2084: An Algorithmic State — Act IX: Patience, Chapter 48: What Fatima Stopped Serving
The notice cuts Fatima’s sugar by nine per cent and says No action required. She raises her chai by two rupees and knows, before the chalk is dry, which four regulars will now come every other morning.
In Brief: Fatima runs a licensed chai stall in Sector 12-East. A revised consumption model cuts her sugar, and a stall two streets over gets more. Over the following weeks she loses customers and mornings, while Zainab argues with her and Manzoor keeps coming at six.
The nine per cent came off in one line and Fatima read the whole notice, which she had not done in four years.
Revised consumption modelling, licensed food vendor, Sector 12-East. Sugar allocation adjusted −9%, effective immediate cycle. No action required.
No action required. She had a great deal of respect for whoever had written that. It was not a lie. There was, in fact, no action available.
Nobody in the lane was short of money that month. That was not the shape of it, and it had not been the shape of anything for forty years. The accounts had what they had, and the notice did not touch them. What the notice touched was the order in which a licensed vendor’s sugar arrived, compared with everybody else’s. That is a different quantity entirely, and no amount in an account will move it.
She raised her prices on the Thursday. Two rupees, which was nothing, and which was also the difference for four of her regulars between a glass every morning and a glass every other morning. She knew which four before she had finished chalking the board.
Zainab said she should have raised it four.
“Four and you’d only lose the ones who were going anyway. Two and you lose them slowly and you have to watch.”
“I know.”
“So.”
“I am not going to explain it to you,” Fatima said. “I have known you thirty years and I have never been able to explain this to you and I am not going to start on a Thursday.”
Zainab, who understood perfectly well and who was arguing for the pleasure of it, took her glass and went to her stool.
The stall two streets over got its allocation raised. The rise was very nearly the exact amount her custom would need to shift for the two of them to swap places. The notice called it rebalancing toward demonstrated demand.
She went and looked at it once. It was not to make trouble. She had no trouble to make, and the woman who ran it had done nothing except exist in the right direction of a number.
It was a fine stall. The tea was fine. She had not been prepared for it, and she did not say so to anybody, including Zainab, including Manzoor. She stood across the road for ten minutes and drank a glass of a stranger’s tea, and it was fine, it was perfectly fine. It tasted of the same shop-bought mix. In 2076 she had thrown away a whole batch over that mix. There were fourteen people at the counter.
She walked back the long way.
By the fourth week she was doing one batch instead of five, two on a good day.
The stove came on at the same hour. That did not change. There was no version of the morning where the stove came on at a different hour. Some years ago she had stopped pretending to herself that the hour was about the tea.
But a stall with one batch has a great deal of morning in it.
She had not had an empty morning since she was twenty-two years old. In the fourth week and the fifth, she found that she did not know how to have one. Her hands went on doing the things at the times. She would find herself wiping a counter that was clean, or checking a pot that was cold. Then she would have to stop and stand still and decide, consciously, at nine in the morning, what a person did.
Manzoor came at six regardless, seventy years old, a man who had worked the looms before the looms stopped needing hands. He would not take a free glass. He had never taken a free glass in all the years she had known him, and he did not begin then. She was grateful for that in a way she could not have said out loud.
“Eleven per cent stronger than yesterday.”
“There is no yesterday. There was one batch yesterday and you had the end of it.”
“Then it is eleven per cent stronger than nothing,” Manzoor said, “which is the strongest anything has ever been,” and drank it, and stayed until half past six, and left, and came back at noon, on a morning when there was no reason on earth for him to come back at noon.
She did not go after her regulars.
Zainab wanted her to. Zainab had a list, an actual list, in her head, which she recited twice. It named the nine people who had gone elsewhere, with an assessment of how each one might be got back. Three of them, in Zainab’s judgement, were ashamed and only needed to be told it was all right.
“Then they know where I am.”
“They are ashamed. Ashamed people do not walk toward the thing.”
“Then they will be ashamed,” Fatima said, “and one day they will not be, and on that day the stall will be here.”
“And if it isn’t.”
“Then it won’t be, and they will have had a hard year and gone somewhere cheaper, and I will not have spent that year making them feel worse about it.” She wrung out a cloth. “I have watched what happens when a person is guilted back into a place. They come for a month. They are careful with you. And then they stop coming for good, and you have lost the month as well.”
Zainab did not have an answer to that, which was rare enough that she left early.
The second glass she went on pouring.
Every morning, in the few minutes before anyone came, she poured the first onto the ground by the leg of the cart. Then the second, made properly, left to stand the length of one full boil, and tipped out, as she had every morning for six years.
In the fifth week of the siege, which was what the lane had come to call the run of small recalculations that each took something, she stood over it. She saw that this was now the more expensive of her two daily habits by a wide margin.
She poured it the next morning and every morning after.
Her mother had been dead six years and had not, in six years, drunk one of them.
The custom came back slowly after the exception, the thirty days when one man’s signature in the Ministry lifted the thresholds off fourteen sectors. It did not all come back, and never quite to where it had been.
Four of the nine did not return at all. Three came back within a week, sheepish. She was ordinary with them, completely ordinary, on purpose, and did not once mention the months. One came back after eight weeks and stood at the edge for a while before approaching. Fatima served him without looking up and said, “The board’s gone up two, if you didn’t see,” and he said he’d seen, and that was the whole of it.
The last one came back in the winter.
By then the shelves were full again and Manzoor had his stool, and the lane had gone back to being loud about other things. A woman Fatima had served for nine years came round the corner with a steel tiffin. She stopped, and stood, and did not come the last ten feet.
Fatima filled the tiffin without being asked, because she knew the amount, and put the lid on it herself. She held it out across the counter at the full stretch of her arm, so that the woman had to come the ten feet to take it.
She came the ten feet.
“Thursday,” Fatima said.
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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