Episode 30: The Plastic Chair

Bahadurgarh, Haryana · 2026

The green door was open.

Sonu was on a plastic chair outside, his back to the wall. Thinner than she had imagined. Not young, not old. A man who looked like he had not slept well for a while and had stopped noticing. His hands were on his knees, fingers spread, the way you sit when you have decided to do something and are waiting for it to start.

He looked up when Gopina reached the door. Looked past her, once, down the lane toward the shared tap. Not fear. The leftover shape of it, the habit of checking.

“You’re Bimla’s girl,” he said.

“I’m Gopina. From the other end of the lane.”

“I know who you are.” He looked down the lane again. “Sit. Not inside. Here is fine.”

She sat on the step. He stayed in the chair. Between them, the width of a doorway.

“Bimla said you were ready.”

“Ready.” He said the word like he was tasting it. “I don’t know about ready. I told her I would tell you what happened. That’s different.”

He rubbed his face with both hands. When he brought them down his eyes were red but dry.

“That week they had a big order. Government. Tiles for some building in Rohtak. The floor was short, two men had gone home for a wedding. Prakash said we could clear it if we ran past the shift.”

“Past ten.”

“Past ten. Eleven, twelve. Two nights we ran until one in the morning. Nobody logged it. Prakash couldn’t log it because the overtime wasn’t approved. If the company found out he was running the floor past ten with no sign-off, that was his job gone.”

“So it wasn’t in the record.”

“Nothing after ten was in the record. We weren’t there, on paper. None of us were.”

He stopped. A child’s voice from inside the house, asking for something. He turned his head. “Not now,” he said. The voice went quiet.

“The pallet,” Gopina said.

“The pallet.” He looked at the wall across the lane. “Third night. One in the morning, maybe later. We were tired. Everyone was tired. The stacking was wrong. You stack them a certain way, you know, the heavy ones at the bottom, you brace the sides. But we were rushing it. Deepak was pulling crates off the belt and I was loading the dolly and the whole thing was wrong from the start. You could see it leaning.”

“Did anyone say anything?”

“I said something. I told Prakash the stack was off. He looked at it and said finish the order, we’ll fix it on the morning shift.” Sonu’s hands went flat on his knees again. “Twenty minutes later it came down. Three pallets. The top one caught Deepak across the back. He went down and the second one came on top of him.”

He said it the way you say the route to the bus stand. Flat. Rehearsed by repetition.

“And Prakash.”

Sonu almost smiled. Not at anything funny.

“Prakash was more scared than any of us. He shouldn’t have run the shift. He shouldn’t have had us there. If the company looked into it, the whole week of unlogged overtime comes out, the unsigned shifts, all of it. His name on every one of those nights.”

“So he took Deepak off the register.”

“He didn’t do it in front of us. I don’t know exactly when. But two days later Bimla went to the office and they told her Deepak had never worked there. The shift wasn’t logged, so Deepak wasn’t on it, so Deepak was never there.” He rubbed his face again. “Mr. Prakash is not a bad man. He’s a small man in a bad spot. He panicked. That’s the whole thing.”

“That’s the whole thing.”

“Nobody told him to do it. No one from the office came down and said erase the boy. He did it himself because he thought he would lose everything.”

A motorbike passed the end of the lane. Sonu watched it until it was gone.

“He still works there?” Gopina asked.

“Same floor. Same shift.” He looked at his hands. “He doesn’t look at me. I don’t look at him. We load the belt and we go home.”

Gopina opened her mouth to ask something else. She stopped. There was nothing else to ask. The picture was done. An accident, a frightened man, a name erased from a register by someone who was trying to save himself from a reprimand. No order from above. No conspiracy. No boardroom. A boy who died because a stack was wrong at one in the morning and everyone was too tired to fix it.

“Thank you,” she said.

Sonu stood up. The plastic chair scraped the concrete.

“Bimla’s boy was my friend,” he said. “He used to bring ice cream for the whole lane, did she tell you that?”

“She told me.”

“The wooden-spoon kind. The small cups.” He picked up the chair and turned toward the door. “Tell her I said that.”

He went inside. The green door closed.