The Night Shift

The building has no sign. Sarita has worked outside it for four years and can describe every inch of its grey skin, but she has never been told what it is called. The badge on her chest says the name of her agency, not the name of the company whose door she guards.

Inside, she has been told, are machines that hold other people's photographs, bank ledgers, hospital records, examination results. The cooling runs so hard that in December the air near the vents is warmer than her room in Khora.

Her shift is ten hours: eight at night to six in the morning, six nights a week. The work is almost entirely the absence of events. Nothing happens, and she is paid to be the reason nothing happens.

Between two and four the road outside belongs to three kinds of people: delivery riders finishing a shift, cab drivers sleeping in their seats with the door open for air, and men who have been drinking and want to know why a woman is standing alone at a gate. She has learned all three scripts.

Her daughter Priyanka is in Class 11 and has a physics teacher who says the future is in data. Priyanka repeats this at dinner as though it is news from a distant country. Sarita, who has spent four years standing beside the future, says nothing, and serves more rice.

In February the agency changed. The men in the building did not change, the machines did not change, the gate did not change. Only the name on her badge changed, and the salary date moved by nine days, and the four years she had worked became, on paper, zero years.

She asked the supervisor what happened to the four years. He said, not unkindly, that the four years were with the old agency and the old agency was no longer anybody's problem.

On the night of the results, Priyanka texted her at 1:12 a.m. — ninety-two in physics. Sarita read it standing under a sodium lamp with her back to a wall that holds a million strangers' memories, and she did not think about irony, because irony is a thing you have time for.

She thought instead about the fee for the entrance coaching, which is fifty-eight thousand, and about the twelve extra night shifts that number becomes when you convert it into her actual life.

At six she signed the register, handed over the torch and the register pen, and walked to the bus stop through air that was already the colour of tea. Behind her, the building hummed on, holding everything, remembering nothing.