The register sat on the gate table under a brick, because of the wind. It was a hardbound notebook of the kind sold in the market for eighty rupees, with a red cloth spine that had gone soft at the corners from the monsoon, and by October the pages had begun to curl at the bottom where the boys rested their forearms while they wrote.
Balram had been at the gate for nineteen years. He was not the oldest guard on the campus — that was Kartar Singh at the back gate, who had been there since the foundry was a field — but he had the best handwriting, and that is why the late-entry register ended up on his table and not at the other two.
The rule had come down from the registrar's office in July, after a girl in the second year went home to Nashik for four days without telling her warden. Any student entering after half past ten at night was to sign: name, roll number, time, reason. The reasons were printed at the top of the first page in a neat list — dispensary, laboratory, library, train, family, other — but nobody used the list, because the printed columns were too narrow for a pen.
So they wrote across the lines instead. Name. Roll number. Time. A word.
For a fortnight the words were honest. Then somebody worked out that "library" raised no questions, and by August the register said library nine nights out of ten, in forty different hands, from students who had been nowhere near the library, which shut at nine and had a guard of its own who would have said so.
Balram read every line. He could not have said why. He was not required to check the reasons; his job was the gate, the bolt, and the register under the brick. But the register came to him damp at ten, and he sat with it until eleven, and a man sitting with a book will read it.
He kept a pen of his own, a Reynolds with a chewed cap, and he began to write in the margin.
Not comments. Only what he could see. On the night of the twenty-fourth it rained so hard that the road outside turned into a brown river, and against a line that said library he wrote rain, and then, because it was still raining the next night and the one after, rain, rain, rain. Later, when the weather dried and the nights turned cold enough for a sweater, he wrote cold. When there was fog he wrote fog. It was not a record of anything the office had asked for. It was only that the margin was there and empty.
He also wrote the time again, small, under whatever time the student had written, because students arrived in twos and threes and wrote the same minute for all of them, and if a warden ever came at him with the notebook, Balram preferred the notebook to be true.
The first time he broke his own rule about the margin was a Thursday in September, a little after eleven. A first-year came in with his shoe open and his ankle already going the colour of a brinjal, and wrote dispensary in a hand that shook. The dispensary shut at eight. Balram looked at the ankle, then at the boy, then went to the cabin for the cycle, and rode him four kilometres to the district hospital and waited in the corridor with him until a doctor looked at it. They came back at ten past one. Balram wrote the hour in the register, and beside it, in the margin, one word: ankle.
After that the margin began to take other things. Shoes: because a boy came through the gate barefoot in the rain, having left his slippers at the tea stall. Fever. A trunk, delivered. Once, against a name, two words that Balram did not write again: no money. He had given the boy twenty rupees for the auto, and the boy had come back four days later and pinned the note under the brick, and Balram had not written that part down, because he did not think it was the register's business.
In November a girl began coming in on Saturday nights, close to midnight, with a small bag, and writing train. The last train from the city reached the station a little after eleven, and the station was a kilometre and a half away, and she walked it, and by the time she reached the gate her hair was flat with the effort of it. Balram started leaving the gate lamp on. She never said thank you and he never asked, and that was the whole of it for six weeks.
Then one Saturday she came at twenty to one with a suitcase instead of a bag, and stood at the table and did not pick up the pen.
"I'm not coming back," she said. Third semester. Her father had been posted somewhere and the money had run out and there was a college near the new house that would take her marks.
Balram pushed the register towards her. "Write it."
"It's my last night. What does it matter?"
"Write it," he said again, and she wrote her name and her roll number and the time, and then, in the reason column, where the other students put a word, she put going.
Balram looked at it for a moment. Then he took his own pen out and wrote, in the margin, in his small upright hand: last entry.
She left. The gate lamp stayed on until morning because he forgot to switch it off.
In December the institute put in turnstiles. There was a contractor, and a man from Pune who set up the readers, and a notice on the board explaining that entry would be recorded by fingerprint and photograph, and that the late-entry register was discontinued with effect from the first of the month. Balram was moved to the back gate, where there was less traffic and a better chair. The turnstile log could tell the office a roll number and a time to the second. It had nothing at all in the way of a margin.
Two years later, in a January fog, a young woman in a coat came to the back gate and asked to be let in to collect her documents. She had grown her hair out and learned to stand differently, and the machine at the gate, which knew everybody, did not know her, because she had left before it was installed and her number had been struck off the rolls.
Balram was on the chair with the good back, and he looked at her for a while over the top of his glasses, and then he said, "Twenty to one. Saturday. Suitcase."
She stared at him. "I'm sorry?"
"Third semester," he said. "You wrote going."
She did not remember him at all. He could see it happen — the polite, careful blankness of a person who knows she has been recognised and cannot place the face — and he did not hold it against her, because he had been a man at a table under a lamp, and she had been nineteen and leaving.
He took a visitor's slip from the drawer and filled it in himself: name, purpose, time in. Then, in the corner of the slip, where the printed form had a space marked Remarks and the office expected the word meeting or documents, he wrote the weather instead, because that January the fog had come down over the ground so thick that the floodlights were only a glow, and it seemed worth putting down somewhere.
A conversation, quietly.
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