Episode 14: Rubber Slippers

Bahadurgarh, Haryana · 2026

The word landed and the room kept going. The fan wobbled. The clerk turned his newspaper. Nobody else heard it.

Gopina’s hands went still in her lap.

Khushi looked at her. Waited. Didn’t fill the silence, didn’t look away.

“You’re —”

“Komila Modi’s daughter. Yes.”

“And you’re here. In this line.”

“We still have to stand in the same line as everyone. My mother makes sure of that, actually.”

She said it the way you talk about a household rule you grew up with. Not humble, not proud. A fact, like the power cuts or the factory whistle. It was just how things worked in that house.

Gopina looked at the rubber slippers. The plain kurta. No car outside with a driver. No phone call to skip the queue. She was sitting in a plastic chair with one short leg, waiting for a shuttered window, same as anyone.

“The family-welfare form,” Gopina said, because she didn’t know what else to say. “You could just — someone at the factory could send it directly.”

“They could. But the stamp has to come from the district office, and the district office won’t stamp it if we skip the line. Rules are rules. Even for us.” She paused. “Especially for us, actually. People are watching.”

Behind them, the shutter on Window 2 rattled and began to rise. One-thirty. The clerk at Window 2 was a different man — younger, slower — and he had his own newspaper cone of peanuts. He didn’t look up either.

“You first,” Khushi said. “You’ve been here longer.”

The form was wrong.

Not the information. The form itself. Gopina had filled out a Wage Correction Request, which was for a living employee. For a deceased worker, she needed a Posthumous Employment Verification, which was a different form, available only at Window 3.

Window 3 was closed.

“When does Window 3 open?”

“Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

Today was Wednesday.

Gopina stood at the counter for a long moment. The clerk waited. He had had this conversation before and he would have it again.

She took her wrong form back and walked to the chairs.

Khushi was still there. Her own form was also wrong — wrong version, as she had predicted — but she had gotten the new blank from the clerk and was filling it out on her knee, using the folder as a desk.

“Wrong form?” she said without looking up.

“Wrong form. I need a Posthumous Employment Verification.”

Khushi’s pen stopped.

“The person whose record is missing,” she said. “He died?”

“At the factory. Two weeks ago. His mother can’t get anyone to confirm he was ever there.”

Khushi put the pen down on her knee. She looked at Gopina for a second longer than the conversation had called for so far.

“I know someone at the plant office,” she said. “Administrative side, not the floor. If there’s an employment record for a deceased worker, the factory’s own HR file would have the same information the district keeps. It might be faster to ask them to just look.”

“You don’t have to —”

“I’m not promising anything. I’ll ask. Someone will look, or they won’t. But it’s a place to start that isn’t Window 3 on a Thursday.”

She said it the way you’d offer to check if a shop was open on the way home. Small. Practical. A thing that cost her nothing, from someone who happened to be near the right door.

“That would help,” Gopina said. “Thank you.”

“Write down the name. The worker’s name, and whatever you have.”

Gopina turned the wrong form over and wrote on the back: Deepak. Son of Bimla. Loading — Unit 3, Line B. The date he started. The date he died.

Khushi took the paper and folded it into her folder alongside her own wrong form. She stood up, tucked the folder under her arm.

“Come back on Thursday anyway,” she said. “For Window 3. Always good to have a backup.”

She smiled. Gopina smiled back. Small and quick. Gone before she noticed it was there.

“Good luck with the family-welfare form,” Gopina said.

“Fourth time should do it. I’m getting good at signatures.”

She walked out. Rubber slippers on the tile, the thin folder, the braid swinging once as she turned the corner. Gone.

The two o’clock whistle blew as Gopina stepped outside. The lights in the labour office flickered and died behind her. Power cut, right on time. Someone inside groaned. The fan stopped its wobble.

The man with the photocopied forms was still by the door, working the afternoon queue. He held a blank out toward Gopina. She shook her head and kept walking.

She went home the long way. Not the straight road through the market, past the shared tap and Bimla’s lane. The other way, along the canal path where the factory compound wall ran for half a kilometer, where the shade was better and the road was empty in the afternoon heat.

She had nothing to show for the day. Wrong window. Wrong form. Wrong queue. Come back Thursday. But her steps were quicker than they had been that morning, and she carried her bag a little lower on her shoulder.

A Modi. In rubber slippers. Filling out a form on her knee.

She walked the rest of the way without hurrying. The whistle would tell her when she was late.

At home the power was still out. Sushma was on the porch with the newspaper spread open as a fan, working it back and forth with the focus of a woman keeping herself alive through sheer effort.

“Where have you been all day?”

“The labour office.”

“The labour office. The whole lane saw you leave at nine-thirty and come back at — what time is it — past two. People are going to think we have a court case. Do you know what that does to a girl’s prospects?”

“It’s a labour office, mami. Not a court.”

“Same building. Same chairs. Same reputation.”

Gopina filled a glass from the kitchen tap and drank it standing. Through the window she could see the lane. Three houses down, Bimla’s door was shut. The plastic folder would be somewhere inside, the laminated card with Deepak’s photograph still pressed between the covers.

Gopina set the glass down.

Tomorrow was Thursday.