Allocation

Nobody on the creek ground wore whites except Arjun Malhotra. The other twenty-one men played in track pants and Provision T-shirts, the standard grey with the zone's lotus on the chest, and two of the fielders were barefoot. Arjun had cream flannels with a crease. He was sitting on an upturned crate at the square-leg boundary, strapping on a pad, and he looked up and smiled before Meera was within twenty metres of him.

'Mrs Kulkarni. You came to watch.' He tightened the top buckle. 'We're 61 for 4. I'm in next. Bad timing for a visit, or good, depending how I bat.'

It was 7.38. Behind him the creek lay flat and brown and smelled of low tide and of diesel from a dredger moored past the mangroves. About forty people stood along the rope: wives with steel tiffins, a boy with a scorebook, three old men on plastic chairs who had clearly been arguing about the field placings since six.

Farhan stopped beside her. He had a buff folder under his arm and he did not open it yet.

'Sir,' he said. 'We need ten minutes.'

'You can have the whole drinks break.' Arjun nodded at a woman holding a flask. 'Sunita's boy got his Saraswati result on Friday. Ninety-one per cent in maths. Tell him, Sunita.'

Sunita did not tell anyone anything. She was looking at the folder.

Meera took it from Farhan and laid three things on the grass at Arjun's feet, in order. First, the printout of the Tower 9 maintenance log: CL-9-04, paused 23:41:07 to 00:00:12, authorised ALC-SVC-03. Next, the photocopies from the Panvel municipal annex, four flats at Sagar Darshan in the names of Rohit and Simran Malhotra, Suresh and Nalini Kapoor. Last, a narrow cloth-bound book from Salim's tin box, the third of five, its corners singed brown.

Arjun looked at them the way a man looks at a menu in a language he can read but would rather not.

'Ah,' he said. He laughed and turned to the rope, to the old men on the chairs. 'You see what happens. Five years of free rice and people still need something to talk about. A cleaning robot stops for twenty minutes, my cousin buys a flat, and now I'm a gangster.' He reached for his other pad. 'Mrs Kulkarni, every family in this zone has a cousin in Sagar Darshan or wishes it had.'

Somebody on the rope chuckled. One of the old men said, 'He's not wrong.'

Meera opened the ledger at a page she had marked with a bus ticket. Most of it was Salim's shorthand, small and slanted and unreadable to anyone but Salim. The bottom third was not. Salim had told her, sitting on her sofa with his hand in a bandage, that a man who buys on 'later' writes his own promise. Ink binds better than talk, he had said, and then asked if she had any biscuits that weren't Provision ones.

She read it out without raising her voice. There had never been any need to.

'Owed to S.Q. One cardiology position, Human Care, for his sister-in-law, before thirty August. Against: one flat, Sagar Darshan, batch three, to be named by S.Q. Fourteen August 2035.' She looked up. 'Then there is a small drawing of a bat. Then an initial. A.'

Halfway back to his mark, the bowler had stopped walking.

Nobody on the rope said anything. The boy with the scorebook closed it. Somewhere behind them a drone went over towards the farms, a thin whine like a mosquito in another room, and Meera could hear it all the way to the creek.

Arjun's hand stayed on the pad's buckle, the strap half through.

---

The pavilion was a tin-roofed shed with four concrete steps and a scoreboard of hooks and painted plates. Somebody had hung 61 and 4 and left the overs blank. Farhan walked Arjun there with one hand near his elbow, not touching it, and the drinks break began behind them without anyone calling it.

Arjun sat on the second step. One pad was still on.

'You can take that off, sir,' Farhan said.

'I'd rather not. I may still bat.'

Meera stood on the bottom step with the ledger closed against her hip. Farhan stayed on his feet. His notebook was a cheap spiral one from the Depot 6 shelf, and he wrote the time at the top of the page. 7.51.

'Dev Rao,' Farhan said. 'Did he pay you, or did you pay him?'

'I paid him.' Arjun said it at once, as if relieved to be asked something he could answer. 'Eighty thousand in October. Another lakh and a half in December. He came to me. I want that on your page, Farhan. He came to my desk and asked how a man with a sister in Hyderabad gets her boy a scooter on an engineer's stipend.'

'And you told him.'

'I told him there was a way to be useful.' Arjun looked at the creek. 'He was good. Better than the two before him. Fast, quiet, and he never asked who the names were for. I thought he was finally relaxing. Five years in grey shirts, eating off one plate. I thought, good, he has discovered he's human.'

Meera thought of the tile in the bathroom of 7-14 and the soft new grout. Three shirts, evenly spaced on the rail. Men who are relaxing do not hang their shirts like that.

'When did you find out about the notebook?' Farhan said.

'Fourth of February. He told me himself. Sat in my office and said he had every move since November written down, in pencil, in a book I would never find. Said a reporter from a Delhi paper was coming on the fifteenth.' Arjun rubbed the buckle with his thumb. 'He wasn't asking for money. I offered. He laughed. He said he'd been paid to learn and he'd learned.'

'So you wanted him dead.'

'I wanted the book.' His voice rose for the first time, and the three old men on the plastic chairs turned their heads together. He brought it down. 'I wanted the book back. That's all. A notebook. Paper. You burn it and it's gone and nobody is hurt. Two lakh forty thousand people keep their rice. Kavita keeps her number. Dev keeps his job, even. I told him that.'

Farhan's pen stopped. 'When did you tell him that?'

Arjun did not answer. Out on the square a fielder was rolling the ball along the pitch with his bare foot, slowly, to nobody.

'Sir.'

'He said if I wanted to talk I should come where there were no cameras.' Arjun smiled, very slightly, at the joke that was not his. 'He said the cleaning units on Tower 9 film the walkways and nothing else, and the harvest gantry is a walkway, so I should switch one off. He gave me the unit number. Wrote it on a slip.'

'CL-9-04,' Meera said.

'Yes.'

'And you went up.'

Arjun unbuckled the pad at last and set it on the step beside him, carefully, the way he might set down a sleeping child.

'Eleven-forty,' he said. 'It was cold up there. I didn't expect that.'

'Who spoke first?' Meera said.

'He did. He was sitting on the rail with his feet hanging over the lettuce, eleven metres up, like a boy on a wall. He said, "You came." As if he'd bet against it.' Arjun turned the pad's buckle over in his fingers. 'I had the bag with me. I put it down on the grating between us. I said there was three lakh eighty in it and it was his, and the book was mine, and we could both go to bed.'

'And?'

'He opened it. Looked inside. Counted one bundle, standing up, with that pencil behind his ear. Thirty-seven notes. He said, "Your man can't count." Then he zipped it shut and pushed it back to me with his foot.'

Farhan wrote. Meera watched his hand and saw it was steady, which surprised her a little.

'He had a book,' Arjun said. 'Blue. In his shirt pocket, I could see the corner. He took it out and held it up and said the reporter would have a copy by Friday whatever happened to this one. I didn't believe him. Nobody copies anything here. There's nothing to copy onto.' He stopped. 'I reached for it. That's all I did. I reached for it, and he pulled back, and the rail on that side is lower because of the harvest arms. Waist height on him. He was a thin man.'

'You held on to the book,' Meera said.

'I held on to the book.'

For a moment nobody spoke. On the field someone had found a thermos and was pouring tea into paper cups, and the smell of it came across the grass, cardamom and too much sugar.

'I took it home and burned it in the sink,' Arjun said. 'Before I burned it I opened it. Twelve pages written on. Grocery lists. Measurements for a bookshelf. A phone number for a plumber in Hyderabad.' He looked at Meera with something close to admiration. 'He brought a dummy. He knew exactly what I'd do.'

Meera thought of the polythene behind the tile and the last entry, 10.02.36, no initials. A man who had already decided he was not coming back to write the next line.

'The bag,' she said.

'Yes.'

'Eleven metres of stairs, past a dead man. Nineteen minutes on the camera. That's time enough to carry it to your car twice.'

'I had time.'

'So why leave it?'

Arjun considered the question properly. She disliked him most at that moment, for the care he took.

'Because of him,' he said, and tipped his head at Farhan. 'No offence, Farhan. Think what a policeman in this zone has seen in five years. Nothing stolen. Nothing sold. A robbery needs something worth robbing. Find a dead man with three lakh eighty beside him, untouched, and what goes through your head? I'll tell you. Nobody took it, so it doesn't matter. Money is the one thing here that proves nothing happened.' He spread his hands. 'Take the bag away and somebody asks what was in his pockets. Leave it there and the case is a fall. A sad man, a bad night, a low rail.'

Farhan's pen had stopped again. The page said 7.58 in the margin, then nothing.

'You didn't count on her,' Farhan said.

'I didn't know she existed.' Arjun bent and began unbuckling the second pad. 'I asked about her afterwards. Sudhir's widow. I'd heard of the Economic Offences Wing. I thought it was closed.'

'It was,' Meera said.

---

Farhan made the call at 8.04, standing by the sightscreen with his back to the step. Meera heard only his half. Yes, madam. The creek ground. No, madam, I think you should come yourself.

The match did not stop so much as run out. Both batsmen leaned on their bats. At the end of his run-up the bowler sat down and took off his shoes. Somebody's son, eight or nine years old, kept bowling a tennis ball at the empty stumps and nobody told him not to. On their plastic chairs, the three old men had given up pretending to watch the cricket.

Kavita Menon arrived at 8.31 in a white consortium car that parked on the grass, which nobody was supposed to do. Running shoes, a pale kurta, hair not done. She did not look at Arjun. She came as far as the boundary rope, a length of blue nylon pegged at intervals and frayed where the fielders had trodden on it, and stopped there, as if the rope meant something.

Meera walked out to meet her. Farhan stayed on the step with Arjun and the two pads.

'He's told you,' Kavita said.

'Some of it.'

'Then you don't need me.'

'I need to know when you knew.'

Kavita looked at the pitch. The boy's tennis ball hit the middle stump and rolled back to him. 'Knew is a strong word.'

'Suspected, then.'

'The morning of the twelfth. Before you came.' She said it plainly, as she said everything, like a figure on a slide. 'Dev brought me one page in December. Handwritten. He wouldn't email it. Four categories, initials, dates. I told him to bring me more. On the twelfth Arjun was in my office at seven-fifteen with tea for both of us, and he already knew it was the gantry. The duty officer hadn't called anyone yet.'

'And the privacy note that shut me out.'

'He drafted it. I signed it.'

Meera took the calculator out of her pocket. She did not need it. She used it anyway, because Kavita was a woman who believed numbers, and Meera wanted her to watch one being made.

'Under one per cent,' Meera said. 'That's what you told me. Two hundred and forty thousand residents.' She keyed it in. 'Two thousand four hundred people. Say each of them pushes one person back one place. Rekha Gaikwad's husband went back fourteen times. He died at number three on the third of September. Dev Rao died on your gantry with your money beside him, and you let a sub-inspector who trusted you write it up as a fall.'

'It wasn't my money.'

'It was your number.'

Kavita did not answer that. Behind her the driver had got out of the car and was standing by the bonnet, smoking, careful not to listen. The air smelled of the creek and somebody's diesel generator, and of the cardamom tea still going round in paper cups.

'Do you know what the Index was for?' Kavita said at last. Her voice had dropped. 'For the funders. For Delhi. For the next zone and the one after. I used to say that if it ever moved off zero they would close us, and everyone inside the fence would go back to standing in ration lines in Govandi.' She glanced at Farhan on the step, then away. 'I still think that's true.'

'And Dev?'

'Dev was point nought nought something. I had decided that before I met him.' She pressed her lips together. 'On the twelfth I sat in my office and watched the Index refresh at nine. Zero. It would have said zero if they'd found ten of him. That's what I built it to say.'

On the field the boy bowled again and missed, and walked down the pitch to fetch the ball himself.

Meera put the calculator back in her pocket without clearing it.

---

Farhan had stood up. He did it slowly, the way a tall man gets off a low step, and took the handcuffs from the back of his belt where they had sat, as far as Meera knew, since he was issued them. They were the old steel kind with a chain between. The zone police did not carry the plastic ones. There had never been enough arrests to justify the order.

Arjun watched him come. Both pads were off now, laid side by side on the step with the straps tucked under, like kit being returned to a school store.

'Stand up, please, sir,' Farhan said.

Arjun stood and held out his wrists before he was asked. Meera saw Farhan notice that and decide not to accept it. Instead he turned Arjun by the shoulder and cuffed him behind, one wrist and then the other, checking the gap with his little finger the way they teach at the training school in Nashik and nobody remembers afterwards. It took eleven seconds. Meera counted, from habit.

'Arjun Kishore Malhotra,' Farhan said. 'I am arresting you in connection with the death of Dev Rao at Tower 9 on the night of the eleventh of February. You have the right to know the grounds of your arrest, and I have told you. A person of your choosing may be informed. You may consult a lawyer. You will be produced before a magistrate within twenty-four hours.' He paused, not to search for the words but to let the last ones land. 'Do you understand?'

'Yes.'

'Who do you want informed?'

Arjun thought about it. 'Priya,' he said. 'Not her parents.'

Farhan wrote the name down. His hand was steady and so was the pen, and the margin of the page said 8.47.

Only then did Meera look past them at the ground. She had expected noise. A crowd had grown while she was talking to Kavita, perhaps forty people: the two teams, the wives with their steel tiffins, a vegetable seller who had wheeled his cart off the road to see, the three old men, now standing. Nobody said anything. The boy with the tennis ball had stopped bowling and was holding the ball against his chest with both hands.

One of the old men spoke first. He was thin, in a checked lungi, and he addressed Meera rather than the police, as if she were the one who would know prices.

'The flats,' he said. 'Sagar Darshan.'

'Some of them.'

'And Human Care?'

'Some of that.'

He nodded, unsurprised. It was the face of a man checking a sum he had done in his head years ago and been told was wrong. Behind him a woman in a green sari said something in Marathi to her neighbour, too low to hear, and the neighbour took out her phone and opened the Ledgerless app and stood looking at it, at her own number, whatever it was, in the white morning light.

Kavita had not crossed the rope. Her driver had put out his cigarette.

Farhan walked Arjun to the jeep. At the boundary he lifted the blue nylon with his free hand so that Arjun could duck under it without stumbling. Nobody on the rope made a sound.

Meera followed with the pads, since nobody else was going to.

At the jeep Farhan opened the rear door, waited, closed it. Then he stood with one hand on the hot metal of the roof and looked at the depot screen at the edge of the ground, where the Index sat as it had sat for four years and three months.

'What's the real number, madam?'

'I don't know yet.'

'But not that.'

'No,' Meera said. 'Not that.'

On the screen the figure refreshed at nine o'clock exactly, and came back 0.00.