Seven Months

Rekha Gaikwad arrived eleven minutes early and took the table nearest the fire door, which Meera only knew because Rekha said so before she said hello.

'I was here at ten to four. I wanted the wall behind me.'

'I'd have done the same,' Meera said.

The canteen sat on the ground floor of Tower 4, under eleven storeys of spinach and coriander, and it smelled of wet soil and boiled dal and the faint sweetness of the pink lamps leaking down the stairwell. Farm workers ate at long steel tables in green overalls. There were perhaps forty of them, though only a handful were people. The rest of the farm's work went on overhead without stopping, a low hum through the ceiling slabs like a fridge in another room. A machine at the counter dispensed thalis on steel trays. Nobody paid. Nobody signed for anything. A boy of about nineteen took two trays, ate one, and left the other half-finished on the table, and nobody looked at him.

Rekha had brought a plastic folder, blue, the kind sold in stationery shops for ₹40, and a steel tiffin she did not open. She was forty-four. She wore a cotton sari in a dull mustard colour and a cardigan over it although the afternoon was thirty-one degrees, and her hair was pulled back so hard it lifted her eyebrows. She looked at Farhan's uniform for longer than she looked at Meera's face.

Farhan had found her. That was the arrangement. Meera had asked him on the bus the previous evening, while she was still turning the Saraswati invoice over in her mind, for every complaint the zone police post had received about Human Care in the past two years. He had said there would be none. There were two. One was a man who had punched a reception screen. The other was a typed sheet, a page and a half long, dated 14 October 2035 and signed R. S. Gaikwad, with a stamp in the corner: civil matter, referred to Human Care grievance cell, no cognisable offence. Farhan had read it twice at his desk and then phoned the number on it himself.

'You teach,' Meera said.

'Marathi. Class six and seven. Government school in New Panvel.' Rekha put her hands flat on the folder. 'Outside the zone. They pay me in rupees, if you're wondering. Thirty-eight thousand a month. I keep it in a bank. I'm one of the last fools.'

'I had a pension paid into the State Bank in Vashi this morning. Two of us, then.'

Rekha almost smiled. It did not get far.

Farhan took out his notebook and a ballpoint and wrote the date at the top of a fresh page, 16.02.36, and underlined it. He sat very straight. In the canteen light his beard looked freshly trimmed, and Meera thought, not for the first time, that he dressed for every interview as if someone senior would later read the transcript.

'Your husband,' he said.

'Sanjay.' Rekha said it to Meera. 'He was forty-six. He drove a tempo for a pharma distributor in Taloja for nineteen years, and then the distributor got the robots, and then we came here. 2032. Second intake. We had a one-room in Kalwa before that, with a shared toilet for eleven families. Here we had a flat with a balcony.' She stopped. 'I'm not going to pretend it was bad here. I want that on your paper.'

Farhan wrote something. Meera watched his pen move and guessed it was the word balcony.

'In January last year he started getting breathless on the stairs,' Rekha said. 'Fourth floor. He said it was the dust. Then he said it was his age. On the twenty-ninth of January he sat down on the landing between the second and third floors and couldn't get up for twenty minutes. I took him to the clinic in Sector 8. The machine took his blood and did the ECG and the echo, all in one morning, very quick, very polite. It said he needed a cardiologist. A human one. It said the word human.' She tapped the folder. 'It put him in the line for Human Care, cardiology, on the third of February. He was number eighty-eight.'

'Eighty-eight,' Meera said.

'They told us it would be four to five months. The welcome hall girl said that. She was very kind. She had a badge with her name on it, Priyanka, and a sticker of a sunflower, and she said, Ledgerless only looks at need, aunty, it doesn't look at who you are. She said that if he got worse the machine would see it in his readings and move him up. Automatic. Nobody could interfere.' Rekha unclipped the folder. 'So I watched it. Every night at nine, on my phone, I opened the app and took a picture of his number. Two hundred and nine pictures. I missed three days in August when he was admitted in the clinic and I slept on the floor there.'

She took out a stack of printouts, A4, held with a black binder clip. Each sheet had four screenshots on it, small, in colour, the Ledgerless screen with its pale blue band across the top and a single number in the middle in large grey type. Under each screenshot, in neat blue biro, a teacher's hand had written the date.

Meera put her reading glasses on and turned the sheets one by one. The numbers went down. Eighty-eight, eighty-six, eighty-five, eighty-five, eighty-one. Down through February, down through March, a few places a week and sometimes none. Seventy, sixty-two, fifty-five. It was the slowest thing she had ever watched move on paper, and she had once spent eight months tracking a single consignment of copper wire through three godowns in Bhiwandi.

'Here,' Rekha said, and put her finger on a square in late May.

Nineteen. And on the next square, the following night, twenty-one.

'He went backwards,' Rekha said. 'Two places. I phoned the grievance cell. They said the queue adjusts for clinical priority, sometimes other patients become more urgent. I said fine. I'm a reasonable woman. People get sicker. I believed them.'

She turned two more sheets. Mid-July: eight, then nine.

'Again.'

Then August, and Meera turned the page and saw it before Rekha's finger arrived. Four, on the night of 21 August. Seven, on the night of 22 August.

'He was number four,' Rekha said. 'Do you know what four looks like when you've watched eighty-eight? Four is nothing. Four is next week. I bought him new chappals for the appointment because his old ones were split at the back. I told my sister in Nashik. And then it was seven, and nobody could tell me why, and on the third of September he was number three and he was dead.'

She said it flatly, the way she might have read a register of attendance. The canteen hummed. At the next table a farm worker in green overalls scraped his tray clean with a piece of chapati and went back to his phone.

Farhan had stopped writing. His pen rested on the page at the end of a word. Meera did not look at him directly. She looked at the clip on the printouts, the binder's black steel arms, and listened to him breathe through his nose.

'There are other places he went backwards,' Meera said.

'Fourteen in all. I counted them in November. Some only one place. I have a list.' Rekha drew a single sheet from the back of the folder, handwritten, two columns: dates on the left, positions on the right, with arrows. 'I gave this to the police in October. With the pictures. Your post.' She was looking at Farhan now. 'They kept it four days and gave it back to me and said it was a medical matter.'

Farhan said nothing.

Meera opened her bag. She had brought the photocopies, forty-six pages from a xerox shop near Vashi station at ₹2 a page, which she had made the night they found the notebook and which Farhan had never asked about. The original was in an evidence locker at the zone post, sealed in a brown envelope with his signature across the flap. The copies were greyer than the original, and Dev Rao's light pencil had gone faint in places, but the numbers held.

She did not show them to Rekha. She laid them face down on her own side of the table, beside her calculator, and ran her finger down the dates on Rekha's handwritten list until she reached 28.05.35. Then she turned the copies over and went looking.

Dev's notebook did not run in clean order. Some pages were dense and some had three lines. Some entries carried a small letter after the initials, written smaller than the rest, almost an afterthought: h, s, k, c. She had wondered about the h since Tuesday. On the eleventh page, halfway down, she found it.

28.05.35 — P.J. h — 31/17

28.05.35 — N.D. h — 44/12

Two lines. Two people who had been behind Sanjay Gaikwad the night before, at thirty-one and forty-four, and who were in front of him the next night, at seventeen and twelve. She took the calculator and did it anyway, because she always did it anyway. Nineteen plus two. Twenty-one.

She went on. 14.07.35 was on the twenty-second page, a single line with a different set of initials, the h after them, and a pair that read 26/5. Eight plus one was nine. 22.08.35 was on the thirty-third page, and Dev had written three entries for it one under the other with the same pencil, the last two slightly cramped as if he had run out of time, each with its h, each with a first number higher than four and a second lower. She did not need the calculator for four plus three. She pressed the keys regardless and watched the 7 come up grey on the little screen.

Meera took her glasses off. She found she wanted to rub her eyes and didn't.

'Mrs Gaikwad,' she said. 'On three of these dates, people jumped over your husband in the line. I can tell you how many on each date. I can't yet tell you who, or what they paid.'

'Paid,' Rekha said.

'I don't know that they paid. I know a man wrote it down.'

'Which man?'

Meera hesitated, and in the hesitation Farhan said quietly, 'An engineer from allocation. He died on Wednesday.'

'Dev Rao.' Rekha nodded once. 'It was in the zone bulletin. The fall at Tower 9.' She looked at the photocopies, at the grey pencil she could not read upside down. 'He wrote it down and then he fell.'

Nobody answered that.

'What about the other eleven?' she said.

'They aren't in here.' Meera put her hand on the copies. 'Either he didn't see them, or they weren't bought, or he hadn't got that far. I can't tell you which.'

Rekha seemed to accept that. She was a woman, Meera thought, who preferred an honest gap to a full answer. She picked up the tiffin, looked at it, put it down again.

'I'll tell you what I'm not,' she said. 'I'm not one of these people who wants to break the machines. My sister does. She sends me videos. Every week, some uncle in Pune shouting that the robots killed the jobs. I don't care about the robots. The robot did his ECG in eleven minutes. In Kalwa we waited six hours at the civil hospital to be shouted at by a ward boy. The robot was the kindest thing that happened to us all year.' Her voice did not rise. 'I'm angry with Priyanka with her sunflower sticker. I'm angry with the poster in the welcome hall, the one with the madam director in it, that says Need Is the Only Number. I'm angry with the doctor at the clinic who held my hand and told me the line was fairer than any of us could ever be. They all told me. Nobody told me it could be bought. If they'd told me, I'd have found the money.'

'How much?' Meera said.

'Whatever it was.' Rekha looked at her. 'I've got a salary. I've got my mother's bangles. I've got a brother-in-law in Dubai who owes us. Whatever it was. I didn't know there was a counter. I would have stood at that counter like I stood in every other line in my life and I'd have paid it, and then he would have seen the cardiologist on the twenty-third of August instead of a box in the clinic cold room on the third of September. That's what I'm angry about. Not the machine. They told me there was no counter.'

Meera had spent twenty-six years being lied to by men who owned counters, and she had a sentence ready about it, something dry about how there was always a counter and the only question was who stood behind it. She did not say it. Across the table Farhan was looking at the page in front of him, at the word he had stopped on. His pen lay where it had been. The second hand on the canteen clock above the thali machine went round once, all the way, and then most of the way again. A drone went past the window at head height with a crate of tomatoes slung under it, and its shadow crossed the table and the binder clip and Rekha's hands.

Meera counted, because she could not help counting. Fifty-eight seconds. Sixty. Seventy.

Farhan put the cap on his pen. He set it down parallel to the notebook, square to the edge of the table, and Meera saw the knuckle of his first finger had gone white where he had been pressing.

'I grew up in Govandi,' he said to Rekha. 'Shivaji Nagar, near the dumping ground. My father had TB twice. When we came here in 2031 he got his medicines on the first day. The first day, aunty. I watched a machine hand them to him.' He breathed out. 'I was posted here in 2034. Your complaint came to my post in October. I didn't sign it off. But if it had come to my desk I would have done the same. I would have written medical matter. I would have believed it.'

'I know,' Rekha said. 'You have that face.'

He took it. Meera saw him take it, and saw it land somewhere below the uniform, and she thought she might have liked him better for it if she were the sort of person who liked people for things.

'Can I have copies?' he said. 'Of everything. Every page. The list. Anything else you have. Call logs to the grievance cell, if you have them. The clinic discharge. Any letter.'

'I have the call logs. I wrote them in a register. Time, name of the person, what they said.' Rekha's mouth moved, not quite a smile. 'Teacher.'

'Everything,' Farhan said. 'Please.'

Rekha reached into the folder again, behind the list, and drew out a second set of printouts, thinner, the same black clip, the same neat dates in blue biro under each picture. A buff-coloured cover sheet was stapled to the front. On it, in the top right corner, sat a rubber stamp in violet ink, slightly smudged at one side where the stamp had rocked: PANVEL PROVISION ZONE POLICE POST, RECEIVED 14/10/35. Below that, in a different hand, in ordinary blue ballpoint, someone had written Returned to complainant 18/10/35 and an illegible initial.

She slid it across the steel table to him and kept her fingers on it a moment before she let go.

'This one was already for the police,' she said.