The Label Sheet

Morning is colder than fog.

Priya wakes before the first alarm, as if her body has learned the shape of 10am–2pm and is trying to be helpful. The room is dim and clean-edged. No white curtain of mist today—just a sharp cold that sits on the floor and refuses to move.

At 7:30 the phone rings anyway. At 7:45 it rings again, dutiful, like a person who doesn’t trust you yet.

She swings her legs down and her feet find the chill. Thand chubhti hai (the cold bites), Sunita always says, and Priya understands it now as a real verb.

She washes her face at the hand pump. The water is so cold it makes her gasp once, not dramatically, just like a small machine turning on.

Inside, Sunita is already up, folding yesterday’s laundry with the patience of someone who has decided not to make a performance out of work.

“Saturday,” Sunita says, as if reminding the house what day it is will make it lighter.

Priya nods and pours herself chai. Ginger and heat. The kettle’s stubborn whistle sounds like a complaint, but it does its job.

Before she eats, she takes out the keyboard.

The OTG adapter clicks into the phone. Physical keyboard connected.

Timer.

Fifteen minutes.

She types a line of dates, slow and deliberate:

31/01/2026

The slashes are the tricky part. Her fingers always want to make them into something else.

Then numbers. Not random numbers—numbers with purpose. Pin code. Phone digits. The kinds of strings that can become an address, a file, a promise.

226301

When the timer ends, she stops.

Stopping on time still feels like leaving a half-washed plate in the sink. But she has learned that discipline is also a kind of cleanliness.

She eats quickly—two rotis, a smear of achar, and the last of yesterday’s sabzi—and then packs her bag.

Plastic folder, flat.

Water bottle.

Two pens.

The new passport photo strip, tucked between two sheets so the corners stay obedient.

Sunita watches the way Priya checks and re-checks.

“You will make a list of lists,” she says, not unkindly.

Priya smiles. “Better than forgetting.”

At the bus stand, the morning air smells of coal smoke and frying oil. The cold has made everyone a little quieter, like batteries at low charge.

Chai Uncle is already there, steam rising from his kettle, his stall lit by a single bulb that makes the sugar jar look holy.

He pours Priya a small cup without asking. The first sip warms her throat and also her courage.

A man at the next bench is arguing with his phone.

“Bandh ka message aaya hai (a strike message has come),” he says loudly, so everyone can be part of his worry.

Another man says, “Kal hai na? (It’s tomorrow, right?) Feb one.”

Priya’s ears catch on the date. Tomorrow. Sunday.

Chai Uncle tilts his phone toward her as if offering proof. Big English letters and a photo of a crowd.

“UGC… rules…” he reads slowly, the way he reads medicine names at the clinic counter sometimes, syllable by syllable.

“Bandh tomorrow maybe,” he adds, then shrugs like a person shrugging off the sky. “They say Hazratganj, Gandhi statue, all that. Big people fight about big paper.”

Priya swallows another sip of chai. She doesn’t know the details of UGC regulations. She only knows that her BA exists on portals and slips and one printed approval that sits in her plastic folder like a pressed flower.

If big people change big paper, the small paper trembles.

Sana had said, Sunday for your things. Sharma Ji had said the same. Priya had liked how simple it sounded.

Now Sunday has a question mark hanging over it.

The shared auto arrives with its usual impatience. Priya squeezes in, holding her bag tight on her lap. The road to the canal-side lane is familiar enough now that she can predict the potholes.

By the time she reaches the clinic, the sun has climbed, bright but not generous. The sunlight looks more confident than it actually is.

The shutter is up. A good sign.

Inside, the waiting room is already full. Month-end makes people behave as if illness also has deadlines.

The desk woman is in her chair, pen in hand, face set to its usual expression: brisk and not interested in excuses.

Priya stands beside the desk, folder held flat.

“Photo,” the desk woman says immediately, as if Priya’s bag has a transparent window.

Priya slides the photo strip out carefully. “Extra.”

The desk woman takes it, peels one face away, and staples it to Priya’s staff sheet without ceremony.

Staple.

Just like that, Priya’s face belongs to the file.

The desk woman shoves the sheet back into the cardboard cover and says, “We’ll keep it in the drawer now.”

Priya nods. A drawer sounds like belonging.

Then the desk woman pushes a small stack of sticker labels toward Priya.

“Month end,” she says. “We have to mark. Write clean. Don’t make spelling mistake.”

It is a small task. It is also a promotion, in the way tiny responsibilities are.

Priya takes one label and writes in her careful hand:

JAN 2026

The letters sit on the white sticker like they are trying to behave.

“Good,” the desk woman says, and Priya’s stomach lifts, a quiet balloon.

Work begins.

The register opens to a fresh page that still smells faintly of new paper.

Names.

Ages.

Villages.

And phone numbers that people throw at her like handfuls of rice.

A man with a cough speaks fast, as if speed will make him reach the doctor sooner.

“98765—”

Priya’s pen pauses.

“Number dheere boliye (please say the number slowly),” she says.

He looks annoyed, but he repeats.

Priya repeats the digits back, matching his impatience with her steadiness. She fills the boxes in the computer screen and hits Enter.

The printer spits out a slip.

The day continues in this rhythm: ask, repeat, confirm. The rule becomes muscle.

Around noon, there is a short lull. The compounder takes a phone call. The waiting room’s noise dips for a moment, like a bus engine idling.

The desk woman flips through the register and taps the margin.

“Tomorrow is new month,” she says, mostly to herself. “We will start Feb page. You will write heading. Date, day, all.”

Priya nods. She has already typed the date this morning like practice for a test.

The desk woman points at the label stack again. “Also, make one for drawer. Staff file drawer. You write.”

Priya hesitates. Writing on a label feels different from writing in a register. A label is not temporary. It sticks.

She chooses a blank sticker and, very slowly, writes:

STAFF FILES

Then, underneath, smaller:

OPERATOR / RECEPTION

She is not sure if she should write it like that. She has heard the compounder say “operator” and “reception” in the same sentence when he is annoyed. She has seen patients treat the desk as the border between pain and cure.

The desk woman takes the label, looks at it, and nods once.

“You have neat hand,” she says.

Priya feels the compliment settle somewhere behind her ribs, warm and private.

At 1:55 the desk woman closes the register with the familiar slap.

“Go,” she says.

₹300 lands in Priya’s palm.

Outside, the sun is mild enough to be surprising. The afternoon has that winter trick: it pretends it is friendly, then disappears early.

Instead of going straight home, Priya walks to the small stationery shop near the market lane.

Inside, a wall of notebooks stares at her—ruled, unruled, brown cover, glossy cover. A glass jar holds cheap pens like they are flowers.

Priya asks for a sheet of sticker labels and a black marker.

The shopkeeper slides them across the counter.

“School?” he asks.

“Office,” Priya says, and she hears herself say it without flinching.

The word tastes strange and good.

At Sharma Ji’s shop, the chair is occupied by a man arguing about photocopy rates. Sharma Ji’s face has its usual look of irritation that is also competence.

When he sees Priya, his eyebrows go up.

“You came early,” he says.

“Bandh talk,” Priya says. “Tomorrow.”

Sharma Ji snorts. “Bandh, bandh. Every month someone wants bandh. Some shop close, some open. Work is work.”

He leans closer. “But if you have BA work, do today little. Tomorrow maybe trouble.”

Priya hadn’t planned that. She had planned to protect Sunday like a small fence.

But a fence is only useful if you can build it.

She pulls out her BA confirmation slip from the folder. The printed page is slightly soft at the edges from being handled too carefully.

Sharma Ji glances at it, then at her.

“You want syllabus?” he asks.

Priya nods.

He clicks through the college portal with quick fingers, the way he always does, and prints two pages for her—course outline and a list of readings that look like a foreign city of names.

“See,” he says, tapping the paper. “You do Sunday reading. One hour. Not full day. Only one hour. Like your fifteen minutes.”

Priya holds the pages and feels a strange relief. The syllabus is not just a concept now. It is paper.

Paper can be filed.

On the way home, the sky is already beginning to fade, even though her watch says it is not late. A thin wind comes up from the open fields.

At home, Sunita is in the courtyard, sorting lentils again. The lentils make a soft sound like rain on steel.

Priya places the new sticker sheet, marker, and printed syllabus pages on the shelf, then lays her folder flat on top as if pressing them into the day.

Arjun appears immediately, like a boy summoned by the smell of new stationery.

“What is this?” he asks, grabbing for the labels.

“Don’t touch,” Priya says.

He touches anyway, but only one corner.

“Didi (big sister), you are now label queen,” he says, delighted.

Priya flicks her scarf at him. “Go study.”

He runs off, laughing.

In the evening, Rakesh wakes from his sleep with the slow heaviness of a man pulled out of deep water. He drinks chai and listens when Sunita mentions the bandh talk.

“Bandh is city problem,” he says. “Warehouse will call. If they call, we go. If road block, we wait.”

Priya watches his face as he says it, the quiet calculation behind the words.

Later, after dinner, she sets up her keyboard again.

Timer.

Fifteen minutes.

Tonight she does not type numbers. She types words.

She opens a note and writes:

31 Jan — staff photo stapled. Wrote labels. Bought label sheet + marker. Printed BA syllabus pages.

She pauses, then adds another line:

Sunday: one hour reading. If bandh, still one hour.

She reads it once.

The month is ending. Tomorrow will be February. Nothing dramatic will happen at midnight—no fireworks, no speeches. Just a new date on a form.

But today, in small ways, she has named her things.

A drawer.

A file.

A syllabus.

She places the label sheet carefully back on the shelf.

Upstairs, she puts two pens in her bag.

She sets the alarms.

7:30.

7:45.

And as she pulls the blanket up, she thinks that maybe this is what becoming “regular” means: not that life gets easier, but that you learn to stick your own name to it, neatly, so it can be found.