The Staff File

Wednesday arrives with fog that looks like it has been poured, not formed.

It sits low over the lane, softening the edges of everything—the hand pump, the neem tree, the bicycle leaning against the wall like a tired friend. Priya’s first alarm rings at 7:30 and she reaches for the phone without opening her eyes, because her hand has begun to trust the schedule more than her mind.

The second alarm is waiting like a backup singer.

She sits up and finds the sweater from the nail on the wall. The floor is cold in the way February likes: not dramatic, just persistent.

In the kitchen, Sunita is already moving. The pressure cooker hisses once, offended at being looked at.

“Today is that… cancer day,” Sunita says, not as an announcement, more like she is checking a box in her head. The TV has been murmuring since dawn, and sometimes a word floats into the house like a kite string.

“World Cancer Day,” Priya says, tasting the English properly. She feels a small satisfaction that she knows the full name. Yesterday, Chai Uncle made it sound like a cousin’s birthday.

Sunita nods. “Clinic people will put poster.” She tears a piece of roti and dips it in aloo sabzi. “You will be busy, na?”

“Maybe,” Priya says, and then corrects herself because the desk woman does not like maybes. “Haan (yes),” she adds.

She goes to her shelf and opens her plastic folder.

The e-PAN printout is inside, flat and clean, like it is trying to behave. Two photocopies sit behind it, slightly paler. The little slip with the ten characters is tucked deep, where her fingers can find it but eyes cannot.

She checks her non-negotiables the way she checks her own heartbeat now: two pens, date stamp? No, the stamp lives at the clinic. Water bottle. Biscuit packet. Phone.

When she closes the folder, the edges line up neatly.

She likes that sound—the soft thap of plastic meeting plastic—as if the day can be shut properly before it begins.

At the bus stand, fog makes everyone look like they are arriving from inside a cloud. The shared autos emerge slowly, headlights dull and patient.

Chai Uncle is wiping his counter with a cloth that has seen too many mornings. A small paper sign has appeared near the kettle.

WORLD CANCER DAY

The letters are printed in bold. Under it, in smaller font, a line that looks too fancy for the bus stand:

United by Unique.

Priya reads it twice.

Chai Uncle follows her eyes and grins as if he wrote it himself. “See? I am also awareness.”

“Where did you get this?” Priya asks, holding her tumbler carefully.

“Clinic boy came. Gave.” He points vaguely down the road, as if ‘clinic’ is a direction, not a place. “Said put here. People will see.”

Priya looks at the slogan again.

United. Unique.

It feels like two words that don’t usually sit on the same charpai.

“What does it mean?” she asks, because it is easier to ask Chai Uncle than to ask the internet.

Chai Uncle thinks seriously for three seconds. “Means… we are all same, but also different,” he declares, satisfied with his own philosophy. Then he squints. “You are also different. You have job now.”

Priya laughs once, small, into her chai. “Job is not difference,” she says, but the warmth inside her chest says maybe it is.

On the auto ride, fog lifts in layers. As they move closer to the canal road, the air begins to clear and the day reveals itself—pale sun, damp patches from earlier rain, a white bird standing at the edge of water like a punctuation mark.

Priya thinks of the words on the paper:

United by Unique.

At the clinic, the queue is already a line before it becomes a queue. People hover with slips in hand, shoulders turned inward, as if holding their own worries tight stops them from leaking.

The desk woman is there, as always, sitting like the clinic has been waiting for her and not the other way around.

She looks up when Priya enters and her eyes go straight to the folder.

“PAN?” she asks.

Priya’s stomach tightens from habit, then relaxes because today the answer is a paper answer.

She pulls out one photocopy and slides it across the desk. The paper moves like a small surrender.

The desk woman takes it, glances once, and says, “Number also.”

Priya takes a breath. She opens the folder again, finds the e-PAN printout, and points.

The desk woman reads the ten characters without moving her lips. Then she reaches into Priya’s file—her staff file, the cardboard cover that has begun to feel like a second, quieter version of her—and writes the number in blue ink on the staff sheet.

Priya watches the pen tip carefully.

One wrong line and the number becomes someone else’s.

The desk woman pauses after the last character and looks up. “Sign,” she says.

Priya blinks. “Sign?”

“Signature.” The desk woman’s tone is brisk, like she is telling Priya to breathe. “Here.”

She points to a blank line under the staff details.

Priya has signed things before—school forms, bank slips—but those signatures were done in a hurry, in front of someone who did not care how her name looked.

This feels different.

She uncaps her pen. Her first pen doesn’t work, as if it has chosen this moment to become dramatic. She doesn’t panic. She pulls out the second pen like Sunita taught her to.

The desk woman’s eyebrow lifts a fraction, approving without saying it.

Priya writes:

Priya Verma

The letters are a little rounder than she expects, because her hand is trying to be careful. The signature looks like her name wearing its best clothes.

She hands back the pen.

The desk woman slips the PAN photocopy into the file and tucks it into the drawer with a practiced motion, the way Sunita puts away money in a tin.

“Okay,” she says.

Okay.

One word, but it lands like a stamp.

Priya takes her seat and opens the February register. The FEB label peeks from inside the cover like a tiny flag.

The stamp sits near the ink pad, waiting.

“Today,” the desk woman says, and pushes a stack of printed sheets toward Priya.

At the top is the same bold heading:

WORLD CANCER DAY — 4 FEBRUARY

Below it, the slogan again:

United by Unique

Under that, a few lines in Hindi about early detection and not ignoring symptoms. No scary pictures, no shouting fonts—just information, neatly stacked.

“Cut and staple,” the desk woman says. “Give with slips. One each.”

Priya nods and starts.

Cutting paper is strangely soothing. The scissors make a soft kach-kach sound, and the straight edges feel like progress. She staples the small leaflets and stacks them into a clean pile.

As patients come, she stamps their slips—one clean press, straight—and adds a leaflet on top like a garnish.

Most people take it without looking. Some fold it and put it in a pocket as if it is a bus ticket.

One older man, coughing into a handkerchief, reads the heading and says, “Cancer?” His voice contains a question and a fear, both.

Priya keeps her face steady. “Awareness paper,” she says. “Aaj (today) is World Cancer Day.”

The man nods slowly, as if nodding can keep the word from growing.

He tucks the leaflet carefully inside his shirt pocket, close to his chest.

Later, a woman with a toddler on her hip says her phone number too fast.

Priya looks up. “Dheere (slowly),” she says, holding up her fingers in sequence.

The woman repeats the digits, slower.

Priya repeats them back.

The woman relaxes a little. “Haan,” she says, and Priya feels the small, silent victory: accuracy is a kind of care.

By noon, the fog is a memory and the sunlight outside the clinic looks almost warm. The queue does not shrink, but it changes shape—more mothers with children, fewer men with mufflers still wrapped around their necks.

During a lull that lasts the length of one sip of water, Priya looks at the leaflet again.

United by Unique.

She thinks of the register in front of her.

Each line is a person pressed into boxes: name, age, address, phone number, complaint.

But when she looks up, each face carries something the boxes do not hold—an irritation, a joke, a tired patience, a private fear. A scar on a chin. A missing tooth. A bangle clinking like punctuation.

Unique.

And still, they all sit on the same bench outside the doctor’s room, waiting for their turn.

United.

The desk woman calls her name softly, not in front of patients, the way she calls Priya when she needs something handled without drama.

“Good work,” she says, and then immediately adds, because praise must not become a habit, “Ink pad is dry. Put two drops.”

Priya nods and reaches for the small bottle.

She has learned that being trusted is made of tiny tasks.

At 2:05, the desk woman counts out ₹300 and slides it across as usual.

“Tomorrow,” she says, meaning: come.

Priya folds the notes carefully and puts them in her pocket.

Outside, the day feels lighter than yesterday. Maybe because the ten letters are no longer only hers; they are now inside a drawer, written in blue ink, made official by a brisk hand.

On the way home, she stops at Chai Uncle’s stall again. The fog has cleared completely and the kettle’s steam rises clean into the afternoon.

Chai Uncle points at the sign proudly. “Many people saw,” he says, as if the bus stand is a parliament.

Priya smiles. “Achha (good),” she says.

He leans in, lowers his voice. “You gave paper also?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are big now,” he says, and laughs at his own exaggeration.

At home, Sunita is rolling dough. Arjun is bent over his notebook, pretending he is struggling while actually copying neatly.

Sunita looks up. “Gave PAN?”

Priya nods. “Haan. File me rakh diya (They kept it in the file).”

Sunita’s face softens for half a second—the kind of relief that never becomes a celebration because there is always the next thing.

In the evening, when the kettle mutters and the neem leaves rustle like someone turning pages, Priya opens her phone notes.

She types one line:

PAN submitted. World Cancer Day paper given.

Then she opens another note and writes a small translation for herself, because words are also documents:

unique = alag (different)

She sets her timer.

Fifteen minutes.

Her fingers find the keys. The bumps on F and J feel like they always do now—small, steady, not dramatic.

At minute ten, without thinking too much, she types her name once in English.

Priya Verma.

It appears on the screen cleanly.

She doesn’t delete it this time.

When the timer ends, she stops.

Outside, the sky has that early-February clarity that makes the distant sound of a train feel closer than it is.

Priya closes her folder, slides it back onto the shelf, and feels the day settle into its place.

A slogan. A signature. A photocopy in a drawer.

Ordinary things.

But today, they hold.