2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XIII: Love, Chapter 70: A Day with Nothing in It

A bucket filled fast takes ninety seconds. Somebody in the courtyard takes six minutes so a dozen people can stay asleep. On the fifteenth day of the exception, Samar moves a cupboard that does not need moving.

In Brief: It is Sunday, the fifteenth day of a thirty-day exception, and Samar spends it in the lane with Kavya and her daughter Ruhi. Nothing is scheduled. There is Fatima’s morning batch, a project involving string, a cupboard, a trip for eggs and a long evening meal in the courtyard with the neighbours.

The fifteenth day of the exception was a Sunday, and it began, as far as Samar could later reconstruct it, at some point before five. It began with the sound of somebody in the courtyard filling a bucket slowly enough not to wake anybody, which woke him.

He lay on the mat with his arm over his eyes and listened to it fill. A bucket filled fast takes ninety seconds. He lay there and worked out that this one was taking six minutes. Somebody had decided to spend the other four and a half so that a dozen people could stay asleep. Then he stopped working things out, because it was Sunday.

He went back to sleep. This was itself new. Some weeks earlier Kavya had told him something, with the flatness she used for the observations she considered least negotiable. A man who cannot sleep twice in a morning, she said, is a man who does not believe the morning is his. He had wanted to argue with the structure of the sentence. Lying there now, he found that the sentence had simply turned out to be true, and had not required his agreement.

Fatima’s second batch was on at seven, which meant the whole lane smelled of it by half past. Ruhi was awake at six on Sundays for no reason her mother had ever been able to establish. By twenty past seven she was at the corner with two coins and an entirely invented account of having been sent.

Fatima, who had known Kavya for nine years and Ruhi for the whole of her life, and had never once been fooled, took the coins.

“Your mother sent you.”

“Yes.”

“For four.”

“Yes.”

“Your mother,” said Fatima, wrapping five, “sent you for four.”

Ruhi took the packet with the expression of a person whose transaction has gone materially better than expected and who intends to leave before anyone reconsiders. She went back across the courtyard at the specific flat-out sprint of a child carrying food. Zainab, the courtyard’s eldest at eighty and the keeper of its arguments, met her halfway and took one. The Agarwals’ youngest took another and did not ask. Ruhi arrived at the flat with three of the original four and a completely clear conscience.

They ate them sitting on the floor, because the heat had already got into the chairs. Kavya ate hers in two pieces and Samar ate his in four and Ruhi ate hers in a manner that could not usefully be counted. For some minutes nobody said anything at all. The food was very good and very hot. There is a kind of quiet that only happens when people are eating something they have been thinking about since the smell arrived.

The morning went the way a Sunday morning goes.

Kavya took the panel apart. It was not broken. It had been cycling correctly for three weeks and would probably have gone on cycling correctly for three more. But she had wanted for some time to know whether the colour it produced at the seventh minute came from the glass or from the angle. There was no way to find out except to take the whole thing down and put it back together wrongly on purpose. She spent two hours on this. At the end of the two hours she had an answer, which was that it was the angle. The answer was of no use to anybody, including her, and she was as pleased about it as Samar had ever seen her about anything.

Ruhi conducted a project involving string.

The project’s aims were never fully disclosed. It began at the doorway. By ten it had reached the far wall of the courtyard. On the way it passed two chair backs, a nail somebody had left in the plaster in 2071, and the handle of a bucket. Then the bucket was needed, which produced the morning’s only genuine crisis. Zainab resolved it. She assessed the situation, declined to break the string, and carried the entire bucket out through the loop. She had the air of a woman who has decided that the fifteenth day of an exception is not the day to start being the person who breaks things.

Samar moved a cupboard.

It did not need moving. At some point during the week Kavya had said that the cupboard would be better on the other wall. She had said it the way people say things they do not expect anyone to act on. He had thought about it for four days. On Sunday morning he decided that he wanted, quite badly and for no reason he could explain, to pick something heavy up and put it somewhere else. It took him fifty minutes. Everything in the cupboard had to come out, and behind it he discovered a photograph nobody could identify and a dead insect of considerable size and antiquity. It went wrong twice. By the second attempt he was sweating through his shirt and had skinned his knuckle on the door frame. When he finally got it flush against the far wall and stood back, he was happier than any afternoon in the Ministry had ever made him.

Kavya looked at it from the doorway.

“It’s worse there,” she said.

“It is.”

“Substantially worse.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to move it back.”

“No,” said Samar, and sat down on the floor with his back against it, and she came and sat down next to him. After a while she put her hand on his knuckle, not to examine it, just to put her hand there.

The middle of the day was the dead part. The lane went quiet, because there was nothing to be done in that heat and everyone who could be indoors was indoors.

Ruhi slept, which she denied afterward.

Kavya did not sleep. She lay on her side on the mat with her eyes open in the half-dark, doing whatever it was she did in those hours. Samar had asked about it exactly once. He had received an answer he did not entirely follow, something about holding two colours next to each other for long enough that they stopped being two colours. He had understood that the answer was true and complete, and that his not following it was a limitation in him and not in her.

Samar lay next to her and did not sleep either. At one point he thought about the file that had brought him here, and let it go without extracting a conclusion.

At some stage in the dead hour a man two doors down began playing a radio, badly tuned. A woman shouted at him about it, and he shouted back. Then the radio came into tune and the argument stopped mid-sentence and did not resume, and the song finished, and nobody said anything about any of it afterward.

The lane came back at four the way it always came back. It did not come back gradually but by a sort of collective decision the lane made with itself. A courtyard which had held two people at half past three held nine at ten past four, and none of them could have told you what had changed.

Samar went out for eggs.

This should have taken six minutes. It took fifty. The man who had eggs did not have eggs. He sent Samar to a woman two lanes over who had eggs and also had a great deal to say about the man who did not have eggs. Then, on the way back, Samar passed Fatima’s cart at the hour when whatever had not sold in the morning was going at whatever she could get for it. He stood there for some time in a state he recognised, with faint embarrassment, as pure want. It was not hunger exactly, because he had eaten at eight and again at noon. It was the specific greed a person feels standing over food they can smell and have not decided to buy yet.

He bought four. He asked for four, and paid for four, and Fatima gave him five and rang four. It was Sunday, and the fifth was going in the bin at six. The transaction went into the sector’s record as a purchase of four, and would sit there, mis-stated by a quarter, for as long as records last.

He ate one on the walk back, standing, before he reached the corner. It was too hot and he ate it anyway, and burnt the roof of his mouth in the specific way that keeps announcing itself for two days.

The quarrel happened at about half past five and was about the cupboard.

It was not about the cupboard. Neither of them thought it was about the cupboard even while it was happening, and both of them said things about the cupboard for ten minutes anyway. It had been a very good day. There had been six people in three rooms since seven in the morning, and the heat had not broken. And Kavya had opened the cupboard on the far wall to get the pot, and had discovered that on the far wall the door opened into the doorway.

“You moved it so the door doesn’t open.”

“The door opens.”

“The door opens into the place where a person stands.”

“Then the person moves.”

“The person is holding a pot,” said Kavya, holding a pot.

It went on. It got, briefly, worse than the cupboard deserved, as these things do when two people are tired and neither has done anything wrong. There was nothing to apologise for and no route out except waiting. Ruhi watched with open interest from the floor. Samar said something about how the cupboard had been her idea, which was true and was the worst available thing to say. Kavya said that suggesting a thing and doing a thing were different, which was also true. They stood in a small hot kitchen four feet apart, being correct at each other. Then Ruhi observed from the floor that they could put the pot in the other cupboard.

There was a pause of some length.

“There is no other cupboard,” said Kavya.

“The shelf,” said Ruhi.

They put the pot on the shelf. It fit. Nobody conceded anything and nobody apologised. Forty minutes later Kavya passed behind him in the doorway and put her hand flat between his shoulder blades for a second, warm through the shirt. That was the end of it, and neither of them ever mentioned the cupboard again in any context for the rest of their lives.

Zainab arrived at six with a pot of her own and no intention of explaining it. She found Samar on the step with the eggs he had not yet handed over. She sat down beside him with the noise a person of her age makes sitting down on a step.

“You bought from Fatima at four.”

“I did.”

“How many did she ring.”

Samar looked at her.

“Four,” he said.

“She rings four.” Zainab settled the pot on her knees. “She has rung four every Sunday since I have known her, which is thirty years, and if you ever tell her I told you, I will say you are lying, and Fatima will believe me, because I have a face.”

“Why does it matter that she rings four.”

“It does not matter at all. Nothing hangs on it. Nobody checks.” She said this with a kind of relish. There was nothing of secrecy in it and everything of appetite, the way another woman might have described a good piece of gossip or a well-made shoe. “That is precisely why I like it. There is very little left in this city that nothing hangs on. I collect them. I have about thirty and I am not sharing the rest.”

She got up two minutes later to go and be somewhere else. Samar sat on the step with four eggs and the roof of his mouth still complaining. He had spent eleven years, he thought, in a building whose entire purpose was the elimination of the category of thing Zainab collected. In eleven years he had never once met anybody inside it who had noticed that the category existed.

The evening was the long part.

Zainab came with a pot. Shabana came without one and was given a plate anyway and objected to it and ate all of it. Somebody’s cousin arrived from four sectors away with news that turned out to be six weeks old. It was received with the full ceremony of news regardless, because the point of it was the arriving.

They ate outside, because the flat was still holding the day’s heat and the courtyard had begun to let go of it. It went on a long time, longer than anyone had planned for. The food kept not being finished, and then somebody made tea. Then somebody was persuaded to sing and, having been persuaded, refused, and was persuaded again, and sang two lines and stopped and was let off. The not-singing was somehow better than the singing would have been, and everyone knew it.

Samar sat with his back against the wall for most of it and said very little, and was not, at any point, required to.

Twice he was aware of being watched by Zainab, in the specific way she watched a person she had decided about. He understood that at some point in the last months he had moved across a line he had not seen. He was now on the side of it where a plate simply arrives, full, and is set down at your elbow. He did not know when. He did not know what he had done.

Ruhi fell asleep against her mother’s side at some point after ten, mid-argument, having been winning.

Afterwards the courtyard thinned and the plates were stacked. Ruhi was carried in, and woke up enough to object to being carried in, and went back to sleep mid-objection. Kavya washed her hands at the tap and stood there for a moment with the water running over them, longer than washing required. The water was still coming at the pressure it had come at all week. There were fifteen days left of it, and some days ago she had decided to stop counting them, and had not managed it.

Samar came and stood behind her and put his hands on her waist. She leaned back into him, the back of her head at his collarbone, and the water kept running.

“You should turn that off.”

“In a minute.”

She turned it off. She turned around. It was very dark in the small kitchen, and hot in the way that made everything slower. He had his hands on her hips and her forehead was against his collarbone, and neither of them said anything clever.

“Come inside,” she said.

Later he lay awake in the dark, with her asleep against his shoulder and his arm gone numb below the elbow and the certain knowledge that he was not going to move it. He thought about the bucket, and about how nothing anywhere would ever hold it, and went to sleep.

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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