The Machine in the Front Room

The notebook

Shabnam Ansari kept a notebook that her husband called the Ramayana, because it was long and she consulted it before every decision.

It was a school exercise book, the kind with a multiplication table printed on the back cover. On each line: the date, the customer, blouse or suit or lehenga, and in the last column a small figure in red. The red figure was what she had paid Guddu bhai.

She stitched in the front room of a two-room house in Bhopal, on a machine her mother had pedalled before her and which now ran on a motor. She was good, and known for it in the way that counts: women crossed two colonies to reach her. But what they wanted now was embroidery, the dense computer kind, peacocks and paisleys across the back of a blouse. For that, every piece went into a cloth bag on Pinky’s cycle and rode to Guddu bhai’s unit near the bus stand, where it waited its turn behind the work of every other tailor in the city.

Guddu bhai was not a villain. He charged what the work cost and took the time it took. But the red column, added up, came to more each month than her rent. And the waiting cost her something the notebook had no column for: the bride’s mother who arrived on Thursday for a blouse promised on Wednesday.

In a showroom on Hamidia Road stood a single-head embroidery machine priced at ₹1,10,000. She had ₹20,000. She had been visiting it for a year, like a relative in hospital.

The question

Mr. Tirkey at Saptarang Bank had a desk with a glass top and, under the glass, a photograph of a hockey team. He read her application slowly, which she took for a bad sign and later understood to be a good one.

“A loan of ₹90,000,” he said. “Thirty-six months. Your instalment will be ₹3,054.” He turned the sheet towards her and ran his pen down a column she had not asked to see. The fee, ₹1,350. The interest across three years, ₹19,950. “So the machine does not cost what the showroom says. With us, over three years, it costs you ₹21,300 more. I am saying it now so that you do not say it to me later.”

“I know,” said Shabnam. She did. Pinky had worked it out on her phone the night before, and then the two of them had looked at it for a while.

“Then my question. What happens in a month with no orders?”

She had been waiting a year for someone to ask. She opened the Ramayana on his glass desk, over the hockey team, and turned twelve months of pages. The red column for each month; and beside it, in Pinky’s rounder hand, a second figure: the orders she had turned away because Guddu bhai’s queue was too long. Averaged across the year, a machine of her own would save and earn her ₹6,500 a month. The worst month was July, when it rains and nobody marries. July was a third of that.

“And in July the instalment is still ₹3,054,” said Mr. Tirkey.

“In July I have the other eleven months.”

He looked at the notebook for a long time. He would tell a colleague afterwards that in nineteen years of small loans he could count on his fingers the people who had brought their own evidence.

₹2,166

Borrow for the machine now, or save for it?

• Take the loanThe story follows this one

  The machine is in the front room this month. ₹3,054 leaves her account every month for three years, orders or no orders.

• Wait, and save the same amount every month

  No interest, no fee, no risk of an idle machine. The red column keeps running for 2 years 6 months. Read that version

July

The machine arrived on a handcart and took the place where the divan had been. Imtiaz, her husband, who drove a school van and distrusted anything with a screen, walked around it once.

“If the orders stop,” he said, “we will be paying ₹3,054 a month for a very expensive table.”

“If the orders stop,” said Shabnam, “we will sell it. Machines have a second-hand price. I asked.” She had. That was in the notebook too.

It was not a smooth year, and it would be dishonest to tell it as one. The machine spoke its own language of error codes, and in the first six weeks she and Pinky spoiled enough blouse pieces to dress a small wedding. In May the thread-cutter failed, and a man came from Indore and charged ₹4,200 for something that took him nine minutes. Then July arrived exactly as the notebook had said it would: eleven orders in the whole month, rain coming in under the door, and the instalment leaving her account on the seventh regardless, because a bank’s calendar has no monsoon.

That month she paid it from what she had kept back in the wedding season. She lay awake two nights doing the sum that everyone with a loan does sooner or later, the one that begins and what if next month also. This is the cost that does not appear on Mr. Tirkey’s sheet. It is real, and she paid it.

August brought forty orders.

The bag

By the second winter there was a new column in the notebook, in green, which Pinky had started without asking: work coming in from other tailors, who had heard that Shabnam’s machine had no queue. Guddu bhai sent a nephew to look at it. Then he sent some of his overflow. He was, as noted, not a villain, and he knew a second unit when he saw one.

The cloth bag still hangs from Pinky’s cycle. It travels the other way now.

Shabnam is careful how she tells this story, because women in the colony have begun to ask whether they should take a loan too. She does not say yes. She says, show me your notebook. If there is no notebook she tells them to keep one for a year and come back. Two have. One of those she told to wait: the red column was too small, and the machine would have eaten her. That woman was annoyed for a month. She is still in business.

Mr. Tirkey came by in December about a blouse for his wife, and stood for a while watching the needle assemble a peacock out of nothing.

“So it worked,” he said.

“It worked because of July,” said Shabnam. “I knew about July before I signed. If I had not known about July, then the same machine, the same loan, and I would be telling you a different story.”

The other future

The year she waited

In the other version the notebook is thinner, or Mr. Tirkey’s question lands differently, and she decides to save. It is not a foolish choice. No interest, no fee, no nights awake in July. ₹3,054 goes into the bank on the seventh of every month, and nobody can come for the divan.

The red column goes on. Pinky cycles to the bus stand. The bride’s mother arrives on Thursday. And by the time the savings reach the price, the price has moved: the machine costs ₹1,21,332, and it is month 30. Over those 2 years 6 months, the work she paid Guddu bhai for and the orders she turned away come, by her own notebook, to ₹1,95,000.

She buys it outright and owes no one, and that is worth something that has no column either. If the notebook had been wrong about the orders, this is the version in which she would have been right. The arithmetic favours the loan only because the work was really there. She had checked. Most of the difference between the two Shabnams is a school exercise book with a multiplication table on the back.