The White One

Every night at exactly 3:10 a.m., eleven regulars come into Kabir's pharmacy, ask for the white one, pay in exact change, and never meet his eyes. He cannot remember ever stocking the tablet, and the moment they arrive, something behind the padlocked cellar door begins to scratch.

The White One

A Psychological Horror Story

CHAPTER ONE
THE REGULARS

At 3:09 the Sanjeevani Medical Hall was the one dry room in Sillakhet, and Kabir had learned to enjoy it the way a man enjoys the last clean minute of a shirt. The strip lights ran thin and steady on the inverter. Outside, the rain worked at the tin shutters with the patience of a creditor, as it had since June.

He did not look at the clock. The clock lived in his shoulders by now, a small tightening that came a minute before the hour. Everything in the shop was where it ought to be: cough syrups in their ranks, brown and amber and a pink no child had ever believed in; the Ganesh calendar with its corner curling; the old Godrej cupboard against the back wall; two rexine chairs for patients who came at no hour he had ever worked. The smell was phenyl over wet cardboard over mildew, and he could have drawn it blind. On the glass counter, wiped twice, stood a jar of orange toffees, filled to the neck at dusk, and beside it a round steel tin he did not remember buying.

Through the front glass the lane lay black from end to end. The line had been down since the rains, and the municipality, in Kabir's experience, regarded a dark street as a form of weather. Only the Medical Hall kept its light, because the inverter kept it. Kabir called the inverter the Colonel, for its bearing, and it hummed on one note, as a colonel does when asked to do too much alone.

At 3:10 the shutter, which he left raised a yard from the floor to let the damp out, began to take them in.

They came one behind the other, and not one of them ducked. He had noticed that in the first week, and had put it down to the hills, which raise people to fit their doorways, though the gap was a yard high and the shortest of them stood taller than that. They brought the rain in with them. Their clothes were damp through: wool the colour of dishwater, a blue sleeve that stopped short of the wrist, a tie knotted by someone who had learned the knot that year, a cap pulled low. A smell came in with them of river steps and cold stone, and their shoes left small wet prints on the tile, and every one of them kept a face turned to the floor. In all the nights there had been, not one had met his eyes. He had stopped taking it personally somewhere in the first year, which, for Kabir, was a long time to go without taking something personally. He had never learned their names, either, which in a town this small seemed to him a discourtesy, and which he carried about as a small unpaid debt.

The first of them reached the counter. All of her that the glass allowed him was two pale hands, nails cut short, and the top of a head with a parting as straight as a ruled line.

"The white one."

Her voice was low and entirely polite, a little hoarse, a voice that had been used hard and put away wet.

He opened the tin and took out a tablet, a plain white disc the size of a shirt button, stamped with nothing, and slid it across the glass on a square of butter paper. The money was waiting beside the toffee jar: a five-rupee note gone soft as cloth and brown at the folds, and two coins, wet. Seven rupees. It had been seven rupees since before he could remember, and he had never asked why not eight.

"Thank you."

That was the whole of it. The hands withdrew, the tablet went with them, and the next pair came up onto the glass. The white one. Thank you. He did it eleven times, and eleven times the money was exact, and eleven times it was the same soft, river-smelling money, which at dawn he laid flat under the Ganesh frame to dry, and which never dried. Not one of them asked for anything else. Not one of them looked ill in any way he could see. He had stopped wondering what the white one was for in the same year he stopped taking things personally, and for the same reason, which was that no answer had been offered and he was a patient man.

They went the way they had come. The shutter rattled once, lightly, as if a hand had trailed along its lower edge, and the lane took them. Kabir fetched the mop from behind the counter and did the floor without looking at it: the wet prints, narrow and in pairs, the long smear where a sleeve had dragged. The damp, he supposed, made everyone's feet look smaller.

The scratching had begun with the first of them. It came from the passage behind the Godrej cupboard, where the cellar door stood, a dry and patient sound, low on the wood, and it did not stop. It went on under the rain until the grey came into the shutters. In the first year he had learned to hear it the way one hears a wall clock, which is to say not at all; the part of him that still heard it was a part he kept busy.

By morning the toffee jar would stand down by a finger's breadth, and a row of wrappers, each folded to the size of a button, would lie along the lip of the counter. He blamed mice. In Sillakhet, he had told the Colonel more than once, even the mice had better manners than the municipality.

He wrung the mop. Out of habit he lifted the lid of the steel tin and looked in. It held less than it had; by dusk it would be full again, to the same line, as it was full every dusk. Once, early on, he had searched every drawer in the shop for an invoice, a wholesaler's name, a delivery slip, and there had been nothing. No one had ever sold him the white one. Somebody, at some hour, filled the tin, and in all the nights there had been Kabir had never once been there when it was done.

CHAPTER TWO
THE WINDOW

Kabir woke at noon, as he did every day, with the light already thinning and a flask of chai steaming on the sill of the shutter slit. It had two spoons of sugar in it. The chaiwala, whoever he was, had been told Kabir's habits, or had guessed them, or had some delicacy about being thanked; either way Kabir had never seen his face, and had come to regard this as the highest form of service.

The lid of the steel tin sat a little off true, as it did every noon. He set it straight and carried the flask to the front window. The lane ran downhill to the culvert in a long wet curve, and the town lay along it in the mist: balconies, tin roofs, a shuttered cinema with its poster gone to pulp. Higher up, the ghat road disappeared into cloud, and no bus had come down it since the rains, which he took to mean that the bus company shared the municipality's view of weather. On the first-floor balcony across the way a woman was beating a rug against the rail. At the far end, by the culvert, a man stood under a black umbrella with his face to the water, as he did every day. Somewhere out of sight a bicycle bell rang twice. Kabir raised a hand to the woman. She did not see it, and he judged this perfectly reasonable. Sillakhet had been shy since the floods.

In all the time he had kept the shop he had never spoken to any of them. They did not cross the lane. He saw them through glass and mist, at the length of a cricket pitch, always busy at something and always turned a little away, and he took it for what the hills do to people after a disaster. There were no children among them. The school, he had been told, had gone down to the plains, and a town without a school, he thought, loses its noon.

The dog sat where it always sat, at the end of the lane, exactly on the edge of the shop's light: a rangy brown animal with a torn ear and the manner of a retired inspector. Kabir called it the Inspector. He had tried roti, biscuits, once an entire paratha, and in all that time it had never set a paw on his side of the step. It took the roti only when he had gone back inside, and watched the Medical Hall with professional reservation, as though the premises had failed an inspection it was not at liberty to discuss.

On a nail beside the Godrej cupboard his phone hung on its charger, drawing a little of the Colonel's strength. Two words had stood on its screen since the rains: No Service. He tried it each day the way one tries the door of a house one has been told is empty, and blamed the tower on Kali Tekri.

He did the stock-check, which was a way of touching everything once. Expiry dates, with a thumbnail. Seals. On the lowest shelf the last jar of gum binder had gone to paste around the rim, and he wrote Reorder binder on the pad by the till, under the same line written on the sheet above it, and the sheets above that, in his own hand, a long white column of them going back and back. He left it there. A man who starts counting his reminders must be ready for the answer.

Afternoons in Sillakhet were short. He put it down to the mist, which came early and closed the day like a lid. He would sit at the counter at one with the newspaper and a pen, and look up, and it would be dusk, and his chai would be cold, and his cuffs, for some reason, would be dusty. He had stopped remarking on it. He had stopped remarking on a good many things, and was a calmer man for it.

Behind every hour of the day he could feel the night leaning toward 3:10.

At ten to six he filled the toffee jar to the neck, as he did every dusk without ever having decided to, and went to the back of the shop for the mop. It was kept in the passage behind the Godrej cupboard, and the passage ended in the door.

A padlock on the outside of a door is a kind of sentence. In all the time he had lived with this one at his back, Kabir had never asked who had written it.

CHAPTER THREE
THE LOCK

He went to look at it at 3:12 that night, with the mop still in his hand and the water of the regulars still drying in the grooves of the tile.

The cellar door was steel, and green under so many coats of other greens that the paint had thickened to a skin. It was set low at the end of the passage, where the shop floor began to slope toward it, as a floor will toward a drain. The hasp was welded. The padlock hung on the outside of it, a brass Godrej, and it was the only thing in the building without rust. The scissors in the drawer had rusted. The Colonel's casing had bloomed. The padlock shone like something that was handled.

From beneath the door came the smell the regulars carried in on their clothes, river mud and wet stone, and he had always put the one down to the other: the hill weeping into the cellar, the cellar weeping into the street, the street into everybody's shoes. A line of damp lay along the sill. Low on the door, where he would have to kneel to see them, the green was scored in short bright strokes. He knelt. They went up no higher than his knee. Caught on a burr of the steel, a hand's breadth below the highest scratch, hung a single thread of white wool. He stood again, faster than he had knelt.

The ring that had come with the shop, Pandey-ji's, held nineteen keys. In his first week Kabir had tried every one of them in that lock, and none had fitted, and he had been relieved, and had not asked himself why a man should be relieved. There had once been a chowkidar on this street, or he thought there had, a man with a stick and a whistle who might have known whose lock it was. Nobody had seen him since the rains, either.

Under the door the scratching went on. He listened to it for as long as he could, which was not long, and went to bed.

The mortar and pestle were on the drainer in the back room when he woke, upside down, washed, still wet. He stood and looked at them. He dispensed from strips and bottles; he had no use for a mortar. The brass scale that belonged on the nail above the sink was gone, and the nail was bare and bright, as a nail is where something has hung a long time. His cuffs, when he turned them over, were grey-white, fine as flour, worked into the weave.

He did what a careful man does. He wrote in the diary, in ink, 1:10, sat down, awake, laid the pen beside it, and watched the minute hand of the wall clock go round. It was a good minute hand. He blinked, he was sure, once.

Dusk. The mist at the window had gone from white to slate. His chai was cold. The pen lay where he had set it, and under his line in the diary, in his own hand, the ink long dry, were two more: tin, done, 5:40. Binder, low.

He read them twice. Then, because the Ganesh calendar had been bothering him for a week by hanging crooked, he lifted it from its nail to set it straight, and stood with it in his hands. The date at the top of the page was the date in the diary, which was the date on the newspaper, and, he saw now, the date it had been yesterday.

CHAPTER FOUR
THE DATE

The third of October: the Ganesh calendar said so, and the diary, and the newspaper that lay on the sill of the shutter slit at noon beside the flask, damp at the corners and folded on the crease it was always folded on.

Before he slept at dawn Kabir had drawn a ring around its headline in heavy ink. He looked at the ring now for some time without touching the paper. SCHOOL SHELTER SEARCH CONTINUES. Beneath it, a photograph of an iron wheel on a stream gate, wet, with no one standing near; beneath that the weather; beneath that the date, which was the third. In the lower corner lay a brown ring of old tea, the diameter of his own cup, left on some morning for which he could find no day.

He opened the diary. It was the kind with a page to each day, and he had been, it appeared, a conscientious man: page after page, in his own blue ink, headed 3 October. Rain. Dog. 3:10. Rain. Dog. 3:10. The rain varied here and there, heavy, steady, once simply worse, but the heading did not, and the dog did not, and at the foot of every page, in the same blue ink, stood the time.

By the till stood the tear-off block that had come with the shop. The top leaf said 3 OCT, and behind it the other leaves stood clean and in order, each with its saint and its auspicious hour, a hand's thickness of days that nobody had torn, like people who have been told to stay seated.

He tried the radio on the shelf: static, and under the static, if he was honest, not even that. He tried the phone on its nail. No Service. He looked at the Colonel, whose panel read FULL, as it had every day, though no wire in the lane carried a current; he had decided long ago to treat this as the manufacturer's confidence.

"Even you," he said. The Colonel hummed on, and declined to be drawn.

There were explanations, and he gave each a fair hearing. A newsagent's boy who reused his stock. A diary kept by a man in a rut. A calendar forgotten, as calendars are, by everyone except the person standing next to it. Each was reasonable. Each was a coat that fitted at the shoulders and not at the arms.

At 3:10 the night before, the rain had changed its note and the eleven had come in, and he had counted the money into his palm and found it seven rupees each, exactly, as it was every night, as it was, he supposed, on the third of October.

In the end it came down to the tin, as everything in the Medical Hall did. Eleven people needed the white one every night, for a purpose he had never been told, at a price he had never been asked to defend; and he, who dispensed it, had never once, to his knowledge, taken one. A man should know what he sells.

CHAPTER FIVE
HOURS

He took it at 9:04, and wrote the time in the diary, because it seemed to him that someone ought to.

The tin was full to its line: twelve, which was eleven and one over, and he had never in all the nights thought to wonder at the one over. He counted them twice, being a man about to steal who wished to know the size of the theft, and then he lifted one out and looked at it in his palm: white, plain, no bigger than a shirt button, and warmer than it had any right to be. He swallowed it dry and followed it with a mouthful of chai. Then he sat down on a rexine chair with his back to the Godrej cupboard, as one sits to wait for a bus.

Nothing came. He had expected a taste, a heaviness, a warm hand laid on the back of the neck, and he waited for it with the dry attention of a man in a doctor's corridor. The rain went on at the tin. The Colonel went on. Nothing came for some time, and then nothing came in a different way, as a room is different once the furniture has been taken out, and the wall clock said 9:11, and then it said something else, and he was no longer reading it.

3:09. The strip light was buzzing, and Kabir was standing at the counter with the pestle in his right hand.

The mortar stood before him, and when he laid his left palm against its side it was warm, warm as a cup lately emptied. A fan of white powder lay across the glass, finer than flour, in the shape his own sleeve had made sweeping it. Both cuffs were grey with it. The brass scale that had gone missing from its nail stood beside the toffee jar with its pans still trembling. The jar of binder was open, its lid upside down on the counter, and the paste in it had been scraped nearly clean. Not one tablet had been pressed from all that powder. Whoever had been at work had run out of time, or of binder, or of whatever it is that lets a man finish.

The flask of chai was cold. The diary lay open at his own line, 9:04, and below it a clean ruled page; whoever had been at work in the hours between had not cared to write them down. The shutter was where he had left it. The rain was where it had been.

He lifted the lid of the tin. A single layer of tablets lay in it, with gaps, like a mouth that has been to the wrong dentist. He counted them. Ten.

He had taken one. The tin said two had gone, and nobody had sold them.

The rain changed its note.

The shutter took them in. The first came to the glass, and the second, and he gave out the white one as he always gave it, and took the money as he always took it, and counted under his breath, which he had never before needed to do. The tenth took hers and said thank you and went. The eleventh came up to the counter.

She had the smallest hands of all, he had always thought, though the glass allowed no measuring of such a thing. Her coins were already laid out in a row, wet and exact.

"The white one."

He turned the tin over. Nothing fell out. He turned it to show her the inside, which he had never done, and held it there. The hands on the glass did not move. They stayed for the length of a long slow count, and the coins lay in their row, and below the floor the scratching went on exactly as it always did, which that night was the worst thing about it.

"Thank you."

She did not ask. She did not take her money back. She said it as she said it every night, and turned toward the shutter with her face still lowered, and the dark let her through. The seven rupees stayed on the counter, in their ring of wet.

He stood with the empty tin in his hands long after the shutter had stopped moving. He had never in all his nights seen anyone go without. Whatever the white one was, somebody had walked out into the rain tonight lacking it, and some part of him that kept better records than he did already knew that this had happened once before.

CHAPTER SIX
THE LEDGER

By the next night the last of the binder had gone to black paste with a bloom on it like breath on glass, and the tin stood empty, and no afternoon had been taken from him.

That was the strange part, and he sat down in the middle of it. Without the tablets there had been no mist at two o'clock. The afternoon had come in order, hour after hour, each with its own face, and he had watched every one go by like a man at a level crossing. Behind his left ear a pain had opened a small and exact workshop. In the walls, where there was no water, he could hear water, and in the back room the tap, which had always dripped, now seemed to have something to say.

At midnight, for want of anything to do with his hands, he opened the bottom locker of the Godrej cupboard. He had never opened it, and had never asked why. The key was the small brass one that hung on a bootlace round his neck, and had hung there, he supposed, for as long as he had had a neck.

Inside, on a folded cloth, lay four things: a laminated card on a lanyard, a green cloth-bound ledger, a pink sheet folded in four, and a strip of ruled paper torn from a notebook. Beside them, wrapped in a handkerchief he knew by its darn, lay a second key, long and flat and brass. Folded into the same handkerchief was one white tablet, kept back.

The card said DR. KABIR RIZVI, MEDICAL OFFICER, SILLAKHET CIVIL DISPENSARY. The photograph was of his own face, heavier, better fed, and apparently under the impression that things would go on.

He put the tablet in his shirt pocket, as one pockets a thing one has not decided about. He did not sit. He opened the ledger on the counter under the strip light, and the handwriting was his own, as familiar as the sound of his own cough. DOSE REGISTER, in capitals, on the first leaf. Inside the cover, ruled off like a prescription, four short instructions:

Noon: mine first. Dusk: the tin, twelve. 3:10: one each, exact change. Do not look up.

After that the pages were ruled into columns, and down the left of every page ran the same list, copied so neatly each time that it might have been printed:

1. Pooja Rawat, VI. 2. Imran Qureshi, VIII. 3. Tenzin Dolma, V. 4. Rohan Bisht, VII. 5. Anita Thomas, IX. 6. Gurpreet Kaur, VI. 7. Deepak Thapa, VIII. 8. Fatima Sheikh, IV. 9. Sneha Pant, VII. 10. Manoj Negi, IX. 11. Kavita Panwar, V.

12. ______
13. Rizvi, K. Staff.

Across from every name ran a field of small ticks, one for each night, each laid as exactly as a stitch: one a night for the eleven, one each noon for the last, and across from line twelve, on every page, nothing at all. He turned the leaves, and the ticks went back and back through the whole thick book, and nowhere in them was a gap, until the final page, last night's, where against the eleventh name the tick had not been made, and a small neat cross stood in its place.

He had never learned their names. Here they all were, in his hand, every one spelled correctly. Eleven of them. Line twelve was a ruled blank, and he had copied it, every night for four years, as carefully as the rest.

The pink sheet had gone soft at the folds. It was a file copy of something: the carbon had pressed through from the white sheet above it, which had gone elsewhere, and what remained was a ghost of print, a few lines with the rest worn out of them. FLOOD CONTROL ROOM, SILLAKHET. ORDER. ...surge at the stream gate expected 03:10... Lower Bazaar cannot be... unless... Hostel Block B, lowest ground, basement shelter to be sealed from outside before the gate is opened... occupants as per Warden's roll: 11... Medical concurrence: cannot be brought up in the time.

At the foot, pressed through all three sheets so hard that it stood out on the back like Braille, was a signature in blue ballpoint: K. Rizvi, M.O.

The torn strip was pencil, written fast, a warden's hand. At the hatch the count is twelve, not eleven. One day-scholar, kept back by the rain. Small. White sweater. Will not let go of the rail. Dr. sahib says

It ended where the paper did.

He found that he was kneeling at the cellar door, and could not have said how he had come there. The green had lifted at one edge where the damp had worked on it, and under the green, in black stencil, someone had lettered BLOCK B, and under that, SHELTER, and under that a figure for its capacity, which he did not read. On the sill, pushed through from the other side, lay a single orange wrapper, folded to the size of a button.

The padlock shone. Around its keyhole the brass was worn to a bright ring, the wear of one key in one hand, night after night. He took the long key out of its handkerchief and put it to the lock, and it went in the way a hand goes into a glove. He did not turn it.

It came up in pieces then, none of them larger than a hand. A steel tray in a dispensary, eleven white discs laid out on butter paper, counted twice, and the count coming out the same. A green rail, wet. A small hand on the rail that would not let go. A voice on a radio set, saying the time twice. And then nothing, the way a fish goes from a rippled pond and leaves only the surface.

The wall clock said 3:09. The passage was quiet. It would not be quiet long.

He rose. He laid the ledger open on the counter, and the pink sheet beside it, and set the empty tin square to the edge of the glass, from habit, because it was 3:09 and that was where the tin went. There was no dose to take first, except the one in his pocket, and he left it there. Somewhere in him a question had been standing all this time with its hat in its hands, and it came forward now, small and clear: in all the nights, he had never once wondered where they went when they left.

CHAPTER SEVEN
3:10

At 3:09 the Sanjeevani Medical Hall was the one dry room in Sillakhet, and everything in it was exactly the right size.

He looked through the front glass, which he had looked through every day and never once looked at. The lane lay black from end to end. There was no balcony where the woman beat her rug; there was a slope of rain-struck dark, and below it a denser dark that might have been a culvert. Not a window held a light. The Colonel hummed his one note, and the glow of the Medical Hall lay out across the wet as far as the step, and stopped. At its edge, where the dog sat every night, there was only the rain.

The tin stood open and empty on the counter. The ledger lay beside it, turned to the first leaf. A square of butter paper waited, because his hand had put it out. In his shirt pocket the last white tablet lay against his ribs, small and flat and entirely patient.

At 3:10 the rain changed its note.

They came in under the shutter as they always came, one behind the other, not one of them ducking, and the smell came in with them, river steps and cold stone. The wet fell from their sleeves onto the tile in small quick drops. Every face was turned to the floor. Tonight they did not come to the glass and go. They came up one beside another until the whole length of the counter had hands on it, and the money lay along the glass in eleven small heaps, each in its own ring of wet.

"The white one," said the first, and the parting in her hair was as straight as it had been every night.

He did not lift the lid of the tin, since there was nothing under it. He turned the ledger on the counter until it faced her, and laid one finger beside the first line, and let it lie there.

The hands did not move. Under the floor the scratching had begun with the first of them, as it did, low on the wood, patient, and it went on.

"The white one," she said again.

She said it past him this time. Her head had turned a quarter, away from the tin and the ledger, toward the Godrej cupboard and the passage behind it and the steel door at the end of the passage; and beside her, one after another down the length of the counter, the others turned the same quarter to the same dark place, and held it.

Kabir looked at her. It was the whole of what he did.

The girl at the glass lifted her face. Her eyes were brown and ordinary and quite dry. She only looked, as a child looks at a teacher who has come back into the room after a long time away, and the one beside her looked, and the one beside that, down the whole wet line, until eleven faces were turned up to the strip light and not one of them was surprised.

"It's ten past three, sir."

Under the floor, in the middle of a stroke, the scratching stopped.

He took the tablet from his pocket. In the strip light it was no bigger than a shirt button, and warmer than it had any right to be. He knew what it would give him: the mist at two o'clock, the woman with her rug, the Inspector at the edge of the light, a town that was only shy. He knew what it would take. He had made it himself once, on a steel tray, for eleven others, and counted them twice.

He laid it on the butter paper, square to the edge of the glass, where the tin always went, and took his hand away.

Then he picked up the toffee jar. It was full to the neck, as it was full every dusk, though he had never once decided to fill it. He held it against his chest in both arms and came round the end of the counter, and the eleven drew in their wet sleeves and parted for him without a sound. He went down the passage past the Godrej cupboard, with the water of the lane running along the tile beside his shoes toward the door.

The padlock shone. The long key was already in his hand, and for the first time in four years he did not wonder whose hand it was. It went in as a hand goes into a glove. It turned. The chain came away, and the welded hasp came away with it, soft as wet paper, as though it had only been waiting to be asked. The steel door opened inward on black water and a stone stair and the smell of river steps.

On the top step, in the light from the passage, lay a small hand, palm upward, in the cuff of a white sweater. It looked as if it had been open for a very long time.

Kabir knelt on the wet stone. He set the jar down and took off its lid, and put an orange toffee into the open hand.

The fingers closed around it. Then she looked up at him.

EPILOGUE

By morning the lane had no light in it.

The inverter let go of its one long note, the strip lights shortened and failed, and the street was as dark as every other. On the counter lay eleven small heaps of exact change, each in its own ring of wet, and beside them one white tablet, softening on its square of butter paper into chalk. In the open ledger, against line twelve, where for four years there had been only a ruled blank, someone had pressed a name so hard it stood through the back of the leaf. At the end of the passage the steel door stood open on a dry stair. The Inspector crossed the step, shook the rain from his ears, and lay down inside.