the queue number

At the clinic there is a machine that gives you a number. You take one, you sit, you wait for it to be called. That is the whole system. It is fair, and it works, and I decided to improve it.

It was a busy morning, the waiting room full, everybody sitting on the hard chairs with their little paper numbers, watching the red number on the wall click up, one at a time, slow as a tree growing. I took a number from the machine. Forty-one. Then I sat down and looked around the room, and I saw that the fair system was also a bit stupid. I had a low number and I was not in any hurry. I was only there for a small thing. And all around me were people who really needed to be seen soon, sitting on high numbers, while a girl with nothing much wrong with her sat on a good low one and did nothing with it.

So I started a swap desk.

The idea was simple, and I thought it was the best idea I had ever had. People trade numbers. If you are not in a hurry and you have a low number, you give it to somebody who is in a hurry and stuck with a high one. Everybody ends up better off. Nobody loses. I set up at the side of the room, on an empty chair, and I began arranging trades, matching the low numbers to the people who needed them most. A little market of pure fairness. I was extremely pleased with myself, the way you are pleased right before a thing goes wrong.

Aiman was there, because Aiman is wherever a market starts, the way a cat is wherever a fish is being cleaned. The instant he saw the swap desk he tried to take a commission on every trade.

"A small handling fee," said Aiman. "For the use of the desk. For the service."

"The desk is free," I said. "Fairness is free. You cannot charge people to be fair to each other."

He sat back down looking the way you look when somebody takes away money you were sure was already yours.

Kavi helped, which is to say Kavi made it louder. Kavi only knows loud, and he appointed himself the announcer of the swap desk. Every time a trade went through, he called it across the whole waiting room like an auctioneer.

"NUMBER TWELVE TO THE AUNTY WITH THE COUGH," shouted Kavi. "NUMBER NINE TO THE UNCLE WITH THE BAD KNEE."

Soon the whole room had stopped watching the red number on the wall and started watching my desk, leaning in, following the trades like a game.

Divya kept the records, because Divya is my best friend and she is the only reason any plan of mine ever half works. She sat with her exercise book and wrote down the true order, who really held which number now, after each trade, because I had stopped being able to keep it in my own head somewhere around the fourth swap.

Mak had brought me for the small thing, and she sat two rows back with her own number, watching me take over the whole waiting room and use up everybody's morning, and she did the eyebrow. The one that says you have not even started yet and it is already going wrong.

And the whole thing, the desk, the market, the announcer, all of it, was really for one person.

There was an old uncle sitting two seats down. Pak Hamid. Thin, neat, very old, with a walking stick held upright between his knees. He had a high number, and he had been there a long time already, longer than me. And I had got it firmly into my head that he should not have to wait. That an old man should not have to sit on a hard plastic chair all morning. That the kind thing, the obvious kind thing, the thing any decent person would do, was to get him moved to the front. So most of my trading was secretly aimed at him. I kept trying to route the lowest numbers his way. I kept offering him my own forty-one, my good early number, pressing it on him.

And he kept saying no. Cheerfully.

"I am in no hurry," said Pak Hamid. "At my age, a morning on a chair, watching the world go by, is not a wasted morning. I will go when my number is called, and not one moment before. Would you like a sweet?"

He had sweets in his shirt pocket. He gave me one. He gave Kavi one to make him quieter, which did not work, but it was a kind thought.

"My son is over in Singapore," he said, to nobody in particular, watching the door. "What is my hurry."

Then the whole thing fell apart, the way my best ideas always do, just when I thought it was going perfectly.

Because I had traded so many numbers, in so many directions, with Kavi announcing each one and the whole room calling out swaps of their own, that nobody knew whose turn it was anymore. The nurse came out to call the next number. The next number had been traded three times. The person now holding it had given it to somebody who had got tired and gone home. The whole running order was a knot.

The nurse stood there with her list, looking at a room full of people holding numbers that no longer meant what they said. It was my fault, all of it. My clever fair desk had taken a simple fair queue and tied it into a knot. Two rows back, Mak did the other eyebrow.

So I fixed it. In front of everyone.

"Number twelve started with the aunty in green," read Divya, from her exercise book. "Number nine started with the uncle by the door."

I went round the whole room and undid every single clever trade, handing each number back to whoever had held it at the very start. I untied the knot I had tied with my own hands, while the nurse waited and the whole room watched the great fairness desk take fairness carefully to pieces. I had been clever with the queue, and now nobody knew whose turn it was.

And while I was on my knees untangling it, the door opened, and a young mother came in, late, with a baby. A real baby, a properly unwell one, hot and fretting and crying the cry that means it. She pulled a number from the machine right at the very back. A high one. The worst one in the room.

And Pak Hamid, who had refused my good low number all morning, who would not be moved to the front for anything I offered him, got up. Slowly, with his stick, one hand on the chair. He walked across the room to that young mother and he gave her his number. His place. The place he had been so patiently holding all morning. He pressed it into her hand, smiling, like it was the easiest and most ordinary thing in the world. Then he went and sat back down at the very back, to wait the whole thing out all over again.

I had spent the whole morning trying to move him to the front. He had just moved himself to the back, in about ten seconds, with no desk and no announcer and no exercise book at all.

I packed up the desk. I gave everyone back their own number, my forty-one included, and I sat down and waited my turn like everybody else, the queue plain and fair and trusted again now that I had stopped improving it.

Pak Hamid was right at the back now, where he had put himself, in no more hurry than before. He caught my eye. He took out another sweet, and unwrapped it, and held one out to me, the whole way across the row.