"Yes," he said. "Share it." He paused. "How many corrections have you done today?"
"Forty-seven," she said. "Mostly name spelling issues and address updates."
"We've turned away—" He stopped. He looked at the park, where his volunteers were at their corner, and the stream of people who had been going to both tables had been, now that she thought about it, noticeably thinner at his corner for the past hour. "We've probably turned away forty people with correction cases," he said. "If they leave without the correction and can't vote—"
"Send them to my table," she said. "I'll process them."
He looked at her. The pause of someone deciding whether the thing they are being offered is what it appears to be. "You'll take voters to your table who came for my table."
"I'll process their correction forms," she said. "Regardless of which table they came to. People not being able to vote because their name has a wrong letter is not a political problem, it's a civic one." She looked at him steadily. "I'm not going to not help them because it might disadvantage you. Send them over."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he turned and said something to one of his volunteers, and five minutes later a stream of voters with correction documents began arriving at her table, directed there by his team. She processed them without making anything of it, without any kind of visible acknowledgment that something unusual was happening. Her volunteers processed them too, with the efficiency she had trained into them.
At the end of the drive, she looked across the park at his table. He was still there, watching the last of the correction cases being processed. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the voters — at the people who had come with a small administrative problem and were leaving with it solved, which was what voter drives were supposed to be for.
She looked at him looking at that, and she thought about the budget allocation document and the Kanpur model correction and the Form 8A notification and this afternoon's voter drive, and she thought: this is going to be a different kind of problem than I expected. She had expected Aditya Malhotra to be a problem of the kind she knew — the kind with sharp edges and clear battle lines and standard political weapons. She was discovering he was a different kind of problem. The kind with ambiguous edges. The kind that kept making her readjust what she thought she was dealing with.
This was, she noted precisely, significantly more difficult to manage than the kind she knew.
