Schedule
Feroze stood on the Byculla market roof with the clipboard against his chest and counted pigeons. Twelve on the north parapet. Six on the water tank. Four on the feeder itself, two of them on the left pad, two on the right, all four looking at him like he was the intruder.
He was. That was the joke of his job.
The feeder was a municipal unit, dual-pad, model FH-7, serial number 0419-BYC. Two pressure sensors, one on each side. Both had to register a bird within three seconds of each other or the hopper stayed closed. The idea, when the program was designed, was that a single bird couldn’t trigger it. One bird on one pad meant nothing. You needed a pair. Pair bonding. Social feeding. The index loved social feeding.
The index loved a lot of things.
Feroze wrote the date and the count and the serial number on his audit sheet. He wrote “12:04, north parapet, roosting.” He wrote “12:07, water tank, drinking.” He wrote “12:09, feeder pads, paired landing, both sensors activated, dispense cycle triggered.” Then he underlined the last line, because that was the line that mattered.
His phone buzzed. His daughter’s school, asking about the term fee. Second reminder. He put the phone back in his pocket and kept writing.
The Municipal Humane-Pigeon Program ran on a coexistence index. The index was a single number, zero to one hundred, computed from three inputs: bird welfare score, conflict reduction score, and cull count, which had to be zero. Zero cull was the floor. You could not cull. You could not relocate without a nuisance-species filing. You could not do anything that moved the cull count above zero, because the moment it moved, the index collapsed and the holding department read the collapse and someone’s Friday report went red.
Feroze’s Friday report was due in three days.
The index’s components were weighted. Bird welfare was forty percent. Conflict reduction was forty percent. Cull count, inverted, was twenty percent. A program with zero cull, good welfare, and reduced conflict scored high. A program with zero cull, good welfare, and rising conflict scored medium, and medium was survivable, and survivable was what Feroze needed.
The Byculla market was not medium. The Byculla market was green and getting greener, and that was the problem.
The vendor was named Noor. She sold lentils and dried chilies from a stall under the market’s north awning, two meters from the roof edge, and she had been selling lentils and dried chilies there for eleven years. Her son’s name was Imran and he was nine and he came after school to help carry the sacks.
Feroze met her on his first audit. She was standing under the awning with a broom, sweeping droppings off the counter, and she looked at his clipboard and said, “You’re the pigeon man.”
“I’m the inspector,” Feroze said.
“Same thing,” she said. “You count them. You write it down. Then what.”
“Then I file it.”
“And then.”
“And then the department reads it.”
“Does the department come here.”
“No.”
“Then what.”
Feroze looked at the awning. The awning was white once. It was not white now. “I write what I see,” he said.
“Write that they shit on my lentils,” Noor said. “Write that I have to throw out a kilo a week. Write that my son won’t eat lunch here anymore because of the smell.”
Feroze wrote nothing. He wrote the date and the awning color and moved on, and he thought about that on the train home, and he thought about it again at dinner, and he thought about it at two in the morning when his daughter’s school fee reminder sat on his phone like a stone.
The first coexistence review was on a Tuesday. Feroze and the junior officer, a man named Ravi who was twenty-three and believed in the program the way a man believes in a religion he has just discovered, sat in the municipal office with the feeder logs printed on A4 paper and read them aloud.
Ravi went first. “Twelve oh four, north parapet, roosting. Twelve oh seven, water tank, drinking. Twelve oh nine, feeder pads, paired landing, both sensors activated, dispense cycle triggered.”
Feroze read his sheet. “Twelve oh four, north parapet, roosting. Twelve oh seven, water tank, drinking. Twelve oh nine, feeder pads, paired landing, both sensors activated, dispense cycle triggered.”
The room was empty except for them. The department head was in a meeting. The meeting was about the index.
“That’s it,” Ravi said.
“That’s it,” Feroze said.
Ravi filed the sheet in the green folder. The green folder was for compliant audits. The red folder was for non-compliant audits. The red folder was empty. Feroze had never seen it used.
The pigeons had learned. Feroze knew this by the second audit, when he found a pair on the pads at 11:47 and another pair at 11:52 and another at 12:01, each pair landing within three seconds of each other, each pair triggering a dispense cycle, each cycle dropping forty grams of grain onto the tray.
Forty grams per cycle. Five cycles in an hour. Two hundred grams of grain, free, delivered to a roof where the birds no longer needed to compete with humans for food.
The welfare score went up. The birds were eating. They were not fighting. They were not hungry. They were pairing on the sensors with the precision of a metronome, because the sensors rewarded precision, and pigeons were very good at precision when precision meant food.
The conflict reduction score went up. The birds were not on the market floor. They were on the roof. They were not stealing from stalls. They were eating grain from a municipal hopper. The vendors’ complaints, which were not part of the index, went nowhere.
Feroze stood on the roof and watched a pair land. Left pad, right pad, three seconds apart. The hopper clicked. Grain fell. The birds ate.
He wrote it down. He underlined it again.
Noor filed the petition on a Wednesday. It was three pages, handwritten, in Marathi, with photographs of the awning and the counter and the sacks of lentils she had thrown out. She listed the dates. She listed the quantities. She listed the names of four other vendors who would sign if asked.
Feroze took the petition to the office and gave it to the clerk, who stamped it and put it in a folder labeled “stakeholder feedback.” The clerk did not read it. The clerk had never read any stakeholder feedback. The folder went on a shelf behind the green folder and the red folder, and Feroze watched it go there and felt something in his chest that he could not file.
“Will someone read it,” he asked.
“The department head reviews all stakeholder feedback quarterly,” the clerk said.
“Quarterly.”
“Quarterly.”
Noor’s petition would be reviewed in three months. The market would be gone by then, or Noor would be gone, or both.
The second coexistence review was worse, because Ravi had learned the rhythm and started to enjoy it.
“Eleven forty-seven, feeder pads, paired landing, both sensors activated, dispense cycle triggered. Eleven fifty-two, feeder pads, paired landing, both sensors activated, dispense cycle triggered. Twelve oh one, feeder pads, paired landing, both sensors activated, dispense cycle triggered.”
Feroze read his sheet. The numbers matched. They always matched. That was the ritual. Two men, one room, one empty chair for the department head, and a recitation of timestamps that nobody else would ever hear.
“Three cycles in fourteen minutes,” Ravi said. “That’s up from last audit.”
“The welfare score will reflect it.”
“Good.”
“Ravi.”
“Yes.”
“The vendors are petitioning.”
Ravi looked at him. “Stakeholder feedback?”
“Filed.”
“Good. The index doesn’t penalize feedback. It penalizes conflict. As long as conflict stays down, we’re green.”
“The conflict is down because the birds stopped fighting the vendors. They don’t need to fight. They have the feeder.”
“That’s the program working.”
Feroze looked at the empty chair. The department head’s chair. He thought about the department head, who had designed the index, who believed in it, who had never stood on the Byculla roof.
“Yes,” Feroze said. “That’s the program working.”
The second audit was greener. The welfare score had gone from seventy-one to eighty-four. The conflict score had gone from sixty-two to seventy-nine. The cull count was zero. The index was eighty-one, up from seventy-three.
Feroze stood on the roof and the birds were everywhere. Twenty on the north parapet. Eight on the water tank. Six on the feeder, three pairs, rotating through the pads like a shift change. The tray was full of grain. The birds were fat. The awning below was white no longer, and the counter below was not white either, and Noor was not there today because it was Friday and she had gone home early with a headache, and her son Imran was there alone, sweeping, eleven years old and small for his age.
Feroze watched Imran sweep. He watched the boy’s face. He watched the boy look up at the roof and then look away.
He wrote the audit. He wrote “compliant.” He wrote the serial number.
That night his daughter asked him what he did at work. She was seven. Her name was Zara and she was in second standard and she wanted to be a doctor, which cost money, which was why the school fee mattered, which was why the Friday report mattered, which was why the index mattered.
“I count pigeons,” Feroze said.
“Why.”
“Because someone has to.”
“Do you like pigeons.”
“I like some pigeons.”
“Which ones.”
“The ones that don’t shit on lentils.”
Zara laughed. Feroze did not laugh. He sat at the kitchen table with the audit sheet and the feeder logs and the serial number, and he thought about Noor’s petition in the stakeholder feedback folder. Imran sweeping alone. The department head who had never stood on the roof.
He thought about what he was good at. He was good at reading feeder logs. He saw patterns. He had seen this pattern from the first audit, the paired landings, the precision, the schedule the birds controlled. He had seen it and he had written it down and he had underlined it, and underlining had not been enough.
He thought about what he was ashamed of. He had signed a bad audit once, three years ago, in another market, in another ward. A different vendor. A different problem. He had signed “compliant” because the index was green and the report was due and his daughter was in nursery school and the fees were due then too. The market had closed six months later. The vendor had moved to the suburbs. Feroze had not seen her again. He did not know her name anymore, and that was the shame, not the signing. The signing he could explain. The forgetting he could not.
He was not going to forget Noor.
The third coexistence review was on Thursday. Ravi read the logs. Feroze read the logs. The numbers matched. The room was empty.
“Fourteen cycles in two hours,” Ravi said. “New record.”
“The welfare score will be ninety-something.”
“Outstanding.”
“Ravi.”
“Yes.”
“The market is dying.”
Ravi paused. “The index doesn’t measure markets.”
“I know.”
“The index measures coexistence. The birds are coexisting. The vendors are coexisting. The conflict is down.”
“The vendors are leaving.”
“Some vendors. Relocation happens in markets. It’s not a pigeon problem.”
Feroze looked at the empty chair. “Who decides it’s not a pigeon problem.”
“The index decides. The index is green.”
“The index is green because the birds are winning.”
Ravi frowned. “The birds aren’t winning. The birds are being fed. That’s the program.”
Feroze did not argue. He had argued before, in other offices, about other indexes, and the argument had never changed the index. The index was the only number the holding department read. The holding department read the number and signed the report and the report went to the commissioner and the commissioner read the number and approved the budget and the budget funded the feeders and the feeders fed the birds and the birds paired on the sensors and the sensors dispensed and the dispense cycles went into the logs and the logs went into the review and the review went into the file and the file went into the shelf behind the green folder.
Feroze had read the file. He had read the whole file.
Friday. The report was due at five. Feroze sat at his desk with the audit sheet and the feeder logs and the index printout and the serial number, and he thought about the columns.
The audit form had six columns. Date. Location. Species count. Welfare observation. Conflict observation. Nuisance-species filing. The first five were for the index. The sixth was for service calls. A nuisance-species filing triggered a service call. A service call could mean removal, relocation, or cull, depending on the species and the location and the discretion of the service team. The sixth column was the only column with teeth. It was also the only column that could drop the index, because a nuisance filing, if it led to a cull, would move the cull count above zero.
Feroze had never used the sixth column. Nobody in his office had. The column was for rats and stray dogs and the occasional monkey. It was not for pigeons. Pigeons were the program. The program was the pigeons. You did not file a pigeon as a nuisance species when the program existed to prove pigeons were not a nuisance.
But the feeder was not a pigeon. The feeder was a machine. The feeder had a serial number. The feeder was on the roof of a market, and it was dispensing grain to birds that were driving a woman out of business, and it was doing so on a schedule the birds controlled, and the data showed improved welfare, which was true, because the birds no longer needed to fight humans for food.
Feroze picked up his pen. He wrote “compliant” in the status box. He signed the audit. He dated it. Then, on the last line, in the nuisance-species column, he wrote the serial number.
0419-BYC.
He did not write “pigeon.” He did not write “bird.” He wrote the serial number of the machine that was feeding them, because the machine was the nuisance, and the column did not ask for a species, it asked for a filing, and a filing was a filing.
He put the pen down. He picked up the audit sheet. He read it once more. Compliant. Signed. Serial number in the sixth column.
A pigeon landed on the clipboard. It was a gray pigeon, common, the kind you see everywhere in Mumbai, and it sat on the clipboard and looked at Feroze with the flat red eye of a bird that had never once doubted it was in charge.
Feroze did not move. The pigeon did not move. They looked at each other for a long time, and then the pigeon cooed once, a low sound, and Feroze signed the form again, over the pigeon’s foot, because the signature had to be on the line and the pigeon was on the line and there was no way around it.
The service call came on Monday. Feroze was on the roof when the van pulled up. Two men in municipal uniforms got out and looked at the feeder and looked at Feroze and looked at the clipboard.
“Nuisance species filing,” the first man said.
“Serial number 0419-BYC,” Feroze said.
“That’s a feeder.”
“Yes.”
“You filed a feeder.”
“I filed the nuisance.”
The man looked at his partner. His partner looked at the feeder. The feeder had three pigeons on it, two on the pads, one on the hopper, all of them waiting for the next pair to land.
“What do you want us to do,” the first man said.
“Remove it,” Feroze said. “The feeder. Not the birds. The birds can stay. The feeder goes.”
The man wrote something on his work order. “That’ll drop the welfare score.”
“I know.”
“The index will drop.”
“I know.”
“Your report.”
“My report is already filed. It’s compliant. The filing is a separate column.”
The man looked at him for a long time. Then he wrote “removal, feeder unit 0419-BYC, Byculla market roof” on the work order and tore it off and handed it to Feroze.
Feroze took it. He folded it once and put it in his pocket. He walked to the parapet and looked down at the market. Noor was at her stall. Imran was there, stacking sacks. The awning was still stained. The counter was still stained. But Noor was there, and she was selling lentils, and a customer was haggling, and the morning was ordinary, and that was enough.
The feeder came down at noon. The service team unbolted it and carried it to the van. The pigeons watched. They did not leave. They sat on the roof and the parapet and the water tank, and they looked at the empty space where the feeder had been, and they waited for grain that was not coming.
Feroze watched from the parapet. He did not write anything. There was nothing to write. The audit was filed. The report was submitted. The index would drop next quarter, and someone would ask about it, and Feroze would tell them what he had seen, and they would read the number and not the story, and that was the system, and the system was the system.
A pigeon landed on the parapet next to him. It was gray and common and it looked at him with the same flat red eye. It did not coo. It just sat there, on the stone, in the sun, waiting for something to happen.
Feroze put his hand on the clipboard and the pigeon’s foot was on the clipboard and they sat there together on the roof of the Byculla market, and below them Noor sold lentils to a woman who was not haggling anymore, and above them the sky was very blue and very empty.