Trilok Bhasin rounded 381 allocations across six years and never once went outside the permitted band. Meghna Rao ended his career for it. Ten years later she finds him behind a counter in Karol Bagh, selling washers.

The offer comes on paper, under Aisha’s door: a post in the Sector 6 room that decides whose testimony survives into the summary. The arithmetic comes out in favour. She tells nobody for sixteen days.

There is one dhobi in Rajendra Nagar where there were nine. Ram Lal Sonkar teaches his fourteen-year-old son the trade anyway, with no water, on a stone worn hollow by a hundred and forty years of the same motion.

Nine hours into the queue, on her son-in-law’s cracked phone, Sarala reaches Clause 19.4 of the charter. Its last four words describe exactly what she once did to her mother’s words at a counter.