Registration for Afterlife

The quiet woman in the white saree finally exploded.

“What do you mean does not exist?” she said.“He was born before you even learned how to count.”

Her voice cut through the room sharply, loud enough for people to turn. Someone in the queue coughed. Radha turned towards me from Counter One and quickly looked away, as though she was not authorised to witness what was going on here at Counter Two.

I cleared my throat. “Ma’am, I mean, his record is not showing up.”

“That is not what you said. You said he does not exist.”

I had walked into the Death Registration Office that morning, at nine. My earbuds played a perfectly curated playlist, the kind that promises a smooth day. As I climbed up the stairs, I had hoped – without thinking much – for fewer people to have died the day before. I needed to be out by six that evening. My first salary had hit my freshly minted bank account just yesterday. And I had a date to keep: coffee with my girlfriend at that fancy café that hosts a weekly quiz.

The DRO stood between the cremation ground and the main road leading to the town. I walked through the dusty, brown doors and took my seat at Counter Two. Every day people walked in – documents in hand and bodies following them on cold, steel trolleys. My job was simple: ask for the name, scan the form, take a thumb impression, and send them on their way.

Most days, it worked fine. This morning, it did not.

I had already tried three times. I wiped the scanner clean, refreshed the page, and entered the AADHAR number manually. I even switched terminals, which Radha hated.

No result. The screen still threw those words in all caps.

NO RECORD FOUND.

Not missing. Not disputed. Simply absent.

“Look, he was admitted here,” the woman said as she handed over her son’s hospital certificate to me. “City Civil Hospital. Ward Thirty.”

I scanned it. No recognition in the system.

“This,” she said, shoving a folded paper in my hand, “is his tenth Board admit card. All his details are here.”

I saw the paper, old and torn at the edges. It was too soft from years of handling. I did not scan it.

“Ma’am, there are syncing issues sometimes. Let me try the manual review.”

“Syncing issues, huh?” she scoffed.

She stepped back a little, her fingers tightly grasping the steel trolley until her knuckles went white. The shroud covered her son’s body, except for one foot. The heel was greyish blue, like river slate. Radha gave a warning cough. I looked away and pressed the manual review button.

“Ma’am, just give me some time, please. We will find him.”

My words made her smile – a dry, sardonic twist at the corner of her lips. I heard myself say “we will find him.” It sounded ridiculous. He was two feet away, resting on his metal bed, while I initiated a search party in the empty pixels of my screen.

“How long?”

I swallowed. “Hard to say.”

She looked at the trolley, and then at me. “You are young. Perhaps you do not remember.”

“What?”

“The night the mountain came down.”

I did remember. That night from fifteen years ago when the rain Gods decided to trick us. At first, it did not seem unusual at all. It rains quite often in our part of the country. People went to bed, windows open, lulled by the steady pitter-patter on their tin roofs. After midnight, though, the mountain simply let go. There was no warning. Just a loud bang, an earthly roar that drowned out the celestial thunder.

Hotels, homes, sleeping children – all washed away in the blink of an eye as the earth tore itself in two. By dawn, half the town was not just destroyed, it was erased.

The Government building was the first to go. The river did not distinguish between a birth certificate and a bone. It devoured it all – files, registers, a lifetime of ink on paper, all buried under the silt alongside the bodies. In one night, it had swallowed both, the people and the proof that they had ever existed.

After the landslide, came the Decree: records must never be trusted to buildings, nor paper. They developed new cutting-edge technology to outlast fires, floods and frail human memories. The DRO had been rebuilt like a fortress of servers. More computers, more routers, more scanners – everything was digitised. Records will not be lost again. Even if people were.

I had to undergo rigorous training before I earned my seat at Counter Two a month ago. Some important-looking company people had come to train us. They spoke in tongues of future-proof technology. Enchanted us with tales about storage that didn’t rust, or burn, or wash away. Storage beyond the binary form. Something experimental, rooted in biology. DNA, someone whispered at the back.

The trainer had laughed, a cold, sharp sound. “That tech is for data that actually matters,” he said as he clicked the remote. “Trust me, they don’t waste immortality on PIN codes like yours.”

I had looked it up after the training session that day. The Perpetual Records Preservation Bill, introduced in the Parliament three years ago, proposed to encode certain category of citizen records into synthetic DNA strands. Theoretically indestructible. Theoretically permanent.

But the Bill covered Tier One citizens: those whose personal records and genome information were deemed of national significance. The rest of us, and the people who came to Counter Two, would live and die in the older architecture. Servers that lagged. Clouds that forgot.

“My son was fifteen then.” Her voice pulled me back to reality.

I looked at the screen. It hummed softly. 30% complete, the screen flashed.

“We used to live by the other slope. His school, gone. The hospital where he was born, washed. The office where his birth was registered, vanished.”

I said nothing.

“They told us not to worry. We have it under control. We have back-ups, they said.”

The system pinged, impatient.

“But not everything had found its way to the servers in our small town. He stood in line again when he was eighteen. He filled out forms, gave his photograph, fingerprints, everything you all asked for.”

I looked at the screen. 56% complete, it said.

“Ma’am, digitisation takes time. If we don’t find anything, we could re-register.”

She looked at me with cold eyes. “Re-register? He’s dead.”

The absurdity of my statement hung in the air. Her plight had unsettled me to such an extent that I was desperate to help. I frantically wanted to bridge the gap between the fact on my screen and the truth of the trolley. I grappled for a solution – any solution – but in my panic I had blurted out a suggestion that only made sense to my computer.

“I know, but the system requires…”

“The system,” she scoffed. “Of course it does. It always wants something, doesn’t it?”

Manual review failed. I shuddered as NO RECORD FOUND flashed on my screen again.

Before I could say anything unhelpful, Radha came to my Counter and whispered, “What are you doing? There is a process. Stick to it.”

The queue behind the woman grew restless. “How long will this take?” said one. “You can process our information first, you know,” shouted another.“Can’t bury the dead after dark,” chimed a third.

Radha glared at me and went away. The woman stepped aside, clutching the steel trolley as if afraid it would roll away. Like the slope of the mountain, the forgotten bodies, the lost records.

As the day dragged on, the crowd dispersed. By evening, the office began to power down, row by row. The supervisor clocked out early. Radha packed up soon after. One by one, the lights over the empty cubicles flickered and died as the watchman did his rounds. The office drowned in shadow until only the bright glare of my screen and the woman in the white saree remained.

“There is a process. Stick to it,” Radha’s words kept playing in my ears. I printed the closing report and kept it on my table facing down.

I looked at the woman. She was still standing there. I wondered what she was thinking about. If she chose to leave and cremated her son without registering his death, the boy would vanish from this world. But not from the server.

The trainer had told us that the system was infallible. “He stood in line again when he was eighteen…” The woman’s words came back to me.

What if I’m correct? What if the data exists in the system? It is probably just lagging. Queued up in the cloud somewhere. And when that data finally syncs and catches up – maybe tomorrow, maybe a week later – there will be no body to match it.

In a country before the landslide, seven years of anonymity was sufficient to trigger the assumption of death. But now, we lived in the post-landslide world. When too many of those presumed dead kept turning up alive, it became a record-keeping nightmare. The Digital Citizen Record Continuity Act had seen to it – an unresolved record no longer meant assumption of death; it triggered an automatic status renewal. Ration entitlements. Voter registration. And after seven years of anonymity, only a court of law could declare a person dead.

Without the death certificate, the server will consider him alive. A digital ghost. The system will treat her son as any other citizen. She will have to file a petition. Produce witnesses. Prove to the court beyond reasonable doubt that her son had existed and then ceased to. I imagined her running pillar to post, with that torn admit card as her only evidence.

I cannot let the system haunt her like this.

“There is a way,” I blurted out, surprised at the calmness of my own voice. “Ma’am, please bring the papers to me.”

The woman looked at me, confused, but for the first time I saw a softness in her eyes. She came forward. As she handed the worn-out admit card to me, she said, “I hope this will get scanned.”

“I’m not scanning the paper; I’m scanning him.”

I opened a new window. New Citizen Registration.

R-O-H-A-N, I entered his name, but when I reached ‘Date of Birth’ I paused. I could not enter the date from thirty years ago. The system would ask for a late fee, proof of birth and residence, which was probably under the river.

I looked up. 5:50 PM the clock said.

I entered today’s date. “Give me his hand.”

She raised an eyebrow but lifted the shroud regardless. I took his cold, stiff hand and pressed the thumb against the scanner. This was the only way. The system allowed multiple records to exist with the same names, same age, same date of birth. But only one unique thumbprint for each person. If I could lock his thumbprint to a death certificate, the old data would be rejected the moment it tried to enter. The system would recognise it as a duplicate and flush it out.

The computer beeped, and a green light lit up in the dim room.

SUCCESS. NEW RECORD CREATED.

I did not look at the mother. I knew what I was doing. A criminal offence. The law declared falsification of data as a cognisable offence. What I was doing wasn’t a workaround for days when the internet was down. It was creation of a fraudulent record – a falsified birth, and a fabricated death.

I switched tabs, opened the Death Registration portal and inserted the new record number. The name flashed before me: Rohan, Age 0.

“Cause of Death?” the drop-down menu asked.

I scrolled past natural disasters, accidents, and stopped the cursor at heart failure. I picked up his hand and scanned the finger one last time.

ANOMALY DETECTED.

NEW REGISTRATION WITH IMMEDIATE DEATH EVENT.

FLAGGED FOR REVIEW UNDER CONTINUITY PROTOCOL.

I stared at it. A gulp slowly travelled down my throat. The system did not know who he was. But it knew

this much – that lives were not meant to begin and end within minutes. Not like this.

For a moment, I hesitated.

I chose the MANUAL REVIEW again, hoping that the system will rely on a human to override its doubt.

My heart was hammering against my ribs. I imagined a warrant somewhere in my name. An investigation. A file. And the slow, but inevitable, State machinery turning to look at Counter Two.

A loud beep broke the silence.

MATCH FOUND.

BIOMETRIC LOCKED.

DEATH CERTIFIED.

I hit the print button. The printer whirred to life in the dark, quiet office. It spat out two sheets of paper. I took them and handed them across the counter.

“Take him. It is done.”

She did not ask why I had handed her a birth certificate along with the one certifying death.

She did not ask why, according to the Government of India, her son had been born at 5:50 PM today and died at 5:55 PM.

She did not ask why I had erased thirty years of her son’s life.

She only had eyes for the official seal at the end. It was her permission to leave, her permission to give her boy a send-off to the afterlife.

The sun had begun its downward journey over the river beyond the cremation ground. It was a bright crimson red, like the bindi on the woman’s forehead. I watched her run to the cremation ground, the trolley clanging loudly behind her.

The pandit was sitting on the ground, arranging flowers. He looked up and saw the woman, papers in one hand while still clutching the steel trolley with the other. He nodded. The ritual was short. The mother lit the pyre and soon the flames went up. She stood there close to the burning body, unmoved, until the fire settled. As the sun dipped into the river, the woman left the building without looking back.

I sat alone in that office as my heartbeat settled. My hands were not shaking any more. On my screen, Rohan’s data glowed softly. A life lived for exactly five minutes. When that wandering old data finally emerges from the maze of the cloud, it will find the grave filled.

I printed a new closing report, switched off the screen and stepped out into the evening.