By Danny K Rajee
(As told to no one in particular, from a cardboard box in the back room of the District Office)
I came into the world on a Tuesday. January, 2023. Nobody celebrated.
My mother was Form 14-B — Application for Widow’s Pension Benefit — cream-coloured, government-issue. My father, if you can call him that, was a ballpoint pen. The woman holding it was Kong SHE, who had taken two buses and walked twenty minutes through the cold to fill me in. She pressed hard. You could feel the intention in every stroke. She wanted someone to read me and actually understand.
She named me after her late husband’s service number. I didn’t know what to make of that, at the time. I was barely an hour old.
Inside me, when she handed me across the counter: one death certificate — original and photocopy both, because she’d learned to bring both — one marriage certificate, his service record (photocopy only, the original having gone missing somewhere in the department, which had caused her a whole separate morning of distress), two passport photographs, an income declaration, and an affidavit that cost her three hundred rupees and half a day at the notary’s.
The man at the counter did not look up. He put me in a tray. The tray had four other files in it, all of them older than me. May 2022, one of them. I didn’t ask what had happened to that one.
The first thing you learn, as a file in Meghalaya, is how to wait. Not the kind of waiting that feels like anticipation. The other kind. The kind where days pass and nothing changes and no one seems to notice or mind. I sat in that tray for eleven days. I counted the cups of tea the clerk drank. Forty-three. I had nothing else to do. The little officers called peons walked past me without curiosity, which I came to understand was simply how things were.
On the twelfth day, I was stamped. RECEIVED. I felt something — you could call it hope, though that’s probably too grand a word for a file. I was moved to a different desk, belonging to a man who also didn’t look up. His calendar was from 2021. There was a picture of a waterfall on it. I stared at that waterfall for three weeks.
By February I’d collected two more stamps and a sticky note — ‘see remarks pg 3′ — written in handwriting so small it looked like it had been done in a hurry, or maybe in the dark. This is the strange thing about being a file: you hold information you cannot yourself access. I knew something about myself that I couldn’t read.
March: I was carried to another office in a jute bag. This office had a window, actual sunlight coming through it, and I let myself think — this is the office where things happen. It wasn’t. It was the office where files are kept before being sent to the office where things happen. There’s a difference, apparently.
April: A man with reading glasses found me, flipped to page 7, frowned in the way people do when they’ve found a reason to stop, and wrote in red ink. A query. It said: Attested copy of deceased’s last pay slip required. Kong SHE’s husband had been dead for two years. His last pay slip was — where? She hadn’t known she needed it. Nobody had told her in January when she was filling me in, pressing hard.
I went to the holding shelf. It smelled of damp cardboard and something older. There were eleven of us there. We didn’t introduce ourselves.
Kong SHE came back in late April and asked about her file. She was told it was under process. This phrase, I’ve come to understand, is the office’s way of saying: we know where you are and we’re not ready to deal with you yet. She came back again. Same answer. She was told to try in two weeks. She did. Same answer.
By June I had been on that shelf for forty-one days. I thought about the buses she’d taken. The walk in the cold. The three hundred rupees for the affidavit. I thought about Mr. HE — Lower Division Clerk, thirty-one years — whose widow had not yet received a single rupee of what he’d spent a career earning.
I don’t usually feel things. I’m a file. But in June, sitting on that shelf, I felt something close to shame. Not for myself. For all of it. My forms were filled correctly. My attachments were in order. The claim was legitimate. And still here we were.
In July, a new officer was posted to the section. She wore her hair in a braid. She came in early, before the tea. First morning, she pulled every file off the holding shelf and sat down with us, one by one, the same way you’d sit down with something that deserved attention.
When she reached me, she read the red-ink query. She picked up the phone. Twenty minutes later she’d established that the pay office could issue a certified statement in lieu of the original pay slip — something explicitly allowed under a circular from 2021 that had apparently been sitting in the system the whole time, unread, or at least unapplied.
Twenty minutes. Forty-one days on a shelf. The solution had existed since January.
I was stamped, signed, forwarded, approved. The disbursement order came in August. Kong SHE got her first payment in September — eight and a half months after she’d walked through the cold and handed me to a man who didn’t look up.
I’m in a cardboard box now, in a back room. Archived. The box smells the same as the shelf did.
I’m telling you this not because my story is unusual. That’s the point, really. It isn’t. There are files on shelves right now that have been there longer than I was. They carry names. They carry dead men’s service records, widows’ patience, affidavits that cost someone a half-day and three hundred rupees. They’re waiting for someone to come in early, before the tea, and read them.
The woman who did that for me — I don’t know her name. I was a file. I was never told.
But I hope there are more like her.
I was File No. HE/31/LP/2023. I carried a widow’s claim. I am resolved now. Most of us are not.
