2084: An Algorithmic State — Act VII: Intuition, Chapter 38: Prakash

Everyone on the floor says Prakash forgets a file the moment he closes it. He has never forgotten one. Seventeen years, perhaps sixty thousand files, and two exercise books of names in a drawer he does not open.

In Brief: Prakash, fifty-eight, has been a Handler at the Ministry for seventeen years and closes every file in nine seconds. The floor, and Renu Sen two desks away, believe he simply cannot remember. His story goes back to his first years at the desk, a school exercise book of names, and a question from his wife.

The thing everybody had wrong about Prakash was that he could not remember.

He could remember. The whole difficulty sat in that, and in seventeen years he had never said it to anyone on that floor, including Renu, who was kind.

He remembered the citizen in 6-West: water allocation, prior review, a name like a village near his grandmother’s. He had remembered it the instant Renu said it, and had gone on producing an expression for her benefit and for the room’s. It was the expression of a man meeting a stranger who happens to know his own address better than he does.

It was a good expression, and he had been building it for seventeen years.

He had come into it at forty-one, out of a records post that had been dissolved under him. For the first two years he had been exactly what everybody in the building assumed a good Handler was: careful, slow, troubled.

He had a book.

Not a ledger. Renu’s ledger was a discipline, and he had a certain respect for it, and it was not the same thing at all. Prakash’s was a school exercise book, kept in a drawer at home, with a list of names in it. Against each name was a phrase of three or four words, whatever had been in the file that had made the file a person.

Mohan Das Agarwal. Kept bees before. Fareeda Sheikh. Asked if the form could be read to her twice. Lakhpat Singh. Wrote in the margin: I do not mind, but my wife will mind.

Four hundred and something. He filled the first book in fourteen months and started a second.

The second book got to about two hundred before the night his wife found him at the kitchen table. It was half past two in the morning. He was not writing, just sitting with it open.

She did not say anything that night. She said it three days later, which is one of the reasons he married her.

What she said was: “How long can you do this.”

Prakash was forty-four. He was good at the work, and he had genuinely believed that the book was the thing keeping him honest. Now he discovered that he did not have an answer. Not a bad answer. None. He sat with the question for twelve days, and the honest arithmetic came out at something like six more years. After that came a decline he could see the shape of. He had two uncles, and he knew what the decline looked like in his family, and he knew it came for the ones who did not sleep.

He had two children. One of them was nine.

He did not stop caring, which is what the floor thinks happened and what he has never corrected.

He built the forgetting.

It took about a year, and it was work: deliberate, effortful, daily work. He would like it understood, by somebody, at some point, that it was the hardest thing he has ever done and that he did it on purpose. He stopped writing the names. Then he stopped rehearsing them on the walk home, which was harder. When he found that they came anyway, unasked, in the four minutes before sleep, he learned to do a thing with them that he has never found language for. It works, more or less, and he could not teach it to anybody.

By the fourth year he could close a file and hold nothing but the chime.

The recall did not go. If anybody ever asked him for one true thing about those years, it would be this: the recall never went, not once, not for a day. What went was the carrying. He can be shown a citizen ID from March and produce, within a second, a village near his grandmother’s. It costs him nothing, and it means nothing, and it sits in him like a phone number.

He does not know whether that is a mercy or a tragedy. Renu watched him do it once and thought he was watching himself decay. She could not decide either, and he saw her not decide, and said nothing.

Seventeen years, perhaps sixty thousand files.

He is fifty-eight. He has a daughter who is a structural engineer and a son who is not much of anything yet. His wife has never, in fourteen years, asked him about the book. It is still in the drawer, both volumes, and he has not opened it.

The amendment came through at the top of his first file on a Monday morning, in the same clean sans-serif as everything else. He read it: This determination has already been executed.

The floor talked about it for four days, and Renu talked about it longer. That year there was a period when a certain number of Handlers began taking noticeably longer over their files. Prakash watched it happen and knew exactly what it was. Nobody approached him, which did not surprise him.

He goes on closing files in nine seconds.

He has thought about it, since the amendment, more than he has thought about anything in a decade. What he has arrived at is this, and he has said it to no one.

He carried them for three years, and then made a decision about how much of a life he was prepared to spend on the carrying. And he has spent fourteen years being described, by people who admire him, as damaged.

He would like, once, before he goes, to say to somebody that it was a decision.

He is fairly sure he will not.

On a Thursday in the spring he read aloud to nobody, as he sometimes did, from a file on his screen.

“Here’s an interesting one. Haven’t seen this before.”

Two desks down, Renu did not look up. She had stopped correcting him around the time of the amendment, for reasons Prakash had worked out within a week and had chosen to be grateful for.

He read the file. It was a woman of sixty-six in 12-East, and he had closed her file in March. She had written a sentence about a courtyard in the free-text field, which almost nobody used.

He closed it, and approved it, in nine seconds.

Then he sat for a moment with his hands off the desk, which he did perhaps twice a year, and which nobody on that floor had ever once remarked on.

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 39: Six Points