Echoes

The fifth floor at CSR smelled of floor polish and somebody's dinner, and there was a Godrej vending machine at the end that took coins and gave nothing, and a boy of about six asleep across three plastic chairs with his shoes off.

"Annu?"

Her father was outside the ward in his chair. He had the prayer beads going through his fingers, and he was doing it fast, which he did not know he did.

"She's been asking for you."

Ananya knelt down beside the chair and took his free hand. It was the hand that had drawn her first force diagram, on the back of an electricity bill, in 2004.

"What are the doctors saying, Nanna?"

"Many things." He smiled, briefly. "All in big medical terms that mean they don't know." And then the smile went. "But there's something different about her. The way she speaks. The things she says."

"Dr. Nayagiri?" A young doctor with a clipboard, looking between them. "Could we speak for a moment? You must be the daughter. Dr. Nayagiri as well?"

"Different field. Experimental physics."

"Ah." She nodded, and rearranged her face. "Your mother's condition is..." She looked for the word and did not find it. "Unusual. We're still consulting our lead neurologist."

"Can we see her?" Vikram had come up behind them with two coffees he had bought and was not going to drink. His shirt was the Quantace one and it was creased where he had been sitting in it since morning, and his hair was doing what it did when he had not slept. He put a hand on Ananya's shoulder and squeezed once, engineer's fingers, exactly their father's.

The ward door opened.

Lakshmi Nayagiri was propped against two pillows with her hands loose on the sheet, and she was very still. Her hair had come out of its plait and fanned across the pillow like waves in spacetime.

"Amma?" Ananya took her hand. It was warm. It was the hand that had guided her through her first equations and it was exactly the same hand, and something about it being exactly the same was worse.

Her mother's eyes opened and found her, and were completely clear.

"Thalli, finally!" In Telugu, with a warmth in it and something else under the warmth, a resonance, like a note played in a bigger room than the one she was in. "Always busy in your research."

"Amma, how are you? You have to take it slow."

"Slow?" Her mother smiled. "I have been waiting too long." And then her eyes went past them both, to the window. "The questions are getting quieter, Krishna. Can you feel it? Someone is answering them. One by one. And each answer makes the walls thinner."

She blinked, and came back.

"Bring me your grandmother's books when you go home tonight. The old ones, in the wooden chest."

"Amma—"

"Don't argue with your mother, Vikram." Sternly. Then, to the window again, where the sun was going down over the water tanks in deep purple: "Time moves strangely these days, doesn't it?"

"Ma'am, we need to run some final diagnostics for—" the doctor began, and stopped, because Lakshmi had turned to look at her.

"Doctor," she said, softly, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your medicine." She closed her eyes. "The books, ra. Before it's too late."

The cafeteria downstairs had four tables and a television showing cricket with the sound off. Vikram put a coffee in front of his sister and neither of them touched them.

"What do you think she means about Ajji's books?"

"I don't know." Ananya turned the cup around. "Memory. Confusion from the medication."

"Maybe." He pushed his glasses up with one knuckle. "Remember how Ajji used to say some knowledge comes looking for you, and not the other way round?"

Her phone buzzed. Their father: She's sleeping now. But she mentioned the temples again. The old stories. Come tomorrow morning?

Ananya stood up to go and stopped, because of the wall.

The ward corridor had one light source, a fluorescent panel above the nurses' station, and her mother's shadow was on the wall to the left of the door, and it was to the left of where a shadow thrown by that panel could be. She stood and looked at it for six seconds, counting, because counting was what she had. On the seventh it was where it should be, and had always been where it should be.

She went down in the lift with a man holding a tiffin carrier and a woman crying quietly into a dupatta, and out through the car park, and got on the bike.

Upstairs, on the fifth floor, her mother slept, and the machine beside her wrote a line every second on a roll of paper that nobody would read.