2084: An Algorithmic State — Act III: Empathy, Chapter 17: The Drawer

The terminal heard every word the dhobi said and reduced it to a line: Refer to Sector Utilities, Tier 2. Chhaya missed six seconds of it, and she wants them back. In her second drawer is a pad of paper slips kept since 2071.

In Brief: Minutes after the dhobi Ram Lal Sonkar leaves her counter, the intake clerk Chhaya Deshmukh sits with what the terminal recorded and what she missed. Her counter keeps a pad of old pre-printed intake slips in its second drawer. Nobody has a rule about them.

The dhobi left at eleven minutes past four and Chhaya sat for a while with her hands in her lap.

The screen had gone to standby. Behind her the queue had four people in it, which for a Friday was nothing. Sujata on the second counter was doing the thing she did with her shoulders when she wanted the shift to end.

Refer to Sector Utilities, Tier 2.

She had not typed it. She had not typed anything in nine years. But 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. The turning had taken her eyes off the dhobi’s face for perhaps six seconds, and in those seconds he had said the first half of the thing about the river.

She had not caught all of it.

She wanted those six seconds back. Not the whole speech, which she could not have held anyway, but the six seconds she had spent being accurate.

There was a pad of intake slips in the second drawer, the old kind, pre-printed. They were kept because the counter’s printer failed twice a month, and somebody in 2071 had decided that four hundred paper slips was cheaper than a service contract.

She took one.

On the back of it, in the four minutes before the next citizen sat down, she wrote what she could remember of what he had actually said. Not the fields. The sentence. Four generations on the river and now a formula decides how many litres an old man is owed, and I cannot tell my son why, because I do not know why either.

She was not sure it was word for word. She thought the shape was right.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she did the only part that frightened her. She wrote his name at the top, and the date, because a sentence with no name on it was a thing she had made up.

It was the list she had stopped at a page and a half in her fourth year, because a record could be requested, and she knew it.

Then she put it in the drawer, under the pad, and called the next citizen, and did her job for the rest of the shift, correctly.

She did it again eleven days later, for a woman whose sister had died in the wrong sector.

Then not for three weeks.

Then twice in a fortnight, then not at all for two months. Then a boy of about twenty said something at her counter that she was still hearing at the bus stop that evening. After that it was most weeks, for the rest of her years in the service.

She never told anyone. There was no rule against it that she could find. She took that to mean nobody had thought of it, and she understood that this was a different thing from permission. The slips went into an envelope, and the envelope into a tin, and the tin into the back of a cupboard in a flat in Sector 9 that nobody but her had a key to.

By the time she left the service there were one thousand four hundred and six of them.

Nothing happened to them. She did not send them anywhere. There was nowhere to send them. She had looked, once, in the fourth year of the slips. The Archive accepted deposits from institutions and from the estates of the deceased and from nobody else at all.

They are still in the tin.

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

Previous: Chapter 16: The Intake Clerk

Next chapter: Chapter 18: Shabana