Ghost of Rasthan

Episode 2: The Examination

Kalanpur did not have a proper library. It had, instead, a back room in the district mosque where a retired clerk named Mahmood Sahib kept a collection of donated textbooks, half of them missing covers, arranged on shelves he had built himself from salvaged wood. For two years, Zorawar spent every evening after his deliveries in that back room, working through mathematics texts three grades above his level, borrowed physics books with water damage on every third page, and a single, precious, dog-eared copy of a general knowledge compendium that Mahmood Sahib would not let leave the building under any circumstances.

"You are the only boy who comes here for the compendium," Mahmood Sahib told him once, watching Zorawar copy passages into a notebook by lamplight because the room had no reliable electricity after dark. "Everyone else wants the mathematics, for the exam scores, for the trade schools. You copy out passages about the founding of the Directorate of Rivers and Canals. Why?"

"Because the exam has a section on national administration," Zorawar said, "and because nobody else is going to bother learning it, which means I don't need to know it perfectly. I just need to know it better than everyone else in the room."

Mahmood Sahib had laughed — a rare, dry sound — and after that had started setting aside any government pamphlet or old civil service manual he came across, however outdated, in a small pile just for Zorawar.

The National Academy Entrance Examination was held once a year, in the last week of the monsoon, in a requisitioned school building three districts away because Kalanpur's own schools had been deemed "insufficiently secure" for an event that involved, however briefly, several hundred unsupervised teenage boys in one place. Getting there required a permit to travel outside curfew zones, which required a sponsor's signature, which was its own small bureaucratic cruelty for a boy with no sponsor — solved, in the end, only because Mahmood Sahib, as a retired civil clerk, still held just enough residual standing to co-sign the travel documents for exam candidates from the district mosque's registry.

"I am putting my name on this," Mahmood Sahib said, as he signed, "which means if you cause any trouble, boy, it comes back to me. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"I don't think you do. I think you understand mathematics and patrol routes and nothing else." But he signed it anyway, and pressed the paper into Zorawar's hand with something that might, in a different country, have been called pride.

The examination hall held four hundred boys the morning Zorawar sat for it, arranged in rows of a hundred, each desk twenty inches from the next, six proctors in military uniform pacing the aisles with the particular blankness of men who had proctored this exam so many times they had stopped seeing the individual faces of the candidates. Zorawar found his assigned seat — third row, eleventh desk — and noted, out of the same habit that made him track patrol patterns, that the boy to his left wore a watch that cost more than Zorawar's family earned in three months, and the boy to his right had ink-stained fingers and a shirt patched at both elbows, and the exam did not care which was which, which was, Zorawar thought, either the fairest thing in Rasthan or the cruelest, depending on what happened next.

The exam ran six hours across three subjects: mathematics, general knowledge and civics, and a physical assessment held separately the following day. Zorawar finished the mathematics section with forty minutes to spare and used the remaining time checking his work three times, the way he had trained himself to do, because a boy from Kalanpur with a sponsor's signature from a mosque clerk did not get the benefit of the doubt on a marginal answer the way the boy with the expensive watch might.

The civics section, when it came, included exactly the kind of question Mahmood Sahib's forgotten pamphlets had prepared him for — a detailed breakdown of the administrative reorganization of the Directorate of Rivers and Canals under the third Command reshuffle, a question so obscure that Zorawar, glancing around during the permitted final review period, could see at least a third of the hall leaving it blank.

He did not leave it blank. He wrote four full paragraphs, citing the specific reorganization dates, and underlined his own name at the top of the page twice, out of a superstition he would later be faintly embarrassed by.

The results took eleven weeks to arrive. They arrived, when they finally did, not as a letter to Zorawar's house but as a posted list nailed to the board outside the district administration office, four hundred names reduced to the eleven who had scored high enough for further review, and Zorawar's name — Iqbal, Zorawar, Kalanpur District, Reg. No. 4471 — sat in the seventh position, two spots above a boy named Bilal Rasheed Khan whose name Zorawar did not yet know would matter to the rest of his life.

Naseem Iqbal, when Zorawar ran home with the news, said nothing at first. She looked at the paper he had copied down from the board, then looked at her son, and then did something she had not done since before her husband's disappearance: she pulled Zorawar into an embrace so sudden and so fierce that he nearly dropped the paper.

"I am not happy," she said into his shoulder, muffled, fierce. "I want you to know that. I am not happy about this."

"I know, Ammi."

"But I am proud. Both things are true. Do you understand? Both things are true at the same time."

"I understand," Zorawar said, and for the first time in two years, he let himself cry a little, quietly, where his mother could not see his face.

The final round — an interview panel and physical assessment at the Academy's regional recruitment office in Bareen proper — was where the district quota candidates were meant, everyone understood without anyone saying it, to be quietly filtered back out. The written exam could not be rigged without leaving evidence; an interview panel's private judgment could be whatever the Command wished it to be.

Zorawar sat, on the appointed morning, in a corridor outside the interview room with ten other boys from ten other poor districts, all of them dressed in the best clothes their families could produce, all of them carrying the same specific, brittle silence of people who understood exactly how much was riding on a conversation they could not fully control.

Inside, three officers sat behind a long table: a colonel with a face like weathered stone, a major who did not look up from his papers once during the entire process, and — the one who would matter — Commandant Rukhsana Baig, the only woman on the panel, sharp-eyed, close to fifty, with the kind of stillness that Zorawar recognized immediately because it was close to his own.

"Iqbal, Zorawar," the colonel read from the file. "Kalanpur District. Father: Ehsan Iqbal, occupation listed as 'teacher, status: under Directorate review.'" The colonel looked up. "Do you know what that status means, boy?"

"It means my father is in a Directorate facility, sir. I don't know which one."

"Does that concern you? Applying to serve the same institution that holds your father?"

It was, Zorawar understood immediately, the entire interview compressed into a single question — the trapdoor beneath which the quota candidates were meant to fall. Say yes, and you were a security risk, a boy nursing a grievance, unfit to be trusted with a rifle. Say no, and you were either lying badly or so hollowed out by fear that you'd already surrendered whatever had made you worth recruiting.

Zorawar had thought about this exact question, in some form, for two years.

"It concerns me every day, sir," he said. "I would be lying if I said otherwise, and I assume you would see through the lie regardless. What I will tell you is what I've concluded from that concern, rather than what the concern itself is. I've concluded that an institution run only by men who agree with everything it does will never correct its own mistakes. I want to serve. I also want, one day, to be one of the people inside this institution capable of telling it the truth. I don't think those two things are in conflict. I think they're the same reason."

Silence settled over the panel. The major, for the first time, looked up from his papers.

"That's a very practiced answer," the colonel said, not unkindly, but with clear suspicion.

"It's a true one, sir, which is why it sounds practiced. I've had two years to arrive at it honestly, rather than one moment to invent it cleverly."

It was Commandant Rukhsana Baig who spoke next, and it was the first time she had said anything at all in the interview. "What would you do," she said, "if you were ordered, as a young officer, to do something you believed was wrong? Something like what happened to your father, for instance. Ordered to detain a teacher for the content of a lesson."

Another trapdoor, and Zorawar understood this one might be the real one.

"I would follow the order, sir, if refusing it meant only that a more willing officer replaced me and did it anyway, with none of the doubt I might carry into the room. I would not follow it if I believed I was the last check between the order and something irreversible — and I would spend every year of my career trying to rise high enough, and gather enough trust, that fewer and fewer orders put me in that position at all, and more and more put me in a position to refuse them and be believed." He paused. "I don't say that because I think it's the answer you want, Commandant. I say it because I've thought about very little else for two years, and it's the only honest one I have."

Rukhsana Baig looked at him for a long moment — long enough that the colonel shifted uncomfortably beside her — and then made a small note on the paper in front of her, and said nothing further.

Zorawar did not know, walking out of that room, whether he had passed or failed. He would not know for six more weeks. But he knew, with the same quiet certainty he had felt on the wall outside his house telling his mother his plan, that he had told the truth in a building built almost entirely out of people who had learned to lie for a living, and that whatever came of it, he was not sorry.

The acceptance letter arrived on a grey morning in late autumn, and Zorawar Iqbal, seventeen years old, became one of two hundred and forty cadets — and one of perhaps a dozen, in that entire intake, from a district with no sponsor and no name — admitted into the National Military Academy of Rasthan.