2084: An Algorithmic State — Act II: Taste, Chapter 11: Sanyal

In July 2057 a child died ninety metres from the drug that would have saved her, because the log was a book in a locked drawer. Sanyal has not lost a child to a supply failure in twenty-two years.

In Brief: Samar has been to the lane across the river four times and has begun to speak carelessly. At Fatima’s tea stall he says the Pranaali’s forms decide more than they should. Sanyal, a clinic doctor who drinks two glasses there most evenings, answers him with one night in a district hospital.

She came to the stall most evenings at a quarter to eight, after the clinic closed, and drank one glass standing up and a second sitting down. And Fatima charged her for one because a doctor who has been on her feet since six is a person you feed. And she had been doing this for eleven years without either of them mentioning it.

Kavya introduced her as Sanyal and did not say doctor, which Samar understood, later, to have been a courtesy to him rather than to her.

He had been in the lane four times by then and had begun to be careless.

“It’s a good system,” he said, meaning it, and meaning also something slightly to the left of it. He meant it in the way a man does when he is trying to hold two things and has not yet worked out that the two things need different sentences. “I only mean that from inside it you start to see the places where it doesn’t quite... where the shape of the form decides more than it should.”

Sanyal put her glass down on the corner of the cart.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Then you have never seen a district hospital in July of 2057,” she said. “I have. I was a houseman. I want you to have the actual thing and not my opinion of it, so I am going to tell you about one night and then you can say whatever you like.”

“There was a child. Four, maybe five. Her mother did not have a document and I never learned which. Bacterial meningitis. Treatable. We had the drug.

“We had the drug in the building. Second store, north corridor, in a box that had come in on the fourteenth and had been signed for by a man who had gone off shift and had not entered it. Because the entry system was down that week and the paper log was a book that lived in a drawer that the day pharmacist locked.

“I spent forty minutes looking for a drug that was ninety metres from the child.

“I want you to sit with the ninety metres. It was not scarcity. It was not war. Nobody was stealing. Nobody was corrupt, not that night, not in that building. It was a book in a drawer.

“She died at about two in the morning. I have thought about it every year since, and what I have arrived at is that no single person in that hospital did one thing wrong. The man who signed for the box went off shift at the end of his shift. The pharmacist locked the drawer because the drawer had drugs in it. I looked in the wrong store first because the wrong store was where it had been the previous month.

“Forty minutes. Ninety metres. A book in a drawer.”

Nobody at the stall said anything. Fatima had stopped what she was doing, which she almost never did.

“I could give you eleven more,” Sanyal said. “I could give you eleven more from that same year and I am being conservative, and every one of them would be a room with the answer in it and nobody who could see the whole room at once.”

“Now.

“I have not lost a child to a supply failure in twenty-two years. Not one. Not in a flood year, not in the heat of ’78, not in the eleven weeks when the eastern corridor was closed.

“The drug arrives before I know I want it. The clinic’s cold store was refitted in 2071 around a compressor that is ninety-three years old, because it was built in 1991 by people who did not yet know it was cheaper to build things that break, and the Pranaali costed the repair against the replacement and the repair won, and it has won every year since, and a man comes and services it in March.

“There has been no famine on this subcontinent in thirty-eight years. You are thirty-two. You have never in your life met a person who was hungry because there was no food. You have met people who were hungry because of a tier, which is a different thing and which I am not defending. But do not confuse the two in front of me.

“The river you crossed to get here was declared self-sustaining in 2079. My mother could not put her hand in that water.

“I am not finished. Ask Fatima what her mother paid for kerosene in a bad month and what she pays for the same energy now. Ask her what happened the last time there was a power failure in this lane and how long it lasted. Ask anybody on this side of the river whether they want the Pranaali taken away and watch what they do with their face.”

“So.” She picked the glass back up. “You are telling me the form decides more than it should.

“Yes. It does. I know that better than you do, because I fill them in and you read them. There is no field on my intake for this woman is frightened of the room and I have wanted one for nineteen years. And I am not going to get one.

“But you came here from a building where nobody has watched a child die of an inventory error, and you have the leisure to be troubled by a shape, and I want you to understand that you have that leisure because of the thing you are being troubled by.”

Samar said, “I understand that.”

“I don’t think you do yet. I think you will.” She finished the glass. “It took me about nine years and a great deal of being wrong in public.”

He tried, walking back with Kavya, to say the thing about the seven seconds.

It came out badly. He had said it well to himself for two weeks. But this was the lane, in the dark, and a woman who had just heard a doctor describe forty minutes and ninety metres. To her it came out as a small complaint about a screen.

Kavya let him finish.

“She’s right,” she said.

“I know.”

“No. I want to be sure you heard which part. She isn’t right that you should stop noticing. She’s right that noticing is a thing you can afford.” They walked a little way. “I can’t answer her either. I’ve tried for four years. Every argument I have ends with a child in a corridor in 2057 and I have never found the sentence that goes after it.”

“Then what do you do?”

“I keep the argument,” Kavya said. “I don’t win it.”

About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.

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Next: Chapter 12: The Cut