Clean Numbers

'Leave the door open,' Kavita Menon said. 'The air conditioning on this floor only works if it can see the corridor.'

It was 6.40 in the evening and the glass walls of her office had turned into mirrors. Behind Meera's reflection, faintly, the towers were coming on one by one across the zone, pink squares stacked on pink squares. Farhan stood by the door with his hands behind his back, the way junior officers stood in rooms where they had not been invited to sit.

Meera put her bag on the floor and took out the folder. She had bought it that morning at a stationer's in Vashi for ₹35, buff cardboard with a string tie, because she wanted Kavita to watch her untie something.

She laid the sheets out in two rows. Top row: Rekha Gaikwad's photographs, printed four to a page at a cyber café beside the bus depot, each one a phone screen held up under a tube light with a date in the corner. Bottom row: photocopies of Dev Rao's notebook, the pencil gone grey and fuzzy in the copying.

'Sanjay Gaikwad,' Meera said. 'Cardiology referral, 3 February 2035. Queue number 88.' She touched the first screenshot of May. 'Nineteen on the night of the fourteenth. Twenty-one the next night.' She moved her finger down to the copy beneath it. 'Fifteenth of May. Dev Rao writes h, two sets of initials, two pairs of numbers. Two people move ahead of nineteen.'

Kavita leaned forward. She did not pick anything up.

'July,' Meera said. 'Eight to nine. One entry, one h.' She moved along. 'August twenty-one to twenty-two. Four to seven. Three entries on the twenty-first, all h. He died on the third of September at number three.'

She had rehearsed this part on the bus, the next part too. Kavita would say the screenshots could be anything. Kavita would say a dead engineer's private notebook was not a system record. Kavita would say patients were reprioritised every night on clinical grounds and the software did not explain itself to relatives. Meera had an answer for each of those, written on the back of an electricity bill folded into her blouse.

Kavita sat back. She took off her glasses and laid them on the screenshot from 22 August, lenses up.

'Yes,' she said.

Meera waited for the rest of the sentence.

'Positions have been adjusted. Not by the software. By people with access to the software.' Kavita said it in the voice she had used for the Musk line in this same room, a week ago, as though it were something she had said to many rooms. 'We have known since late 2034 that there was some leakage. We estimate it at under one per cent of allocations. Point seven, point eight. Statistically it does not register.'

Farhan shifted his weight. His shoes squeaked on the floor.

'Sanjay Gaikwad registered,' Meera said.

'I am sure he did, to his wife.' Kavita looked at her steadily, without hostility. 'Ledgerless makes about nine lakh allocation decisions a day. Food, cloth, medicine, power, beds, drone routes. Under one per cent. I can give you the exact figure if you like. I will not pretend it is zero to you. I only pretend it is zero to the screens.'

'Then why are the screens zero?'

Kavita turned her chair a quarter towards the glass, towards the pink towers and the dark blocks between them.

'In 2031 there were two hundred and forty thousand people on this land, or on the land they were moved from, and a third of the children were underweight. We measured them. I have the files. Now nobody here goes to bed hungry. Nobody. Your sub-inspector's mother does not go to bed hungry.' She did not look at Farhan as she said it. 'The consortium funds us on one number. If it moves, the funding moves. If the funding moves, the rice moves.'

She put her glasses back on and squared the August photocopy against the edge of the desk with one finger.

'So tell me, Mrs Kulkarni. Would you trade that for a rounding error?'

Meera opened her mouth. The electricity bill was still folded flat against her ribs, and none of the four answers on it fitted the question.

Farhan spoke before she did.

'Madam is right.' He had taken one step in from the door, no further, as if the carpet had a line on it. 'With respect, ma'am. I am not saying the Gaikwad matter is nothing. I asked for the copies. I have them in my locker. But my mother had two meals a day in Govandi if my father had work that week, and one if he didn't. Now she has three and she complains about the dal.' He tried a smile and it did not hold. 'The numbers are clean where it counts. Rice. Water. Roofs. You are looking for ghosts in a queue while two lakh forty thousand people eat dinner.'

He had clearly been holding this in for some time. It came out in one breath, in the order he must have arranged it.

Meera turned round in her chair to look at him properly. He was very tall in the doorway, and his beard had been trimmed that morning, and he was standing exactly the way she had stood in 1998 in front of a deputy commissioner who had just explained why a cooperative bank fraud was a matter for the cooperative.

'Dev Rao is not a ghost,' she said. 'He is in a drawer in the clinic basement with a fractured skull. I saw him on Tuesday. So did you. He fell eleven metres off a gantry he had no reason to be on, beside three lakh eighty thousand rupees he had no reason to have, and he had written down the date Sanjay Gaikwad went from four to seven.' She picked up the August photocopy and held it out to him. He did not take it. 'Those people ate dinner too. Gaikwad ate dinner until the third of September.'

'That is not the same thing.'

'No. One of them is a rounding error.'

Farhan's jaw moved. He looked past her at Kavita, the way a batsman looks at the umpire.

Kavita had not been listening to them, or she gave a good impression of it. She had pulled a tablet across the desk and was scrolling with one finger, the screen lighting her face from below. A drone went past outside the glass at eye level, low and slow, humming like a refrigerator in another room.

'Sub-Inspector,' she said, still scrolling. 'While you're here. The Rao file. The clinic report says fall, the gantry rail is loose on the north side, maintenance has confirmed it. If you could put it through as accidental by Monday, the inquiry closes and his sister can take him home to Hyderabad. She has been asking. It is unkind to make her wait.' She glanced up. 'You can attach the money as found property. It can go to the district treasury. Nobody here needs it.'

She said it the way people ask someone to pick up milk.

Farhan did not answer.

Meera watched him. He put his hands behind his back again, then brought them round to the front, then put one in his trouser pocket, where she knew he kept his notebook, a cheap spiral thing with a Mumbai Police crest that he had been writing in all week. He did not take it out. The air conditioning ticked. Somewhere along the corridor a lift arrived with two soft notes and nobody got out.

'Sub-Inspector?'

'The file is open, madam,' Farhan said.

'I know it's open. I'm asking you to close it.'

'The file is open,' he said again, more quietly, and looked at the floor between his shoes. 'There are some things I have to check.'

Kavita set the tablet down. For the first time since Meera had come into the room she looked at Farhan for more than a second, and her face did not change at all, which was worse than if it had.

'Of course,' she said. 'Check them.'

The clock on the wall behind her read 6.52. Farhan had moved back to the doorway without seeming to walk there, and he was no longer standing beside her desk, and he was not standing beside Meera's chair either. He was standing in the corridor's cold air, exactly halfway.

---

The zone police post was a single-storey block between Gate 2 and the bus turning circle, with a neem tree out front that someone watered from a jerrycan. At 9.10 the next morning Meera was kept waiting on a plastic chair in the corridor for twenty-five minutes, under a notice about lost Provision cards and a framed photograph of the chief minister cutting a ribbon in 2031. The ribbon had been green. She had not noticed that before.

At 9.35 a constable showed her into the briefing room. It had a whiteboard with last week's duty roster half rubbed off, eleven chairs in two rows and a ceiling fan that turned without moving the air. Inspector Bhosale sat at the front table with a single sheet of paper squared in front of him. Farhan stood by the window. He had his cap under his arm.

Bhosale was a heavy man near retirement who had spent the week finding reasons to be in Kharghar. He did not stand up.

'Mrs Kulkarni. Please.' He gestured at a chair. She stayed on her feet, so he read it to her where she stood. The consultancy arrangement of 13 February was terminated with immediate effect. Her temporary credentials were withdrawn. Any material she held relating to the Rao inquiry was to be returned to the post by 5 p.m. She was thanked for her assistance.

'Thanked,' Meera said.

'It is in the letter.'

'Who signed it?'

Bhosale turned the sheet round so she could see. There was a stamp, a signature that might have been anyone's, and under it the words Competent Authority.

'That is not a name.'

'It is the competent authority,' Bhosale said. 'The consultancy was granted under the consortium's administrative arrangements. It has been withdrawn under the same arrangements. The police side was never party to it. I only convey.'

'Somebody asked for it. Somebody wrote it. Somebody drove it here before nine thirty in the morning.' She looked at the date stamp. 18 FEB 2036. 08:47. 'Forty-seven minutes past eight. Fast work, for a rounding error.'

'I don't know what that means.'

'No.' She put both hands on the back of the chair in front of her. 'Is the Rao file closed?'

'The file is under review.'

'By whom?'

'By the appropriate officers.' He said it the way people say the weather is the weather. 'Mrs Kulkarni, you are retired. You are not on any roll. You were here as a courtesy, and the courtesy has ended. I am not saying this to be unkind.'

'Nobody is saying anything to be unkind,' Meera said. 'I have noticed that.'

Bhosale picked up his pen and put it down again. The fan went round. Outside, a delivery drone settled on the post's roof pad with a sound like a sack of rice being dropped from a short height, and the window glass shivered once.

Meera turned to Farhan.

He was looking at the roster on the whiteboard. 14/2 to 20/2, his own name in blue marker against three night shifts, the last letters smeared where a sleeve had dragged across them. He looked at it as if he had been asked to learn it by heart. His cap was still under his arm. He had shaved again, and there was a small nick under his left jaw with a fleck of tissue stuck to it.

'Sub-Inspector,' she said.

'Ma'am.'

That was all. He did not say the file was open. He did not say there were things he had to check. He moved the cap from one arm to the other and kept his eyes on the board, and she understood that he had been in this room before she arrived, possibly for some time, and that whatever he had said to Bhosale or Bhosale had said to him, it had been said without her.

Last night he had stood halfway. This morning he had picked a side of the door to stand on, and it was the inside.

She took the photocopies of Dev Rao's notebook out of her bag, forty-one sheets in a brown cardboard folder, and set them on the table beside Bhosale's letter. She kept her calculator. Nobody asked for it. Nobody in the building would have known what it was for.

'Five o'clock,' Bhosale said.

'You have them now,' Meera said, and went out past the neem tree to wait for the bus.

---

The 8.40 from Gate 2 was the last bus with seats and it had none. Meera got one anyway, because a boy in a Saraswati blazer stood up for her without looking up from his phone, and she was too tired to be insulted by it.

She had spent the afternoon in the lodge on the Panvel road settling a bill of ₹2,850 for six nights and arguing with the manager about a seventh she had not slept there. He had a printout. She had a calculator. They agreed on six. Then she had sat on the bed with her bag packed until it got dark, which had not been the plan, there being no plan.

The bus rattled. Every window frame had its own note, and the one beside her head buzzed against the rubber seal whenever the driver touched the brake. A man in the aisle held a pressure cooker box against his chest like a baby. Two women behind her were discussing a wedding in Uran and whether the caterer was human.

Let it go, she told herself. You are not on any roll.

She took out her phone. Rekha's screenshots were in a folder she had named GAIKWAD, fourteen of them, one for each night Sanjay had gone backwards. Below them was a second folder, forty-one photographs of the notebook pages, taken on the lodge bed under a sixty-watt bulb on her first night with the book. She had returned the paper. Nobody had asked about the phone.

The calculator sat in her lap. It was a Casio she had bought in 1998 for the departmental exam and it had outlived two husbands' worth of batteries, if she counted Sudhir as two, which on some days she did.

She began with the dates. Fourteen slips. On each of those dates Dev had pencilled entries, initials and paired numbers, and beside most of the pairs he had written a single lower-case letter. She had not paid the letters much attention before. On her second morning with consultant access she had seen the same letters in the Ledgerless menu, a column of fourteen allocation categories from a for apparel down to w for water fittings, and had thought only that Dev was tidy.

She went through the photographs one at a time, enlarging each with two fingers, and entered what she found. Twenty-three entries on Rekha's fourteen dates. She counted them twice. Then she counted the letters.

h, eleven times. Human Care.

s, five. Saraswati.

c, four. Coastal block.

k, three. Kilowatts.

She added them on the Casio because she did not trust herself at that hour. Twenty-three. Nothing for apparel. Nothing for food, furniture, footwear, utensils, transport passes, water fittings. Nothing in the ten categories where the machines made enough for everyone and nobody needed to wait.

Under one per cent, Kavita had said. Statistical noise. Noise went everywhere. Noise did not know the difference between a pressure cooker and a cardiologist.

The bus lurched over the Kalamboli speed breaker and the man with the pressure cooker apologised to nobody. Meera kept her thumb on the keys. Four categories out of fourteen. If the jumps were random, the chance of any one landing in those four was four in fourteen. The chance of all twenty-three doing it was that, multiplied by itself twenty-three times. She keyed it in slowly, pressing equals after each step and saying the count under her breath, and one of the women behind her stopped talking about the caterer to listen.

The display filled and shrank. 3.065 –13.

Three in ten trillion, near enough. Less likely than winning the old state lottery every week for a year. She had sent men to Arthur Road on worse arithmetic.

Outside, the bus came round the long curve where the road ran beside the zone fence, and the farms stood up one after another in the dark, Tower 4, Tower 7, Tower 9, glowing pink from the ground to the roof, fourteen storeys of light that nobody paid for. She could see the gantry on Tower 9 from here, a dark line across the glass eleven metres up.

She did not clear the screen. She turned the calculator face down on her knee so the number would keep, and held it there all the way to Vashi.