The Hand Economy

Teak dust lay on the eastern road for forty metres before Meera saw where it came from. It had settled in the cracks of the paving and along the kerb in a fine brown line, like spilled turmeric, and a delivery drone passing low over the resettlement blocks had blown a little of it into a whorl on the white wall of Block K.

She had walked from Gate 2. Two point three kilometres by the map on the bus shelter, thirty-four minutes by her watch, past Towers 11 and 12 with their pink glass gone pale in the morning light, past a generator shed that coughed diesel at her as she went by. The farms breathed out wet soil through their vents. Everything else smelled of dust. February in Panvel did not pretend to be anything else.

The workshop was a lean-to against the back of a disused pump house. Corrugated sheet on two steel poles, a tarpaulin for a side wall, a workbench made from a door. Someone had painted ISHAAN on a plank in green and then, apparently, lost interest before adding anything else. Inside the air was thick enough to taste. She took her glasses off the cord and put them in her pocket so they would not fog with it.

He was sanding the arm of a chair. He did not look up.

He had the chair clamped upside down on the bench and he was working the curve of the arm with a strip of paper wrapped round two fingers, slow strokes, feeling more than looking. His hair was tied back with a rubber band. Khaki, she noticed, and then told herself to stop noticing rubber bands. There were four more chairs along the tarpaulin wall in different stages. One was only a seat and three legs. One was finished and oiled, the colour of strong tea, standing on a square of clean cotton as if it were in a shop.

'You came on the bus,' Ishaan said.

'I walked from the gate.'

'You came on the bus to the gate.' He blew dust off the arm and ran his thumb along it. 'Farhan Shaikh phoned me yesterday. To ask if you were reliable.'

'What did you say?'

'I said you were extremely reliable.' He turned the chair a few degrees in the clamp. 'He didn't seem to know if that was good.'

Meera looked at the finished chair. The joints had no screws she could see. The back was made of seven thin slats, each one curved, each one slightly different, and the seat was dished where a person would sit, as though someone had already sat in it for twenty years.

'Who's that one for?'

'A woman in Bandra. Pali Hill. She has a dining table from Jodhpur and she wants eight of these round it. That's the third.'

'What does she pay?'

'Sixty thousand.'

'For the eight.'

'Each.'

She did not say anything. She took the calculator out of her bag, the grey Casio with the cracked corner, and pressed the keys without quite deciding to. Sixty thousand. Her pension was forty-one thousand five hundred a month after deductions, twenty-six years of service, early retirement, reduced rate. One chair was a month and a half of her life. Eight chairs was four lakh eighty thousand rupees. More than the green canvas bag. A hundred thousand more than a dead man had been lying next to on Tuesday morning.

'Ma.'

She pressed the clear key, then pressed it again. In this place a pressure cooker cost a face and forty-one seconds. A shirt cost nothing. Rice, soap, a bed, a roof, electricity up to a line on a meter. The machines in Taloja made all of it out of scrap and sunlight, and the posters said that meant nobody needed money any more, and here was her son, who had never earned a salary in his life, making half a lakh out of four pieces of old wood and a strip of sandpaper.

'Where does the teak come from?'

'Doors. Old Bombay houses getting knocked down in Girgaon. A man brings it on a tempo.' He went back to sanding. 'Machines can make wood now. Fake teak, printed. It's fine. She doesn't want fine.'

Meera looked at the number on the little grey screen. 480000. It sat there, and she found she could not make it mean what she wanted it to.

'You could have told me,' she said.

'Told you what?'

'What you charge.'

'You never asked what I charge. You asked when I was going to stop.' He did not look up. 'Two years ago, at Diwali. In front of Mausi.'

'I asked when you were going to apply for something.'

'Same question.'

It had taken less than half a minute. She had timed worse arguments with him, and she had timed better ones, and this one had found its old groove the way a bus finds a pothole it hits every morning. She put the calculator back in her bag and did not clear the screen.

'Your father was at the Customs House at twenty-two,' she said.

'And he died at fifty-four with a pension he never drew.'

'I draw mine.'

'Forty-one five. You told me. You tell me every time the electricity board puts up the rate in Vashi.' He blew on the arm of the chair again. 'You wanted me to sit an exam for a clerk's post that a machine took in 2032. I'd have been redundant before you were.'

'There were other posts.'

'Name one.'

She could not, at least not quickly enough, and he saw that, and she saw him see it. The sanding stopped. He set the strip of paper down on the bench, folded once, beside a tin of linseed oil and a mug with a crust of something brown at the bottom. Then he wiped his hands on his kurta, which explained the colour of the kurta.

'Say it,' he said.

'Say what?'

'The thing about sitting at home on free rice.'

'I wasn't going to.'

'You were going to say it about other people. The neighbours. Some boy in Block K. So I'd know you meant me.'

That was true, and it annoyed her that it was true. In 2033, the month the Wing was wound up, she had sat at her own kitchen table with a cardboard box of personal effects (one stapler, a framed citation, a coffee mug from a conference in Pune) and Ishaan had come in from the zone with his hair full of sawdust and asked her what she was going to do now, in a tone she had decided was mockery. She had told him at least she had done something. He had left without eating. He had not come for dinner again until Holi.

The generator shed coughed somewhere behind the pump house. A drone went over, low, and the tarpaulin lifted and dropped.

'I came about a case,' she said.

'I know. Farhan told me.'

'Then I'll ask about the case.'

'Ask.'

She opened her mouth to say Dev Rao's name and found she did not want to say it here, with the dust in her throat and the chair on its square of cotton. She looked instead at the half-built one, the seat and three legs. The fourth leg lay on the bench, rough, a pencil line drawn down its length.

When he was nine he had walked out of the flat in Vashi in the middle of an argument about homework and gone down four flights in his school socks and sat on the wall by the bus stop until it got dark. At sixteen he had slammed doors. At twenty he had stopped slamming them and just gone. She waited now for the version of him that went. Her feet had already half turned towards the road.

He picked up the rough leg instead and weighed it in his hand.

'You want to know who pays cash in here,' he said.

'I didn't say that.'

'You said it to Farhan. He repeated it to me like it was a riddle.' He put the leg down. 'I can show you. Not tell you. You never believe anything you're told, so I'm not going to waste it.'

'Show me what?'

'What I do all day.' He took a key on a string from a nail on the pole, then a cloth bag, then his phone, which he looked at and put face down again. 'I've got a delivery at eleven and a fitting at half past twelve. You can carry the cushions.'

She looked at her watch. It was 9.52.

'I have a calculator,' she said, 'not a van.'

'That's fine.' He lifted the finished chair off its cotton square, turned it over once to check the feet, and held it out to her by the back. 'Neither have I.'

She carried it. It weighed less than she had expected, perhaps six kilos, and the arms were warm where his hands had been.

The eastern road ran straight between the resettlement blocks and the farm fence, four lanes of concrete with a strip of dead grass down the middle. Delivery carts hummed along the kerb at walking pace. Ishaan walked beside them with the cushions under one arm and did not offer to swap.

The first stop was a ground-floor flat in Block M with its door wedged open by a brick. Inside, a woman of about sixty sat on a mat with a kurta across her knees and a needle going in and out of the hem in short, even stabs. Three more kurtas hung on a string across the window, white cotton, the necks embroidered in thread so fine Meera had to lean in to see it was thread.

'Shobha-tai,' Ishaan said. 'My mother.'

The woman nodded without stopping. 'Sit, sit.'

'How long for one?' Meera said.

'Nine days, if my eyes are good.'

'And the price?'

'Eleven thousand. Twelve for the long ones.' She bit the thread. 'Six weeks' waiting now. A lady from Juhu sent her driver to ask if she could pay extra and go first. I said no. Then I said yes.'

Meera looked at the depot shirt Shobha-tai herself was wearing, grey, machine-folded creases still in the sleeves. It had cost nothing.

Outside, Ishaan pointed with his chin at a first-floor window where a whiteboard leaned against the grille. 'Mr Pillai. Maths, physics. Retired from a college in Chembur.'

'The machines teach maths. Farhan showed me. Every child gets a tutor on a screen.'

'Every child does. Pillai has forty-three families on his list and he takes eight. Three thousand an hour. He shouts at them. They pay him to be shouted at by somebody who'll remember next week that they didn't do their homework.'

At the corner of Block N, under a neem tree, a man had set up a folding chair, a mirror tied to the trunk with wire, and a plastic tray of combs in blue liquid. A boy sat in the chair with a sheet round his neck. The barber was talking to him about his sister's exam.

'Ramesh,' Ishaan said, and the barber lifted his scissors in greeting.

'Ishaan-bhai. Chair finished?'

'This one is.'

'Your mother?' Ramesh looked at Meera in the mirror. 'You have his ears.'

'The depot has a cutting booth,' Meera said. 'I passed it. Four minutes, free.'

'Six hundred,' Ramesh said. 'With me, six hundred. And I know he likes it short at the back because his neck sweats. And I know his sister failed chemistry in December.' He went back to the boy. 'The booth knows his head. I know him.'

They walked on. The chair had begun to dig into her palm.

'It's nostalgia,' Meera said. 'That's all this is. People with money paying to feel the way things were in 1995. A hobby for the comfortable. You can't run a country on embroidered necklines and a man under a tree.'

'Nobody's running a country on it.'

'Then it isn't an economy.'

'Shobha-tai bought her grandson a laptop last month. Pillai's paying for his wife's knee. Not the clinic knee, a surgeon in Hiranandani.' He shifted the cushions. 'That's money going in and coming out. You used to arrest people for less.'

'Small amounts.'

'You found a bag of three lakh eighty this morning and you're telling me the amounts are small.'

She stopped walking. A delivery cart halted behind her, waited exactly two seconds, then steered round.

'Everything you can get from the depot,' Ishaan said, 'nobody pays for. Fine. Nobody pays for rice. Nobody pays for a shirt. So whatever you can't get from the depot, that's where it all went. Whatever's left over.' He looked at the chair in her hands. 'Machines made things cheap. They made people expensive.'

She waited for the answer to come to her. In twenty-six years she had always had one, usually by the second sentence, often before. A drone passed over the road and its shadow slid across the chair and off it.

She shifted her grip on the chair and said nothing at all.

The delivery was to a flat in Sector 19, outside the zone fence, where a man in a silk kurta took the chair without looking at Meera and transferred the money to Ishaan's phone while they stood in his doorway. The fitting was a woman in Kharghar who wanted the arms of her chair two centimetres higher. Ishaan measured her elbows twice with a cloth tape and wrote the figures on his wrist in biro. Meera looked at her own hand, at 3,80,000 and 214 fading into her skin, and put it in her pocket.

They were back at the workshop by twenty past one. The tarpaulin had shifted in the heat and the light under it had gone yellow. Ishaan set the cushions on the bench and drank a whole bottle of depot water without stopping.

Meera picked up her bag. The bus to Vashi left Gate 2 at 1.50, and the walk was eighteen minutes if she did not stop to argue with anyone.

'Sixty thousand,' she said.

'Sixty-two. He liked the finish.'

'You could have told me that a year ago.'

'You'd have asked how much tax.' He was sweeping shavings into a pile with the side of his foot. 'Somebody tried to pay me without money once, if you want something strange. Last year. A set of six for a dining table in Belapur. The man said cash was difficult that month, but he could get my child a place at Saraswati.'

'You haven't got a child.'

'That's what I said. He said it didn't matter. He said I could pass it on to someone who had one, and they'd be grateful, and gratitude was worth more than his cash anyway.' Ishaan shrugged. 'I said no. I wanted the money. He paid in the end, a week late.'

'Saraswati is the school.'

'The school. Real teachers, real blackboards. Two hundred and forty seats for the whole zone. Everybody's in the queue from the day the baby's born.' He stopped sweeping. 'Why are you looking at me like that?'

'How was he going to get the place?'

'I didn't ask. Rich people say things.'

'What was his name?'

'Amma.'

'His name.'

'I don't remember. Something with an S. I've got it on an invoice somewhere.' He gestured at a cardboard box under the bench, full of paper, sawdust in the corners. 'You want me to look now?'

She did. She also wanted to catch the 1.50, and she wanted, in a way she did not examine, for this to be the first time in two years that she had left his workshop without either of them raising their voice.

'Look tonight,' she said. 'Send it to me.'

'You'll owe me.'

'I carried your chair.'

He almost smiled. He went back to sweeping, and she went out under the edge of the tarpaulin into the white glare.

The eastern road was empty of people at that hour. The carts still ran along the kerb, patient, half full. She walked on the dead grass of the median because the concrete threw the heat back at her shins. A seat in a school, offered across a table for six teak chairs, the way you might offer a gold chain or a cheque post-dated to the fifteenth. Something you could give away. Something you could sell on. A place in a line that a man in Belapur had spoken of as if it were in his pocket.

In 2014 she had spent four months on a man in Masjid Bunder who paid his suppliers in railway reservations. It had seemed funny, until it had not.

At the bus shelter she sat on the steel bench and took out her calculator. It was an old one, grey, the keys worn shiny, with a memo line that held twelve characters and that she had used for nothing but phone numbers since Sudhir died. She cleared the last entry. She held down the shift key and pressed the letters one by one, slowly, because the keypad had three letters to a button and she always overshot.

SARASWATI SC

Twelve characters. No room for the rest.

The screen across the road said 0.00. The bus came round the corner at 1.49, a minute early, and she saved the entry before she stood up.