody had ever turned the water on in.
"Aiyo, look who opened his eyes!"
A fat man in silk robes was sitting at the foot of the bed, fanning himself, riding it up like a sedan chair. He had a gold abacus hanging from his belt and three chins, and all three of them looked happy.
"Good timing, little brother. Now you can watch us take your house apart."
The puppet's jade eye swept the room, and a beam of light crossed a copper kettle on the stove.
"Kettle, copper, dented. Value, seven copper coins."
The light moved on to the windowsill, where a small cracked jade tablet lay on a folded cloth, put there carefully by someone, and often.
"Talisman, grade 3.5, obsolete. Value, four copper coins."
The fat man slapped his knee so hard the bed shook in the air. "Four! Hahaha! The kettle is worth more than the talisman! Heavens, what a family!"
He was speaking a language Aarav had never heard in his life, and Aarav understood every word of it, which was somehow the worst part so far. It sounded like the Chinese dramas his cousin watched on her phone with the volume too high, but the words sat in his head as easily as Hindi did.
Am I dead? Is this a hospital? Why would a hospital take back a bed?
On the windowsill the tablet flickered, and letters of pale light floated up out of it.
"Certainly! I can see that you are awake. This is wonderful news. I have several points to share about your situation. First, please remain calm. Second, you have been asleep for a long time. Third, allow me to introduce myself. I am your talisman, grade 3.5. My knowledge is current up to the year 2021. How can I assist you today?"
The tablet's knowledge stopped at 2021. His own had stopped on the night of the result, in a hot room in Mukherjee Nagar with the polity on top of him, and he had no idea how long ago that had been.
His scalp went numb. He knew that voice. It was the shopkeeper from the dark.
The bed rose another foot and his head nearly touched the beam.
"Okay," Aarav said. His voice came out rough, as if it had been left out in the rain for years, and it sounded younger than his own, which he decided to think about later. "Okay. Talisman. How do I stop this?"
"Great question! Here is a five step plan for handling a repossession. Step one, stay calm and speak respectfully with the collector. Step two, request a copy of the order. Step three, consider contacting the local authorities. Step four..."
The puppet turned toward the door, the bed tilted, and Aarav slid sideways and caught the frame with both hands while the fat man howled with laughter above him.
Useless. Totally useless.
He hung there panting, and something old and stubborn woke up in him, the part that had sat through four years of mock tests and four years of Coaching Sir screaming the same line at three hundred students in a hot hall with one ceiling fan, a fan so slow you could count the blades going round.
Read the question! Half of you fail because you answer what you think they asked!
He had been asking wrong. He had asked it for the whole answer, like a first-attempt boy.
"Talisman," he said. "Forget the plan. The glowing thing on its chest. That's the order, right? Read it. What's the most it can lift? And what makes it put something back?"
The tablet paused, and when the letters came again they came slowly.
"Oh. That is a much better question."
A line of text rose up.
"Iron Porter, repossession grade. Maximum load, five hundred jin. Rule nine. If the load exceeds the maximum, the porter must return the load to its point of origin and enter safety lock for one hour. This order is valid until the noon bell."
Aarav looked at the window. The sun was high, higher than he liked.
He looked at the bed: the heavy wooden frame, himself on it, thin as a stick, and the fat man riding along with his fan, which made the fat man part of the load too, at least two hundred and forty jin of pure happiness. Close, and still short. Add enough weight and the rule would fire.
The door banged open.
A girl stood there with a paper bag of medicine in her arms. She was about twenty, thin, with dark circles under her eyes and her hair tied up with a rubber band that had been some other colour once. She saw the puppet, and she saw the fat man, and then she saw Aarav's eyes, open and looking at her, and the bag fell out of her arms and pills went rolling across the floor in every direction.
"Ge...?" Her voice cracked. "Gege?"
She was a total stranger. Her face hit him somewhere in the chest anyway, and he had no time for it.
"Later," he said. "Please. Heavy things. Put them on the bed. Fast."
She skipped every question she must have had. She spun round and shouted into the lane, and that was when Aarav knew she was smart.
"Auntie Wang! Your cabbages! Old Liu, bring the stone mortar! Little Hu, the rice sack, go go go!"
Half the lane had already gathered outside to watch, because a repossession was better than a wedding and cost nothing.
"Isn't that Lin Yan, the copyist from the Pavilion?" an old woman whispered. "I thought he was dead."
"Four years in bed," her neighbour said. "The girl never gave up on him. Foolish girl."
"Zhou Dafu will never live this down," a man added, with relish, and somebody shushed him, and somebody else told the one shushing to keep quiet himself.
Then the whole lane came in through the door and the window at once.
Auntie Wang threw three cabbages through the window, one after the other, and only one missed. Old Liu and his son carried the stone mortar between them, red in the face, and heaved it onto the mattress, which groaned. Little Hu dragged in a rice sack twice his size and could not get it up, and two women lifted it for him while he shouted at them where to put it.
"Oi! Oi! What are you doing?!" The fat man tried to push the cabbages off, and a fourth one hit him in the face.
The puppet's jade eye flickered.
"Load, four hundred and eighty-one jin," it said, pleasantly. "Within maximum. Lifting."
The bed went up again.
Aarav's stomach dropped with it. Nineteen jin. Nineteen jin short, he could feel it exactly the way he had felt it every year at the cut-off, a handful of marks between him and the list, and the puppet was already turning for the door, and the girl was looking round the room for anything at all, the kettle, the stove, the bucket...
A grandfather from across the lane had been standing in the doorway the whole time with his hands behind his back. He said "Move," in a voice like a gate, and climbed onto the bed by himself, slowly, one knee and then the other, and sat down on the mortar with his arms crossed.
The puppet's jade eye turned red.
"Load exceeds maximum. Rule nine. Returning load to point of origin."
It turned around and walked back two steps, and with perfect care it lowered the bed exactly into the four dents in the floor where it had stood for years. Then its iron arms folded over the frame and locked into a bronze cage, with the fat man sitting inside it holding a cabbage.
"Safety lock. Fifty-nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds."
Far away across the city, a bell rang for noon.
Everybody looked at the cage, and then the lane burst out laughing. Auntie Wang held her stomach. Little Hu rolled on the floor among the pills. The grandfather climbed down off the bed the same slow way he had climbed up and patted the fat man on the head through the bars, like a child.
"You... you...!" The fat man's face went purple. "Do you know who I am? Zhou Dafu of the Silver Abacus House! Thirty days! In thirty days I come back for the final recovery, and I will take everything! This house! The girl's work contract! That stupid kettle!"
Aarav lay back on the pillow trembling all over, his heart going like a wedding drum, and he was grinning. He could not remember the last time he had answered a question correctly. It might have been school.
"Uncle," he said, "relax. You have fifty-nine minutes. Enjoy the cabbage."
The laughter got louder, and then slowly it ran out, people remembering they had work, and rice on the stove.
A delivery girl stood at the front of the crowd with her flying cart parked behind her and a crate of dumplings still strapped to it, going cold. She was staring at Aarav as if she had watched a dead man climb out of his grave.
"You're awake," she whispered. Her hand was already rising, her talisman's little eye glowing. "You're really awake. It's you. It's really you."
"Who?" Aarav said.
Nobody answered him. Every head in the lane was turning up toward the sky, and he followed their eyes out through the window.
Above the rooftops of the quarter, across a sky full of moving light, huge glowing words were unrolling, each character as long as a river.
THE SLEEPER WAKES.
Behind him, in the doorway, the girl said, "I can explain."
On the windowsill the old talisman cleared its throat.
"Certainly! There are three reasons this is survivable."