2084: An Algorithmic State — Act IX: Patience, Chapter 49: The Door He Missed
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For nineteen years Manzoor has walked the same route: a shutter unlatched for a woman with a hip, a tablet handed to the right brother before ten. Nobody asked him. It is written down nowhere. Then he gets a fever.
In Brief: Manzoor, a regular at Fatima’s tea stall, falls ill with a fever and stays in bed. Zainab, Bilal and the Agarwals’ youngest look after him. None of them knows about the daily route he walks for neighbours in the lane, and the route is not recorded anywhere, not even in his own flat.
Manzoor had a fever on the Tuesday and thought it was the heat.
By Wednesday he knew it was not the heat. He went anyway, because Wednesday was the long route, and did about half of it. He came back at nine instead of half past ten and did not stop at the stall, which Fatima noticed and did not remark on.
Thursday he did not get up.
Nobody covered the route because nobody knew there was a route.
Be slow about this, because the lane was not careless and the people in it were not indifferent. Zainab looked in on him twice and brought food both times. Bilal came and looked at the fan. The Agarwals’ youngest, from the shop whose shutter came up at half past six, was sent up with a flask and stayed forty minutes. Manzoor liked him, and the boy had worked out, at eleven, that sitting with somebody is a service. Half the lane knew Manzoor was ill by Thursday afternoon, and a good many of them did something about it.
What none of them knew was the sequence.
Second floor, the woman with the hip, who needed the window shutter unlatched from outside because she could not reach it and would not ask. The two brothers on the ground floor who had not spoken in four years. Their mother’s medicine had to be handed to the younger one before ten, because the elder one would not take it from a neighbour. The man at the end with the leg. The girl with the cough who was not supposed to be in the lane at all. Four more.
Manzoor had been doing it for nineteen years. He had never been asked to and had never written it down. There was no field for it anywhere in the Pranaali, and there was no scrap of paper in his own flat either, because the route was in his legs.
Sunita Devi on the second floor went four days without the shutter.
On the second day she managed it herself with a broom handle, and the effort put her on the floor for an hour and a half. She told nobody about it at the time, and her daughter learned about it in September. On the fourth day the heat in that room reached a temperature that a woman of eighty-one with a hip should not spend an afternoon in. She spent the afternoon in it, and was fine. Afterward she was extremely fine about it, in the way of a person who has decided that the alternative to being fine is being a burden.
The younger brother’s mother missed her medicine on the Thursday and the Friday.
She was all right. That is the fact and the book will not improve it: she was all right. She was seventy-six and she missed two days of a tablet that mattered on a scale of months. The consequence was somewhere between nothing and something too small to find.
The girl with the cough spent the four days behind a shut door, and nobody came, and her mother counted that as the one good thing.
Manzoor got up on the Sunday and did the route.
He did it slowly and it took him twice as long. He found the shutter latched from the inside, which told him, and he found the mother two days short, which told him. He stood in the lane for a while afterward, at the hour when the light goes flat.
He did not say anything to anyone about it, then or later.
He went to the stall on the Monday and Fatima gave him his glass and looked at him.
“You are back.”
“I am back.”
“Good,” Fatima said, and went to the pot, and did not ask him anything, and put a second glass down in front of him at ten past six that he had not asked for and did not pay for, and he drank both.
About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.
Previous: Chapter 48: What Fatima Stopped Serving
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