The typewriter Kamala has used for thirty-four years, a grey Godrej with keys worn hollow at the centre the way only time wears them and not use, because it is time, not the fingers, that consumes the metal until it takes the shape of the fingertip pressing it, sits on her desk in the second-floor office when the file arrives with the order to be typed, and the order, this July morning when outside the monsoon cannot decide whether to fall, is the release order for a man who in nineteen ninety-six was younger than she is now and who today is old, acquitted after the Court, in a city far from this provincial tribunal, ruled that the confessions on which they had convicted him did not hold, or rather, to use the word someone read aloud in the corridor, were unreliable.

Kamala feeds in the sheet, turns the platen, hears the click she knows. She types the heading. She types the case number, which is a number that tells her something, not because she remembers it, numbers she does not remember, but because the hand, reaching certain figures, slows on its own, the way the foot slows on a step one knows to be worn even in the dark.

Outside, in the corridor, an usher pushes a cart of files tied with string, and the wheel that squeals is the same wheel that squealed thirty years ago, or perhaps it is another cart, another wheel, but the sound a thing makes in a courthouse is a sound that does not change: it is the sound of paper waiting, waiting by the hundredweight, behind the doors, on the shelves up to the ceiling, the paper that decides upon men without knowing anything of men.

Thirty years have not passed as one thing, they have passed the way years pass in an office, that is, without one noticing except by small and lateral signs: the carbon paper that at a certain point was no longer to be found at the market and the flimsies that became a useless habit, then the photocopiers, then the blue screen on the desk over there that she never learned to use because they left her the old machine for the formulas, for the orders, for the things that must have the weight of a struck key; and in all these years that man, whose face she never knew and about whom she never wanted to know whether he was guilty (because knowing was not her job, and not knowing, she had told herself, was not cowardice, it was the way one like her stayed clean), has been in a cell two provinces away, where time, she imagines, is not consumed on keys but on something else, on the bars perhaps, or on the hands.

In the bottom left drawer, under the green felt that covers the spare paper, there is a flimsy. It is pale blue, one of those that were laid between two sheets with the carbon paper in between so that everything typed existed twice, one for the record and one for the archive, and this one, which never ended up in any archive, Kamala has kept there for thirty years; it is the copy of the confession that she, young, with the same fingers but not yet this hand, typed one night under dictation, when they brought her the sheets written in pen and told her only: copy. And she copied, because copying was her job and a job well done, this they had taught her, does not ask whose is the voice that dictates. (In the next room, then, one could hear a man who neither wept nor spoke, and a tap that dripped, and she had typed harder so as not to hear the tap.)

She finishes the release order. She draws it out. It is clean, without errors; she does not make errors. Then she opens the bottom left drawer, lifts the felt, and for a time that is not long but is not short either she holds the flimsy between two fingers, and she knows she could tear it now, into four pieces, and throw it away, and no one would ever know it had existed, neither the man who goes free today nor his children nor the distant Court; or she could do the other thing. She does not tear it. She puts it inside the case envelope, between the new order and the old papers, where someone, sooner or later, opening the file to archive it, will find it, and reading it will understand that that confession had been copied one night, under dictation, by a hand that had been told only: copy.

She closes the envelope. She runs her tongue along the strip of glue, which tastes of rubber and dust, and presses the flap with her palm, and stays a moment with her palm on the envelope, the way one keeps a hand on something one does not want to open again, or perhaps only the way one dries glue.

Then she puts the green felt back over the spare paper. She switches off the desk lamp, the one with the crooked arm that no longer holds up and that she keeps raised with a rubber band. She covers the Godrej with the yellowed plastic cover. She takes her bag from the nail behind the door. She goes out, and locks up. In the room, one more sheet remains.