Echoes

The neuro ward of the CSR hospital was on the fourth floor, and at half past twelve its corridor smelled of phenyl and somebody's filter coffee.

"Annu?" Nanna sat in his wheelchair outside the ward door, prayer beads in one hand, his silver-rimmed glasses pushed up into his hair the way he wore them when he had given up reading. "She's been asking for you."

Ananya knelt beside the chair and took his free hand. "What are the doctors saying, Nanna?"

"Many things." He smiled. "All in big medical terms that mean they don't know." He turned the beads once. "She changed the chant, Annu. And then she fell, in the middle of the line, like somebody switched her off."

"Dr. Nayagiri?" A young doctor had come out of the ward, clipboard in hand. She glanced at Ananya. "You must be the daughter. Dr. Nayagiri as well?"

"Different field. Experimental physics."

The doctor nodded. "Her vitals are stable. Dr. Reddy will see her at eight. MRI, EEG, and a lumbar puncture, and we've started acyclovir in case it's a viral encephalitis, until the PCR comes back. He'll also send an antibody panel." She said it the way people said routine, which meant it wasn't.

Vikram came down the corridor with two paper cups of coffee and his Quantace T-shirt on inside out under a jacket. He squeezed Ananya's shoulder and didn't say anything, which was how she knew how frightened he was.

Amma lay propped on two pillows, her plait undone across the sheet and a cannula taped to the back of her hand.

"Amma?" Ananya took the other hand. It was warm and dry and perfectly ordinary.

Her mother's eyes opened, dark and clear. "Thalli, finally!" she said. "Always busy in your research."

"Amma, how are you? You need to take it slow," Ananya whispered.

"Slow?" Her mother smiled. "I've been waiting too long." Her gaze went past them to the black window and the car-park lights. "The questions are getting quieter, Krishna. Can you feel it? Someone is answering them. One by one. And each answer makes the walls thinner."

Nanna flinched, the way he did when the chair caught his bad shoulder. The beads stopped in his fingers. He looked at the window as if something might be standing in it, and then down at his own knees.

Amma blinked, and was Amma. "Annu. Bring me your Ammamma's books. The old ones, in the wooden chest."

"Amma..." Vikram said.

"Don't argue with your mother, Vikram." She closed her eyes. "The books, ra. Before it's too late."

"It's one in the morning, Amma. Nobody is bringing anybody any books," Ananya said, too sharply. Vikram gave her a look across the bed. She didn't apologise.

She knew where the books were. Ajji's chest had lived under Ananya's bed since the October Ajji died, because nobody else in the Tarnaka house had room for it and nobody else had wanted to be the one to open it. She had opened it once, properly, five years ago, on a bad night in her second year of the PhD. In the top books she had found a few loose pages in a dead Englishman's brown copperplate, Blackwood's, and built a career's worth of trouble on them. She had pushed the chest back under the bed and kept her suitcase in front of it.

By four that afternoon they had moved Amma to the bed by the window, and the neem outside laid its shade across her sheet. Her phone lay by her hand. Somebody on the colony WhatsApp group had forwarded a turmeric cure for brain fever, and she had already answered it with a NIMHANS link and a polite thumbs-up, which from Amma was not a kindness.

"You brought them." She was sitting up against the pillows, and her voice was stronger than it had been all night. "Your Ammamma's treasure box."

Ananya had gone home after Dr. Reddy's round, slept two hours in her clothes, and dragged the chest out from behind her suitcase without letting herself think about why. She set it on the visitors' chair. It had crossed the city on her lap in an auto. She undid the brass clasps. The top books she knew. Below them was everything she had never touched: Osmania exercise books gone soft at the corners, a bundle tied with an old sari border, Ajji's Telugu running into Devanagari on every cover.

The smell came up out of the wood, camphor and old paper, and with it Ajji, finding her at ten on the floor of the Vidyanagar house with a borrowed physics book open on her knees. By rights she was their Ammamma, but at fifty-one she had declared herself too young for the word, and to the children she had been Ajji ever since. Amma and Nanna still said your Ammamma, as if quietly correcting her. Ajji had stood over her a long moment and said, to nobody, "Like your mother. Always nose in books instead of playing." At ten Ananya had taken it for a scold. Kneeling by the chest now, she was less sure.

"Amma, what is all this?" Vikram lifted out an exercise book as if it might be hot.

"History. Warnings." Amma's eyes went to the window. "Your Ammamma understood first. Why do you think she did both, Sanskrit and physics? The barriers aren't walls, children. They're questions. Where nobody asks anything any more, there is nothing left to keep the door shut."

Nanna turned his chair a few degrees away from her, towards the corridor.

"Amma, enough about doors. You had a lumbar puncture this morning," Ananya said, in the voice she used on first-years. She heard it and didn't soften it. If her mother kept talking like this, somebody would write it in a chart, and then it would be true.

"Akka, you sound like Mr Sequeira," Vikram said, to make somebody laugh. "St. Joseph's, Habsiguda. PT master, moustache like a shoe brush. 'Nayagiri, questions after the third lap.'"

Nanna laughed, once, and Amma smiled at Vikram as if she had never said anything about doors. "Listen to Manager-garu, Annu," she said. "He has done a leadership course."

Dr. Reddy came in at half past four with the file under his arm and sat on the end of the bed, which Ananya decided to take as a good sign.

"Antibody panel is back," he said. "NMDA-receptor antibodies, serum and CSF, both negative. The rest of the spinal fluid is normal. HSV PCR is negative, so we are stopping the acyclovir. MRI is clean, and it matches her 2023 scans from the CSR MS-screening camp, which were routine and clean as well. No seizures on the EEG." He closed the file. "I can't tell you why she fell. I can tell you what it isn't, and that's a long list."

Nanna let out a breath and the beads started moving again.

"Negative. Good," Amma said, to the window. "In OGH they never even sent it."

Nanna's hand closed on the beads.

"Amma, when were you ever in OGH?" Ananya said. Her mother had said it as if she remembered the ward. Dr. Reddy glanced from one to the other and wrote something down.

"One more night for observation," he said. "If she's like this in the morning, she goes home after my round. Follow-up in my OPD in two weeks."

"Sir, can I get a copy of the EEG?" Vikram asked. "The raw file, not the report."

Dr. Reddy looked at him over the file. "Software?"

"Software."

"Records office, ground floor. Bring a pen drive and don't send it to anyone on WhatsApp." He stood, touched Amma's foot through the sheet the way the old doctors did, and went out.

Amma was already asleep, her hand open on the blanket, the cannula gone.

At nine that night Vikram sat in the hospital canteen with a cold chai and his laptop, running Amma's EEG from that morning through a pattern-matching script he had written for work and never meant to point at his mother. The tea-boy was stacking chairs. The match came back at a quarter past.

He checked it twice against a recording of Ajji's recitation he still had on his phone from 2014. The bursts in Amma's trace were not random. Their long and short intervals ran isomorphic to the heavy and light syllables of a chant, and each cycle was a little shorter than the last, as if the brain were optimising the rhythm. He ran it a third time with the labels stripped off.

The oscillations scanned as Sanskrit metre.