2084: An Algorithmic State — Act IX: Patience, Chapter 50: Three Months of Red

Naseem is putting two hundred and forty figures into six metres of red for a wedding, and she works the reverse as carefully as the front. Then the model comes for the sector, and the good thread starts to run out.

In Brief: Naseem embroiders a red wedding cloth for Naina in her courtyard, as she has done three times before. Nobody pays her for it. The work takes three months, and in the ninth week the model that cut Fatima’s sugar reaches the thread Naseem needs for the border.

The cloth had been on the frame since the last week of the cold.

Naseem worked it in the courtyard from about nine, when the light came over the far roof and stayed usable for four hours. She worked again after four if the day had been bright. In between she did other things. There was no version of this in which the cloth was the only thing.

It was six metres of a red she had chosen in a shop in Chandni Chowk with Naina’s mother in February. The choosing took a morning and produced nine candidate reds and a mild falling-out. The falling-out had been about a red that was, to Naseem’s eye, going toward orange, and that Naina’s mother had liked very much. They had bought the other one, and Naseem had been right, and neither of them had ever mentioned it again.

The border was the work. The field was the field, and the field took days and no thought. The border was two hundred and forty repetitions of a figure that Naseem’s mother-in-law had used. Naseem had altered it in her fourth year of marriage, in a way she had never told anyone about. Anybody who had ever looked closely at the two of them side by side would have seen it instantly, and nobody ever had.

There were bad weeks. There had been one in the second month when the light was wrong for nine days running. It was some haze thing, nothing anybody could see when they looked up, but the courtyard went flat and grey and Naseem could not trust the red under it. She could have worked. The stitches would have been the same stitches.

She did other things for nine days.

Her sister, who was practical, asked her what the difference was. Naseem said that under bad light you stop seeing the colour and start seeing the thread. Once you are seeing the thread, you begin correcting things that do not need correcting.

“So the work would be better.”

“The work would be tighter,” Naseem said. “It would not be better. There is a difference and I cannot show it to you until it is finished, and probably not then.”

Her sister let it go, in the manner of a woman who had let this exact thing go for thirty years.

She had done four of these.

Her own, which was terrible, and which she still had, and which she took out roughly once a decade to be appalled by. Her sister’s, which was competent. A cousin’s daughter’s, which was the best work of her life. It had gone to Nagpur in 2079 and would never be seen again by anyone she knew. And now Naina’s.

Nobody had commissioned any of them. There was no money in it, and there had never been money in it. In the shop in February, Naina’s mother had raised the subject of money, and Naseem had looked at her in a way that ended the subject permanently.

What there was instead was this. On a day in the hot part of the year, in a lane, a girl would come out in six metres of red. A woman had put two hundred and forty figures into it. The girl would wear it for one afternoon and then fold it. At some point in the afternoon, an aunt would take a corner of it between two fingers and turn it over to look at the reverse. It would not be a planned point, or a point anyone would photograph.

Naseem worked the reverse as though it were the front. It cost her, across six metres, perhaps three additional weeks.

In the ninth week the model came for the sector.

She heard it in the ordinary way: Fatima’s sugar, then a water pressure thing two lanes over, then the tailoring stall’s permit going into additional review. She did not connect the pieces. She was not a person who connected pieces, and she had lived her whole life in a place where things got harder in the way weather got hotter.

What it meant for her was that thread got difficult.

Not unavailable. Difficult. The shop that had it stopped having it reliably. The shop that reliably had it was in a licensed market that took most of a morning to reach and back. The licensed market’s stock was a marginally different weight. Nobody would ever notice it, but Naseem could feel it through the eye of the needle within four stitches.

She made two trips. She used what she had for the field and kept the good thread for the border. That meant recalculating how much border she could afford. It took an evening with a piece of paper, and it came out four figures short.

Four figures out of two hundred and forty.

She could have compressed the spacing across the whole run. Nobody would have seen it. Nobody in the lane would have seen it, and she was reasonably sure her own sister would not have seen it.

She took the frame apart instead and redid the last section at a spacing that would carry the whole border on what she had.

It cost her twelve days. Twelve days, in the ninth and tenth weeks of a three-month job, to avoid a compression. The compression would have been invisible to every human being who would ever look at the cloth, including the woman who would wear it.

Her husband, who was not a talker, said, from a chair, on the fourth of the twelve: “You are doing it again.”

“I am doing it once.”

“You did it in Nagpur.”

“That was the sleeve and the sleeve was wrong.”

“Nobody said the sleeve was wrong.”

“I said the sleeve was wrong.”

He went back to what he was doing. In twenty-six years it was the closest he had ever come to praising the work directly. Both of them knew it, and neither of them was going to make it worse by saying so.

She finished it nine days before the wedding, which was the correct amount of time. It was enough that it could be pressed and hung and looked at properly, and not so much that the household got used to it.

The last figure of the border was in the bottom corner, where the fall of the cloth would put it against a person’s ankle. She did it in the good afternoon light, and it took forty minutes, and when it was done she did not do anything.

She did not stand back. She did not call anyone. She sat on the courtyard step with the frame across her knees for a while. It was the way you sit when the thing in your hands has stopped being work and has not yet started being a thing you gave away. After some minutes a child came past and asked her what it was, and she said it was for a wedding. The child said, “Whose,” and she said, “Naina’s,” and the child said “Oh” in a tone suggesting that this explained everything, and went to chase somebody.

Naseem took the cloth off the frame.

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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