2084: An Algorithmic State — Act III: Empathy, Chapter 16: The Intake Clerk

Chhaya Deshmukh has not typed a word at work in nine years. Her job is to be looked at while a machine listens. Twenty-two grievance categories, four sentiment values, and no field for an old man’s father.

In Brief: Chhaya Deshmukh is a Grade V intake clerk on the Ministry’s ground floor, where a terminal transcribes and sorts every citizen’s grievance while she listens. An old dhobi comes to her counter about late water and will not be hurried. A Handler from the second floor comes down to watch.

Chhaya Deshmukh had not typed anything at work in nine years.

She still put her hands on the counter’s edge, either side of the terminal. A woman with her hands in her lap looked like a woman waiting for you to finish. That was in the training too. Hands visible. Shoulders open. Eyes on the citizen and not on the screen. The screen was angled away from them anyway, and it filled itself as they spoke, line by line, in a font they would never see.

Her whole job was to be looked at while a machine listened.

She had been Grade V for nine years and would be Grade V for however many more the Ministry decided she was worth the chair. Below her there was nothing. Above her, at Grade IV, you got a desk with a door, and the citizens came to you already summarised.

The ground floor smelled of the floor polish they used on Tuesdays. Under that, faintly and always, it smelled of the people. Not unpleasantly. It was just the smell a room gets when strangers have been standing in it, one after another, for a very long time. They carried in whatever they carried from outside: dust, cooking oil, the sourness of a bus.

The queue rope was down. The queue rope was almost always down.

The old man came at a few minutes to four. She knew before he opened his mouth that he was going to take a long time, because he put one hand flat on the counter first. People did that when they had decided in advance that they were not going to be moved along.

Dhobi, he said. He said the word himself, before anything else, before his name.

Chhaya let him talk.

The water to his lane had come four days late for the third month running. She got that much in the first thirty seconds. The other nine minutes were everything the four days sat inside. There were two families at the top of Rajendra Nagar, gone, because their sheets had soured waiting on a delivery slot. There was his father, who had taught him standing in the Yamuna when the Yamuna still ran clean enough to teach a boy anything. There was a son he did not know how to explain any of this to.

She watched his face and not the screen. She had been trained to do that. She had also, somewhere in the nine years, stopped being able to tell whether she did it because of the training.

Beside her, the terminal worked.

…Sentiment: distressed, non-threatening. Recommended action: refer to Sector Utilities, Tier 2.

She could not read it from where she sat without turning her head, and she did not turn her head, and she knew what it said anyway. She had watched that same paragraph assemble itself perhaps four thousand times. The categories were finite. That was the whole design. There were twenty-two grievance categories and four sentiment values, and it had never, in nine years, run out of room.

He was still going. The first time he reached the Yamuna, a man at the back of the queue had called out to ask whether this was the counter for transit passes. She had turned to tell him it was not. Now the dhobi had got to the part about the Yamuna a second time. People did that, because the second time was usually the one they had actually come to say.

Chhaya nodded. It was not the counted nod they taught in the module, the one at four-second intervals, calibrated for the perception of engagement. It was a different one. Slower, and off the beat, and slightly too long.

She had worked out, in her second year, that the module’s nod was detectable. Not consciously. But people noticed it the way you notice a smell you cannot name, and they finished faster, and they left less satisfied. The satisfaction score went into a different report that was not hers to see. So she had unlearned it. She nodded wrong on purpose. It was the only part of the work she had ever changed.

When he finished, the screen had already been finished for some time.

“Thank you for your patience,” Chhaya said. “Your grievance has been recorded and referred to Sector Utilities. You’ll receive a determination within nine working days.”

He looked at her.

That was the part. That was always the part. There was a half-second, after the sentence, when the citizen’s face did a small thing, a settling, a going-out, a rearrangement. She had watched it four thousand times and it had never become ordinary.

“That’s it,” he said.

“That’s the process, sir.”

“I said...” He stopped. He took his hand off the counter and looked at it as though it belonged to someone who had been more use to him. “I have been telling you about my father.”

“Yes.”

“Is my father in there.”

There was no answer to that which the counter permitted her to give. There was a Grade V response, and it was All information provided has been recorded. It was not a lie. Everything he had said had been heard, and processed, and reduced, and the reduction was itself a form of recording. She had said the sentence often enough that it came out of her mouth without asking her first.

She did not say it.

“No,” Chhaya said. “There’s no field for your father.”

Her mother had died in the second year, and Chhaya had taken four days, which was the allocation. She had come back on the fifth and sat down at the counter and been perfectly all right. Then a woman of about sixty came in about a housing transfer. In passing, not as part of the grievance, the woman mentioned that her sister had been the one who was good with forms.

The screen had recorded: Requestor reports diminished household administrative capacity.

At the end of that shift Chhaya had gone up to the third-floor stairwell. The stairwell was the one part of the building with no counter and no camera worth the maintenance. She had stood on the half-landing where the window didn’t open, and had said, out loud, to nobody:

“Sushila Deshmukh.”

And then she had gone home.

She had done it every working day since. One name, at the end of the shift, on the half-landing. Not her mother’s. Her mother had only been the first. It was whichever name from that day had stayed with her. It was never the loudest one, and never the one with the most serious grievance. More often than not, it was someone whose case she could not afterward have described in any detail at all.

There was no system to it. She had tried, once, in the fourth year, to keep a list, and had got as far as a page and a half before she stopped. A list was a record and a record could be requested. And there was the part she would not have been able to explain to anyone who asked, and nobody had ever asked. Writing them down had immediately made it a smaller thing than saying them.

Nobody in the Ministry knew. Nobody in her building knew. Her husband worked in transit scheduling and was a kind man. He knew that she took the stairs instead of the lift, and had decided years ago that this was about her knees.

Nine years. Perhaps two thousand names. She could not have recited more than a dozen of them.

She did not think of it as remembering. Remembering would have required a system, and she had watched, for nine years, what a system did to a person’s account of themselves. It was the one minute a day in which she let one of them be a whole person she was not going to keep.

The Handler came down at four, on a Friday, for a physical requisition form that any terminal in the building could have generated.

She placed him immediately. He was from the second floor, Exception Handling, the ones who came down perhaps twice a year and never for the reason they gave. He stood at the far end of the counter with the flat correct posture the second floor taught, and he did not approach, and he watched the dhobi finish.

He watched the screen too. She saw him find the angle for it, and hold it, and go on holding it after the paragraph had settled into its final shape.

Then he left, before she had finished thanking the old man for his patience. Citizens sometimes did that, out of embarrassment. Ministry staff never did, because Ministry staff had no reason to be embarrassed by a process they had helped design.

She thought about him for the rest of the shift, in the way you think about a thing that has not yet become anything.

The old man’s name had been Ram Lal Sonkar. He had spelled it for her, letter by letter, at the start. The terminal had already taken it from his citizen tag before he reached the counter, and had not required a single letter of it from either of them.

At six, on the half-landing of the third-floor stairwell, at the window that did not open, Chhaya Deshmukh said his name out loud, once, and went home.

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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