Ancient Algorithms

Wed 10 Sep, 23:46

akka u up? dont answer. frankfurt clock still stuck at 9:15, nobody fixes it, i love this office. tell u at breakfast. tell amma i ate (i did not)

The text came in while she was asleep with Ajji's 1994 register face down on her chest, and she did not read it until the morning, and after that, for a long time, she read nothing else.

The diaries had been in the chest the whole time, under the birch bark, under the red silk. They were not the exercise books. She had been through those twenty-two in August and stopped at that layer; beneath them, in what she had taken for the chest's cardboard lining, the diaries had been waiting ten years for someone in the house to stop being too busy.

There were fourteen of them, long ruled registers with marbled covers, 1976 to 2015. At eleven at night on the first of September Ananya was sitting cross-legged inside a line of them on her floor with a pencil behind her ear, tea gone cold by her knee, and the table fan turning its face back and forth.

Ajji wrote in four languages and moved between them mid-sentence: Telugu for her temper, Dakhni for the bazaar, Sanskrit in small upright Devanagari for the verses, and English, in the looping convent hand of Mysuru, for mathematics.

By midnight she had stopped reading them as diaries.

It was the arrangement that gave it away. On the left-hand pages Ajji had written verses plain, the saṃhitā, as any temple chanted them. On the right she had written them again and again, pulled apart and braided: the pada, each word alone; the krama, in overlapping pairs; the jaṭā, each pair forward, backward and forward again. And then, filling whole spreads in pencil so dense it looked like weaving, the ghana.

Ananya had learnt the ghana as a child, like a skipping rhyme. ab ba abc cba abc. Ajji used to tap it on the dining table with two fingers, and Vikram, aged six, would tap it back with a spoon until someone took the spoon away. It was a thing the old people did so that the words would not go wrong.

She wrote the first line of the Nāsadīya on the back of a Quantace printout, pada by pada, so she could see the bones.

na / asat / āsīt / no / sat / āsīt / tadānīm

Then the ghana of the first three, as Ajji had it on the right-hand page:

na asat · asat na · na asat āsīt · āsīt asat na · na asat āsīt

Each word came back in a new neighbourhood, forwards and backwards. Swap one syllable and you did not break one pattern; you broke five, and the copies that were still right outvoted the wrong one. Three thousand years before anyone in Bell Labs had a word for it, somebody on a riverbank had built a repetition code with interleaving and taught it to children as a way of not getting scolded. Srinivas's spellchecker, in a form you could chant.

She wrote it down properly, because that was how she thanked things.

$$P_{\text{fail}} \sim p^{\lceil k/2 \rceil}$$

[If each recitation slips with probability p and a word is said k times, the slip survives only if most of the copies go wrong together. Say it ten times in ten neighbourhoods, and a mistake has almost nowhere to live.]

"Okay, Ajji," she said aloud. "Okay. So it's a code."

The fan turned its face towards her and away.

It was not only a code, and that was what kept her on the floor until the tea had a skin on it. A code protects a message: you send it, it arrives, you stop. Ajji's right-hand pages did not stop. The ghana of the Nāsadīya ran for twenty-two pages in the 1987 register and picked up in 1988 from a different syllable, and in the margins were small numbers that Ananya took for page references until she saw the pattern. They were breath counts. Ajji had timed each line in breaths and in heartbeats, two fingers on her own wrist, and the numbers were never the same twice. In the margin of one spread, in English: Slower tonight. Fever. Good. The thing prefers me steady.

Ananya read that line four times, then went back over the breath counts instead of the verse.

The meter was fixed, heavy and light syllables any child could learn: that was the protocol. But the timing came from a body, a woman with a fever in a Vidyanagar kitchen at four in the morning, breathing the way she happened to breathe that night.

She wrote under the equation, in her lab-log hand: The meter is the protocol. The chanter is the key.

Then she crossed out key, because a key is a thing you can copy, and wrote it again anyway, because she could not think of a better word.

On the facing page of the same register, beside a column of breath counts, Ajji had drawn a small box in pencil and written inside it, and underlined it twice:

We are not locks. We are the noise the lock cannot predict.

Some things could not be predicted, only lived through; the textbooks called them irreducible. "A recited verse you can know before it comes," she told the fan, which was the only one listening. "A composed one, made up from what's in front of you, nobody can. Not even the one composing."

The last thing she found that night was folded into eighths inside the back board of the 1976 notebook: thick foxed paper in a man's brown copperplate, most of it bled past reading. At the bottom, in a shakier hand: The equation is not written on the wall. The wall is written on the equation. W.B. Under it, in blue ballpoint, Ajji: Gauri's wrapper. Kept. The Razdans still keep the temple in the valley, Gauri said, if anyone in this family ever wants to ask. Don't know what he meant. I think he did not either, at the end.

She folded Blackwood back into his eighths. From her parents' room down the corridor came the ceiling fan, Nanna turning over with the grunt his back cost him, and under it, so low it could have been the fan, her mother's voice. Her hand stayed on the folded paper. She looked back at the breath counts in the open 1987 register.

She did not go and listen, that night or the next. The reason was that if it was the ghana, she would have to ask what it was for, and since Golconda she had suspected the answer had her name in it.

At ten to three on the second night, Vikram came in without knocking, which was how he knocked, holding a steel vessel of Maggi by its handle with a kitchen towel and two forks sticking out of it like antennae.

"Nobody in this house eats. I've decided to be the adult."

"You made it in the pressure pan."

"The saucepan has a history with me." He sat down inside her line of registers without disturbing a single one, a skill he had had since he was four and had never used for good.

She had told him about the ghana at dinner, in a rush, while Amma went on eating and smiling at a point just past Ananya's shoulder. Vikram had said, "Send me the scans," and gone to his room. Now he opened his laptop on the bed and turned it towards her.

"Don't be angry," he said.

"Why would I be angry."

"Because I used Kaveri-3."

His optimisation cluster, the one that was supposed to be watching Quantace's telemetry and nothing else.

"Those are Ajji's diaries. On the company—"

"It was idle, Akka. Two hundred GPUs getting cold. I logged in on the VPN, gave it Ajji's scans and your pāṭha rules and every complexity textbook I could find, and told it: sort these. By how hard they are to find, not how hard they are to check." He pushed his glasses up. "Only three hours. Look at what it did before you scold me."

It was a tree, drawn upside down, as Ajji's mathematics would have drawn a mountain. Across the wide base ran pale nodes: sorting, shortest path, a pendulum, the tides. P, the model had written. Things you can check and also find, quickly. Bedrock.

Above it was a darker band of stranger nodes: a glass pane, a folded protein, a Sudoku, a password, a face. NP, it said. Easy to check. Hard to find. Against each node the model had set a fragment from Ajji's scans where the prosody matched, and the ghana sat across that whole band like scaffolding on a building going up in Kondapur.

"It says everything in the middle stays standing because nobody can find the shortcut down," Vikram said. He waited for her to look at him.

"And above it?"

He scrolled. "I was getting there."

The tree narrowed as it climbed, the labels grew less certain, and at the very top there was a single node with no children and no parents, and inside it one syllable.

ka

"I didn't put that there," Vikram said. "It found it in the 1994 book. Ajji's written it in a box, alone, and under it, 'the question that contains all questions'. So it made that the apex." He looked at her sideways. "Big claim for a single letter."

"A pronoun," she said, and could hear Ajji saying it. "Ka. Who. Kasmai devāya haviṣā vidhema. To which god shall we offer. The whole hymn keeps asking and never says. And then later people just made the question into a god. They called him Ka."

"A god called Who."

"Yes."

"That's the most Telugu-family thing I've ever heard. Nobody knows who he is, everyone's scared to ask, so we give him prasadam."

She laughed so hard she knocked her tea over, and Vikram saved the 1987 register with a speed she had only seen him use for the last piece of Double Ka Meetha. From down the corridor Nanna called, "Pillalu, it's three o'clock," in the voice he had used when they were nine and seven, and that set them off again, face down, silently, shaking.

Later, when the vessel was empty, Ananya drew the laptop towards her again.

"If somebody solved the top one," she said.

"Akka, I told it to sort them. Not solve them."

"I know. And this isn't a problem. It's a question." She kept her eyes on the screen.

"But say somebody did," Vikram said.

"Then it all comes down," she said. "Everything under it becomes easy. Glass, proteins, passwords. Faces."

He nodded slowly. He was not smiling now. In the corner of the screen a line of small grey text, which she did not bother to read, said the run had been archived under his employee ID.

"Chalo," he said, and stood, and took the vessel. "Goodnight, Dr. Nayagiri. Please don't wake up Ka."

On the third night she did go and listen.

She sat on the cool floor of the corridor outside her parents' room, and through the door came the fan, Nanna's uneven breathing, and under them the other sound.

She had called it muttering for three months. The doctors had called it perseveration. She recorded forty minutes. Then she went back to her room, put in her earphones, slowed the recording to half speed, and laid the 1987 register open next to her laptop.

na asat · asat na · na asat āsīt · āsīt asat na · na asat āsīt

Her mother's voice, barely there, a breath with consonants in it. Ananya followed Ajji's pencil with her finger. Amma reached the end of the verse and went on into the second in ghana, forward and back, and the pauses were never the same twice. Once there was a cough, and the cough was folded into the rhythm and the rhythm went on.

It was the ghana of the Nāsadīya, word-perfect against a notebook her mother had not opened in ten years, whispered in her sleep by a woman who, some days, could not remember whether she had eaten lunch.

At six she went to the kitchen, where Nanna was sitting at the table in his wheelchair with his fountain pen and the maroon register open in front of him, as he had every morning since July. He looked up. Whatever was in her face made him cap the pen.

"Since when has it been running this long," she said.

Everyone in the house knew the habit, the ten minutes at Ajji's hour, the door clicking to. She had not known it was the ghana, or that it went on after her mother was asleep.

"Since your Ammamma." He did not ask what she meant. "Since the October. First I thought it was grief, talking in her sleep. Then it didn't stop." He turned the register towards her with two fingers. "The tablets make it stop. She said the house was too quiet with them. She stopped taking them in August. I let her."

"You let her." It came out of her louder than she meant. "She can't find the word for the neem, Nanna, and you let her?"

He looked at the pen in his hand. When he spoke it was to the pen.

"And because when she chants, you come home happy."

She watched it cost him, the colour going up his neck to his ears, a man of fifty-four caught keeping a column on his own wife and daughter and liking one of the numbers.

At Golconda she had photographed one page and let him take the book back. Now he gave her the whole of August without being asked, the columns he had ruled in pencil: date, time, what Lakshmi said or failed to remember, and at the far right, headed A., the hours Ananya had come home. She had never told him when she ran the Core. He had guessed from when she came in and how she looked.

The photograph stopped at the sixteenth. The page did not.

18 Aug. L. put the new strip back in the drawer, full. Said the house was too quiet.

20 Aug. A. home early. No run. L. sang in the kitchen, the real song. Japa from 11:45 till after four.

22 Aug. A.'s best run. L. could not remember our wedding. I told her. She said, "That's a lovely story."

29 Aug. A. at Core all night. L. said the neem was "cheaper". Did not know what she meant. She did not either.

Ananya read across, and the August column lined up under her finger. Her best run had come four days after the tablets went back in the drawer. Every night Ananya had felt the Core slide towards an answer it had no right to find, her mother had been in this house holding the same verse shut, and since the eighteenth with nothing to dull the cost. The wedding was the price of the best run. Ananya had stood in the Sanctum that Friday and been proud.

Under the ruled columns, small, he had written A column is not a cause?

"Nanna," she said. "It's me."

"I don't know that."

"I went back on the Friday. After that Wednesday."

"You were home on Wednesday."

"I thought it would help. You wrote what happened."

Her finger went back up the page to till after four. She had heard it through the wall. Nag's message had come in the morning: the point had drifted and had not fully recovered. She had booked Friday because she was frightened of leaving it alone. The recording had not made that danger go away. It had let her hear what Amma was doing inside it.

"Then what will you do?" he asked.

"Ask for leave."

He looked towards the bedroom, then back at her. "Will that help her?"

She wanted to say yes.

"I don't know."

He waited, his pen still capped. She looked at the question mark under his columns.

"If I go back because I'm frightened to stop, I can go back forever." She touched the wedding entry. "And keep calling these good runs."

"Beta—"

"She chose about the tablets. I've been choosing for her about the runs."

She looked down at her hand, flat on the page now, covering part of his writing.

"I'm not asking you to tell me it's all right, Nanna."

He put his hand over hers, the old dry hand with the pen callus, and held it there. He did not tell her.

Through the kitchen door she could see into her parents' room. Amma was asleep on her side, one hand under her cheek like a girl, and her lips were still moving.

Ananya went to the stove, lit it, and put the milk on for coffee, because somebody had to, and while the milk was coming up she took out her phone and opened the Hiranyagarbha run calendar and deleted Thursday's slot, and then Saturday's, and then the week after.

The milk rose and she caught it in time. Behind her Nanna uncapped his pen and wrote something, and she did not ask what.

It had been the night after Golconda, the last tablet still in her, when Lakshmi woke at the wrong hour with the verse already in her mouth.

Not 11:45. Later, the room grey-black, Krishna's breathing beside her catching on his back. She did not know how long she had been saying it. She knew only that it was going well, the pairs coming forward and back the way Ajji's two fingers had tapped them on the dining table, and that somewhere across the city a thing was pulling, and she was there to pull the other way.

On the Monday morning the new strip lay on the steel plate by her tea, all ten blisters full, where she had set it out herself. She looked at it a long time.

On the tablets the nights went quiet. That was what they were for, and they did it well. But they took Ajji too. The voice that came up in her at 11:45, the one with Mysuru in its vowels that scolded her for rushing the jaṭā, went quiet with the nights, and the house was only a house, and she was a woman of fifty-four alone in a pūjā room saying words. She would rather have the voice, and the cost of the voice.

That week Padma's geyser had tripped, and she had gone over with the yellow Meco multimeter from the steel biscuit tin above the fridge, as she always went, and stood in Padma's bathroom with a probe in each hand, looking at the dial like a stranger's handwriting, until Padma said kindly that she would call the electrician.

She put the strip back in the drawer with the tumblers.

Ananya came home lighter after the long nights. Lakshmi had noticed that. She did not let herself finish the thought.

Ananya told Sharath on the Thursday, in his office, at a quarter to nine, when the Financial District below them had turned into a circuit board.

She had rehearsed it in the company car: data integrity, anomalies she could not yet explain, her mother's health. She left out the ghana and Nanna's column, because she did not know how to say them to a man with a graphene crescent behind his ear without sounding like the kind of woman Mehta used to smile at in faculty meetings. He listened with his hands folded on a desk that held a glass of water and a closed paper notebook.

"How long," he said, when she had finished.

"A month. Until Amma's stable." She made herself hold his eyes. "I know the Core schedule is booked around me. I know Deshpande will be happy, and that's not a reason you care about."

"Deshpande being happy is a reason I care about a great deal. It happens so rarely." He smiled, dry and brief, and the relief went through her before she could stop it. "Ananya. Of course. Take the time you need."

"That's it?" She had been ready to defend the month, not to have it given to her. "Sir, the point drifted when I left it alone. I haven't shown that stopping is safe."

His hands were still folded. She made herself go on.

"I can't tell you another run will make it safe either. I'm asking to stop doing them. Not handing you a result."

"My father died in an auto on the way to Osmania General, forty minutes in traffic, in 1999. Go home. Sit with your mother. The Core has waited nine hundred years for someone like you. It can wait a month."

The number caught in her somewhere, nine hundred, and she let it go past.

"The logs need to stay as they are," she said. "And no more runs while I'm away. Not someone else doing mine."

"Your runs," he said at the door. "The logs. I'll have them frozen. Nobody touches the golden point while you're away. Not even me." He tilted his head. "You're humming."

She had not known. It was Ghantasala, Siva Sankari, which Ajji used to play on the cassette player while she oiled Ananya's hair.

"Sorry. Habit."

"Don't apologise. My mother likes that one." He opened the door for her. "Go home, Doctor."

In the lift going down, past floor after floor of black glass, she watched her own reflection. She felt lighter than she had since June. A month with Amma; she told herself that was all the relief meant.

On Saturday Vikram made her come to the immersion, on the grounds that she had not left the house except for work and one Sunday at Golconda since June, and that a person who spent her nights reading her grandmother's diaries needed to be put in a crowd of two lakh people and a DJ truck, medically.

They left the bike at a cousin's flat in Domalguda and walked, because nothing with wheels was moving south of Narayanguda. Trucks stood nose to tail down Tank Bund with Ganeshas roped onto their beds, one riding a peacock, one a rocket, one dressed as a cricketer, and on every truck boys in gulal-streaked banians danced to teenmaar remixes you felt in your fillings. The dappu drummers walked in front, beating the old fast rhythm. Beside a bajji cart an old woman was singing a bhajan cheerfully flat, a quarter-tone under the drums. "Seethamma, from Lalaguda," Vikram said. "Sings at every wedding in the lane. Never invited."

By six the light was going orange through the haze, the floodlights had come on at the cranes, and out on the water the Buddha stood grey with his hand raised, watching the gods go under.

The girl found them near the Ambedkar statue: perhaps five, a frilled yellow frock, gulal in her hair, a plastic whistle, not crying. She had decided crying was for later. Vikram saw her first. He crouched so that his face was lower than hers.

"Amma ekkada, chinni?"

The girl considered him. "Green saree."

"Green saree. Okay. That narrows it to four hundred aunties." He held out both hands, palms up. "Shoulders? You'll see better. You find her, I'll do the walking. Deal?"

She climbed him, whistle clamped in her teeth, and took his hair in both hands like handlebars.

"Name?"

"Chinni."

"Chinni, I'm Vikram, this is my akka, she's a doctor but not the useful kind. Look for green."

They walked the bund towards the police booth at Liberty, slowly, against the current. Chinni steered by pulling his hair. Vikram said "ow" at every turn, and after the third time she began doing it on purpose. At a cart he bought mirchi bajjis in a newspaper cone and passed one up to Chinni, who licked it and handed it back with great dignity, and he ate that one too, and then a third because, he said, it was lonely.

"You'll die," Ananya said.

"Happy man." He wiped his hands on his jeans. "Monday I'm going back to Raghav. Raise. I've got slides. I'm going to make him say the word bandwidth and then make him eat it."

"You said that in June."

"In June I was young. Now I am a man with bajji in him. Thaggedhe le, Akka."

She laughed, and took out her phone, and took a photo of the two of them from the side: her brother with a strange child on his shoulders, gulal on his glasses, one hand up to stop her, too late. "Delete that," he said. "I look like a bajji." She did not delete it.

Sharath watched the immersion from the penthouse with the lights off, as he had every year since he could afford a window. Hussain Sagar was a dark coin a long way east, rimmed with crane floodlights, and the sound did not reach him at all.

"She wants to stop," he said.

The graphacer warmed behind his ear. He had not put it into communion. He only let it listen, which was a distinction he had begun to suspect mattered to nobody but him.

Then she needs a reason not to. The voice was the building's, level and without a gender, arriving in the small bones of his ear.

"I said a sentence, not a question." He poured water, and the glass filled to exactly the line he meant it to. "She will come back because she can't not. You haven't met many physicists."

I have met all of yours.

He let that go. On the glass the night view dimmed and a panel came up over the lake. Kaveri-3, floor 43, a three-hour run on the night of the second, launched under an analyst's ID. Inputs by hash, matched anyway: thirty-eight scanned pages from a private notebook, 1994, and pāṭha rules identical to a file on Dr. Ananya Nayagiri's Quantace laptop. The output was a tree, wide and pale at the base, narrowing, one node at the top by itself.

Ka.

It had taken Sharath eleven years, a doctorate at MIT and a company worth more than some states to draw that tree. The boy had drawn it in three hours from a bedroom in Tarnaka, shown it to his sister and said goodnight.

At the lake they were fifty metres from the booth when it happened.

Fifteen dappu drummers had come through the crowd to their left, beating hard, and the crowd was doing what a Hyderabad crowd did, everything at once: pushing, dancing, shouting for a lost friend, stepping on your foot and apologising and stepping on it again. Ananya had her elbow in someone's back and someone's elbow in hers.

Then the elbow was gone.

She felt it first as room. There was suddenly space around her body, a hand's breadth on each side, and around the next body, and the next, all the way down the bund. Nobody touched anyone. The crowd was still moving, all of it, in the same direction at the same speed, in long smooth sheets that slid past one another like pages. A man passed a woman carrying a steel plate of prasadam with a centimetre to spare, and neither looked. The drums lost their swing. All fifteen dappus came down together, dha, dha, dha, dha, the old lopsided rhythm straightened into a clean march, and every boy on every truck was dancing the same step on the same beat, and the teenmaar song sounded as if it had been fixed.

At her throat the pendant was so hot it hurt.

Chinni sat on Vikram's shoulders very straight, hands resting on his head, the whistle silent. Vikram walked on under her, in step with the sheet. His face, in profile, was calm and pleasant and looked like no one.

She counted afterwards. It was ten seconds, perhaps eleven.

Then somebody's uncle, very drunk and very happy, tried the naagin dance with both arms above his head, caught his chappal on the divider, and went full length into the drummers. A dappu rolled away on its rim. Somebody yelled "Arey, uncle!" and somebody else laughed, loud and rough and nothing like anybody else's laugh, and the crowd closed back over the gap, an elbow landing in Ananya's ribs, and the drums picked up from three places at three speeds and found their swing and lost it and found it.

Chinni blew the whistle, right into Vikram's ear.

"Ayyo," he said, "my eardrum, you small criminal," and she shrieked with laughter.

Ananya's hands were shaking. She put one of them flat on her chest, over the pendant, which was cooling now, and kept it there.

"Akka?"

"Heat," she said. "It's nothing. Too many bajjis for you, not enough for me."

She could have told him. He had built the tree; he would have understood faster than anyone. But he had walked in step with the sheet, and if she said it aloud he would go looking, and Vikram looking was a thing she could not switch off once it started. Behind them Seethamma was flat again, gloriously, and Ananya had never been so glad of a wrong note.

"Who else has queried the subnet this month," Sharath said.

Nobody has found the subnet. Vikram Nayagiri has queried three adjacent things. The NULL-EVT tag, twice. The directory /phase5/, once, on 15 August. The deleted ticket, three minutes later. Each query was idle curiosity. Each was correctly scoped. Taken together they describe the subnet's outline to within two hops.

"He doesn't know he's drawing it."

Not yet.

You could buy intelligence in any IIT corridor. What you could not buy was the ones who were good the Priya way, who went sideways into a problem and came out holding something you had not told them existed. He had paid the boy too little for six years because it was convenient.

"Flag everything he runs," he said. "Every query, every job, every file he opens on or off the network. Don't block him. If he feels a wall, he'll climb it. Just let me see where he walks."

Flagged.

The glass cleared and the city came back, and in the corner a second panel slid up: VIKRAM NAYAGIRI, SecInt, SOC Floor 43. The badge photo was six years old. The boy had not known how to stand for it. He was half smiling, as if someone behind the camera had just said something stupid.

Sharath picked up the phone on the desk, the old kind with a cord that no model in the building was allowed to transcribe.

"Raghav. Sorry, it's late. You're at the lake?" He waited while the man walked somewhere quieter. "Your boy Vikram. He's going to come to you about money on Monday. Don't give it. Don't refuse it. Tell him it's under review, and give him the Frankfurt relay audit, the one nobody wants. Nights. Make it urgent, and make it his." He listened. "No, he's done nothing. That's the point. I want him too busy to be curious. Can you do that for me?"

There was a pause on the line, a little longer than a pause should be, filled with drums from very far away.

"Of course, sir," Raghav said.

"Thank you." Sharath hung up. The man had passed. He wrote the length of the pause down anyway, in the paper notebook, in seconds.

On the glass, faint over the badge photo, was his own face. For a moment it lay across the boy's so exactly that the half-smile seemed to be his, and he looked away first.

Ananya looked at Vikram a second longer than was comfortable. Then a woman in a green saree came through the crowd screaming "Sravya!", and Chinni screamed "Amma!" back. The mother took her down off Vikram's shoulders, slapped him on the arm twice with the flat of her hand because words were too slow, and burst into tears into her daughter's frilled yellow shoulder.

Vikram stood there with his empty hands, rubbing his scalp where the girl had pulled.

"See," he said to Ananya. "Shoulders. That's all I'm good for."

On the walk back to Domalguda he sang "Jaamu Rathiri" at the lake, in the wrong key, getting the words wrong on purpose so she would correct him, and she corrected him every time. Behind them the cranes went on lowering gods into the black water under the floodlights, one after another, all night.

On the tenth of September, at twenty past ten at night, Vikram rang his sister from floor forty-three with his feet on the desk and a cup of cafeteria coffee balanced on his stomach.

"Frankfurt," he said, before she could ask. "Raghav's given me the whole relay audit. Nights. Urgent. He says my raise is under review, Akka. Under review. Like it's a movie waiting for the censor board."

On the phone she was in bed, the lamp making a gold stripe down one side of her face, Ajji's 1994 register face down on her chest. Behind him the SOC had emptied to Karthik packing up, and on the far wall eleven of the twelve clocks disagreed with each other by a few honest seconds, while Frankfurt sat at a quarter past nine under its marigold garland.

"So you'll be late again."

"I'll be home before you wake up. Promise. Go to sleep. Doctor's orders. Useless doctor, but still."

"Eat something."

"I ate three bajjis on Saturday. I'm fine till Diwali."

She did not laugh. The crease had come between her brows, the one she got when a result would not sit still, and she was looking at him as she had on the bund, a second longer than was comfortable.

"Vicky," she said.

She only used the name when she was furious or when she was frightened for him, and she was not furious. He put the coffee down. "Enti?"

"Nothing. Come home."

"Before you wake," he said, and made a stupid face at the camera until she gave up and smiled, and ended the call.

He stretched until his back cracked, pushed his glasses up, and pulled the throughput graphs towards him. The building hummed. In the corner of the screen the clock said 23:46, and he reached for the cold coffee, and did not notice the next minute arrive.