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.

Twenty years of one man’s mercy, answered in a document of two pages. Dev Sharma reads it at his desk at four in the afternoon, and the sentence he keeps going back to is a number.

Meera Krishnan’s panel worked for fourteen weeks and wrote 406 pages. The minutes had room for 400 characters. Every word that went into them was true.

Eighty-four per cent of Dev Sharma’s reviews ended in mercy. His predecessor’s figure was six. Today he sits alone at the third table, in a chair placed the same distance from everyone else.