Munshi Ji watched these changes with a careful optimism. He continued to catalogue, but his ledger shifted in tone. He began to record not only dates and transactions but the kinds of small transformations that once would have seemed unrecordable: the afternoon the schoolteacher started teaching dyeing alongside arithmetic; the night the bakery began hiring an apprentice from the textile studio; the moment a girl who had never spoken in public read a short essay about how Ayesha taught her to trust her hands.