2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XI: Answerability, Chapter 62: Rao, Sunday

In twenty-two years Meghna Rao has never once broken Section 4, Subsection 4. On Sunday night her sister asks her a question on the phone, and an eleven-year-old’s drawing of a fish waits in a drawer.

In Brief: Meghna Rao of the Personnel Integrity Division is reviewing the man who built the government, and the rules forbid her to discuss it with anyone. On Sunday night she phones her sister Padma in Vizag to hear about her three nieces.

Meghna called Vizag at ten, which was late for a Sunday, and Padma picked up on the second ring and said, “You’ve been at work.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“You’ve been at work on a Sunday.”

There was no answer to this that Padma would have accepted, so Meghna asked about the girls, and got twenty minutes, which was the point of the call.

Shruti had a thing with her ankle. Ananya had decided, at fifteen, that she was going to be a marine biologist. She had informed the household of this at dinner in a tone that allowed no discussion, and Padma had a theory about a teacher. Divya, who was eleven, had sent Meghna a drawing three weeks ago and wanted to know whether it had arrived.

“It arrived. I’ve got it on the...” Meghna looked at the wall of her flat, which had nothing on it. “I’ve got it.”

“You’ve not put it up.”

“I will put it up.”

“You have never in your life put anything up,” Padma said, with no malice at all, “and I have stopped taking it personally, and I would like you to tell her you’ve put it up, because she is eleven.”

They talked about their father for a while, as they did, in the shorthand two people use for a subject they have both been over.

“You know what I’ve never asked you,” Padma said.

“What.”

“Whether you’re happy.”

Meghna laughed, which was not the right response and was the only one available at ten at night on a Sunday.

“That’s a Sunday-night question.”

“It’s a Sunday night.”

She could not tell her sister what she was doing.

That was not a difficulty she had ever had before, and it had taken her some weeks to notice it as one. The rule was so old in her that it had stopped registering as a rule. Section 4, Subsection 4. She had never once broken it in twenty-two years and had never once wanted to.

What was different was that the review had begun to take up the whole of her. So there was very little of her left over that was permitted onto a telephone.

She could not say: I am reviewing the man who built the government. She could not say: I have not slept past five since the Secretary’s thirty-day exception lapsed. She could not say: there is a Handler two floors below me, R. Sen, who did the honest thing and put her name to it. I have spent a fortnight making sure her name does not appear anywhere it could hurt her. And that is itself a discretion, and I know it is, and I have done it anyway.

So she said the work was heavy.

“Heavy how?”

“Just heavy.”

“Meghna.”

“Padma, I can’t.”

A pause on the line long enough that Meghna checked the connection.

“I know you can’t,” her sister said. “I have known for twenty-two years that you can’t. What I would like, and you may say no to this, is for you to say the sentence I can’t tell you instead of the sentence just heavy. Because one of them is a rule and one of them is you deciding I’m not worth the shape of the truth.”

Meghna sat with that after the call, in a flat with nothing on the walls.

She had built her life on one proposition, taken from a kitchen table in 2049 and never once revisited. A system which runs on discretion will always, eventually, find a nephew. Everything followed from it. The desk with nothing personal on it. The queue read in the order the system generated it. The twenty-two years without a single referral she could not defend line by line.

It had cost her some things. She had always known what they were and had always been honest with herself about the price, at least at the hour of the evening when the flags were cleared.

Until this year, she had not had to consider whether the honesty at that hour was itself the trick.

She got the drawing out of the drawer where it had been for three weeks.

It was a fish. It was, on inspection, quite a good fish. Divya had done something with the light on the scales that was better than most eleven-year-olds managed. She had signed it in the corner in the way children do, too large, taking up a third of the sky.

There was nothing in the flat to put it up with. She looked, properly, for twenty minutes, in a kitchen drawer and a box in the cupboard and finally in a document sleeve. She found nothing, because she had never once in nine years in this flat needed to attach anything to a wall.

She propped it against the lamp on the side table instead, where she would see it from the chair.

Then she sat down in the chair and looked at it for a while, and did not open the folder. It was in her bag by the door. It contained three hundred and forty-one correlations and two hundred and eighty-eight determinations and a year of the most careful work of her life. One line of it was a Secretariat clerk named Bhatia, nine years in the office. He had been moved to a desk on the third floor the week after he put an unasked page in front of the Secretary.

In the morning she would open it. In the morning she would be very good at this.

Tonight there was a fish.

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 63: The Wait