2084: An Algorithmic State — Act III: Empathy, Chapter 19: What Manzoor Does
Manzoor is seventy and walks a route nobody in the lane knows is a route: Fatima’s stall, the Agarwals’ shutter, a widow upstairs who needs nothing. Twenty-nine doors, every morning, between two glasses of tea.
In Brief: Every morning, between his first glass of tea at Fatima’s stall and his second, Manzoor walks the lane. Nobody has asked him to. On the way he checks on the Agarwals, Bilal, a boy carrying bread and the widow Roshan Ara, and he thinks about the looms he once worked.
Manzoor had a route.
He had never called it that, and nobody in the lane called it anything. Nobody in the lane had ever put it together. The old man drank his first glass at six and his second somewhere near noon, and in between he had gone past every door that needed going past.
It went like this.
Fatima’s first, obviously, because the tea was there and because Fatima’s stall was where you learned what the night had done. Then the corner, and up the narrow side where the Agarwals’ shutter came up at half past six. If it had not come up by seven, something had happened. Then the long way round past the grain market, because Bilal’s people did their counting early. Bilal did not stop for tea, but he could be intercepted on foot if you timed it.
Then the tailoring stall, and then the two rooms above the tailoring stall. A widow named Roshan Ara lived there who had not come down since the spring and who would not have said she needed anything.
Then back along the lane the slow way, which took forty minutes if he did it properly, and which he did properly.
He had worked the looms two sectors over, before the looms stopped needing hands. He was seventy. He said seventy, and he had been saying seventy for a while.
“You are in my light,” Fatima said.
“I am in the light. The light is not yours. You did not build the sun.”
“I pay for the corner.”
“You pay Rafiq for the corner and Rafiq does not own the sun either.” He shifted six inches anyway. “Eleven per cent stronger than yesterday.”
“You say that every day.”
“Because it is true every day.”
She did not look up. “One day it will not be true, and you will say it, and I will know something is wrong with you.”
“Then you will have been warned, and you will not be able to say afterward that nobody told you.”
This was the whole conversation. With small variations it was the whole conversation most mornings, and it took under a minute. In the course of it Manzoor established that Fatima had slept, and that her supplier had not come Thursday. The sugar notice had said nothing new. The tap at the back of the stall had run thin since the night Kavya’s courtyard went dark, and the kettle took longer to fill. Fatima blamed the washer. Manzoor had looked at the washer, and the washer was fine. The girl with the steel tiffin had not been by yet, which meant her mother was either at work early or not well.
He filed it. He did not use the word.
The Agarwals’ shutter was up, and the youngest was lighting the sticks with the door open, which he did on days he was running late. Manzoor stood in the doorway long enough to be seen and not long enough to be talked to, and moved on. At the grain market he did not find Bilal, and did not look hard. A man who could not be found before eight was a man who had been up since four. There was only one reason for that in this lane, and Manzoor had no intention of asking about it in the open.
He found instead a boy of about ten with a stack of flatbread wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, moving at his usual speed, who nearly went through him.
“Slow.”
“Can’t.”
“Everyone can. That is the entire difference between a man and a truck.” He caught the boy’s shoulder, not hard, and turned him a quarter so the stack sat straight. “Now you can run. Go.”
The boy went. The bread stayed on.
Roshan Ara took a long time to come to the door. She had, as always, an explanation ready for why she had taken a long time, and the explanation was, as always, about the door.
“It sticks.”
“It sticks,” Manzoor agreed. He had oiled that hinge in March and it did not stick.
He did not go in, and he never went in. A man of seventy going into a widow’s rooms was a thing the lane would have had opinions about, and Roshan Ara would have had the worst of them. Both of them knew it and neither of them had ever said it. So he stood on the landing and she stood in the doorway. For nine minutes they discussed a dispute she was having with her nephew in Ghaziabad about a photograph.
At the end of it he said, “Is there anything,” and she said, “There is nothing,” and he said, “Right,” and went down the stairs.
Halfway down he stopped and came back up and said, through the closed door, “Thursday I am going past the pharmacy anyway.”
A pause.
“If you are going anyway,” Roshan Ara said.
“I am going anyway.”
“Then.” Another pause. “The blue one. Not the strip. The bottle.”
“The bottle.”
He went down the stairs.
The looms had stopped needing hands in the year he turned forty-three.
It had not happened all at once, which was the part people got wrong when they told it. There had been twelve years of it happening. A shift was dropped here, a line consolidated there, and each time a supervisor explained that this was a temporary measure and was, each time, entirely sincere. By the end there were four men doing what forty had done, and the four were mostly there to watch for faults. Then there were two. Then the fault-watching itself was done better by something that did not need to be watched.
Manzoor had been good, and had never found a way to say it out loud that did not sound like a complaint. He had been better than good. He had been the one they sent for when a batch came out wrong and nobody could say why. He could put his hand flat on a length of cloth and tell you which loom and, on a good day, which shift.
When the assessment came it had assessed the things there were fields for. He had scored adequately on all of them, and adequate had not been the number they were keeping.
He did not think about it often. Some decades ago he had made an arrangement with himself, which was that he would think about the looms on one day a year and not the rest. He had mostly kept it, and the day was not today.
By half past ten the route was done. Manzoor came back along the lane the slow way and stopped at the stall for his second glass. Zainab was on the stool that had become hers by a consensus nobody had ever formally reached. She was in the middle of a report on a negotiation about onions that had ended ninety minutes earlier.
He listened to the whole thing, which took a while, because Zainab told a story about onions the way other people told a story about a war.
“You are not listening,” she said, at the end.
“You said forty rupees and then you said thirty-two and then the man’s brother came out.”
Zainab looked at him with some suspicion. “You were not listening.”
“I was listening. I was simply also doing something else.” He drank. “The tiffin girl did not come this morning.”
Fatima had been counting into a tin and had given no sign of following the conversation at all. She said, “No.”
“Her mother, I think.”
“I thought that too.”
“I will go past.”
“You will go past anyway,” Fatima said, “on Thursday, to the pharmacy,” and she did not look up from the tin. Manzoor did not ask her how she knew that, because they had been doing this for a very long time and asking would have wasted a morning.
The lane kept a ledger of what everyone owed everyone else. It was not written down. There was no place a person could go to see it, and it did not balance, and it had never in Manzoor’s lifetime been settled. At his own door, at midday, he did the thing he did every day at his own door. He stood for a moment with the key in his hand and ran the lane in his head, door by door, and checked that everyone he had accounted for that morning was accounted for.
Twenty-nine doors.
Nobody had asked him to do it, and nobody had noticed him doing it, and nobody would notice, for perhaps two days, if he stopped.
He went in and made himself something to eat and slept in the afternoon, which was the arrangement he had come to with being seventy.
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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