The orphanage had its routines, but Rajiv had long stopped seeing them as comforting. They were rules meant to control bodies, not minds. Breakfast was stale bread and watery tea, the kind that burned the tongue if you drank it too quickly. Lunch was lentils that smelled faintly of rust and dust, and dinner… well, dinner depended on how generous Mr. Ghosh was that day.
Rajiv watched the other boys scuttle through their daily motions, fear tightly coiled in their spines. The bigger boys bullied the smaller ones, stealing what little they had. The head warden patrolled the courtyard with a stick, but his attention was selective: if a boy of "proper caste" misbehaved, a warning. If a boy like Rajiv, an orphan with no lineage, faltered, a harsh smack across the back or a week without rice.
Rajiv learned early that people's cruelty was never random—it followed a pattern. The upper caste boys had privileges he didn't; even in punishment, they were spared the humiliation reserved for the "lineage-less." The kitchen staff whispered, and he could tell who was afraid, who was corrupt, and who secretly hated the system but had no power to change it.
He counted everything. Always.
The cracks in the walls. The frayed rope of the swing in the courtyard. The exact tilt of the ceiling fan blades. He calculated the weight of each step he took, the time it took for Sister Mary to limp across the hall, the speed at which the pigeons left the rooftop when someone approached.
It was a game, yes, but also survival.
One afternoon, as the monsoon clouds darkened the Kolkata sky, Rajiv noticed something unusual: the cook, a rotund man named Bhola, was sneaking extra rations into the quarters of a few older boys. Rajiv memorized the tray movements, the slight hesitation when the warden's footsteps approached, the pattern of the boys' glances. That night, the rations disappeared, replaced with a threatening note: "Stop stealing or suffer the consequences."
Rajiv didn't flinch. He knew the cook was desperate. His family had been thrown out of their home due to the eviction policies of a local landlord, someone with ties to politicians in the city. Bhola's theft wasn't greed—it was survival. Rajiv made a mental note: the system punished the powerless while rewarding the corrupt. He filed it away like a blueprint.
Then there was the incident with Ravi, a boy barely ten years old, who had been dared by the upper caste boys to climb the water tower. The boy fell, breaking his arm. The warden blamed Ravi's clumsiness, the upper caste boys laughed, and Rajiv sat quietly on the sidelines, recording every micro-expression: fear, triumph, indifference. Later that night, he crept to Ravi's bedside, counting the splinters in the chair, the number of tears falling onto the floor, the exact shade of pain in Ravi's eyes.
"This is wrong," Ravi whispered.
"It always is," Rajiv said, softly. "But the world isn't fair. We must be better than it."
That was Rajiv's first lesson in justice: it was not given, it was taken.
By age eight, he had devised small experiments to test the boundaries of authority. He memorized the pattern of Mr. Ghosh's cigarette breaks, the exact time it took for the warden to notice the boys playing football on forbidden afternoons, the gaps in Sister Mary's patrol. He discovered that he could manipulate small events without anyone realizing. A misplaced broom, a strategically dropped bucket, a note left in the wrong place—each could redirect the course of the day.
It wasn't mischief. It was preparation.
And then there were the nights.
When the orphanage was silent, and the rain hammered against the broken windows, Rajiv lay awake on his cot, counting the heartbeat of the boy next to him, listening to the sighs of the building, the creak of the floors, the wind whistling through the broken bricks. He wondered: Why were some children born with names, houses, and privileges while others, like him, were left to rot in the damp shadow of a forgotten orphanage?
He didn't know about the caste politics yet, not in words. But he could feel it in the looks the staff gave certain boys, in the subtle favoritism of those with family connections, in the invisible barriers that separated them.
Rajiv learned to read those invisible walls as easily as he read the ledger of bricks and beams around him. He saw them, cataloged them, and stored them in his mind like a map he could follow when the world finally gave him a way out.
And he vowed, silently, that if he ever gained power, he would never allow injustice to thrive. Not like this. Not ever.
He didn't sleep much. The others snored, oblivious, dreaming of candy and freedom that might never come. Rajiv lay awake, creating mental simulations: how to outsmart the warden, how to defend Ravi, how to protect the smallest, weakest boys in the orphanage. He became their silent guardian, a boy whose memory was his shield, whose intelligence was his sword.
By the time he was nine, Rajiv had not only learned survival—he had learned control. He understood human nature in ways adults would never suspect. He knew fear, greed, cruelty, loyalty, and love in their rawest forms. And he had begun to see a pattern: those with power would always abuse it, and those without it would be crushed.
The world beyond St. Jude's would soon teach him the same lesson, on a scale he could not yet imagine.
But for now, he counted. Everything.