"Because it's the truth," he said. "And because when you win the eastern wards on a better argument, I want to lose them on the merits, not because you were underselling yourself." He picked up his bag. "I'll see you at the flat."
He walked away. She stood in the corridor of the university building and thought about a man who had just told her how to run her campaign better and had said, when you win the eastern wards — not if. When. As if her winning them was a foregone conclusion and he was simply concerned about the quality of the loss.
The next morning she added a new slide to her campaign presentation about the eastern wards. The slide led with her direct experience on the Kanpur project. The first event she used it at, she could feel the shift in the room — the specific shift of people who had been listening to a politician and had suddenly understood they were listening to someone who had actually done the thing.
She did not tell him it had worked. She also did not need to — when she came back to the flat that evening, she could see that he had already tracked the event through whatever monitoring his team did, because he looked at her when she walked in with the brief, specific expression of someone who has seen a result they anticipated and is noting it without comment.
Day six: voter registration drive, Municipal Park. Both campaigns, same park, opposite corners. Her volunteers set up their table at the east end. His set up at the west end. Voters moved between them with the cheerful indecision of people who were enjoying having options, collecting materials from both tables with the collecting instinct of citizens who knew they were the ones being sought.
She was helping a elderly man with his voter ID documentation — a corrected form, a small discrepancy in the spelling of his name that had been a problem for him for two elections — when she became aware that Aditya had come to stand near the table. Not in the way of a political rival coming to disrupt. In the way of someone who was watching something and had stopped without making a decision to stop.
She finished with the elderly man. She looked at Aditya. "Can I help you with something?"
"The corrected form," he said. "We've been turning those cases away — we were told we don't have the authority to process corrections at voter drives."
"The notification from the Election Commission last June gave constituency candidates' representatives authority to facilitate Form 8A corrections at registered voter drives," she said. "I have the notification. If your team needs it I can share it."
He looked at her with the expression she had been starting to recognise — the recalibration expression, the one that occurred when she said something that moved him from one position to another without his intending to be moved.
