2084: An Algorithmic State — Act III: Empathy, Chapter 18: Shabana
For fifteen years Aisha has told strangers how a grain convoy saved her mother. Her mother was twenty-three that night, not nineteen. She does not remember any headlights. She remembers diesel.
In Brief: On a Sunday afternoon Samar visits Shabana, Aisha’s mother, alone in her rooms above a shop two lanes past the tannery. At Aisha’s urging he has come to hear the story of the 2058 convoy from the woman it reached. Shabana feeds him first, then tells it her own way.
Aisha’s mother lived two lanes past the tannery, above a shop that currently sold phone parts and had sold something different in each decade of her tenancy. She was forty-nine and looked it, which she said herself, in the first minute, before Samar had finished sitting down.
“People tell me I look well. I look forty-nine. I have earned all of it.”
Aisha had not come. That had been made clear in advance and not explained, and Samar had chosen not to ask. Shabana opened the door as though a stranger arriving alone on a Sunday afternoon were the most ordinary event of her week. She fed him first, and there was no version of the visit in which she did not. There was rice, and a dal with something bitter in it he could not identify and did not ask about. There was a pickle she said was her sister’s, and better, she said, than anything he could get in the Grid. That was true, and she made him agree to it out loud before she would sit down.
“Now,” Shabana said. “My daughter has sent you to hear about the trucks.”
“She didn’t send me.”
“No. She told you the story and then she told you to come and hear it from me, which is not sending, exactly.” She poured water for him and then for herself, and drank hers first. He had learned by then that this was a courtesy and not an oversight. “She has been doing this for about fifteen years. She brings people to me. Never many. One or two a year, when she meets someone she thinks needs it.”
“Does it work?”
“It works very well.” Shabana set the glass down. “Every one of them leaves this room understanding the world better than they did when they came in. Not one of them has ever asked me a single question about myself.”
She told him about the trucks anyway, because he had come for it and because she was not cruel. But she told it wrong, or wrong by Aisha’s account of it, and the wrongness started early and did not stop. Samar had Aisha’s telling almost word for word, having sat with it in the courtyard for the better part of an hour. In Aisha’s telling the mob had come twice, and the second time the convoy’s headlights had swung into the lane’s mouth. A model somewhere had re-routed food distribution through Nizamuddin Basti because sixteen simulated futures had judged the alternate road marginally safer. And a nineteen-year-old girl had got the last three doors home.
“Twenty-three,” Shabana said.
“Sorry?”
“I was twenty-three. She says nineteen. She has said nineteen for as long as she has been telling it.” Shabana was not annoyed. She said it the way you correct the spelling of a name you have long since stopped expecting anyone to get right. “I have corrected her twice. Both times she said it back to me correctly and then said nineteen again the next time. I think nineteen is younger. I think younger is better for the story.”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.” She refilled his water without being asked. “Not very much. But it is a thing about me that is not true, told to strangers, by someone who loves me, in order to make a point I agree with. You asked if it matters. It matters like that.”
He did not have an answer.
“The trucks came,” she said. “That part is right. I don’t remember headlights. She always says headlights. What I remember is a smell: diesel, and the particular hot smell an engine has when it has been running a long time and the road has been bad. And I remember thinking, before I thought anything else, they are bringing grain and they are going to be robbed, because that is what happened to grain that year, and I stood there for a moment being sorry for the drivers before it occurred to me that the lane had gone quiet.”
“And the mob stopped.”
“The noise stopped. I did not see anyone stop. I was three doors from my own door and I went through it and I bolted it and I sat with my back against it. I have never known what happened out there. Neither has anyone. Aisha thinks she knows, because she has read the routing decision.” Shabana’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “She showed it to me once. A page of it. It does not say anything about my street. It says a probability.”
“She believes the model saved you.”
“The model may well have saved me. I have never said it didn’t.” She sat back. “What I have said, to my daughter, perhaps three times in thirty years, is that on the night in question I did not know I was being saved, and that a person who does not know she is being saved is not, in that moment, being cared for. She is only being kept. Those are different, and only one of them is a kindness, and I have never been able to get her to hold both of those thoughts in the same hand at once.”
“May I ask you something,” Samar said, later, when the light had gone orange in the room and neither of them had moved to put on a lamp.
“You may ask me anything. It will be the first time today.”
“When Aisha talks about you, and she does, often, and with more love in it than she puts into anything else she says, she’s using you to make an argument.”
“Yes.”
“Does she know you know that.”
Shabana thought about it, and she thought about it for long enough that Samar began to be sorry he had asked. Then she thought long enough again that he stopped being sorry. It had become clear she was not deciding whether to answer. She was deciding what the answer actually was, and nobody had asked her to do that in some time.
“No,” she said at last. “She knows. It has never once changed what she says next.”
She set her glass down on the table and left her hand on it.
“My daughter has spent her whole life defending a machine because it did not kill her mother. That is a large thing to build a life on, and she has built it honestly, and I am proud of her. But she has never needed me for it.” Shabana looked up. “She needs the night. She does not need the woman. If I had died in 2061 of something ordinary, the argument would be exactly as strong. Perhaps stronger. She could have said my mother, who did not live to see it and no one would ever have been able to sit in a room with me and find out that I was twenty-three.”
“That’s a hard thing to say about your own daughter.”
“It is a true thing about my daughter, said by someone who would put herself in front of a truck for her.” She smiled properly for the first time. “You will find, if you keep coming to that courtyard, that both of those can be the case. It is the whole trick of living in a lane. Everyone here knows the worst thing about everyone else and comes to the wedding anyway.”
At the door she asked him whether the child was well now, Kavya’s girl, Ruhi. It was the only question either of them asked that afternoon that did not concern the past. He said yes, and said she was running around a courtyard chasing another child in a game with rules nobody could follow.
“Good,” Shabana said. “Tell Aisha I asked.”
“Why not tell her yourself?”
“Because she will hear it as a position.” She began to close the door, then stopped, holding it half. “Bring her next time. Not to talk. She has heard everything I have to say. Just bring her, and let her eat, and let me look at her for an hour without either of us having to be right about anything.”
The door shut.
Samar stood on the landing above a shop that sold phone parts, in a building two lanes past the tannery, and went down the stairs into the noise.
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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