The second day on the asphalt is worse than the first. The first day you have the anger. The second you have the sun. This morning I left my daughter with the neighbour, with yesterday's rice, and the neighbour asked nothing, she took the girl by the hand and looked the other way, which is her way of being kind. My husband has been at the dock since yesterday, looking for a day's work. One of the two of us had to stay with the factory. It fell to me, because I have had the factory in my hands for eleven years. By eight Natun Bazar Road was already burning, and we sat in a row with our umbrellas open, mine black, and black in the sun is a foolish thing but it is the only one I have. Behind us the stopped trucks were sounding their horns. In front, the Fortune gate, shut with a chain. Two months. Two months of uppers stitched, counted, handed in, and the envelope never came. The evening before I had gone to the grocer for rice and Rahim said nothing. He only turned the ledger towards me, on the counter, open at my column. Two months there as well. Rahim's ledger and the Fortune register look alike, lines and numbers, except that his is written by hand and I am inside it.

Around ten the company's white van arrived. It stopped ten metres from the blockade. The wages clerk got out, the one with the ironed shirt, and he was holding the payroll register and a fat envelope. He spoke loudly, standing on the running board. He said the management wanted to reopen. He said the factory reopens if half the line comes back today. He said that whoever gets on the van takes a month straight away, cash, and the rest later, when production starts up again. A month straight away. The silence that came after that sentence I had never heard in the middle of a road, a silence with the horns inside it and everything, and yet silence, because two hundred heads were doing the same sum all at once, the rice, the rent, the ledger, the school, and each of them was doing it with her own numbers. Then he began to call the names from the register. In order, the way it went at the handing out of the envelopes, when the envelopes came. Once the names were called on a Thursday, at the window, and each of us answered with her thumb ready for the pad, and there was the queue and the heat then too, but it was Thursday's queue, the queue that ended with the envelope in your hand and the rice bought on the way home. This was the same voice and the same register and another queue. He called Fatema. Fatema got on with her head down, and nobody breathed a word. He called Jesmin. Jesmin got on looking straight ahead, and one woman behind me spat on the ground, quietly, without theatre. The floor supervisor was sitting with us, on the ground like the rest of us, two months without an envelope like the rest of us. He did not raise his head. My hands were working on their own at the hem of my sari, fold and hold, fold and hold, which is the gesture for the uppers when the line is running and you must not think, the hands know and you do not.

Then he said my name. Shefali Begum. He said it twice, because the first time I did not move. I stood up. My legs were prickling from the asphalt. I gave the umbrella to Rupa without looking at her. I walked to the van. Ten metres. Ten metres with two hundred people watching your back is a long road, longer than the road home, longer than the night shift when the uppers never end. The clerk opened the envelope. Inside there was the money, real, counted. One month. I looked at the money. I looked at the register with the line beside my name, ready for the signature. I looked at the running board, which was low, easy, one stride. And I sat down. There, in front of the running board, on the ground, my back against the hot metal. The clerk said something I did not hear. The metal burned through the cloth and I stayed. Rupa told me afterwards that from behind it looked as though I had parked the van myself, I was sitting so comfortably. From behind you could not see that I was shaking. And that is all right, that it could not be seen.

The van left with two. Two out of two hundred. It turned slowly, because we were everywhere, and when it passed in front of me I saw Moriom at the window, looking at no one. I do not judge her. Her mother is ill, and doctors do not write things down in a ledger the way the grocer does. In the evening I passed Rahim's shop. I did not go in. He was in the doorway, he saw me, he went back inside, and from the road I watched him open the ledger on the counter. He drew a short line under my column and wrote the date. One week. That is how he told me, with the line, without speaking. At home my daughter was already asleep. I stayed in the doorway looking at her. Then I sat on the doorstep, in the dark, and my hands began on their own. The hem of the sari, between thumb and forefinger. Fold, hold, next. Fold, hold, next. Tomorrow we go back onto the asphalt. Fold, hold, next. Again.