2084: An Algorithmic State — Act II: Taste, Chapter 13: Kavya’s Weight

In October 2059 Kavya’s grandmother stood twelve hours in the Referendum queue, read all forty pages of the charter on a cracked phone, and pressed Decline. Within the month she lost her ration registration.

In Brief: After the power cut, Kavya Nair invites Samar into her workshop behind the courtyard, where her small daughter plays with metal offcuts. A faded photograph on the shelf shows Kavya’s grandmother in the queue for the 2059 Referendum. Samar asks why Kavya has never registered with the Grid.

She kept her workshop in a room behind the courtyard that had, at some point in a previous life, been someone’s kitchen. A stone sink still fixed to one wall, unconnected to anything, now serving as a bin for the small metal offcuts her work produced by the handful every week. Samar had not been inside it before the night the throttling happened. He was inside it now because Kavya had said, without much ceremony, come and see something. And the invitation was the first thing she had offered him that was not, in some way, a test.

The room smelled of solder and machine oil and, underneath both, something like the inside of an old book. Half-finished panels leaned against every wall. None of them looked enough like the structure in the courtyard for Samar to guess what they might eventually become. One bristled with a fan of hair-thin wire. Kavya, following his glance, said it would eventually carry no current at all. Its only purpose was to catch the light and throw it in patterns she hadn’t yet decided she liked. Another was stripped down to bare, unpainted metal, waiting, she said, for a skin she was still arguing with herself about. In the far corner, on a mat too small for her, a girl of perhaps eight lay on her stomach. She held a handful of the same metal offcuts from the stone sink. She was arranging and rearranging them into shapes that answered to no logic Samar could follow. She murmured something to them under her breath. It might have been a story, or it might only have been the tune he’d heard once already, from a window, without a name for it. She did not look up. Kavya did not introduce her. Samar took it the way he had taken the fruit-seller’s warning on his first evening in the lane. Some doors in this room were not yet his to knock on, whatever else had been offered him tonight.

On a shelf above her workbench sat a photograph in a plain frame gone soft at the corners. It was so faded that its subject had nearly returned to the paper it was printed on. It showed a woman past middle age, unsmiling, standing in a queue that stretched out of frame in both directions.

“My grandmother,” Kavya said, following his eyes to it. “Fifty-four, there. Fifty-four and still the kind of person who wouldn’t smile for a camera just because someone told her to.”

“Where was she standing?”

“You’d know the queue if you’d seen the Archive’s footage of it. It’s the same one, the Referendum, October 2059. Terminal at the end, the button they’d started calling Consent because someone in a planning meeting decided that word would poll better than Agree.” She took the frame down and turned it so the light from the doorway fell across it properly. Now Samar could see what he had missed before. Her grandmother’s hand, at her side, was closed into a fist. Everyone else’s hands, in the blurred edges of the frame around her, seemed to be open.

“She got to the terminal,” Kavya said, “twelve hours after she joined that queue, because the queue for the Referendum was worse than the queue for anything the Collapse itself had produced, which is its own kind of joke if you think about it long enough. And when she got there, she read the charter. Not the summary. The actual charter, all forty pages of it, because she’d spent those twelve hours in line reading it on a phone with a screen already cracked in three places, and she was one of the... what was the number the Archive gave you?”

“Fewer than two per cent.”

“Fewer than two per cent. She was one of them. And when she got to the terminal, she didn’t press Consent.” Kavya set the frame back on its shelf, gently, the way you set down something that has already survived one drop too many to risk a second. “She pressed the only other button the terminal had, which nobody had really designed with any dignity, because nobody designing that terminal had seriously expected more than a handful of people to ever touch it. It just said Decline, in the same size type as the other one, like an afterthought the ballot’s designers had been legally required to include and hadn’t spent longer than an afternoon on.”

“What happened to her? After.”

“Nothing dramatic. No one arrested her. No one came to the flat. She lost her ration registration within the month. Lost her housing allocation the month after, since housing was tied to registration by then. She and my grandfather moved out here, to what wasn’t yet called anything, because this was the part of the city the Programme’s early maps simply stopped bothering to draw, and twenty-five years later, that’s still true, and my mother grew old out here, and I grew up out here, and none of us has ever once pressed a Consent button of any kind, because the option, once you’re three generations outside the registration system, mostly just stops being offered to you.”

Samar thought of his own file, four thousand strong. He thought of a lifetime spent believing the border between the Grid and everything past it was a fact about geography. It was a fact about a queue twelve hours long and a button nobody had bothered to make dignified. He did not know what his own parents had pressed. Nor did he know what either of them had done in the War, which both had been old enough to remember and neither had once, in his hearing, described. He had never asked. In thirty-two years he had never thought there was a question there to ask. He had grown up believing the two of them had simply always belonged to the Grid, as he had always believed he simply belonged to it. The not-asking was its own inheritance.

“You could apply now. Couldn’t you. Get registered. Get Ruhi onto the tier that would actually protect her.”

“I could.” She said it plainly, with no defensiveness in it, and the plainness was harder to sit across from than defiance would have been. “I’ve had people tell me that for years, usually kindly, usually as you’re telling me now, like it’s a door I’ve simply forgotten is unlocked. It isn’t that I’ve forgotten. I walked up to that door once, when I was twenty-two and pregnant and frightened in a way I don’t enjoy remembering, and I stood in front of it for three days deciding, and I decided no, and I have had nine years since then to wonder whether that was courage or just my grandmother’s stubbornness wearing my face.”

“Why no, though. In the end.”

“Because registration doesn’t just get you a ration tier. It gets you a file. A thumbnail. A number that reads your daughter’s whole future in fourteen of sixteen weighted branches before she’s old enough to know there were branches to weigh.” Kavya ran a thumb along the edge of a half-finished panel, an old habit surfacing the way Renu’s cup-turning surfaced. “I made this...” She gestured, taking in the room, the panels, the courtyard beyond the doorway, all of it, in one motion. “...because I wanted to build something that could sit in a room and admit, honestly, that it didn’t understand what it was looking at. I decided I would rather raise a daughter in a room full of things that don’t understand her yet than in a system that’s already decided, to fourteen decimal places, exactly how much of her it’s willing to.

“She died the year I finished the first version of it, and I’ve never decided whether I’m sorry she missed it or grateful she isn’t around to tell me all the ways it isn’t finished yet.”

She did not say anything about Ruhi’s father. Standing in a room that smelled of solder and old paper, Samar knew without being told that this was not an absence in the story. The story she had just given him was complete on its own terms. It was whole the way a photograph is whole even when it only shows one side of a person’s face. To ask her to account for the parts she hadn’t offered would cost him something he was no longer willing to spend, two weeks into whatever this was becoming.

“Thank you,” he said instead, “for showing me this,” and meant, more than the room, the frame, the twelve hours in a queue he would now never be able to think of the same way again.

Kavya looked at him for a moment with an expression he had not yet learned to read completely. But he was beginning, slowly, to recognise its family. It was close to the look she’d given the installation on its best evenings. It was the look of a woman deciding, in real time, how much of what she’d built could survive being looked at by someone new.

“Don’t thank me yet,” she said, not unkindly. “You haven’t seen what it costs to keep it standing.”

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 14: Tea