2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XIV: Creative Courage, Chapter 77: Bilal
Bilal checked the load at two in the morning, with an instrument he had made himself. He did not check what else was drawing on the line. Roshan Ara, seventy-four, has lived in the building behind the tannery for thirty-one years.
In Brief: Nine weeks after Dev Sharma’s thirty-day exception lapsed, the tap in the courtyard lane goes again in September. Bilal, once a licensed technician and still the best repair hand in the lane, re-routes the power within a day and a half. The fix has a cost, and for four days the courtyard argues about what Bilal owes for it.
The tap went again in the second week of September, nine weeks after the exception lapsed, exactly as Aisha had said it would.
Bilal had it re-routed inside a day and a half.
That is the fact that matters, and it is the fact nobody in the courtyard ever disputed, then or since. Three people in the lane could open a junction box, and one could do it in the dark. Bilal had the piece re-lit before Kavya had finished deciding whether to ask him.
He had been a licensed structural technician, Grade II, three grades above anything he had done since. In his thirties he had been reassessed against a revised biomechanical curve, and the reassessment had found him no longer worth the licence. No explanation had been offered to anybody who might have argued against the finding. In twenty years he had never once mentioned it in that courtyard without being asked.
He was better at this than anyone, and he knew he was better at this than anyone. Those are two separate facts, and the second one is the one this is about.
The re-route ran through a distribution line on the north side that used to feed a workshop, which had closed in 2078. It was a good line. Bilal said it was the only line in four hundred metres with the headroom to carry the installation and the pump together, and he was right. Neither of them would sit near a threshold. He had checked the load, and he had checked it properly, at two in the morning, with an instrument he had made himself.
What he had not checked was what else was on it now.
He would say afterward that nothing should have been on it, and that was true. The workshop had closed six years earlier and its feed should have been dead. There was no reason on any drawing in existence for that line to carry anything else.
There was something else on it.
At some point from 2079, the stairwell and landing lights of the four-storey building behind the tannery had been quietly moved onto the dead workshop feed. Nobody ever established when, or who. Somebody had wanted them off the building’s own metered supply, and had done it well enough that they ran for six years without anyone noticing. When Bilal put the installation and the pump on that line, the stairwell lights dropped below the voltage they needed and went out.
Roshan Ara went down the second flight on the Thursday evening.
She was seventy-four, and she had lived in that building for thirty-one years. She had gone down those stairs in the dark before. There is nobody in the margins who has not gone down stairs in the dark. That evening she went down them the way she always did, with her left hand on the rail and her right on the wall. The third step from the turn is a half-inch shallower than the rest. She had known that for thirty-one years, and in the dark she found it a half-second late.
Wrist and two ribs. She lay on the landing for about twenty minutes. Manzoor found her, and he was going past anyway, on a Thursday, to the pharmacy.
The courtyard argued about it for four days, and not about whether Bilal had done it, which he had. He said so within an hour of hearing, plainly, without being asked, which is more than most people manage. The argument was about the other thing.
“You checked the load,” Zainab said.
“I checked the load.”
“You did not check what was drawing on it.”
“There was nothing on it. There was nothing on it on any drawing, on the meter, or on the instrument at two in the morning, because at two in the morning the stairwell lights were the only thing on it and they draw less than my hand.” Bilal did not raise his voice. He never raised his voice, and that was one of the five or six things about him that people found difficult. “I checked everything a person can check.”
“Then you should have checked something a person can’t.”
“Then it doesn’t get fixed,” Bilal said. “That is the actual sentence at the end of what you are saying and I would like somebody in this courtyard to say it out loud once. If I have to know what is on every line in four hundred metres before I touch anything, the tap stays off. Kavya’s piece stays dark. The pump stays down and we are carrying water up two flights in February. That is the trade. It has always been the trade. I have made it perhaps two hundred times in this lane and every one of you has drunk out of it.”
He was right about all of it and he did not say the other thing.
That is what Samar took away and could not put down. Bilal made the argument, and the argument was correct. In four days he never once said I am sorry or I got it wrong or she is seventy-four and she was on a landing for twenty minutes. Aisha put it to him directly on the third evening, because Aisha was the only one who would.
“Nobody is asking you to stop. Everybody in here knows what you do for us. I am asking you to say that a woman broke her wrist because of a thing you did.”
“A woman broke her wrist because somebody in 2079 put a stairwell on a dead feed and told nobody.”
“Bilal.”
“That is what happened. You are asking me to say a different thing that is not what happened, because it would make the four of you feel better about drinking the water.” He picked up his coil of wire, which he had started carrying again the week the tap went. “I will pay for the clinic. I have already paid for the clinic. I am not going to stand in a courtyard and perform a thing so that people who cannot open a junction box can decide how they feel about me.”
He went to the stair, and at the mouth of it he stopped, and did not turn round.
“Ask Manzoor how many times I have done this,” he said. “Then ask him what the lane would be if I hadn’t.”
He went up.
Nobody asked Manzoor.
Manzoor was in the courtyard. On the Thursday he had carried a seventy-four-year-old woman’s weight on his shoulder down a flight and a half of unlit stairs. In four days of argument he had not said one word. He went back to his glass.
Later, considerably later, on a different evening, he said it to Fatima: “He is right, and he is a hard man to be right at.” Fatima did not repeat it for two years.
Roshan Ara’s wrist set badly and gave her trouble for the rest of her life. She never once blamed Bilal, and said so, repeatedly, to anyone who raised it, in a tone that ended the conversation.
“Thirty-one years I have gone down those stairs in the dark,” she said. “He gave you water. Drink it.”
She stopped going down after dark.
Bilal put the stairwell back on its own supply within the fortnight, at his own cost, better than it had been, and told nobody. And Manzoor found out in the way Manzoor found out everything and did not mention it either.
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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