ANTYODAYA
Chapter 10

The Knock

Fatima Ansari was forty pages into Rukhsana Bano's tribunal file, at a little after one in the morning, when the knock came. She had spent her whole life among the machinery of the state, and she knew before she reached the door that it was not a neighbour — because neighbours knock with their knuckles, and the state knocks with the flat of the hand, three…