Fingers in symphony

A short novella- Part 2 of 5

She was relieved to find her reports were normal, otherwise a corrective course would have followed.

Exiting the welfare department, she found herself wondering about the shopping unit, closed and guarded from the likes of her, entry only by documentation and a full body scan, the luxuries she once found commonplace were now beyond her reach.

Her unit was divided into four categories. The main admin bloc with all its governance and welfare departments, the commerce bloc for all shopping requirements, the financial bloc and the residential bloc. The residential bloc was further divided into family units and women like her.

The family units comprised of all the powerful and influential families that survived the war but didn’t have a lot of wealth anymore. For their contribution to the current gov’s NWO, they got to keep their families and remaining wealth together. They were going to be the face of the future leaders- their children received elite education and training- the future ruling class. They were heavily segregated and protected from the other units, specifically from hers. She didn’t find it strange, as before the war, there wasn’t much mixing between the rich and the poor either- but what irked her the most, was that they didn’t get food pills, they got proper food. She had heard from others- from the women in her compound, murmuring over the booming tone of the caretakers.

Every day she dreamt of food- from the morning tea her mom would lovingly make for the two of them as the rest of the family stirred in bed, the smell of her ma’s kitchen, the force feeding. Her father’s insistence on finishing her food before leaving for office. It felt like visions from a past life- separated by multiple other insignificant lives. A pull so strong, the visions were rooted deep.

The evening prayer bell startled her back to the present. She joined the winding line to the prayer hall – a mandatory step before the lights went out. Life was coded in these housing/supervision quarters- you were being trained for one and only one purpose- your ability to birth and then nurse.

“Ae ladki, dhyan kaha hai tera, mandir wali line mein lag”, the shrill voice of the boarding matron jostled her back from one of her favorite memories.

Her eyes found the girl the matron was shouting at stumbling into the winding line of the mandatory evening prayer sabha.

Because there wasn’t much to do during evenings, the hostel occupants were made to do mandatory prayers and sewa of the elderly who shared the same compound.

Nethra went through the process without much thought or deliberation usually, but now she had an agenda and her steps found a new spring.

After the evening ablutions, when the pills were administered and the women formed a line for the meditation room, she tiptoed out along with two others.

The warden had left for a convention and the superiors were too high on food pills to care.