Mandi Gobindgarh, December 1996.

Anita Kumari is twenty-two, the first woman in the Quality Assurance department at Bharat Ispat, and she has been there four days when she watches an older man she likes and respects write down a number that is not the one the machine gave.

Within a month she writes one herself.
She has good reasons.
Everybody does.

Twenty years later a letter arrives from a customer in Ludhiana, and Anita walks into a record room to find out what her own handwriting has been doing all this time.

A quiet novel about steel, paper, and the small compromises that outlive the people who make them.