Aman Joshi walked out of the examination hall into the white March glare with the emptied calm of a man who has finally done a thing he has been about to do for six years.

The Combined Recruitment Examination. Eleven lakh candidates. Nineteen thousand posts. His fourth attempt and — by the rule that decided such things from a distance, like every rule that governed him — his last. He was twenty-four. He had spent the whole of his adult life in one small room above a photocopy shop, in a town that existed to sell hope in monthly instalments.

He had done well. He knew it the way a farmer knows the sky. Reasoning: clean. Quantitative: clean. Walking out, he allowed himself the thing he never allowed. He imagined the phone call home. He imagined his father saying nothing for a moment, which was how his father said the largest things.

He bought a five-rupee kulhad of tea he couldn't afford and stood drinking it among the others — all of them wearing the same dazed look of people who have set down a weight they have carried so long they no longer know who they are without it. A boy from his Reasoning batch caught his eye and gave him a small exhausted thumbs-up.

Aman gave it back.

That was the last clean hour of his old life.

The video arrived on the hostel group, thirty seconds, shot shakily off someone's screen. Aman watched it on the edge of his cot with the fan dead and the power gone, and at first his mind refused it, the way a hand refuses a flame before the pain arrives.

It was the question paper. His question paper. The one that had been sealed, secret, equal — equality being the entire point, the only article of faith he had left: that he and the minister's nephew sat down before the same blank page, and the page did not care who their fathers were.

The timestamp on the file was three days old.

The paper had been for sale before any of them entered the hall. Price: eight lakh rupees. Almost exactly, Aman noted, with the strange clerical precision that descends in the first minutes of catastrophe, what his father had borrowed against the house.

So the page had cared after all. It had simply never cared about him.

The Board's statement was one line.

In view of certain irregularities, the Combined Recruitment Examination held on the 14th instant stands cancelled in its entirety. A fresh examination will be scheduled in due course.

In due course. Three words informing him, politely, that the years of his one life were an administrative error, regrettable, now corrected. As though twenty-four could be rescheduled. As though his father's loan could be rescheduled.

The hostel that night made the worst sound he had ever heard, which was the sound of two hundred young men in adjacent rooms making no sound at all.

What Aman did not know yet — what almost nobody knew yet — was whose exam it had been. The Board that had stamped that one-line burial was the State Staff Selection Board. Appointed by the state government. Chaired by a man the Chief Minister herself had chosen.

The page had an owner. And the owner was about to get very, very lucky in the matter of who took the blame.