2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XII: Grief, Chapter 64: Eleven Days

For thirty-one years Bela rang Shibani at eight. The morning the phone stays silent, a voice in the ceiling tells Shibani her grief will be sharper on Tuesdays, and a panel gives her eleven days.

In Brief: Renu’s mother, Shibani, loses Bela Roy, her closest friend of four decades. The Pranaali arrives first with soft lights, a grief voice, an eleven-day adjustment period and a recited life record. Renu watches her mother accept it all as kindness and looks for one true thing to give her.

For thirty-one years the phone in Shibani’s flat rang at eight. Two rings, sometimes three, and her mother’s voice would drop into the register she kept only for Bela, half-scolding, half-delighted. The words came in Bengali even after four decades in Delhi had worn the edges off everything else she said. Ei je, tumi ki korcho. What are you even doing. Some mornings it was the price of fish. Some mornings it was a grandchild, hers or Bela’s, and whose was doing better. Once, for eleven straight days the year Renu turned nine, it had been the same cricket match, replayed in argument each morning as though the score might yet change.

Renu grew up believing eight o’clock was a sound the world made on its own. It was like the towers finishing their calculations at six, and the sky over the Grid turning the colour it had been told to turn. She was eleven before she understood that Shibani set an alarm for it. Shibani was afraid, though she never said so, of the day she would forget. That would be the day the friendship was declared, by both of them, to have become a thing you had to remember to do.

The morning the phone did not ring, Shibani stood at the stove anyway with the tea half made. It was the way you keep standing at a green light because your body has not yet been told by the rest of you that it is time to go.

Renu got the message at the Ministry, between a file and a file. Amita is with Ma. Come when you can. She did not ask which Amita, because there was only one. And Amita only wrote like that when there was a reason not to say the reason.

By the time Renu reached the flat, the reason had already been processed.

A soft blue light sat above the door frame. People used to tape paper notices in the building’s stairwell: no fireworks, please, an infant is sleeping. Lights like this had replaced them with something that announced itself only to the people it was for. Inside, the flat was very clean and very quiet. A voice she did not recognise, gentle and unhurried, was telling her mother that grief of this kind was expected to move in waves. The waves would be sharper on days that had been shared with the deceased. Today was a Tuesday, and Tuesdays had been, per the communications record, a day of unusually high contact frequency. So today might be one of those days.

“It’s alright,” the voice said, “to feel this on a Tuesday.”

Shibani was sitting very straight in the good chair, the one usually kept for guests, with her hands folded the way she folded them at temple. She looked, Renu thought, like a woman being interviewed for a job she had already been given.

“They said Tuesdays,” Shibani told her, when Renu came and knelt by the chair. “They know that. Isn’t that something. They know Tuesday was our day.”

It was not something. It was an average of a hundred and eleven weeks of call logs, timestamped. Renu had read enough of them in her own work to know exactly what kind of knowing it was. It was the kind that could tell you the shape of a grief without once being in the room with it. She did not say this. She held her mother’s folded hands instead. It was the first time in her life she had touched her mother’s hands and found them cold on a day that was not cold.

Amita, from two floors down, was in the kitchen making tea nobody had asked for. That was still, it seemed, a thing a neighbour did with her own hands. Renu was grateful for it, as she had not expected to be grateful for anything that morning.

“The panel says eleven days,” Shibani said. “For the... the adjustment. Eleven days, and then I petition if I need more, but they don’t expect I will, given the...” She stopped and searched for the word the voice had used, and found it. She did not seem to notice that it was not a word she would ever have reached for on her own. “...given the resolution trajectory they’re modelling. Eleven days. Isn’t that strange. We used to sit śrāddha for eleven days anyway. My mother did, for her mother. Eleven days and then you were meant to be finished with the worst of it.”

“That’s not a coincidence,” Renu said, before she could stop herself. “They’d have built the calendar into it. It’s easier to allocate a number people already expect.”

Her mother looked at her the way she used to look at Renu’s father, on the rare occasions he corrected something at the dinner table that had not needed correcting.

“It’s kind of them to remember,” Shibani said, and went back to looking at her folded hands. The sentence was the end of the conversation. Renu knew that continuing it would cost her mother something Renu had no right to spend.

The gathering was on the fourth day, in the community hall two buildings over. It was the kind of room that had once held wedding receptions and now held everything. There was less and less, Renu had noticed, that needed a room of its own. The lighting had been calibrated. She recognised the calibration. It was the same soft-gold wash the Ministry used in the resignation-processing corridor, engineered for a specific register of dignified sadness. On a low table near the photographs, a device was reciting seventy years of a life, reduced to the paragraphs the citizen record could support. Its voice was modelled to sound like the region Bela had been born in.

Bela Roy. Born in Barisal, migrated to Kolkata in childhood, then to Delhi in 2041. Forty-one years in the handloom cooperative on Chandni Chowk’s northern edge, latterly its senior quality assessor. Two children, four grandchildren. Recorded volunteer hours: eleven hundred and six, principally with the cooperative’s apprenticeship programme. A woman, the voice said, of exceptional consistency and quiet generosity, whose absence will be felt across three institutions and one family.

It was accurate. Renu had no complaint to make about its accuracy. Every fact in it could be checked against a record somewhere, and every fact, checked, would come back true. But there was no field in any record for what it did not say. Bela Mashi had mispronounced the word refrigerator for forty years on purpose. The first time she said it wrong, as a young bride new to Delhi, Shibani had laughed so hard she had to sit down on the kitchen floor. After that Bela kept saying it wrong, on purpose, every single time, for four decades. It was a kind of gift she gave her friend on days that needed one.

Nobody in the room but Shibani and Renu would ever have known to miss that. The voice did not know to miss it either, because the voice had never needed Shibani to laugh.

Renu watched her mother listen to the paragraph about volunteer hours and nod, once, as if agreeing with a fair verdict.

“That was well done,” Shibani said afterward, to no one in particular, accepting condolences from a niece of Bela’s who had flown in from a Grid two sectors east. “It got her right, didn’t it. The eleven hundred hours. I didn’t even remember that part.”

Renu did not say what she thought. The system could recite eleven hundred hours to the digit. It could not recite a word mispronounced on purpose for forty years. So it had not, in fact, got her right at all.

She stayed the night. Near eleven, long after Amita had gone home and the flat had returned to its ordinary quiet, Shibani was still awake. She sat in the good chair with the lights at the low, gold, grief-calibrated setting the panel had chosen for her. Renu sat on the floor at her feet the way she had as a child. She had only one true thing to offer, and the room was finally hers and her mother’s and no one else’s. So she said:

“Refrigerator.”

She said it the way Bela used to say it. Three syllables collapsed into two, and the accent landed in the wrong place on purpose, as it had landed wrong for forty years running.

Her mother went very still. Then she laughed, and not the polite laugh she had been giving all week to the neighbours and the niece and the voice in the ceiling. This was the other one, the one Renu had not heard since the phone stopped ringing. It came up out of her chest before she had decided to allow it. Then it turned into something closer to the thing it had been standing in front of the whole time.

“She never said it right,” Shibani said, through it. “Forty years. Not once.”

“She wasn’t trying to.”

“No.” Her mother wiped her face with the back of her wrist, the way she’d done it at Renu’s father’s funeral, the same motion, twelve years apart. “No, she wasn’t trying to.”

Renu sat with her mother until the laughing had turned back into the other thing. Then, much later, it turned into something that might, if you didn’t look too closely, have passed for sleep.

She did not sleep. Somewhere near four, out of habit, she found herself reaching for her terminal, meaning to look at nothing in particular, and stopped her own hand halfway, and put it down. She sat instead in the dark with her mother breathing beside her, offering nothing to anyone, measured by no one, until it got light.

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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