Cover

INKED

DOMECHILD

Shiv Ramdas is a former radio host and media non-personality who retired to play with words. Instead he ended up in Gurgaon.

Dedication

To Anish Chandy: a man with broad shoulders.

We have not made the Revolution, the Revolution has made us.

—Georg Buchner

1

It all began on the day the lawbots came for Tweedledum and dragged him away, screaming.

Everyone saw them take him, but nobody asked why, in case someone actually knew something. All Albert ever knew about him was that he liked to whistle and to wear tweed coats, even in summer. And that his name, in all probability, wasn’t actually Tweedledum.

The morning had begun in the usual fashion, with the sun rising, as suns tend to. Two hours later, Albert was already standing in line outside the Department, waiting for the first buzzer. When it came, he took a deep breath, holding it for a moment before exhaling heavily. Another day.

Then, along with everyone else, he stepped through the archway and the massive white doors and on to the conveyor belt that would carry him to his cubicle. His eyes were downcast and still they flickered, from left to right, over people’s shoes, skirts, the tails of their coats, anything but what surrounded them—there was no need to look at that, anyway. Everything was exactly the same as what preceded it. At the Employment Department, déjà vu was not a feeling; it was a constant state of being.

From the inside, the Department was nothing to write home about, and it wasn’t just because everyone in the City was here right now and there was no one at home to write to in the first place. Down the centre and all the way to the end of the room where it sloped upwards ran the conveyor belt, a thin black strip flanked on either side by an ocean of white cubicles that stretched as far as the eye could see, nestled back to back like featureless tiles in some gigantic game of dominoes. The next floor was the same. And the next, and the one above that, and so on—level upon level of stark, unrelenting sameness, a monument of monotony reaching up into the sky.