The Long Number

Friday morning arrives with the same wind as yesterday, but the air has changed its mind about fog.

Not the thick, poured kind that hides the end of the lane. Just pockets of it—small, lazy clouds sitting low near the fields, as if someone forgot to fold them away.

Priya wakes to her first alarm at 7:30 and, for a moment, thinks she has already turned it off.

Then it rings again.

She fumbles, finds the screen, and silences it properly. The second alarm at 7:45 feels like a friend who insists on walking you to the gate.

Sunita is already up, rinsing cups at the hand pump. The water hits steel with a clean sound. In the courtyard, the neem leaves flip and clap softly, busy with their own work.

“Photocopy today,” Sunita says without looking up.

“Yes,” Priya replies. She says it like she is repeating a timetable, not talking about a book that contains her name.

The passbook lies on top of her plastic folder for a while, still wrapped in its polythene. Priya doesn’t like the feeling of carrying it out of the house. It feels like carrying a secret in a transparent bag.

But the desk woman’s instruction is clear: photocopy only.

And Sharma Ji’s rule is clear: paper, not WhatsApp.

Priya slips the passbook into her bag between two old notebooks—an attempt at camouflage that makes her feel slightly foolish, and slightly better.

At the bus stand, the wind has arranged everyone’s shawls into odd shapes. Chai Uncle’s sign for World Cancer Day is still there, but the tape has loosened and one corner keeps lifting, trying to become a flag.

He sees Priya and holds up two fingers.

“Two chai?” he asks.

“No,” Priya says. “Today early.”

He squints at her bag. He doesn’t ask what is inside, but his face has that look adults get when they can tell a child is carrying something important.

“Bank work?” he guesses.

“Clinic,” Priya corrects him. “They’re talking about shifting wages to bank transfer soon. Passbook copy.”

“Oh,” he says, like he is tasting the word. “Transfer.”

Then, as if he has found the correct joke, he adds, “Earlier cash, now hawa mein paisa—money in the air.”

Priya laughs. It is funny. It is also exactly what worries her.

A radio near the paan shop is reciting weather the way it recites prices—confident and full of numbers.

Strong ground winds during the day, it says. Temperatures from twelve to twenty-two. Dry weather. No rain.

Priya catches the numbers and the promise of no rain, and feels oddly grateful. Damp paper is a different kind of headache.

She doesn’t stop for chai. She doesn’t want to be late to the shop and late to the clinic. Today has a double queue waiting inside it.

Sharma Ji’s shutter is half up when she arrives. The shop smells like yesterday’s ink and warm plastic.

He is not on the chair yet; he is still becoming present, the way a shop becomes open in stages.

He looks up, sees Priya, and makes a small sound of recognition.

“Passbook?” he asks.

Priya pulls it out like a person producing an ID at a checkpoint.

Sharma Ji takes it, peels the polythene back, and flips to the first page with the briskness of someone who has seen ten thousand first pages.

“IFSC here,” he says, tapping with a finger. “Branch name, code. Account number also.”

Priya’s throat tightens around the phrase account number.

Account number is not new. She has always known she has one, the way you know you have bones.

But seeing it printed there—in a long line, unbroken—makes it feel suddenly like a thing someone could take.

Sharma Ji pulls a sheet of paper from a stack and places it over the passbook.

He slides it down.

Up.

Down again.

“Cover?” he asks, without looking at her.

Priya stares. “Cover?”

He taps the paper. “If you want, we can cover some digits when copying. But clinic will need full number for transfer. Otherwise transfer to where?”

He says it as if he is scolding a child for wanting a lock on a door.

Priya feels heat in her cheeks.

She isn’t trying to be dramatic. She is trying to be careful.

“Do they need the whole number?” she asks quietly.

“The whole thing,” Sharma Ji says. “But you’re not sending it around. You’re handing paper to the desk. It’s office work.”

The sentence sits on Priya’s tongue like a small permission.

She nods.

Sharma Ji pulls the paper away and places the open passbook on the photocopier glass.

The lid comes down, and Priya watches her name disappear under it.

There is a whirr, a bright flash, and then her details come out as a flat, warm page.

Sharma Ji makes two copies without asking.

“One for clinic,” he says, “one for you. Keep. Always.”

Priya takes the copies carefully, as if the digits could fall off.

On the photocopy, her account number looks even longer, because the machine has made it bolder.

Her eyes go to the IFSC first. Four letters. Friendly now.

Then to the long line of digits.

She quickly folds the paper, once, then twice. Not to hide it from Sharma Ji—he has already seen it—but to make it feel smaller.

“Don’t show everyone,” Sharma Ji adds, softer than before. “Like PAN. Bank details are the same.”

Priya nods, relieved that even he understands the instinct to tuck.

Outside, the wind is stronger. It pushes dust into little spirals that run across the road like children playing and then vanish.

Priya reaches the clinic with a few minutes to spare.

The desk woman is already in her chair, hair clipped back, eyes doing their quick scanning of the room.

Priya greets her and places the passbook photocopy on the desk as if she is putting down a plate.

The desk woman glances at it.

“Good,” she says. She doesn’t smile, but the word itself is a smile.

She pulls out Priya’s staff file—the cardboard cover with Priya’s stapled photo and the tidy sheet Priya signed two days ago.

Then she takes a separate paper from a drawer.

It is a form with boxes and lines, the kind that looks like it has been photocopied many times and still wants to be official.

“Bank detail,” the desk woman says. “Fill.”

Priya’s hands go slightly cold.

She has filled patient forms. She has filled staff forms. She has typed complaint letters.

But this feels like writing your own address on the front of your body.

She looks at the boxes.

Name.

Account number.

IFSC.

Bank name.

Branch.

There is even a line that says “I certify the above details are correct.”

Priya reads the sentence twice.

The desk woman taps the paper with her pen. “Dheere,” she says—slowly—and Priya understands that it is advice, not impatience.

Priya takes her pen.

She writes her name first. PRIYA VERMA. The letters behave.

Then she looks at the long number.

On the photocopy, the digits sit in a neat line. On the form, the boxes wait like open mouths.

Priya starts.

One digit per box.

She hears Sharma Ji’s voice: don’t guess.

She hears her own clinic voice: repeat.

So she repeats to herself, under her breath—just enough rhythm to keep her careful.

Not the whole thing aloud. Just a way of not slipping.

She writes, stops, checks, writes again.

By the time she reaches the last box, her shoulder muscles ache with the effort of being careful.

She writes the IFSC next. Four letters, then numbers. It feels almost kind.

The desk woman watches her fill the form with the same expression she uses to watch a printer: ready to intervene if something jams, but otherwise letting it run.

A patient coughs loudly in the waiting area.

A toddler begins to cry, the sound sharp enough to cut through the paper world.

The printer clicks.

The clinic day, impatient to begin, presses in.

Priya finishes the last line and signs her name.

When she slides the form across, the desk woman reads it quickly, eyes moving like a finger on a ruler.

She compares the account number on the form with the account number on the photocopy.

Once.

Twice.

Then she makes a small approving sound.

“Okay,” she says. “Good writing.”

Priya exhales. She didn’t know she was holding her breath.

The desk woman staples the bank form into Priya’s staff file with two decisive clicks.

Click. Click.

The sound is oddly comforting.

Stapled means: finished.

Then the desk woman reaches into the cash drawer and counts out ₹300 for Priya.

She slides it over like always.

Nothing has changed yet.

But Priya’s job now has an invisible path attached to it—money traveling without her touching it.

“Transfer maybe next month,” the desk woman says, as if reading Priya’s thoughts. “Not sure. Doctor will decide.”

Priya nods.

Not sure is also a kind of information.

The queue begins properly.

A man with a wool cap pushes a slip forward and says his phone number like it is one word.

Priya lifts her hand. “Slowly,” she says, and smiles to soften the instruction.

He repeats. Slower this time.

She writes the digits neatly, one per box, the same way she wrote her own.

For a moment, she feels equal with her work.

At noon, sunlight pushes in through the clinic window, bright enough to make the stapled papers in the file shine at the edges.

Between patients, Priya sees her photocopy sitting under a paperweight on the desk—her long number held down by something ordinary.

It looks less like a secret now, and more like a tool.

By 2:00, her hands are tired in the familiar way: from writing, from listening, from holding the day steady while other people spill into it.

On the ride back, the wind is strong enough to make the canal water look restless. A few white birds stand near the edge, their bodies still while everything else moves.

At home, Sunita asks one question.

“Ho gaya? (Did it get done?)”

“Ho gaya,” Priya says.

Sunita nods and goes back to her work, satisfied with the simple completion.

Arjun appears and tries to peek into Priya’s bag.

“What photocopy?” he asks. “Salary secret?”

“Chup (hush),” Priya says, and this time her smile is automatic.

In the evening, she takes out her keyboard and sets the timer.

Fifteen minutes.

Her fingers land on F and J, then move into the small familiar patterns.

She does not type her account number.

She doesn’t need to.

Instead, she types the four letters that started this whole day.

I.

F.

S.

C.

On the screen, they appear in calm capitals.

IFSC.

Then she types one sentence, slowly, like a form filled with care:

Paper is safer when it knows where it is going.

Outside, the wind keeps turning neem leaves, checking their backs, as if the whole world is learning to hold its own information without dropping it.