2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XIII: Love, Chapter 72: The Part She Did Not Offer

Kavya sorts metal offcuts into four piles for no reason and tells Samar to ask about Ruhi’s father. His name was Arun. He was a joiner who could do a mortise by eye, and he wanted to register.

In Brief: Ten days after Naina’s wedding, Kavya tells Samar about Arun, the joiner she lived with in the margins before Ruhi was born. Arun wanted them to register with the Grid so he could get his shoulder looked at. Kavya refused, and in eight years she has not settled the argument.

She told him on a Tuesday, ten days after Naina’s wedding.

There was no run-up to it. He had come in and found her at the table, with the small metal offcuts sorted into four piles for no reason he could see. She said, without looking up, “You’ve never asked about Ruhi’s father.”

“No.”

“Ask me now.”

His name was Arun and he had been a joiner and he had lived four lanes over. They had been together, in the loose unlicensed way of the margins, for two years and a bit.

“He was kind,” Kavya said. “I need to start there because everything after it sounds like an accusation and none of it is. He was kind, and he was funny, which I did not know at the time was rare, and he had hands like...” she stopped. “He could do a mortise by eye. Nobody can do that. He could.”

He wanted to register.

Not urgently, and not at first. It came up in the second year the way it comes up. There was a cousin who had done it and was fine. There was a clinic that would not see him for a thing with his shoulder. There was an argument about whether the Chowk side was getting worse or whether they were getting older.

“He was not wrong,” Kavya said. “I want that said too. I have spent nine years listening to people in that courtyard talk about registration as though it were a moral failure and I have never said what I actually think, which is that Arun’s argument was better than mine and I knew it was better than mine at the time.”

“What was his argument?”

“That a person with a licence can get a shoulder looked at. That is the whole of it. He did not have a theory. I had a theory.”

She was pregnant in the spring and did not tell him for eleven days.

She has never been able to explain the eleven days to anybody’s satisfaction, including her own. Over time she has decided that it was because she knew what he would say, and knew what she would say back. She did not want the two of them to be in that room yet.

He said: then we register.

She said: no.

“And that was it?”

“That was not it. That was the beginning of four months.” Kavya moved one of the piles of offcuts three inches for no reason. “He was very good about it. It has never stopped being hard. He did not shout at me once. He made the argument, and then he made it again differently, and then he stopped making it and asked me to make mine, properly, out loud, in a way I could stand behind.”

“Could you?”

“I made it for two hours. It was the best I have ever made it. Everything I have said to you, I said that night, in a room four lanes over, at twenty-two, better than I have said it since.”

She stopped.

“And at the end of it he said: that is a very good argument and it is about you, and I am asking about her.”

He left in the autumn, before Ruhi was born.

Not badly. There was no scene, and he did not go quietly either. He came and said what he was doing, and said it three times over a week so that she could not later claim he had not. He said that he was going to register. If she changed her mind at any point in the next year or the next ten, he said, he would be where he was.

He registered in the winter. He is in the Grid. He has a licence and a shoulder that got looked at and a union at some percentage and, so far as she knows, no other children.

Samar opened his mouth and shut it. He had been to the Bureau once, on a weekday, and had asked a woman at a terminal about exceptions for scores under forty. He had carried the answer home and not brought it to this table. The number had been thirty-one. Kavya knew the number. She did not know he had gone and asked. There was a bent hinge on top of the nearest pile. He turned it over with one finger and put it back the way it had been.

“What,” Kavya said.

“Nothing. Go on.”

She looked at him a second longer than the word deserved, and went on.

“Does he know about her?”

“He knows everything about her.” Kavya’s voice did not change. “There has been money for eight years. It comes through a woman at the fruit cart who does not know whose it is and would not tell me if she did, and it is not much, and it comes on the same week every quarter, and I have never acknowledged it and neither has he, because the day either of us acknowledges it the arrangement stops being possible.”

“Why?”

“Because acknowledging it would make it a thing we were doing together, and if we were doing something together then one of us would have to be wrong about the rest of it.”

“Does Ruhi know?”

“Ruhi knows there was a man and that he lives in the Grid and that he was kind. She asked at four and I told her that. She asked at five and I told her the same thing in different words and she noticed, which was the first time I have ever been caught out by my own daughter.” Kavya finally looked up. “She has not asked since. I do not know whether that is because she is satisfied or because she has worked out that it costs me something, and if it is the second one then I have taught an eight-year-old to manage me, and I would rather not have.”

Samar did not say anything.

“You want to know if I think I was right.”

“No,” he said, and found as he said it that it was true. “I want to know what you think about it now.”

Kavya sat back.

“I think I was right for me and I do not know whether I was right for her, and I have had eight years to find a way of putting those two together and there isn’t one,” she said. “I think if she had grown up in the Grid with a father and a tier she would be a different person and I would have no way of knowing whether the different person was better off, because the different person would not have this courtyard and would not sing before she could read and would not...” she stopped again. “And I notice that I have just made my argument again, which I did not intend to do, which is how I know I have never resolved it.”

“Why now,” Samar said, later.

“Because a whole lane spent three months on a length of cloth and four hours on where people sit, and I stood in the middle of it holding my daughter’s hand, and it occurred to me somewhere in the third hour that there are two people in the world who have made large decisions about that child without asking me, and neither of them is her father.” She was not looking at him. “And then it occurred to me that there are three, and that I have been quite comfortable for eight years being the one who does not have to explain herself to anybody.”

She pushed one of the piles flat with her palm.

“So. Now you know the part I did not offer. You did not ask for it. I am aware that you not asking for it for months is a considerable part of why I am telling you.”

In the next room Ruhi was arguing with something, at length, in a tone of enormous seriousness. The tap over the stone sink dripped behind it, a drop at a time. It had dripped like that since the morning before, when the exception, the Ministry’s thirty days of full water for fourteen sectors, ran out.

Kavya listened to it for a moment. Then she began putting the offcuts back into the stone sink, a handful at a time, which took some minutes, and Samar sat where he was and let her do it.

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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