2084: An Algorithmic State — Act XV: Narrative, Chapter 82: The Original

In 2059 a dying woman said four lines in Bhojpuri at a relief counter. The file kept a six-line summary. Her great-granddaughter Kavya has been applying for the original since she was twenty-two.

In Brief: For nine years Kavya has applied for the unsummarised record of what her dying great-grandmother told a Continuity Relief clerk at Nizamuddin in 2059. Her grandmother, Sarala, translated the words at the counter. The file holds only a six-line summary, and every application is refused.

The fifth application went in on a Tuesday in March and was refused on the Thursday. That was faster than any of the previous four, and Kavya took it, correctly, to mean that somebody had built a rule since the last time.

Request: retrieval of unsummarised intake record, Continuity Relief counter, Nizamuddin, June 2059. Requestor relationship: great-granddaughter. Determination: refused. Ground: Section 3, Subsection 2 (records retained in summary form are retained in summary form).

She had the first four refusals in a folder. She was thirty-one and had been applying since she was twenty-two.

Nobody in the courtyard knew about it except Zainab. Zainab knew only because she had been there the evening the second refusal came. She had watched Kavya read it standing up and put it down and go and work on the panel for four hours without saying one word.

It was not a thing Kavya talked about. The reason was that she had never found a way to say what she wanted that did not sound smaller than it was.

She wanted a sentence.

In June 2059 her great-grandmother had been dying. Her grandmother, Sarala, was fifty-four then, the one in the photograph with her fist closed. Sarala took her mother to the Continuity Relief counter at Nizamuddin because there was nowhere else to take her. Her great-grandmother said something to the clerk. In Bhojpuri, which was the only language she had ever said anything important in.

And Sarala, who had the schooling, translated her mother into the four scheduled languages, at a counter, in front of her, because that was the form the counter could take.

Retained in summary form.

Six lines. That was the file. Kavya had them memorised: presenting condition, dependants, tier, duration, disposition, outcome.

Every one of them true.

“You know what’s in it,” Zainab said, once.

“I know what the summary says.”

“The summary is probably accurate.”

“I’m sure it’s accurate.” Kavya had her hands in the panel and did not take them out. “That isn’t the thing.”

“Then say the thing.”

Kavya thought about it long enough that Zainab went and got tea and came back and she was still thinking about it.

“My grandmother stood at a counter and turned her mother into four languages that woman had never spoken,” she said eventually. “And she was proud of it. She told me that herself, when I was nine. She was proud that she was the one in the family who could do it.” She turned the panel a quarter turn and did not look up. “I want to know what she was translating.”

The sixth application went in eleven months later, under a different section. It was granted on a technicality. Kavya brought the grant across the courtyard to Aisha, who had grown up in the sector and argued with everyone in it. Aisha had never heard of the technicality and did not entirely believe in it, even after reading it twice.

What arrived was an image. It was a photograph of a paper form, taken in 2061 during the digitisation, catalogue reference and all. The paper had gone soft at the fold, and the clerk’s carbon showed through from the sheet beneath.

And in the box at the bottom, in a hand that was not Sarala’s, there were four lines in Devanagari script that Kavya could not read. Bhojpuri written in Devanagari is still Bhojpuri. Kavya’s family had stopped speaking it in the generation between her grandmother and her mother, in Delhi, for the ordinary reasons.

She had the original and she could not open it.

Fatima’s mother had been from Chapra.

Fatima, who ran the tea stall at the courtyard’s edge, could not read it either. She had never learned to read in anything except Hindi, and had said so cheerfully for forty years. But she took the image and looked at it a long time. Then she took it to a man of about seventy who ran the paper-parts stall two lanes over and who had, she said, a sister who taught.

It took nine days.

What came back was written out on the back of a receipt, in the man’s careful hand, in English. He had asked what it was for and had been told, and he had made a judgement about who it was for.

I do not want the room. I want to go home. Tell them she is a good girl and she has done everything and it is not her fault. I am not frightened. Tell them I said I am not frightened.

Kavya read it in the courtyard at six in the evening with the light going.

Then she read it again. Then she folded the receipt in half and put it in her shirt pocket and went and sat on the step for a while. Ruhi came and sat next to her and did not ask, because Ruhi at eight had already learned the whole of that. The two of them sat there until the lamps in the lane came on.

The summary had said: presenting condition, terminal. Requests home discharge. Dependant present. No adverse determination indicated.

Every word of it was correct.

She did not tell Samar for four months.

When she did, he asked whether the original had told her anything the summary had not. He was a man who had spent eleven years being paid to ask exactly this.

“No,” Kavya said.

“Then...” He stopped himself, which was new, and which she noticed.

“Say it.”

“I was going to ask what you got.”

“I know.” She was making tea, badly, the way she made it. “I’ve asked myself that for nine years, and the only answer I have is not an answer. I got the words she used.” She put the glass down in front of him. “She said tell them I said I am not frightened. Twice. She said it twice, so it went in twice, so the clerk wrote it twice. The summary is one line and it is accurate and it does not have twice in it.”

Samar turned his cup a quarter turn.

“Don’t do that,” Kavya said. “That’s Vikram’s.”

“Sorry.”

“I know it isn’t much.”

“It isn’t nothing,” Samar said. Then, because that was not adequate and he knew it while it was still in the air, he said nothing else at all, and drank the bad tea. That was the end of the conversation, and it was not resolved, and neither of them tried to resolve 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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