2084: An Algorithmic State — Act II: Taste, Chapter 8: The Inspection

Gopal Mehra has inspected 140 carts in Sector 12-East for nine years. A new sub-clause wants each one fifteen centimetres from the wall behind it. In this lane, not one of them can be.

In Brief: Gopal Mehra, a municipal inspector, makes his Tuesday visit to Fatima’s tea stall in Sector 12-East with a folding stool and a new item from the rulebook. Obeying it would put her cart in breach of another rule. Three weeks later his route brings him back.

The inspector arrived on a Tuesday in April, which was his first mistake, because Tuesday was the day Fatima made the second batch. And there is no arguing with a woman who has her hands in something.

His name was Gopal Mehra. He was fifty-three, and he had been doing Category 4 inspections in this sector for nine years. He carried a folding stool, which the Municipal Continuity Schedule did not require of him. He had begun carrying it in his fourth year, after the incident with the ladder. It had done more for his professional relationships than anything the training had given him.

He set the stool down at a distance he had learned by experience: close enough to be dealing with her, far enough not to be standing over her. Then he said, “Fatima ji. Permit.”

“Behind you.”

Gopal turned. The permit was nailed to the wall of the adjoining shop, at a height of roughly two metres and thirty centimetres. By his own records, it had been there for four years.

“That is not your wall.”

“It is not my wall.”

“The permit must be displayed on or adjacent to the structure.”

“It is adjacent.”

“It is adjacent to the Agarwals’ shop.”

“The Agarwals’ shop is adjacent to my structure.” Fatima did not look up. “Everything in this lane is adjacent to everything. That is what a lane is.”

Gopal wrote nothing down. Nine years had taught him that the writing-down was the only real weapon he had, and that a weapon used early is a weapon spent.

“At a height visible to a standing adult of median stature,” he said.

“You can see it.”

“I am one metre sixty-eight.”

“Then you are not median.” She poured two glasses, without measuring, and the level came up identical in both. She had never thought about this. Gopal had noticed it in his second year and had never mentioned it to her, because he had a sense that mentioning it would spoil something. “Sit down. You have been standing since the Malhotras’.”

“How do you know I was at the Malhotras’.”

“Because you always do the Malhotras’ first and you always have that face afterward.”

He sat down on his stool. She put a glass on the corner of the cart where the glasses went, and he drank it. He was permitted to do this under a 2071 clarification concerning refreshment offered in the ordinary course. He had once looked it up and found it, and had never told anyone he had looked it up.

“There is a new item,” he said, after a while.

“There is always a new item.”

“Sub-clause 31.4. Structures with a rear aspect abutting a residential wall require a thermal separation of not less than fifteen centimetres.”

Fatima considered the back of her cart. It had abutted the Agarwals’ rear wall since 2059, at a separation of approximately nothing.

“And if I move it fifteen centimetres.”

“Then you are in the lane.”

“And if I am in the lane.”

“Then you are Part 3, Clause 8, obstruction of a designated pedestrian corridor, which is a larger form and goes to a different office.” Gopal said this with the weariness of a man reading out the terms of a trap he did not set and cannot dismantle. “I am telling you this so that you do not move the cart.”

“You are telling me not to comply.”

“I am telling you that compliance with 31.4 produces non-compliance with 3.8 and that 3.8 carries a fine and 31.4 carries an observation. An observation is a line in a file. A fine is money.” He finished the tea. “I am also telling you that this office has raised the question of 31.4 versus 3.8 in writing twice, in 2079 and again last spring, and has received on both occasions an acknowledgement.”

“What is an acknowledgement.”

“An acknowledgement is a document confirming receipt of a document.”

Fatima wiped her hands on the cloth at her waist and looked at him for the first time that morning.

“Gopal. How many of these carts.”

“In this sector, one hundred and forty.”

“And how many are fifteen centimetres from a wall.”

“None of them. There is no arrangement of this lane in which any of them is.” He stood up and folded the stool. The folded stool was the signal that the visit was ending, and both of them had learned the signal years ago. “I will record an observation. The observation will say that the operator was advised of 31.4. It will not say that the operator was in breach of 31.4, because the operator being in breach of 31.4 requires a measurement, and I have not taken a measurement.”

“You are standing next to it.”

“I have not taken a measurement,” said Gopal Mehra. He put his tape measure back in his bag without opening it. Then he wrote, in a field of four hundred characters, Operator advised, Clause 31.4. No measurement taken. Structure otherwise compliant.

He came back three weeks later because his route brought him back. He came back also because it was Tuesday. And at some point in the last four years, he had stopped choosing the route by anything he could have written down.

There was a boy at the stall, ten or so, eating something in a hurry with the entire top half of his body committed to it, the way boys eat. Fatima was not watching him eat. But she was standing in a way that meant she knew exactly how much of it was left.

“He is not paying,” Gopal observed.

“He is not.”

“That is a provision of goods without a recorded transaction. Part 4.”

“It is.”

“Which requires a note in the daily reconciliation.”

“Which I do not keep.”

“Which you are required to keep.”

“Which I do not keep,” Fatima agreed, “and which you have not asked to see in nine years, and which I would show you if you asked, and it would be a blank book, and then you would have to write something down.”

Gopal Mehra stood in the lane for a moment with his stool under his arm. The smell of the second batch came off the cart, and the boy went at his food like a man being timed. Gopal understood something then. It was not for the first time, but it came with the clarity that arrives when a thing has been true for so long it finally becomes visible. He had spent nine years being paid to look at one hundred and forty carts. And he had spent nine years choosing, four hundred characters at a time, which parts of them to have seen.

“I would like one also,” he said.

“You would like one also.”

“The same as him. Not the tea. The other.”

Fatima made it. She did not charge him for it either, and he did not raise Part 4, and he ate it standing up in the lane at half past ten in the morning like a person with somewhere to be, and it was very hot and slightly too salty and he thought about it, on and off, for the rest of the week.

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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Next: Chapter 9: Kavya