Kilowatts

Every door in Block F had a grey box screwed to the frame at shoulder height, about the size of a paperback, with two numbers glowing green on its face. On the door of F-3-11 the top number read 4.20 and the bottom read 1.06. On F-3-12 it was 4.20 and 0.31. Someone had stuck a sticker of Ganpati over the corner of the second box, as if that might help.

'Daily quota on top,' Gopal Mhatre said. 'What you have left underneath. Resets at midnight.'

He ran a repair stall in the lee of Ishaan's lean-to, fans and mixers and the occasional drone with a bent rotor, and Ishaan had sent Meera to him that morning with a text that said only: Ask Gopal about the boxes. Gopal was sixty or so, with a pen behind each ear and a soldering burn on his thumb the shape of a comma. He had agreed to walk her round the blocks if she carried his toolbag, which weighed about as much as the chair had.

'Four point two units,' Meera said. 'For everything.'

'Lights, fans, fridge, the induction plate. Machines in the depots run off the solar field past Gate 4, that's not yours. This is yours.' He tapped the box. 'Nobody needs more than four. Fridge is maybe one and a half. Fan, one. You'd have to try.'

A door opened two flats along. A woman in a housecoat leaned out, saw Gopal, and came straight over without looking at Meera at all.

'Gopal-kaka. Sunday you said.'

'I said Sunday if I had time.'

'Point five. That's all. For three days.' She lowered her voice, which made it carry further. 'I'll do your shirts. Starch also.'

'I'll see.'

She looked at the meter on F-3-12, then at the closed door beside it, and her mouth went thin. 'Ask him what he's doing in there till three in the morning,' she said, and went back inside.

Meera waited until the latch clicked. 'Point five of what?'

'Units. You can transfer between meters. Neighbour to neighbour, inside the block.' Gopal shrugged the pen from his left ear and put it behind his right, where there was already a pen. 'Officially it's for sharing. Old people, sick people, a wedding.'

'And unofficially.'

'Unofficially, the boy in 12 has three graphics cards and a cooling fan he built from a pedestal fan and a bucket of ice, and he drinks everybody's spare by six in the evening.'

They went down the stairwell. It smelled of dust and somebody's frying mustard seeds. On the second floor a man stopped Gopal to ask if he still had the old meter cable, the one that could be persuaded, and Gopal said no in a tone that meant not on the stairs. On the ground floor two teenagers stood at a meter with their phones held up to it, arguing about a transfer of 0.8 that had gone to the wrong flat. One of them said the other owed him for February. Meera heard the word owed and stopped.

She had spent four days being told that nobody here wanted anything. She had stood in Depot 6 and watched a pressure cooker leave for nothing. She had been prepared, more or less, to concede the point about soap and rice. What she had not expected was this: people on stairwells keeping tallies, offering starch and shirts, glancing at each other's doors with the particular sourness of someone who suspects a neighbour of being better off. She had seen that look across a thousand chit-fund meetings. She had not expected to see it over a fan.

'What do they want it for?' she said. 'The boys.'

'Computing.' Gopal said it like an illness. 'Running models. Mining whatever they mine now. Training something. My grandson explained it twice and I fixed a toaster while he talked.' He pushed open the door to the street. The light was white and dry, and somewhere a generator was coughing. 'Food is free, madam. Phones are free. The box on the wall is the only thing in this zone that says no.'

Meera looked back at the stairwell, at the two boys still holding their phones up to the meter like a pair of pilgrims.

'Who decides,' she said, 'when the box says yes?'

Gopal took the toolbag back from her and weighed it in his hand for a moment.

'You'd have to ask Tanmay,' he said. 'Flat 12.'

Flat 12 did not answer. Meera knocked three times, then a fourth, and the woman in the housecoat opened her door again just wide enough to say, 'Terminal room. Where else,' and close it.

The terminal room was the ground floor of Block H, two streets over, a long hall that had been built for evening classes and still had a blackboard bolted to one wall with SANITATION chalked on it in a teacher's hand. Nobody had taught sanitation there for some time. Forty-odd machines ran along trestle tables in two rows, most of them with their side panels off, their insides lit blue and red and throbbing with fans. The hall was four or five degrees hotter than the street. It smelled of warm plastic and dust and, faintly, of something burning that nobody seemed worried about. A notice by the door said MAX 0.6 UNITS PER STATION and someone had written underneath it, in biro, ha.

She found Tanmay at the far end, where the extension cables met. He was sixteen or seventeen, thin, in a Mumbai Indians shirt washed nearly white, with headphones round his neck and a stainless-steel bucket of ice at his feet. A pedestal fan with its cage removed was bent over the bucket, blowing cold air sideways into an open case. Three graphics cards. Gopal had counted correctly.

'You're Tanmay.'

He didn't look up. 'You're the police lady who was in Depot 6 with Farhan-bhai. Everybody saw you.' He typed something. 'I don't do anything illegal. Transfers are allowed.'

'I'm not police.'

'Then why are you asking?'

'Because I don't understand it.'

That made him glance at her, briefly, the way people glanced at a dog that had walked into a shop. 'Nobody over forty understands it.'

'I'm fifty-two,' Meera said. 'So I'm well past help.'

Nothing. He went back to the screen, where lines of text scrolled too fast to read. Meera put Gopal's case aside in her head and looked at the setup properly: the ice, the cables taped at the joins, a cardboard box on the floor with a courier label half torn off, the address scored out in marker. Pune. Return to sender.

'Something didn't arrive,' she said.

His hands stopped.

'Drones only bring Provision,' he said after a moment. 'Anything you buy outside, the courier needs an outside address. Mine got sent back twice. Eleven thousand rupees, my uncle paid, and it's sitting in a warehouse in Pune because they won't deliver to a gate.'

'What is it?'

'Power supply. A better one. This one's going to cook.'

Meera took out her notebook, wrote her address in Vashi in block capitals, flat number and all, and tore the page off. She held it where he could see it but not take it.

'Send it there. I'll bring it on the 7.15.'

He looked at the paper for a long time. Then at her. Then he pulled his headphones off his neck and put them on the table.

'What do you want to know.'

'How you get more than four point two.'

'You apply.' He opened a window on the second screen and turned it towards her: the Ledgerless page, white and green, the same layout she had seen at Rekha's on the photographs. Utility Quota Revision. Your position: 1,388. 'Same as the doctor, same as the school. Everything's one queue, different category. I applied on 9 January. Normal time is six, seven weeks. Some people wait three months.'

'Who's ahead of you?'

'Nobody can see that. You see your number. It goes down.' He shrugged. 'Mostly it goes down.'

'Mostly.'

He reached for the ice, took a cube, and rubbed it across the back of his neck. A boy two stations along was watching them now and pretending not to.

'Last month a man in Block K got two units extra,' Tanmay said. 'Permanent. He applied after lunch. By dinner his box said six point two. My friend saw it, he was fixing the man's router.' He dropped the cube back. 'And it's not only him. It happens. Hours. Not weeks. Everyone here knows somebody whose went through in hours.'

'And what do they say about it?'

'Nothing.' He put the headphones back round his neck. 'You say something, maybe your number goes up instead of down.'

On the screen, his position flickered and settled. 1,388.

---

The room cost ₹850 a night and came with a ceiling fan, a single bed, a framed print of the Gateway of India hung slightly crooked, and a landlady who had asked for three nights in advance and counted the notes in front of her. It was on the second floor of a lodge on the old Panvel road, ten minutes' walk from Gate 2. Meera had taken it on Monday so she would stop spending four hours a day on buses. From the window she could see Tower 9, or the pink smudge of it, above the roofs.

She sat on the bed with the photocopies spread across the blanket in date order. Forty-one pages. Farhan had made them on the police-post machine, which streaked a grey line down the left margin of every sheet, so Dev's handwriting looked as though it had been written beside a railway track.

She had been reading the entries as positions. Before and after. 214/9. 61/2. Someone who had been far back and was now near the front. That was what Rekha's photographs had confirmed, and she had stopped looking for anything else.

Tanmay's screen had said 1,388. A queue number. But the box on the wall said 4.2, and that was not a position. It was an amount.

She went through again from the first page, slower, with the calculator open on her knee.

On page 23 she found it. 28.12.35 A.K. k 4.2 → 5.7. Small letters, the pencil pressed lightly, as if Dev had written it standing up. No queue numbers on either side. Just the two figures and the arrow.

She punched the subtraction in out of habit. 1.5.

Page 31. 22.01.36 A.K. k 4.2 → 6.2. Two units. Last month. She thought of Tanmay rubbing ice on his neck. By dinner his box said six point two.

Her first thought was the business card. She took it out of the back of her own notebook, where she had tucked it on the day Arjun Malhotra poured her tea and said Sudhir's name without being given it. Cream card, raised print. ARJUN K. MALHOTRA. DEPUTY DIRECTOR, ALLOCATION. A mobile number and an email with the consortium's domain.

A.K. Arjun Kumar, Arjun Krishna, whatever the K was for.

She sat with the card in one hand and page 31 in the other and made herself do the other half of the sum. Dev had used initials for everyone. Initials meant a first name and a surname. Arjun Malhotra was A.M. on any page Dev had written so far; she had seen two A.M.s already, both in Human Care entries, and she had not thought of him either time. A.K. could be Anil Kadam, Ashwini Kale, any of the Khans. The zone had 240,000 people. If even a tenth of a per cent of them had those initials, that was 240 people, and she was counting a middle letter on a business card as a match. In 1998 a junior inspector had brought her a case built on initials and she had sent him back to Crawford Market for a week to find the man's handwriting. He had found a different man.

And Tanmay's Block K man might not be either entry. Two units was two units. People rounded.

She laid the pages face down so she would stop looking at them.

She had read access to Ledgerless for another twenty-four days. Kavita had said so in front of Farhan, with a smile. Read access meant she could open the utility-quota category and look for revisions on 28 December and 22 January, 4.2 to 5.7 and 4.2 to 6.2, and see whose meters they belonged to, and whether those revisions had waited six weeks or six hours. If the names were A.K., she would have names. If one of them sat in Block K, she would have Tanmay's friend and a router.

If there were no such revisions at all, she would have something more interesting.

Nobody needed to hear Arjun's name from her before then. Not Farhan, who would defend him from reflex. Not Kavita.

The consultant laptop was on the chair under her cardigan. It had a consortium sticker on the lid and a login screen that took her face, then a six-digit code from a text message, then her face again. She plugged it into the one socket in the room, unplugging the fan to do it.

The fan wound down. The room got warmer. The screen came up white and green.

The screen asked for her face. She gave it. It sent a code to her phone, 418207, and she typed it with one finger. It asked for her face again.

ACCESS SUSPENDED. PLEASE CONTACT ZONE ADMINISTRATION. REF 18:06.

She tried twice more. The reference changed to 18:09, then 18:11. The rest stayed the same.

She plugged the fan back in and put her shoes on.

---

The administration building was lit on four floors. At 7.25 p.m. the glass doors still opened for her face, which she took as an oversight. The young man at reception had a terminal turned towards visitors, and she asked him to log her in there, in case the laptop was the problem. He tried. He read the screen and then read her, and picked up his phone.

'Madam is still upstairs,' he said. 'She says you can go up.'

Kavita Menon was standing at the window with a cup of something green, looking at the towers. She had taken her shoes off. They sat side by side under the desk, heels together.

'Mrs Kulkarni. I was going to call you in the morning.'

'The system called me first.'

'I'm sorry about that. It's automatic once the order goes in.' Kavita put the cup down on a coaster. 'Consultant read access covers aggregate data. Some of what you've been opening is individual-level. Health referrals. Household utility records. Under the zone's privacy framework that needs a separate consent process. Our compliance people flagged it. It's routine.'

'I've had the access for five days.'

'And it took them five days to notice. That's also routine.' She smiled. 'We'll set up a supervised session. You tell us what you need, someone from allocation pulls it, you see it with a minder in the room. Probably next week.'

'Someone from allocation.'

'They know the data.'

'Next week the dates I'm interested in will still be the dates I'm interested in,' Meera said. 'Whoever pulls them will know what they are.'

Kavita sat down, which made her shorter than Meera for the first time. 'You're looking for a pattern in a man's death. I understand that. But I have 240,000 people whose kidney results and electricity meters are in that system, and they were promised nobody would be reading them on a laptop in a lodge on the Panvel road.'

Meera had not told her where she was staying.

'Who placed the order?'

'I did. At six.'

'What happened at five?'

Kavita did not answer that. She moved the cup half an inch on its coaster. Behind her the window held Tower 9, pink, and on the corner of the desk a stack of paper squared off with the edges matching.

The top sheet was not consortium paper. It had the state emblem in the corner and the blue stamp of the Panvel Zone police post, and under the stamp a signature Meera had watched being made that afternoon on a photocopy log. F. SHAIKH, SI. The typed lines above it were short. Request under Section 91 for production of all Ledgerless queue revision logs, categories Human Care and Utilities, period 01.02.35 to 11.02.36, inclusive of operator credentials.

Utilities. She had not told him about the kilowatts. She had not told anyone.

The received stamp, red, said 16.52.

Kavita followed her eyes to the sheet and did not cover it. That, Meera thought later, was the most honest thing she did all evening.

'The sub-inspector's request will go to legal,' Kavita said. 'Legal takes time.'

'How much time?'

'As much as the framework requires.'

Meera picked up her bag. At the door she stopped, because the coaster under Kavita's cup was a square of cork with a printed number on it, the same one that sat on every depot screen in the zone, and somebody in the gift shop had thought it would make a nice souvenir.

0.00.

On the stairs she took out her phone and found Farhan's number. It rang six times. When he picked up, there was traffic behind him and his voice was careful.

'My access went at six,' he said, before she could speak. 'Did yours?'