2084: An Algorithmic State — Act II: Taste, Chapter 7: Fatima, Before
Every morning Fatima pours a second glass of tea, lets it sit for one full boil, and tips it out. She has done it for six years. In eleven years she has never written down what anyone owes her.
In Brief: Fatima has run a tea stall on a corner of Sector 12-East for eleven years, and her mother ran one before her. Her regulars arrive at their usual hours, among them old Manzoor, Zainab, and Bilal, who wants her at an evening meeting above the grain market. A girl with a tiffin comes up short.
Fatima was awake before the muezzin, as she had been for eleven years at this stall and longer at her mother’s. She had the stove lit by the time the first call reached her end of the lane. So the smell of the tea and the sound of the prayer arrived, most mornings, close enough together that they had long ago fused in her into a single arrival. Steam and voice at once.
She made the tea the way her mother had, and her mother’s mother before that. Her confidence lived in her hands and her ear rather than on any page. A fist of loose leaf. Water at a boil she judged by sound rather than time. Milk only after the leaf had given up everything it had. And at the end, always, a crushed cardamom pod and a knuckle of ginger. She kept the ginger wrapped in a wet cloth so it would still have some fight left by the second batch. Once she had tried a shop-bought spice mix that a supplier pressed on her at a good price, and thrown out the whole first batch rather than serve it. The trouble was not that it tasted wrong, exactly, but that it tasted like nobody. Fatima had never in her life served tea that tasted like nobody.
The first glass, always, went to the lane itself. She poured it onto the ground by the leg of her cart. The habit was older than any reason she could have given for it, so the pouring had long since become its own explanation.
There was a second habit beneath the first, older in one sense and younger in another. She performed it only in the few minutes before anyone arrived to see her do it. She poured a second glass, let it sit untouched the length of one full boil, and only then tipped it out too. She had done this every morning for six years, since the week after her mother’s funeral. She had opened the stall the next day because she did not know what else a body was for on a morning like that. Her hands, running years ahead of the rest of her, made two glasses out of pure habit. Only then, with the slowness grief moves at in its first days, did she know that there was no longer anyone to hand the second to. She had not stopped making it. She had only stopped expecting anyone to drink it. The lane had noticed, the way the lane noticed everything eventually, and had never asked her about it.
Manzoor came at six, as he had for as long as she’d had a stall to come to. He was seventy, or claimed to be. He had once worked the looms two sectors over, before the looms stopped needing hands. Now he did nothing anyone in the lane could precisely name, though everyone agreed he did it well.
“Eleven per cent stronger than yesterday,” he announced, holding his glass up to a light that wasn’t there yet to hold it up to.
“You say that every day, Manzoor.”
“Because it’s true every day. You’re the only person in this sector who improves with practice instead of getting comfortable.” He drank half of it in one motion, the way old men drink hot things. They had long ago stopped being able to prove to anyone, including themselves, that it still hurt. “Zainab’s coming. I passed her at the corner arguing with a cart about the price of onions.”
“Zainab argues with carts the way other people say good morning.”
Zainab arrived not long after, still warm from the argument. She had the energy of a woman who has won a negotiation she didn’t especially need to win and is pleased with herself regardless. She took her glass already poured to the strength that three decades in this lane had settled on. The question and the answer had worn down long ago into the pouring itself. She settled onto the low stool that had become hers because, for thirty years, everyone else had chosen another seat.
“Bilal’s looking for you,” she said, as information rather than urgency. “Something about the grain counts again. He thinks the notice board’s wrong about the Thursday delivery.”
“The notice board is always wrong about something. It’s the one reliable thing about it.”
“That’s what I told him. He wants to meet about it anyway. Above the grain market, evening, the usual people.” Zainab drank, and made a small satisfied sound she made every morning, whatever the tea’s actual quality. Fatima had long ago stopped taking the sound as a review. She took it as simply a thing Zainab’s throat did on contact with something warm. “You should come, even if you think it’s nothing. He listens to you more than he lets on.”
“I have a stall to run.”
“You always have a stall to run. It’s never stopped you before.” Zainab said it with the flat fondness you keep for a true thing about someone you’ve watched be exactly the same for three decades. Fatima could not honestly disagree, and did not try to.
Bilal himself came through not long after, moving fast, the way he always moved. He was a man who did most of his business standing up and mid-stride. He didn’t stop for tea. He never stopped for tea, and the lane had decided this said something about him, though no two people agreed on what. But he touched two fingers to the edge of her cart in passing, the closest thing he had to a greeting, and said, “Evening, above the grain market, if you can,” and was gone before she could answer either way.
A girl of perhaps eight came by around seven with a steel tiffin. She had the seriousness small children bring to errands their mothers have trusted them with. Fatima filled it to the height her wrist knew, a finger’s width below the rim. She had been filling that same tiffin for that same mother for two years, and the measure had long since moved into her hands. The girl counted out coins with the exaggerated care of someone warned, more than once, not to lose any. She came up short. The amount would have meant nothing to anyone with more than the coins in her fist to spare, and everything to the woman who had counted them out that morning.
“Tell your mother Thursday,” Fatima said, closing the tiffin’s lid herself so the girl wouldn’t have to manage it and the coins at once. “Tell her I said Thursday, not that she owes me. There’s a difference, and she’ll know it.”
The girl nodded, solemn as a courier carrying something far heavier than a tiffin of tea, and went.
Fatima did not write this down anywhere. In eleven years she had never written down what anyone owed her. She had found that the ledger she carried in her head, name by name and week by week, was more accurate than any ledger kept with a pen. She did not trust people more than a pen would. But a woman might be short this week because her husband’s contract had ended. A man might be short this week because he had decided, correctly, that Fatima was too soft-hearted to make an issue of it. A pen could not tell the difference. Fatima, it turned out, could.
By eight the lane was fully awake around her. A boy she recognised, not one of hers, ran past with flatbread wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. Two men further down were arguing in the easy, unhurried way of men who had had this argument before. It was about a radio one had fixed and the other insisted still buzzed on the low frequencies. The smell of someone’s frying oil arrived under her tea’s steam and lost, as it always lost, because Fatima’s stall had the corner and the corner had the wind’s favour. She considered this, with a small and entirely undisguised pride, one of the only truly unearned advantages life had ever handed her. From the shop that shared her back wall, incense drifted over on the eight o’clock draught. The Agarwals’ youngest lit the sticks before school, as his grandmother had taught him before Fatima ever met either of them. Some mornings, though not today, the boy left a marigold on the corner of her cart on his way past. On the mornings there was extra, she left a glass of tea by his family’s shutter before it opened. The two of them conducted the entire arrangement in marigolds and tea.
She thought, some mornings, about the notices the Ministry sent. The sugar allocation, unchanged. The water schedule, unchanged. The small print at the bottom reminded her that Sector 12-East’s classification remained under standard review, whatever that meant. It might mean nothing more than a sentence a form needed somewhere on it. Years back she had stopped reading past the first line of any of them. Her theory was that a notice which changed nothing did not deserve the courtesy of being finished. She was not wrong about this, most weeks. This was one of the most weeks.
By nine the stove had gone through its second batch and was working on its third. Manzoor had moved from his stool to lean against the wall behind it in the posture of a man settling in for a morning he had no other plans for. Zainab had gone and come back once already to report a further development in the onion negotiation nobody had asked her to update them on. And the lane went on being exactly what it had been every morning Fatima could remember. Loud, uneven, running entirely on its own time. And, in a way she had carried for eleven years in her hands and her stove and the second glass rather than in any word for it, sufficient.
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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