If a country is born in a courtroom, it grows up in a camp.
They had set the migrant camp on the edge of the city, where land was cheap and sympathy cheaper. A sea of cloth tents, some government-issued, others stitched from whatever could be found—saris, bed-sheets, sacks. Smoke rose from makeshift stoves. The smell of boiled lentils fought the smell of sweat and fear.
In the car, the clerk beside me kept reciting numbers as though numbers would protect him.
"Thirty-two thousand registered," he said. "But they say more arrived last night. Water supply is… intermittent. A doctor reports fever clusters in the western row."
"A doctor?" I asked.
"Dr. Evelyn has been here since dawn."
Of course she had.
When we arrived, the camp greeted us with a sound that was not applause and not anger. It was simply noise—life pressed too tightly into too little space.
A man approached with a ledger and a stamp. He looked at my face, then at my government pass, then back at my face, as if waiting for the paper to correct reality.
"Madam Minister," he said, then lowered his voice. "If you can speak to them—calm them—there was… a disturbance last night. Rumours that trains are being stopped. People say the government is hiding lists."
"Are you hiding lists?" I asked.
He startled. "No, madam. But we are… behind."
Behind. That word was everywhere in these days. Behind on food, behind on medicine, behind on paperwork, behind on hope.
We walked into the camp. Children stared as though I were a creature from a different kind of world. Some women looked at my dupatta, my shoes, my posture, and their eyes softened with a mixture of envy and resentment—because to them I represented safety, and safety is a story people tell themselves when they are tired.
An old woman grabbed my wrist suddenly, her fingers surprisingly strong.
"My son," she said. "His name is on the list, they told me. But they won't show me. They keep sending me away. I have been here three days."
"Who told you his name is on the list?"
"A man with a stamp," she said bitterly. "A stamp is all anyone respects now."
I squeezed her hand gently, not as performance but as acknowledgement. "What is your son's name?"
She told me. I repeated it, so she would know I had taken it into my mouth and therefore, in some small way, into responsibility.
We found Evelyn near a tent marked "MEDICAL." Her sleeves were rolled, her hair pinned back, her hands stained with the honest dirt of work. She was speaking to a young mother whose baby coughed weakly, a cough too small for the fear it carried.
Evelyn looked up. "Minister."
She did not add Madam. She did not add flattery. It was strangely relieving.
"How bad?" I asked.
"As bad as you expect," she replied. "Better than it could be if we act fast."
Kathrine was not there. I imagined her at a desk somewhere, waging war against scarcity with arithmetic. Some wars are fought with bandages; others with budgets.
Evelyn wiped her hands on a cloth. "They need water discipline," she said. "They need clear messaging. If rumours win, we will have riots before we have epidemics."
"Messaging," I repeated.
"Yes," she said. "I don't care if it comes from sermons, from radio, from posters. They need to hear one voice. Not ten officials contradicting each other."
One voice.
All my life, men had paid for my voice and then tried to pretend it belonged to no one. Now the state wanted it. The state wanted to borrow my throat for survival.
We set up a small platform—two crates and a plank. A few policemen stood nearby, not with cruelty but with that tense readiness men carry when they know hunger can turn into a weapon.
Someone brought a microphone. Someone else brought a portable radio unit, the kind used for field broadcasts. The clerk looked as though he might faint.
"What will you say?" he whispered.
I looked at the crowd gathering, faces tightened by travel, eyes hollowed by loss. In their expressions I saw the same calculation I had seen in cabinet—only here it was stripped of manners.
Can you help me?
Or are you another liar?
I stepped forward. The microphone made my voice sound unfamiliar, metallic, as though the air itself had been replaced.
"My name is Tehseen," I said.
A murmur ran through the crowd, the name carrying different meanings to different mouths. Some recognized it with curiosity. Some with disdain. Some with hope, because any known name feels like a rope in a flood.
"I am not here to sing," I said. "Not today."
That surprised them. It surprised the policemen too. They had wanted entertainment—something soft to pour over panic like perfume. Panic is not defeated by perfume.
"I am here," I continued, "to tell you what is true, and what we are doing next."
Behind me, the ledger-man shifted. Truth is a dangerous word in a new country.
"We are registering families row by row," I said. "Not by favour. Not by bribery. Row by row. If someone tells you your name is on a list and refuses to show you, bring that person's name to the desk. If someone demands money for a stamp, bring that person's name to the desk. We will not allow thieves to dress themselves in government clothing."
The crowd stirred. Some faces sharpened, as though they had long been waiting for permission to accuse.
"We have doctors here," I said, and gestured toward Evelyn. "If you see fever, if you see coughing, if you see weakness, do not hide it out of shame. Disease does not respect shame. It respects only action."
A few women nodded. A man near the back shouted something about trains, about India, about betrayal. His voice carried the wildness of someone who had lost too much too quickly.
I held up my hand. The old instinct returned—the instinct of the mehfil, where a room can erupt into chaos if the singer does not command it.
"I know you are afraid," I said. "I am afraid too."
That admission landed like a stone in water. Ministers are not supposed to confess fear. But fear, unspoken, grows claws.
"You have left homes," I said. "You have buried parts of yourselves on roads. But you have not come here to die in a camp. You have come here to begin again. And the government"—I swallowed the word, because it was new and heavy—"the government will not abandon you to rumours."
The crowd quieted. Not because they suddenly trusted me, but because they were listening. Listening is the first crack in despair.
When I stepped down, Evelyn exhaled as though she had been holding her breath for an hour.
"That," she said quietly, "was medicine."
I looked over the camp again, and I realized what my ministry truly meant. Not theatres. Not festivals. Not fine words in newspapers.
It meant turning a frightened population into citizens—one truthful sentence at a time.
That night, back at my office, the radio equipment sat on the table like a sleeping animal. A clerk asked if I would go on air.
"Not a song," he said quickly, as if apologizing for the suggestion. "Just… an announcement. Instructions. Calm."
I sat before the microphone, alone. In the silence, I could almost hear the cabinet chamber again—those murmurs, that word, tawaif, thrown like a rotten fruit.
Then I thought of the old woman gripping my wrist.
I leaned toward the microphone and spoke into the new nation's ear.
And for the first time, my voice belonged to something larger than a room.
It belonged to a people trying to survive their own birth.