2084: An Algorithmic State — Act VI: Refusal, Chapter 36: The Rounding

Trilok Bhasin rounded 381 allocations across six years and never once went outside the permitted band. Meghna Rao ended his career for it. Ten years later she finds him behind a counter in Karol Bagh, selling washers.

In Brief: Meghna Rao is building a case against a Secretary out of many small discretions. First she visits Trilok Bhasin, the Grade II handler she referred to Personnel Integrity ten years ago. He was separated from service and now works a hardware counter in Karol Bagh, and he will not close the shop to talk.

Meghna Rao found him behind a hardware counter in Karol Bagh, selling washers.

While she arranged it, she had told herself that this was ordinary diligence. A reviewer building a case out of many small discretions ought to go back and check her own oldest instrument against reality, before she pointed it at a Secretary. She had told herself that all the way from the Ministry, and had gone on telling herself that at the counter. She stopped when Trilok Bhasin looked up from a drawer of washers and knew her instantly.

“Director,” he said.

“Mr Bhasin.”

“It’s just Trilok now. There’s no grade.” He shut the drawer. “You’ve come a long way for a tap fitting.”

He would not let her buy him tea, and would not close the shop. So they talked across the counter for an hour and twenty minutes, interrupted four times by customers, twice by the same customer.

He was sixty-one. He had been Grade II for fifteen years. He had been separated from service ten years ago, and had been behind this counter for nine of the ten. The year in between he did not describe and she did not ask about.

“You want to know if I still think I was right,” he said.

“That isn’t why I came.”

“It is at least a little why you came.” He said it without heat, the way a man states a price. “Everybody who has ever come here has wanted that. There have been four. Two journalists, one from the Division doing something with old files, and now you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That I was wrong.”

Meghna had prepared for several answers and not for that one.

“I rounded three hundred and eighty-one allocations across six years,” Trilok said. “Never more than the permitted variance. Never once outside the band. Towards people I decided needed it. You showed me the pattern in a room on the fourth floor and I cried, which I have never enjoyed remembering, and you were right, and I was wrong, and I have had ten years to look for a version of it in which I was not wrong, and there isn’t one.”

“Then...”

“Ask the actual question, Director.”

She sat with that. A customer came in for a length of chain, and Trilok cut it and took the money. He came back and stood in the same place, waiting, without any sign that he minded waiting.

“Why did it take four months,” Meghna said. “To build the pattern. Nothing you did was flagged. Nothing you did breached a threshold. I found it because I decided, privately, on my own instinct, to keep looking at a file that no rule required me to look at twice.”

“Yes.”

“That is the same instrument you used.”

“It is exactly the same instrument,” Trilok said. He put both hands flat on the counter. “I used mine to change three hundred and eighty-one outcomes and told nobody. You used yours to look, and then you wrote it down, and put your name on it, and handed it to something that could tell you no.”

“And if the process had told me no?”

“Then you would have been a woman who had looked and been told no, and I would still have been behind this counter, and the difference between us would be exactly what it is now.” He shrugged. “You want me to say we are the same, because if we are, the thing you are building against somebody is unsafe. I don’t know whether we are. I have had ten years and I don’t know.”

She did not tell him the name. She had come intending not to and she did not.

He worked it out anyway, or worked out enough of it, somewhere around the fiftieth minute. She saw him do it, and he did not say it either. She thought better of him for that than for anything else in the hour.

“It’s somebody senior,” he said.

“I’m not going to discuss it.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m telling you why I’ve been talking to you for an hour instead of selling washers.” He straightened a row of small boxes that did not need straightening. “When you referred me, I thought you were a machine with a haircut. I said that. I believe I said it in the room.”

“You did.”

“For about three years I hated you specifically, and then for about three years I hated the Division generally, which is less work, and then I stopped.” He looked up. “What changed it was that I read the referral. Properly. It took me six years to read my own referral properly, which I recommend to nobody. And in it you had written a paragraph about intent. You wrote that you believed me. That I had done it to help. You wrote that in a document whose only purpose was to end my career, where nobody would ever have asked you to write it, and where it did me no good at all.”

“It was true.”

“That is exactly the point I am making, Director.” Trilok Bhasin picked up a washer, looked at it, and put it in the wrong drawer. “You could have got the same outcome without it. You wrote it because it was true and because you had to live with yourself. That is discretion. That is the same instrument again.”

A customer came in. Trilok went to serve her.

Meghna stood at the counter in a hardware shop in Karol Bagh with a folder she had not opened, the Secretary’s small discretions listed by date. She did not feel absolved, which she had not come for. She did not feel steadier, which she had.

She thanked him at the door. He said, “Don’t come again,” not unkindly, and went back to the drawer.

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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Next: Chapter 37: Renu’s Question