The Staircase of Meru

The clock over the fridge said twenty to two, and Amma was still chanting.

Ananya had her laptop open on the dining table and a printout the ceiling fan kept trying to lift by one corner: a histogram of something that should have been random. She had made it three times, because she did not like it.

It was the third night. Since Ajji died, Amma had kept a short japa at a quarter to twelve, Ajji's hour: ten minutes, fifteen on an anniversary, then the click of the pūjā-room switch and her slippers going down the passage. The family found it sad and did not say so. Amma, the one time Vikram called it her bhakti hour, would not have it: "It's a practice, not a superstition. Like a lab log. You do it on time or you don't do it." Sometimes the japa carried on after she had fallen asleep; Nanna called that sleep-talking, and the tablets stopped it, mostly. On Friday it had still been going at one. On Saturday Ananya had heard it through her wall at half past, and turned over, and told herself it was the weekend.

Tonight she got up.

The pūjā-room door stood open a hand's width. The lamp had burned down to a blue bead. Amma sat on the low plank with her back to the door and her plait undone, the beads moving in her right hand, and what came out of her was longer than the short lines she kept for Ajji's hour, and it had a stride. Ananya knew its shape in her chest the way you know a staircase in the dark.

"Amma," she said. "Amma, it's nearly two."

The chant stopped. Amma turned her head, not her shoulders, and looked at her with perfect calm.

"Velli padukō, thalli," she said. "Inkā konchem undi."

Go and sleep, child. There's a little more left.

It was Ajji's sentence, word for word, in Ajji's level night voice: the voice that used to come through the pūjā-room door in Vidyanagar when Ananya was small and stood outside it in her nightie, and never once went in. Amma hardly ever called her children thalli. That had been Ajji's word.

"Amma. You've been sitting here since twelve."

"Since twelve?" Amma's brow creased, puzzled and patient, as if it were Ananya who had wandered in from a dream. Her hand had not stopped on the beads. "Go to bed, Annu. You have work."

She turned back to the lamp, and before Ananya had decided whether to step into the room, the verse picked up again at the next syllable, where it had left off.

Going in meant taking the beads out of her mother's hand and looking at whatever was in her face when she did, and she could not do that at two in the morning on her own.

She went back to the histogram because she was frightened, and the histogram was something that could be wrong in ways she understood. She binned the gaps finer. The comb came back finer, every tooth in its place. Some time after three the pūjā-room switch clicked, and Amma's slippers went down the passage, unhurried, as on any night.

In the morning Amma made idli, sang along with Nanna's radio, and told Vikram his eyes were red from the phone.

"Did you sleep, Amma?" Ananya said.

"Like a stone." Amma looked pleased with herself, spoon in the chutney. "First time all week. Those tablets, finally."

"You were up till after three. In the pūjā room."

Amma laughed and pointed the spoon at her. "You were dreaming. I was snoring by twelve, ask your father." She went back to the stove, humming. There was not even the guilty pause of someone who half remembers.

When Amma took the idli plate back to the kitchen, Ananya leaned across the table to Nanna, who had the Eenadu open beside his plate.

"Nanna. She doesn't remember."

"Remember what?"

"Last night. She answered me like Ajji, in Ajji's exact words, and this morning there's nothing."

He folded the paper into quarters, then eighths, the way he folded an answer script when the answer was wrong and he had decided not to say so yet.

"It's the sleep-talking," he said. "The tablets will sort it. Give them a week."

"Nanna, she wasn't asleep. She looked at me."

"Give them a week, Annu." He smoothed the folded paper beside his plate and looked at the kitchen door, not at her. "I'll keep an eye."

By her fourth week at Quantace, Ananya had stopped checking her collar in the lift.

She noticed this that same Monday, the seventh of July, somewhere between floors twenty and twenty-four, with a steel tumbler of canteen filter coffee in one hand and a printout in the other. The glass wall of the lift showed Gachibowli under a low grey lid of monsoon cloud, and the woman in the reflection looked like someone who belonged in the building. She did not trust the woman. She drank the coffee anyway.

Srinivas, the decoder man, had given her the surface code in her first week, in four sentences, between spoonfuls from a three-tier dabba. "Qubits make mistakes all the time, madam. So we weave check-qubits through them in a mesh, and the mesh is a spellchecker: it underlines a wrong letter without ever reading the word. My decoder looks at the underlines and works out which letter was wrong. Normal is a steady snowfall of flags, and you only worry when it stops being steady."

The printout was the histogram from the dining table. It was not complicated. That was what worried her about it.

For three weeks the Core team had been fighting a ghost. Every forty minutes or so, the Sunya Core's surface-code patch lit up across its whole width. A hundred-odd qubits flipped together, more flags in one round than the decoder could read, and a logical qubit that should have lived a comfortable eternity of microseconds fell over like a tent with its pole kicked out. Everyone knew what it was. Radiation: a muon from the upper atmosphere, a stray gamma from the concrete, breaking Cooper pairs across the chip. Google had published on it. The standing plan was lead shielding and prayer, in that order.

Ananya had believed it too, for as long as it took her to look at the timestamps.

The Monday stand-up was on floor twenty-four, in a glass room called Varahamihira, because someone in Facilities had been given a list of Indian astronomers and a label maker. Twelve people, one screen. Deshpande stood at the head of the table with a pen she never uncapped.

"Bursts," Deshpande said. "Where are we."

Arjun Menon, the postdoc from IISER Pune who had smirked at "temporal loop" on her first day and had been politely unbearable since, gave the update. Burst rate steady. Shielding quote from Bengaluru. A proposal to move the sample stage four centimetres left, based on a rebar simulation he was clearly proud of.

"Any objections," Deshpande said. It was not a question.

Ananya put her tumbler down. The steel clicked on the glass table, louder than she meant it to.

"They're not cosmic rays," she said.

Twelve heads. Arjun's eyebrows went up and stayed up.

"Dr. Nayagiri," Deshpande said, "we have spoken about vocabulary."

"No time travel. I remember, ma'am." She pushed the printout across. "This is just waiting time. If radiation is hitting the chip, each hit doesn't know about the last one. So the gaps between bursts should look like this."

She took the marker and wrote under Arjun's rebar diagram:

[If the sky is throwing them, the waits forget each other.]

"Short gaps common, long gaps rare, a smooth curve down. That's what cosmic rays look like."

She turned the printout over. On the back was the real histogram.

It was not a curve. It was a comb. Bursts at 2,400 seconds, give or take a hair. Bursts at 4,800. At 7,200. Almost nothing between the teeth.

Arjun leaned in despite himself. "Cosmic rays can't do that."

"No," she said. "They're arriving on a rhythm, and the rhythm is ours. Our syndrome schedule has a supercycle. The same echo sequence, the same idle windows, in the same order, every forty minutes when you count the recalibration block. The bursts sit on its downbeat." She tapped the teeth of the comb. "Something on that chip is being pumped. Two-level defects in the oxide, quasiparticles, I don't know yet. But a periodic drive is building it up until it tips. You'd get the same thing pushing a child on a swing. Push on the beat and it goes higher every time."

"So change the period," Arjun said. He said it as you'd tell someone their shoelace was untied.

"Then it learns the new one. Give it a week." She did not know why she said learns, and she let it stand. "I don't want a different period. I want no period at all."

"Pseudo-random," someone said from the far end. Srinivas.

"Pseudo-random has a period too. A long one, but it has one. And it'll leave gaps we can't calibrate around." She took a breath. "There's an enumeration from Pingala. Chandaḥśāstra, second century BCE, for listing metrical patterns. Light syllable, heavy syllable. The prastāra walks every pattern of length n, in order, one row at a time, and when it's done with n you go to n plus one. It never repeats and it never runs out. Deterministic, so we can calibrate every idle window in advance. Aperiodic, so nothing can dance to it." She put the marker down. "Light is a short idle, heavy is a long one. I already wrote the scheduler. It's forty lines."

The silence had the texture of Prof. Mehta's review meetings, just before he said interesting in the voice that meant no.

Deshpande picked up the printout. She looked at the comb for a long time. Then she looked at Ananya.

"Bindu first," she said. "Twelve qubits. If it runs twenty-four hours clean, you get a Core window on Thursday night. Srinivas, give her the decoder hooks. Arjun, hold the rebar."

That was all. The meeting moved on to the cleanroom rota.

Bindu failed on Tuesday. Not the schedule; her own calibration of the long idle, off by eleven nanoseconds, so that the Ramsey fringes on qubit seven came out smeared like a thumb-print on a spectacle lens. She sat on the test-lab floor with her back against the rack and wrote in the small square hand she had used since she was fourteen:

8 July, 16:52. Q7 fringes smeared, runners out of step. Not the schedule. Me. Long idle mis-set by 11 ns: I used last week's frequency. The chip had moved and I hadn't. Note: the chip moves. Re-measure before every run, not after.

On Wednesday Bindu ran clean from midnight to midnight, then lost qubit three to a genuine gamma hit early on Thursday. She felt something close to affection for it. It was the sky's actual business.

The Security Operations Centre on floor forty-three had twelve wall clocks, one for each city where Quantace had a data centre, and Vikram had long ago stopped believing any of them. Singapore ran eleven seconds fast. Frankfurt had been stuck at a quarter past nine since a firmware update in May, and Deepak had garlanded it with plastic marigolds and declared it the SOC's spirit clock.

At 10:20 on a wet Wednesday, Vikram's anomaly model coughed.

It was his baby, built out of spite and energy drinks in his first year: an unsupervised model that learned what normal looked like on every Quantace cluster. When it saw a shape it had never seen, it raised a soft yellow flag, because red made Raghav hold meetings.

The flag was on Kaveri-3, the optimisation cluster on the server floor: signal timings for the smart-traffic contract, rosters for the CSR hospitals, which ambulance goes where. Past a few thousand jobs, the best solvers in the world thought for days and came back with within three percent, please don't ask me again.

A nurse-rostering instance. Four thousand one hundred shifts across eleven hospitals: no nurse on three consecutive nights, Sister Mary never with Sister Lalitha, the Warangal clinic's single anaesthetist needing Sundays off for church. The solver had returned a roster in 0.8 seconds, and on the line he always read first, the distance between the roster you had and the best one that could possibly exist:

gap: 0.0000%

"Karthik."

"Busy, bro."

"You're watching reels."

"I'm researching social engineering," said Karthik, not looking up. "This aunty is being scammed very creatively. It's educational."

Karthik rolled over, still holding the phone. Deepak came with him, because Karthik and Deepak moved as a unit, like a pair of chappals.

"Proven optimal," Vikram said. "Like someone solved the Sunday Sudoku in the time it takes to look at it, and then showed their working."

The model had logged forty-one of these since the middle of June. All on Kaveri. He compared the flags with the building's other telemetry—power draw, chiller loads, the Quantum Research job queue. They clustered in small heaps when the little test fridge on twenty-three was running, and tall heaps when the big machine downstairs was cold and working.

"Bug in the logging," Deepak offered.

"Then it's a very well-behaved bug. It only lies when the fridge is on."

At twelve he took it to Raghav, who listened in his glass office with his fingers steepled and his navy suit dry. His suits were always dry.

"Is that a threat vector?"

"It's a..." Vikram found only the honest word. "It's a weirdness vector."

"Is anything leaving the building? Anybody in it who shouldn't be?"

"No. Not that I can see."

"Then it's not your vector." Raghav unsteepled his fingers, which was the office equivalent of standing up. "Kaveri is Quantum Research's allocation, and Quantum Research is not our floor. If something's writing optimal answers, the hospitals get better rosters and the nurses get their Sundays. You want a raise this quarter, Vikram. Spend July on the real attacks. Informational. Closed."

Vikram closed the ticket, but kept the forty-one job IDs: he copied them into a text file on his personal laptop and named it sunday_anaesthetist.txt, so that nobody searching for anything sinister would ever open it. Then he looked up the Quantum Research calendar, which CySec could read and was not supposed to care about. Thursday 21:30–03:30. Core. QEC schedule test. Owner: Deshpande. He decided to stay late on Thursday.

Deshpande brought her down at half past nine and stayed, because after ten the lift answered only to senior palms.

Nag sat at console one. Srinivas had three, his dabba open beside the decoder. Arjun was on a stool by the readout rack, re-measuring the long idle he had volunteered to redo, which was as close as he would come to an apology. Deshpande stood behind them with her capped pen.

Nag was humming. It took Ananya a minute to place it: Endaro mahānubhāvulu, the Tyāgarāja every aunty sang at weddings, under his breath, his forefinger marking the tāla on the console's edge. Every beat fell on the pulse tube's chuff. She watched his finger through twenty of them, and it did not drift.

"You keep time with the pump," she said.

"After so long, madam, it keeps time with me." He gave her the pleasant smile and went on humming.

"Old schedule off at the end of this cycle," Deshpande said. "Pingala on. Srinivas."

"Hooks live."

"Arjun."

"Long idle's good. Good-good. I checked twice."

"Nag."

"Running, madam."

On the monitor the syndrome pattern changed character: short idle, long, short, short, long, the prastāra walking its rows. Nobody spoke. The first burst came eleven minutes in, one, and the room let out a breath together.

Karthik left at eleven, telling Vikram he was married to a laptop and the laptop was cheating on him.

The floor emptied to the night shift and the rain. Vikram had the anomaly model on one screen and the chiller loads on the other, and the chiller said the big fridge was cold and working, which on every night since June had meant flags.

One came at ten to ten. After that, nothing. Kaveri's jobs came back the way honest jobs came back: gap 2.8 per cent, gap 1.9, gap 3.1, solvers sweating for hours. At one he ate the cold half of Deepak's vada pav and found himself, absurdly, disappointed, like a man whose ghost had stopped turning up.

Over the six hours, three bursts, spaced at 11, 94 and 203 minutes: the waits had forgotten each other again. Poisson. The comb had gone. Logical error per cycle dropped by a third, a number Srinivas refused to say aloud in case it heard him. Deshpande said, "Write it up," and sat down in a chair by console four for the first time all night.

At half past three the window closed and the Core went back to the old tidy schedule for the overnight maintenance run. Ananya was winding a cable when the fourth burst came. It landed on the old downbeat, to the second, as though it had been waiting outside a door she had shut and knew when it would open again. At console one, Nag's finger came down on the beat with it.

She did not put it in the log. The only word she had for it was learns, and she had already used that word once this week, in front of twelve people.

At 03:40 the yellow flag came up on Kaveri, single: an ambulance-routing job for the CSR hospitals, gap: 0.0000%, after six clean hours.

Vikram wrote the time on the back of his hand in biro, the way he had in school, and then typed it into sunday_anaesthetist.txt. It did not occur to him that the six clean hours had been his sister's.

At lunch on Friday Arjun bought her biryani, because, he said, the histogram had told him he owed it, and asked what a heavy syllable was, because he had been saying words out loud in the washroom all morning like a madman. On the way back they passed Deshpande on a call in a glass room. She looked up, found Ananya's face, and gave one short nod, like a Carnatic teacher marking the end of a tāla. From Deshpande, Arjun said in the lift, it was practically a garland.

On Friday night the rain stopped long enough for Vikram to take over the terrace.

The Tarnaka house had a flat concrete roof with a knee-high parapet, a Sintex tank on a steel stand, and a view, if you stood on the tank's ladder, of the Osmania arts college dome sitting in the dark like an upturned bowl. Amma's washing had been banished to the stairwell. In its place was the e-bike, carried up two flights for fifty rupees and a Thums Up, its front fairing off and a black aluminium bar clamped where the headlight should be.

"Five thousand lumens," he said, before she had even sat down.

"Legal?"

"Legal-ish." He wiped his hands on his shorts. "In the rain you'll see my indicators from Mettuguda. Arrows on the road, Akka. Actual arrows, projected. Left, right, braking. Auto anna comes from behind, he sees a giant white arrow on the tar, he understands his life has been wrong."

"He'll overtake you from the left out of respect."

"Respect is a lot to ask. I'll settle for the arrow."

She sat on an upturned paint bucket with two cups of Irani chai and samosas from the Tarnaka junction, gone lukewarm in the climb and perfect anyway. He had his laptop open on the parapet. On the screen, beside a wall of firmware code, was a small video window: a grey fisheye view of the terrace from above, the tank, the bike, the top of her own head.

She looked up. A cheap white camera was zip-tied to the tank stand, its blue light blinking.

"You've put CCTV on Amma's washing."

"I'm testing beam spread. It needs a camera." He took his chai. "Also, since you're a big-shot now, I'll show you something. Educational. For a corporate person."

The feed ran through what he called "the bench", a CySec test sandbox he could VPN into from home: a mock-up of the building's monitoring stack, fake badge log, fake camera wall, scrolling like the real thing.

"Say you are a bad man," he said. "Say you want to walk through a room and not be on the camera. You don't cut the camera. Cutting it is loud, it raises a flag. You feed it itself." He typed. "Take the last ninety seconds of nothing. Nobody moving, just the tank being a tank. Loop it. Stitch the timestamps so they keep counting. Do the same to the logs, replay the quiet ones with new times. Now watch."

He hit enter and stood up, and walked into the middle of the terrace, and did the full Allu Arjun, beard-stroke and all.

On the laptop, the terrace was empty. The tank stood there being a tank. The timestamp in the corner ticked forward, second by honest second, and the badge log under it scrolled on with nobody's name in it.

"Thaggedhe le," Vikram said to the empty screen.

Ananya found she was laughing, and also that the back of her neck had gone cold.

"How long does it hold?"

"Till someone compares it with a second source. A door sensor, a power meter, a human looking out of a window. That's the weakness. Good SOCs cross-check." He came back and killed the loop, and there he was again on the screen, sweaty and pleased. "Don't do this, obviously."

"Obviously."

"I'm serious. I'll be the one who has to catch you."

"Vicky, I have enough trouble making twelve qubits behave. I'm not breaking into buildings."

"Say it with an arrow," he said, and went back to his firmware.

For a while there was only the work. He soldered with his tongue between his teeth, as he had since he was nine. She checked his current limiter because she could not help it, found he had set it by feel, and fixed it, and he let her. Down on the road a scooter went by playing a Balakrishna dialogue on its speaker at full volume, and they both mouthed along to the last line without looking at each other. Somewhere towards Lalaguda a DG set coughed and caught.

"Akka."

"Hm."

He was looking at the bike, not at her. "The application."

She waited. They had not talked about it since June, since the day she found out.

"Everyone thinks I did it because I believed in you," he said. "Amma thinks that. Nanna told his students. 'My son had such faith in his sister.'" He put the solder wire down carefully, as if it could go off. "I did believe in you. That's not why I did it."

"Vicky."

"I was scared." He said it fast, to get it out before he could dress it up. "The CSR hospital does the infusions free, fine, but the MRIs aren't free, and the neurologist in Banjara Hills isn't free, and Nanna is taking tuitions in a chair with his shoulders like that. I did the numbers one night. Six months. Maybe eight. And you were waiting for Mehta to reply to an email. You'd have waited a year to be asked properly." He finally looked at her. "If Amma gets worse and we can't pay, I didn't want it to be because I was polite."

There were several things she could have said. That he had had no right. That she had locked herself in a stall on twenty-two on her first day, too furious and too relieved to cry. That he had been paying the electricity bill since he was twenty-four and she had let him.

She drank the last of the cold chai instead. Then she reached over and flicked his ear, hard, the way she had when he was six.

"Ow!"

"That's for forging my signature."

"I improved your signature. Yours looks like a seismograph."

"And this," she said, and put her head on his shoulder, briefly, where it had not been in years. His shirt smelled of solder flux and rain. "This is for the other thing."

He did not say anything. After a moment his fingers tapped on the parapet beside the laptop, the way they did when he was thinking: a long, a short, two shorts, a long. Heavy, light, light, heavy.

Her own hand, without asking her, answered on the bucket's rim.

He went still. "You remember that?"

"Of course I remember," she said, and realised as she said it that until this second she had not.

June 2014. The Vidyanagar house, the morning of her first day of college, and the courtyard neem throwing its small leaves into everything.

Ajji sat on the cement ledge with a heap of jasmine buds in her lap, stringing them two by two, crosswise, the way Mysuru women did. Her hands were quick. Ananya only understood years later that at sixty-nine they had looked much older, the knuckles swollen like tamarind pods. Ananya, eighteen, in a new salwar and a mood, sat beside her with an Osmania ID card on a red lanyard and a bus to catch at nine.

"Before any study, the first line," Ajji said. "You know it. Say it with me properly, not the way you say it to get to breakfast."

sarasvatī namastubhyaṃ varade kāmarūpiṇī

vidyārambhaṃ kariṣyāmi siddhir bhavatu me sadā

Ajji's voice took the verse as water takes a slope. Ananya's came in behind, flat, a beat late on kāma*, and Ajji stopped and made her do it again, and again, until the eight syllables of each quarter sat where they should, the fifth light, the sixth heavy, a small click at the end of every line.*

"Good. Now it's yours." Ajji put the jasmine aside and reached into the fold of her sari at the waist, and brought out something on a thin silver chain. "And this."

It was the pendant, which Ananya had never once seen off Ajji's throat: a disc of old silver the size of a five-rupee coin, worn soft at the edges, and cut into its face, so fine you had to tilt it to the light, a Sri Yantra, triangles locked into each other around a single point.

"Ajji, no."

"Yes." She put it over Ananya's head herself, lifting her plait out from under the chain. "Do you know what it is?"

"A yantra. A diagram."

"A Meru," Ajji said. "A mountain seen from above. Go down its steps and you arrive at the centre. Go up and you arrive at the centre also." She tapped the disc once with a jasmine-sticky finger. "Pingala drew his counting as a Meru too. Every pattern, step by step. You'll find it in your combinatorics, you'll think you discovered it, and you'll be very rude to me about it."

The wooden chest was already open on the veranda behind her, the red silk folded back, the smell of sandalwood coming off it in the heat. She lifted out a bundle of birch bark, brown and thin, tied between two wooden boards, and untied it on her knees with the care she gave the milk when it was about to boil over.

From under the dining table inside came a sound: tap, taap, tap tap, taap. Vikram, sixteen, on the cool floor with his textbook on his face, drumming the table leg. Without looking round, Ajji tapped on the board in her lap. The drumming stopped, surprised, and then answered, and for a few breaths the grandmother and the boy had a conversation in long and short that neither of them found at all strange.

Then Ajji read, slowly, finger under the line, so that Ananya could follow the old characters.

iyaṃ visṛṣṭir yata ābabhūva yadi vā dadhe yadi vā na

yo asyādhyakṣaḥ parame vyoman so aṅga veda yadi vā na veda

"From where this creation came," Ajji said, "whether it made itself or did not, the one who watches over it in the highest heaven, he surely knows." She paused. "Or perhaps he does not know."

And Ananya, eighteen, with a bus at nine, rolled her eyes. She remembered doing it. She remembered choosing to.

"Ajji, it's just a hymn that doesn't know the answer."

Ajji tied the boards closed, one knot, two, and looked at her with an expression Ananya would spend eleven years failing to name.

"The hymn asks a question, thalli. It's not ignorance. It's protection." She laid her hand flat on the bundle. "The question is the shield. The day someone answers it completely, the shield breaks."

"You'll see." Ajji began to knot the jasmine into Ananya's plait. "You'll do your physics and you'll find her in the equations and you'll think, aha, got her. Remember this. Maths is one of her languages. Not her name."

At the gate Ajji pressed her thumb to Ananya's forehead, where the kumkum was, and to the pendant. Ananya came home that night full of the lab, and told Ajji none of it properly, because there would be other nights.

There were, for sixteen months.

On the terrace, eleven years later, the jasmine was gone. She could smell it anyway, clear as the rain coming: the courtyard, the thread, the thumb on her forehead. She turned the pendant over in her fingers, and it was the temperature of her skin, and she held it until Vikram, without asking, passed her the other half of his samosa.

Sharath dreamed the ward again, and this time it was clean.

The paint was fresh. A ceiling fan turned that had never turned in 2002. Priya sat cross-legged on the bed in her school uniform, and she was not seizing, and she was not bleeding, and she looked at him the way she used to across the Class X merit list, amused that he had come second again.

"You're trying to solve me, anna," she said. She held up her pencil and turned it end over end. "But I'm not a problem. I'm a question." The pencil stopped. "And questions don't survive their answers."

He reached for her hand. The distance to the bed was exactly the length of his arm, and then exactly the length of his arm again.

He woke at 04:11 in the penthouse, in the grey. The graphacer was already on, curved behind his right ear; he had not taken it off. On the electro-chromic glass it drew his breath as a line, and counted it for him in soft blue numerals, eleven, twelve, thirteen, each breath the same length as the last.

He lay still and let it count. It was the most peaceful he had felt in years.

Dinner on Sunday was pesarattu, because Vikram had asked and Amma was well enough to be bullied. She stood at the tawa with the spatula like a sceptre, and the batter hissed, and the kitchen was loud with the extractor and the pressure cooker and Nanna's radio playing an old Telugu film song half a tone flat.

"Amma, where's the..." Vikram began, turning towards the fridge.

"No, ra, the chutney's in the steel dabba. Second shelf." She did not look round.

He found it. He came back. He opened his mouth.

"Ginger's already in it."

He shut his mouth. Nanna laughed; Vikram grinned and flung up his hands. "Okay, okay, mind-reader. Amma, one more thing and then I'll..."

"Yes, you can have the crispy one." She slid it onto his plate, golden, the edges lacy. "I made it for you already."

Then she laughed. It was her own laugh, bright and teasing. She looked round the table for someone to share it with.

Nobody else did. Vikram held his plate. Nanna's hand had stopped on the wheel of his chair. Ananya's fingers had found the pendant, and it was warm, warmer than her skin, warmer than the kitchen.

"What?" Amma said, and the laugh went out of her face, and she turned back to the tawa. "Eat. It'll go cold."

Ananya looked at Nanna. Nanna was looking at Amma's back, and his mouth had the shape of the tablets without the words. Afterwards, when the plates were done and nobody had said anything, Vikram went up to the terrace to put the bike away before the rain, and Ananya followed him, because she did not want to be on her own.

He switched the projector on to check the seal. A white bar of light went up from the parapet into the underside of the cloud. The rain had started again, fine and slanting, and the beam caught it: a thousand bright threads falling through the light.

For one second, perhaps two, the threads stopped slanting. They fell straight, all of them, in even lines, like something being counted.

Then the wind came off the Osmania campus, and the rain went ragged and ordinary again.

"Did you see that?" Vikram said.

See what was right there, the easy answer, the one that would let them both go down to bed. She had used it on herself at the pūjā-room door, and at console one, and at the dinner table an hour ago.

"Yes," she said.

He let out a breath as if she had handed him something heavy. He did not switch the beam off. He held it up into the rain, the way he used to hold the torch over her broken cycle chain, and she took out her phone and, while he watched, wrote down the time.