The Summer of the Hundredth Level

Veer’s summer plan fit on one line, and he had written it on the last page of his school diary on the last day of school:

Finish Kingdom Quest. All 100 levels.

He was on level 61 when the holidays began, which put him ahead of Rohan (54) and well ahead of his cousin in Indore (48, and a liar, so probably 41). The first two weeks went exactly to plan. Morning session before Ma commandeered the phone, afternoon session in the hot dead hours when even the fans gave up, evening session officially not allowed but achievable through diplomacy.

Level 70. Level 74. Level 79 — the ice fortress, which took three days and cost Rohan, on his own phone across the colony, something close to his sanity.

Then, on a Tuesday evening in week three, the colony transformer made a sound like a dropped thali and died.

Not a power cut. Power cuts were hours. This was a transformer, and the electricity office — Papa reported, with the grim pleasure adults take in bad news honestly earned — said the replacement part had to come from the city. A week. Maybe more.

A week.

The phones lasted one evening of careful rationing before the charging problem became a crisis. By Thursday, the colony’s entire population under fifteen was gathered in the courtyard at dusk like refugees, holding dead rectangles.

It was Dadaji — Veer’s grandfather, who had been watching the courtyard assembly from his chair with unbearable amusement — who finally stood up.

“When the British left,” he announced, “they did not take the games. Who knows gilli danda?”

Nobody knew gilli danda.

“Ah,” said Dadaji, cracking his knuckles. “Then tonight, level one.”

What happened over the next eight evenings was not what Veer would have predicted. Gilli danda turned out to be genuinely, unfairly difficult — a whole physics of flicks and angles; Rohan took to it disgustingly fast. Seven stones followed, then kho kho, which left everyone’s knees the same shade of courtyard, then a cricket format Dadaji called “one-tip-one-hand” with rules that changed depending on whose window was at risk. The courtyard, it turned out, held about forty children Veer had somehow never met, including Ananya from B-block, who bowled a straight ball no one could read, and whose team therefore Veer joined permanently.

The strange thing was the time. Evenings in Kingdom Quest went by in a smooth, silent slide — you looked up and they were gone. Evenings in the courtyard were enormous. A single one held three games, one argument about a boundary rule, one scraped elbow, one round of stolen mangoes eaten on the water tank, and still ended with light left over.

On the ninth day, the transformer arrived on a truck, and by night the fans were spinning and every phone in the colony was drinking at its charger.

Veer finished Kingdom Quest four days later. Level 100. The final dragon fell, the screen filled with gold coins, and a banner unrolled: CONGRATULATIONS, HERO. YOUR QUEST IS COMPLETE.

He sat there in the afternoon quiet, waiting for the feeling to arrive.

It was — he turned the thought over honestly, because there was no one to perform for — smaller than he’d expected. Two months. A hundred levels. The banner didn’t even have his name on it. Somewhere in Indore, his cousin would see the same banner. Everyone who ever finished saw the same banner.

That evening he was in the courtyard by six, where Ananya was already marking the wickets in chalk and Dadaji was overruling an objection to his new rule about left-handed batting.

“Finished my game,” Veer mentioned, taking his fielding position. “All hundred levels.”

“Good,” said Ananya, mid-run-up. “What’s after level hundred?”

Veer opened his mouth and found the answer was: the banner. That was the whole thing. That was what was after.

“Nothing,” he said. “It just ends.”

Ananya bowled. The ball came in dead straight, unreadable as always, and knocked the middle wicket flat, and the courtyard erupted, and somebody’s little sister ran off with the chalk, and the game — the real one, the one with no last level — went on.