The Work
Nine situations, and what is done about each.
It was going to be March, then the new plant, then the audit. Nobody argued either time, and nobody in that house has ever said no to it. Shares move in a fortnight. What takes months are the questions underneath. Who runs what. What a share is worth inside the family. What he is called afterwards.
He said yes to one boy in the family in March. To another in November he said three years outside first. He meant both. Neither is written anywhere, and the two mothers have spoken since. A charter binds nobody in India. What binds is the clause lifted out of it, into the Articles or an agreement or a will.
The elder brother asks after the younger one's blood pressure through the auditor. The affection has not gone anywhere. There is no room to put it in. Months alone with each of them. Then one meeting, with who sits where and who speaks first settled before anybody sits down.
The boy was on a call, hand up, one minute. He waited in the doorway. When the call ended, he asked about the audit, and got the whole of it in ninety seconds. A written role. A basis for what he is paid. Terms on which he could go. Worked out with him, not about him.
He asks whether his mother has eaten. She asks whether he has. By half past, both of them have found something else to do, and neither could say when that started. Both of them in the room, and no side taken. What the money was for, put to two people who have never put it to each other.
He sold in July, and drove past in January on the way to the dentist. The man on the gate put a hand up. He has been on it since 2004. What the proceeds actually changed. And which people in that family were never asked before they arrived.
He telephoned her at nine from a hotel and said he had eaten. He was found at seven the next morning. She was five hundred kilometres away and asleep for seven hours of it. The papers she has to sign, read to her first, by somebody who is also there for the rest.
The auditors added it up for the first time, across the company, the family and six sets of personal accounts. It was not about four. Asked to name one person whose life was different, he could not. One place for every request to arrive. A yardstick. An answer inside a fixed number of days, refusals included.
For two years a man of sixty-two has been waking at four and going down to sit in the dark. Not one person in that house has ever done him a wrong, which is why there is nothing he can say inside it. One person, over months. Nothing structural, and nothing said reported to anybody.
Set out by who is holding them rather than by what has happened, at The People.