Fiction

A dog walks five kilometres of the most closely modelled ground on earth and nobody puts anything down for her. Past the checkpoint, a fruit seller drops half a spoiled guava beside her cart wheel without looking.

Dev Sharma wakes at 4:50, eleven minutes before his house expects him. For nine months the rear gate’s latch has been fully closed. This morning the dog does not go to her bowl.

Samar approved Harish Oberoi’s file before the chime finished sounding. Sixty-two, a moustache going white on one side first, confidence 97.1. Years later he asks the Archive what happened to the man.

For twenty-six years Dev Sharma knew a longer recording of his night at Gate Four existed. He never asked to see it. On a Tuesday, in plain clothes, he sits down in a low chair in the Archive and asks for all four minutes.

Aisha has signed more than nine hundred files. She fought about sixty. Four she still thinks were wrong. Then Samar, two years out, comes to her office to ask how she saved one tailor’s licence.

Sector 4-West has lost 2.1 points of confidence across 6,214 determinations, and no one can say why. The first person to feel it is Pushpa Devi, whose tailoring licence has renewed cleanly for eleven years.

At eight, Ruhi was carried across a checkpoint at dawn and named in a Handler’s testimony. At twenty-two she reads it for the first time, with a ninety-one per cent match from the Union Bureau still unanswered.

Renu’s network has no list and has never met in one room. It is nine Handlers in four buildings who take longer over their files. In the fourteenth month, one of them remembers a citizen ID she saw four months before.

A stranger from Sector 6 offers Kavya three years of licensed, metered power for the light in her courtyard. The board wants six months of recorded outputs in return. Kavya hears it as a request to end the work.

Aisha files three formal minutes over eighteen months about one clerk who copies more than four hundred referrals a year by hand. One sentence of the Pranaali changes. A journalist she has never met gets the credit, and she cannot prove he is wrong.

Ashwin Menon has spent twenty-two years standing next to documents nobody reads. In a lane he has never seen, he says one sentence to a woman at a tea stall. It contains the name of an eight-year-old girl.

A well-dressed stranger asks three people in the lane where to find the Handler who resigned over a girl named Ruhi. He never asks for her mother. Ruhi’s name sits in the Archive, searchable forever, because Samar put it there.

The oversight committee spends four minutes on Amendment 4.9. It changes nothing the model does. It only makes every Handler’s screen say, in the same clean sans-serif: This determination has already been executed.

In 2059 a dying woman said four lines in Bhojpuri at a relief counter. The file kept a six-line summary. Her great-granddaughter Kavya has been applying for the original since she was twenty-two.

Saraswati has measured three fingers of oil into the same brass lamp every morning for forty-one years. Three sectors away, her son does seven minutes of Reflective Practice that remembers nothing about him.

At six o’clock on a Tuesday, Latika Bhandari typed “A good day to be alive in Delhi” and marked it placeholder. It was received forty billion times. Nobody knows she wrote it.

At twenty-six, the Bureau gave Vikram and Meenal forty-one per cent, and he let her go. He married at ninety-one per cent. Fourteen years later, a dead woman’s file makes him sit for eleven extra seconds.

For eleven years Samar Varma did intake. Now he sits in a corridor of nine chairs behind a shuttered printing works, tells each patient how long the doctor will be, and then says nothing at all.

Bilal checked the load at two in the morning, with an instrument he had made himself. He did not check what else was drawing on the line. Roshan Ara, seventy-four, has lived in the building behind the tannery for thirty-one years.

No adverse finding. Renu Sen could go back to her desk tomorrow as though none of it had happened, and no one above her would ever raise it. That is not what she came to ask.