Chapter 10: The Corruption

The first time Mishti saw a death she couldn't prevent was in Lormi.

Not through the antenna. Not through the map. Through: the phone. Her father called at 3 AM on a March night — the hour when phone calls are never good, the hour that carries the specific dread of a ringing that means someone is hurt or dead or dying, the hour when the body answers the phone before the mind has decided whether it wants to know.

"Mishti. Ganesh Bhaiya is dead."

The words: arrived. The way all impossible words arrive — whole, complete, refusing to be misheard or reinterpreted or softened. Ganesh Bhaiya. Dead. The man who had given her jaggery at four. The man whose chai stall backed onto the mahua tree. The man who had watched her climb the sal tree every morning with the concern of a village uncle.

"How?"

"They found him at the stall. 2 AM. The stall was — burned. Someone set fire to it. He was inside."

"Who?"

Her father's silence: long. The silence of a man who knows the answer and cannot say it on a phone because phones in Chhattisgarh are not secure, because the people who set fires to chai stalls also have access to phone records, because the forest that Dhanraj Lal had patrolled for thirty years was not just trees and langurs and sambar deer. It was: land. And land in central India was: money. And money attracted: the kind of people who burned chai stalls with old men inside them.

"Come home," Dhanraj said. "When you can."

*

Mishti went to Mihir. In the courtyard. 4 AM. The peepal tree in darkness — the tree that trembled day and night, that never slept, that seemed, in the pre-dawn dark, to be: listening.

"I need to go home."

"I know. Audrey will drive you to the station. The Rajdhani leaves at 6."

"You know? How—"

"Kaveri smelled it. Two hours ago. She woke me. We tried to reach your father — the phone lines to Lormi were: down. Cut. Deliberately."

"Someone cut the phone lines before burning the stall."

"Yes."

"This wasn't random."

"No. This was: targeted. Ganesh Bhaiya's stall sat on land that the Lormi tehsildar has been trying to acquire for three years. The tehsildar — Suresh Pandey — works with a mining company. Bauxite. The Achanakmar buffer zone has: deposits. The forest department has blocked the mining licence. Your father has blocked the mining licence. And Ganesh Bhaiya's stall — the stall, the land it sits on, the access road that runs behind it — is the proposed entry point for the mining operation."

Mishti sat in the courtyard. The pre-dawn cold — Delhi's March cold, which is not the January fog-cold but the clear, sharp cold of a city waking up, the cold that carries the smell of bread from the early bakeries and the sound of the first Metro rumblings from underground. She sat and understood: Ganesh Bhaiya had not died because of a fire. He had died because of bauxite. Because of a mining company. Because of a tehsildar. Because of the specific Indian machinery of corruption that grinds through villages the way mining equipment grinds through forests — without regard for what lives there.

"Can I see it?" she asked. "Can I — use the antenna? Go back?"

"The death has already occurred. Your antenna is: prospective. Forward-looking. You can't see the past."

"Then why couldn't I see this one coming? I'm from Lormi. The stall is — was — the place I drink chai every morning when I'm home. Why didn't I see Ganesh Bhaiya's death?"

Mihir sat beside her. The first time he'd sat this close. The proximity: deliberate. The gesture of a man who was about to say something difficult and wanted to be: near.

"There are deaths we cannot see. Deaths that are: shielded. The Counter doesn't just balance our interventions — it also protects certain deaths from being prevented. Deaths that serve the Counter's interests. Deaths that maintain: the balance. Ganesh Bhaiya's death was — and I'm sorry for this, Mishti — it was a scheduled death. Not a wrong one, in the Counter's calculation. The Counter decided that Ganesh Bhaiya's departure was: necessary. For reasons we cannot see and wouldn't accept if we could."

"That's — that's monstrous."

"Yes. It is. The Counter is not: moral. It is: mathematical. It calculates balance, not justice. And sometimes the calculation produces: monstrous results."

"Then the Counter is the enemy."

"The Counter is the system. You can't fight the system. You can only work within it. Save the ones you can. Honour the ones you can't."

"The red section."

"The red section. Ganesh Bhaiya goes in the red section. Not because he was an adjustment — because he was: uncatchable. A death we couldn't prevent. The hardest category."

*

Mishti took the Rajdhani home. The train: delayed, again, because Indian Railways. She sat in the berth with the curtain drawn and the Classmate notebook open to the red section and wrote:

Ganesh Bhaiya. Lormi. March. Chai stall. Fire. Bauxite. Tehsildar Suresh Pandey. The Counter shielded this death. I was not able to see it. I was not able to prevent it. He gave me jaggery when I was four. His chai tasted like iron and home. He is gone.

The entry was: the longest in the notebook. Longer than any death vision. Longer than any save report. Because this death was: personal. The first personal death in the catalogue. The death that taught Mishti that the gift was not a shield for the people she loved. That the antenna pointed outward — at strangers, at cities, at maps — but was: blind. Blind to the deaths that happened in the place she came from. Blind to the deaths of people who mattered to her. The gift was: generous with strangers and cruel with: family.

In Lormi, the chai stall was: ash. The mahua tree behind it — scorched on one side, the bark blackened, the leaves on the lowest branches: curled and dead. But the tree was alive. The mahua, like all forest trees, was: resilient. Fire was not new to it. The forest burned every summer — controlled burns, set by the forest department to clear undergrowth, the fire that feeds the forest by destroying what suffocates it. The mahua had survived those fires. It would survive: this one.

Mishti stood at the ash. The smell: acrid. The smell of burned wood and burned thatch and burned cooking oil and, beneath all of it, a smell she refused to identify because identifying it meant acknowledging that the man who had served her chai for twenty-two years had been: in the fire when it burned.

Her father was at the police station. Filing a report. The report that would go to the tehsildar's office. The tehsildar's office would review it. The tehsildar — the man who had ordered the fire — would review the report about the fire he had ordered. The circle: complete. The system: functioning as designed.

"I'm going to do something about this," Mishti said. To the ash. To the mahua tree. To the village that had gathered at the stall's remains and was standing in the specific Indian silence of a community that knows who did it and knows that knowing: changes nothing. Because the tehsildar has power. And the mining company has money. And the chai stall owner had: neither.

She called Mihir from the village's single PCO booth — the STD/ISD booth that still existed because Lormi's mobile coverage was: theoretical.

"I want to use the antenna on Suresh Pandey," she said.

"You want to see his death?"

"I want to see if he has one coming."

"Mishti. That's not how we work. We prevent deaths. We don't: wish for them."

"I'm not wishing. I'm asking."

"The answer is the same. The antenna is for saving. Not for: revenge. The moment you point the antenna with anger, it stops working. The gift requires: compassion. Even for the people who burn chai stalls with old men inside them."

"I don't have compassion for Suresh Pandey."

"I know. That's why you need to come back to Delhi. Grieve here. Train here. Let Lormi handle its own justice."

"Lormi can't handle its own justice. The system is—"

"The system is: corrupt. Yes. And the corruption is: not our department. We save lives. We don't fix systems. If we tried to fix every corrupt system that produces wrong deaths, we would need an army, not a division of twelve."

Mishti stood in the PCO booth. The smell of phenyl floor cleaner and old plastic. The receiver: heavy in her hand. The specific weight of a phone that still connected through copper wire, like the Division's rotary phones, like the infrastructure of a country that was simultaneously: ancient and modern, digital and analogue, corrupt and beautiful.

"I'll come back," she said. "But I'm adding Suresh Pandey to the notebook."

"Which section?"

"A new one. Section four. Blue ink. For: the ones who cause the deaths. The ones the system protects. The ones whose names I will: remember."