They worked in four teams over forty-eight hours.
Sunita's network was extraordinary in the way that community networks built by trusted women always were — dense, fast, operating through channels Kalyani's programme coordinators had never mapped because they had never thought to look for them. The women who sold vegetables in the morning. The crèche workers who knew which households had young men enrolled in the Wellness Scheme. The informal health workers who had been doing Sunita's kind of noticing for years without a common vocabulary for what they were noticing.
Priya went door to door in the evenings. She said the same thing each time, in the same calm register, with the same documentation — a printout: this is what they know about your body, this is what your body is worth to them. She watched, each time, the same sequence of response: disbelief, recoil, the face of someone receiving information that rewrites what they thought their daily life was.
One man — Prakash Nair, thirty-six, enrolled eleven months ago, O-negative blood type which made him rare and therefore valuable in the Provenance system — listened to everything and said: "My mother was enrolled in this programme. She was never told she was enrolled. The coordinator came to the clinic and offered her free monthly health checks and vitamins and she went because it was free."
"How old is she?"
"Sixty-three."
She thought about the rate card. Corneas. At sixty-three, a woman's corneas could still be valuable. "Tell her not to go back to the clinic. Tell everyone in your family. Go to Sion Hospital instead."
He looked at the printout in his hands. "This woman. Dr. Priya Vashisht. That's you."
"Yes."
"You worked for them."
"Yes."
"And now you're doing this."
"Yes."
Something shifted — not forgiveness, but something more provisional. "I have three neighbours in the programme. I will talk to them tonight."
Over forty-eight hours, working in parallel with Sunita's teams, they reached sixty-eight households in the settlement. Covering it was what they could do with what they had in the time they had.
