2084: An Algorithmic State — Act VI: Refusal, Chapter 34: The Dhobi’s Son
There is one dhobi in Rajendra Nagar where there were nine. Ram Lal Sonkar teaches his fourteen-year-old son the trade anyway, with no water, on a stone worn hollow by a hundred and forty years of the same motion.
In Brief: Ram Lal Sonkar is the last dhobi in Rajendra Nagar. Two families have gone, and one block has put in a unit that washes in the flat. For one week he teaches his fourteen-year-old son Vipin the four parts of the trade: water, the beating stone, starch and the ledger that is not written down.
Ram Lal Sonkar had four things to teach and no illusions about any of them.
Water first, and there was no water. Or there was water three days late three months in a row, which was the same as no water for the purposes of teaching a boy anything about it. So he taught it dry. He taught Vipin how the temperature would feel on the inside of the wrist if the temperature had been right. It was a stupid way to teach and the only way available.
“You are not feeling anything,” Vipin said.
“I am feeling what it is not.”
The boy was fourteen and had a face that gave everything away, which his father privately thought was the best thing about him and had never said.
Second was the beating stone, which they had. It was in the yard and had been in the yard since before Ram Lal. It had a hollow worn into it at one end from a hundred and forty years of the same motion. It was the only object the family owned that had never required a document.
He put the boy on it with an old sheet and let him go at it badly for a week.
“You are hitting it.”
“You said to hit it.”
“I said the stone does the work. You are doing the work. You will do the work for twelve years and then your shoulder will go and you will do nothing for the rest of your life.” He took the sheet and did it four times and gave it back. “The stone. Not you.”
The boy tried it. The boy got it slightly, in a way that would not survive to the next morning and would come back on the third day. That was how it always came back.
Third was starch, and starch was chemistry, and Ram Lal did not know the chemistry. He knew the outcome. He knew that his father had used rice water, and that he himself had used rice water until the rice stopped being spare. What he used now came in a sachet and was not as good and was not much worse.
“Why not as good?”
“I don’t know.”
Vipin looked at him.
“That is a real answer,” Ram Lal said. “There are men who will give you a reason. They are making it up. I have used both for fifty years and one of them is better and I could not tell you why, and if you go into this work you will spend your life knowing things like that.”
Fourth was the ledger, and the ledger was not written down.
Who paid late and who paid never. Who sent a shirt that was not a shirt they owned. Which house sent things down on Tuesday with a note and which house sent things down on Tuesday with a person, and what the difference meant.
He walked the boy through Rajendra Nagar on a Thursday and named it door by door. Vipin had grown up in the same lane and had been on those stairs a thousand times. Vipin listened to his father describe a neighbourhood he had never seen.
“How do you know all that?”
“I have been washing their clothes for fifty years. There is nothing about a household that does not go through its washing.”
He knew what he was doing.
Two families at the top of Rajendra Nagar had gone in the spring, and would not come back. The block behind the mandir had put in one of the units that did the washing in the flat. The units did not do it well and did not need to, because well was not being measured. What was being measured was that a person did not have to leave a sheet with anyone.
There was one dhobi where there had been nine. He was the one. He would be the one for another five or six years, and then he would be too slow. Vipin would be twenty, and there would not be a trade for Vipin to have.
He taught him anyway.
Not because it would feed him. Ram Lal had been to the intake counter and said as much of this as the counter had room for. He came away with a referral to Sector Utilities, Tier 2, and nine working days. The counter screen had asked him to confirm that the referral had been explained to him, two buttons, and he had picked up the paper and left both alone. Standing in the road afterward, he understood exactly how much of his life the counter had been built to hold.
He taught him because there was a thing his father had done with his hands in a river, and a thing he did with his hands on a stone. If he did not put it into the boy, it stopped in this yard, on a Thursday, in front of him. No ordinance anywhere would record that it had stopped, or that it had ever existed to stop.
“Will I do this,” Vipin said, at the end of the week.
“No.”
The boy’s face gave everything away, as it always did.
“You will do something else and it will probably be better and I hope you never touch a stone after you are twenty.” Ram Lal wrung out the sheet, twice, once each way, and shook it out flat with a crack. “You will still know it. That is what I am doing. I am not giving you a trade, I am giving you a thing you know.”
“What good is it if I don’t do it.”
“None,” his father said. “None at all. Hold that end.”
The boy held that end.
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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