Index Zero

A woman in a maroon nightie and a grey cardigan walked up to the counter of Depot 6 at 9.48, looked into a camera the size of a five-rupee coin, and said, 'Five litre. The tall one, not the flat one.'

Behind the counter something hummed. A belt moved. Twenty seconds later a steel pressure cooker came through a rubber flap in its cardboard sleeve, still smelling faintly of machine oil, and the woman tucked it under her arm like a loaf of bread and went out past them into the sun. She did not look at the camera again. She did not look at anyone. Meera checked her watch. Forty-one seconds, door to door.

'That's it?' she said.

'That's it.' Farhan was leaning on the jeep's open door, pleased, the way men are pleased when they show you their village. 'Face, item, done. She'll have it on the stove by ten.'

'Who signs for it?'

'Nobody signs.'

'Who's charged?'

'Nobody's charged.' He said it kindly, as if to a child who has asked where the sun goes.

Meera looked at the depot. Single storey, white panels, a ramp, a queue of six people that moved so quickly it hardly counted as a queue. Above the door a drone lifted off a pad with a parcel slung under it and tilted away over the resettlement blocks, low enough that she heard the motors change pitch as it turned.

'Somebody made that cooker,' she said. 'Steel. A gasket. A whistle. Three, four kilos of metal. Somewhere a book shows one cooker going out of this building and not coming back.'

'The system knows a cooker went out. It makes another one.'

'Out of what?'

'Scrap from the recycling line at Taloja. Power from the solar fields past Gate 4.' He counted on long fingers. 'Machines from the consortium. All paid for in 2031.'

'Paid for by whom?'

'The state and the consortium. It's on the website.' He shrugged. 'After that it costs nothing to run. Or close enough that nobody counts it.'

There was no pause before any of it. That was what bothered her. Twenty-six years in Economic Offences had taught her to listen for the pause: the half-second when a man decides how much of the truth will hold his weight. Evasion meant there was something to evade. Farhan was not evading. He answered as quickly as he would have told her his own name, because to him there was nothing there.

'And if she comes back this afternoon and asks for another one?'

'Then she gets another one.'

'And a third?'

Farhan frowned. 'Why would anyone want three pressure cookers?'

She had no answer for that, and it annoyed her.

Her right hand had gone into the pocket of her kurta of its own accord and found the calculator: grey, solar strip, the 7 key worn smooth. She had carried it through bank raids at Nariman Point and a fortnight in a godown in Bhiwandi with four crore of fake stamp paper. Every case she had ever closed began in the same place. Find where the money came in. Find where it went out. The crime lived in the gap between the two, and the gap was always written down somewhere, by somebody who had to answer to somebody else.

She watched the next person step up to the camera. A boy of about twelve. School shoes, size five. Thirty-three seconds.

There was no in. There was no out. There was no book.

Meera took the calculator out, looked at the blank grey screen, and put it back.

They drove east along a road that had no potholes, which was the first thing in the zone that made Meera uneasy in a way she could name. Farhan kept the jeep at forty. On both sides the resettlement blocks went past in rows, eight storeys each, cream paint already gone the colour of milky tea along the bottom where the dust settled. Washing hung from every balcony. Somebody on the fifth floor of Block R-11 was beating a carpet with a cricket bat.

Above the rooftops the drones held their positions. Meera counted fourteen over one stretch of four blocks, spaced like birds on a wire, each hanging still for a few seconds before it dropped, delivered, rose and took its place again. They made a sound like a ceiling fan in the next room. Below them a man was shaving on his balcony with the mirror propped against the grille. Two girls in school pinafores were sharing an earphone at a bus stop. A grandmother was sorting fenugreek into a steel thali on a doorstep. None of them looked up. They looked up at drones about as often as they looked up at the sky to check it was still blue.

'How many?' Meera said.

'In the air at any time, about eleven hundred. Total fleet, twenty-six hundred and something.' Farhan slowed for a speed bump that was painted, not built. 'They charge on the roofs. You'll see the pads.'

'Who watches them?'

'The system.'

'Which person?'

He thought about it. 'There's a fleet office. Near Gate 1.'

'How many people in it?'

'A few.'

At the junction with the main road a screen stood on two steel legs above the bus shelter, the size of a cinema hoarding. It showed the date, the time, 10.06, and the temperature, 31 degrees. Below that, in figures half a metre tall, white on blue: SCARCITY INDEX 0.00. Under the number, smaller, the same thing in Marathi and Hindi.

Farhan stopped the jeep, although nothing required him to.

'That's ours,' he said. 'Every depot has one. Every school. It measures the gap between what residents ask for and what they receive, across every category, every hour. Zero means nobody in the zone asked for something and didn't get it. Food, clothes, housing, goods, care.' He said the list the way people say a prayer they learnt young. 'Zero since month eleven. Four years and some months. Delegations come from Delhi to stand where we're standing and take photographs of that screen.'

'Who calculates it?'

'Ledgerless.'

'Who decides what counts as asking?'

'The software.'

'And who wrote the software?'

'The allocation department.'

'Who checks the allocation department?'

Farhan looked at the screen rather than at her. 'There's an audit. Annually. The consortium does it.'

'The consortium that runs the zone.'

'Ma'am.' He put the jeep in gear. 'It's zero because people get what they need. I grew up in a chawl in Govandi where my mother queued at the ration shop with my sister on her hip. I know what a gap looks like.'

It was a good answer, and she believed he meant every word. She also noticed it was the first answer that morning he had needed to take a run at.

The bus behind them sounded its horn. Farhan pulled away. Meera twisted in her seat and watched the screen recede through the rear window, the clock rolling over to 10.07 while the number beneath it did not move at all.

In twenty-six years she had seen a great many perfect figures. Quarterly returns from a cooperative bank in Thane that never varied by more than a lakh. A gold dealer in Zaveri Bazaar whose stock balanced to the gram every month for nine years. Honest numbers were untidy. They twitched. They had bad weeks. A figure that sat exactly where it was supposed to sit, month after month, was a figure somebody leaned on, every day, with both hands.

'Four years at zero,' she said.

'Four years and three months.'

She took the calculator out again, typed 0.00, and looked at it.

The administration building stood at the centre of the zone on a low rise of reclaimed earth, four storeys of glass that caught the sun and gave nothing back. Farhan parked in a bay marked for him by name. A machine at the door read both their faces, and Meera's took longer, 2.8 seconds by the clock above the lift. Visitor, the screen decided.

Director Kavita Menon's office was on the top floor and had three walls of glass. From the chair she was offered Meera could see Towers 6 to 11 in a line to the south, glowing faintly pink even in daylight, and beyond them the creek, flat and brown, with the coastal block standing at its edge like something that had been delivered to the wrong address.

Kavita did not sit behind her desk. She sat on the low sofa across from Meera with her ankles crossed, in a cotton sari the grey of wet slate, and she let a silence go on long enough to show she was not in a hurry. She was forty-seven and looked as if she had been told so and had decided not to believe it.

'Dev was one of our best,' she said. 'I want that on the record before anything else.'

'Noted.'

'You'll have heard the line people use about this place.' Kavita turned her head toward the glass. 'A businessman in America said it at the end of 2025. That within ten or twenty years nobody would have to work unless they wanted to, and money would stop meaning anything. Everyone laughed. Economists laughed hardest. I was one of them.' She smiled at the towers. 'He wasn't wrong. He was early. Two hundred and forty thousand people out there are the proof.'

She said it the way a priest says the bit of the service that never changes. Meera had heard bank chairmen do the same thing with their founder's motto, usually about a year before the auditors came.

'What's your mandate?' Meera said.

'To show it works.'

'On paper. Who signed it, and what does it let you do?'

'The state and the consortium jointly. It lets us provide.' Kavita spread her hands. 'Food, shelter, goods, care. Without the friction of exchange.'

'Who do you answer to?'

'A board. Delhi watches. The world watches, frankly.'

'Who on the board reads the allocation logs?'

'Nobody reads logs, Mrs Kulkarni. That's rather the point. The system reads them so that people don't have to.'

'And if I wanted to read them?'

Kavita looked at her properly for the first time. Meera knew the look. She had seen it on the faces of managing directors in Fort who were deciding whether she was a nuisance or a danger, and how much each would cost.

Farhan shifted on his chair. 'Ma'am, Mrs Kulkarni is here at my request. Informally.'

'I know.' Kavita stood, went to her desk and touched the surface, which lit under her fingers. 'Informally won't get her through a single door here. The doors don't recognise informal.' She typed something with two fingers. 'Temporary consultant. Thirty days. Read access to Ledgerless at department level, physical access to every building except the server floor.' She looked up. 'I'd rather you looked from inside than guessed from outside. Guessing is how rumours start.'

It was generous. It was also, Meera thought, the way you handled a stray dog that had got into the compound: you fed it in the kitchen, where you could see it.

'Why?' Meera said.

'Because I've nothing to hide, and I'd like that established quickly.' Kavita came round the desk. 'Your face is registered now. The doors will know you.'

On the wall beside the lift, as they left, a smaller screen repeated the number in white: 0.00. Meera's face went into the machine's memory at 10.31, and somewhere a file with her name on it began to fill.

The lift opened before Farhan could press the button, and a man stepped out holding two paper cups of tea, one in each hand, as if he had known to the second when they would be standing there.

'You'll be Mrs Kulkarni.' He held a cup out to her. 'Ginger, no sugar. Farhan said you take it plain. Arjun Malhotra. Allocation.'

She took the tea because refusing it would have been a statement. Farhan did not get a cup. He did not seem to expect one.

Arjun was forty or so, broad through the shoulders, in a pale blue shirt with the sleeves turned back twice. A cricketer's tan stopped at his wrists. His eyes were red at the rims, and he did not try to hide it. When he spoke about Dev he stopped once in the middle of a sentence and looked at the floor until he could go on.

'He sat two desks from me for four years,' he said. 'He brought his own lunch in a steel tiffin. Every day. Dal and two chapatis. I used to tell him the depot would give him a better lunch for nothing and he said he liked knowing who'd made it.' He breathed out through his nose. 'Sorry. I keep doing that. I'm told it's normal.'

'It is,' Meera said.

'Whatever you need, you come to me. Not the helpdesk, not a form. Me.' He took a card from his shirt pocket, an actual card, cream stock, with a number written on the back in blue ink. 'Your access will take a few hours to filter down to the building locks. If a door won't open, ring that. I'll have someone there in ten minutes. And if you need a vehicle so you're not tying up Farhan all day, I can sort that by two o'clock.'

'That's kind.'

'It's the least.' He looked at Farhan. 'He's a good lad. He'll have told you we're all very proud of him.'

Farhan had told her nothing of the kind. He looked pleased anyway.

The lift was still holding its doors for them. Arjun put out an arm to keep them open, and as Meera stepped past him he lowered his voice so that it was meant for her alone.

'I was sorry to hear about Sudhir,' he said. 'I know it's been a while. But it doesn't really go anywhere, does it.'

The tea was hot through the paper. Meera kept her hand where it was.

She had not said her husband's name in this building. She had not said it to Farhan, who had known her for four hours and had asked nothing about her except whether she wanted the window down. Sudhir had been dead since October 2029. He had taught physics at a junior college in Vashi and had never once been in the newspaper, and there was no reason on God's earth for a deputy director of allocation in Panvel to know what he had been called.

'No,' she said. 'It doesn't.'

'Anything at all.' Arjun let the doors go.

They closed on his face, kind, sad, attentive. Meera watched the floor numbers count down from 4. She thought about how long it took to learn a stranger's husband's name. A phone call to the right person. A minute with a pension file. Less, if the stranger's face had gone into a machine at 10.31 and the machine had somewhere to look.

Or he was simply a decent man who had asked about her before she arrived, the way decent men did.

She had met a great many decent men. Several of them were now in Taloja jail.

'He's like that with everyone,' Farhan said. 'He knows my mother's birthday.'

'Does he.' Meera turned the cream card over and read the number again. Ten digits, written slowly, every one of them closed and neat.

The lift opened onto the ground floor at 10.58. Farhan turned left, towards the glass doors and the jeep, and Meera turned right, because she could hear a ceiling fan and nothing else, and in her experience a room with a fan in it was a room with people in it.

The corridor ran thirty metres to a pair of frosted doors. Painted on the wall in green, in the same rounded letters as the depot signs, were the words HUMAN CARE. Below them, someone had stuck a laminated sheet with the hours: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., Monday to Saturday. The laminate had bubbled at one corner.

The waiting area was full. Meera counted the chairs out of habit. Six rows of eight, forty-eight moulded plastic seats bolted to steel rails, and every one taken. Another dozen people stood along the back wall. An old man in a white kurta held a plastic folder of papers against his chest with both arms, the way people held babies on trains. A woman in a nurse's cardigan that was not a uniform sat with a steel tiffin on her knees. Two boys of about eight sat on the floor under the window, playing something with bottle caps, without a sound.

Nobody was talking. On a Thursday morning in Navi Mumbai, sixty-odd people in a single room, and nobody was talking. The fan turned. The room smelt of phenyl and of the jasmine in somebody's hair.

Meera stood at the end of the second row. A woman of about thirty looked up at her, then down at her own feet, and stayed looking down. Meera had been a police officer for twenty-six years. She knew the difference between people who had not noticed her and people who had decided not to.

'Excuse me,' she said to the man in the kurta. 'How long have you been waiting?'

He held the folder tighter. 'Since morning.'

'This morning?'

He looked past her at the frosted doors and did not answer. A woman beside him moved her handbag from the empty space on the rail to her lap, which was an answer of sorts, though Meera could not tell to what.

Farhan came up behind her. He had the jeep keys in his hand and the face of a man whose guest had wandered into the wrong part of the house.

'It's the specialist side,' he said. 'Clinic care is in the blocks, you don't come here for a fever. This is for the real doctors.'

'How many real doctors are there?'

'I'd have to check.'

'Check,' Meera said.

He did not write it down. She noticed that, and she noticed that he kept his voice lower than he had in the director's office, as though the room had rules nobody had posted.

On the left-hand door, at eye level, was a small black panel. Red digits glowed in it, square and steady, like the clock on a microwave. It did not say what the number counted. It did not change while she watched it, and she watched it for a full minute by her own wristwatch, the fan going round, a child's bottle cap clicking once against the tiles.

In the zone where nothing was scarce, where the screens upstairs and in every depot said so to two decimal places, somebody was two hundred and fourteenth in line for something.

Meera took the biro from her pocket. Below the 3,80,000 that had been on the back of her hand since half past eight, she wrote 214, and underlined it twice.