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.