Hidden Variables

The car stopped where the lane off Shah Ali Banda got too narrow for it, and Sharath did not get out.

It was past midnight on the fourteenth of September. A dog slept across the mouth of the lane in the centre of the one sodium light, and at the far end, behind the blue door, his mother's tube light was still on, because she did not sleep before one and had not since 1999. He had come to eat. He had sat here forty minutes instead, with the boy's audio on his phone, unable to walk down a lane his mother would read on his face from the far end.

The graphacer was warm behind his ear. It offered, very gently, to help him remember.

He knew what it would give him. The ward in sunlight, Dr. Kumar in a clean coat, Priya lit like a calendar saint. Twenty-three years of that voice had laid the night down smooth, and he had let it, because the smooth version hurt in a way he could stand.

He told it no. It went quiet at once, and the skin behind his ear went cold.

Without it the memory came back as it had actually been: badly lit, and in the wrong order, and smelling of phenyl.

There was no Dr. Kumar. There was no specialist at all.

There was the Female General Ward on the first floor of the old block, under the Nizam's dome, with a bucket under the crack in the ceiling. There were thirty-one beds and fifty-some patients. Priya shared bed fourteen, head to foot, with a woman from Mahbubnagar, seventy if she was a day, who had broken her hip falling off a bus and who moaned in her sleep like somebody calling a cow home. Relatives slept on newspaper between the beds, chappals under their heads. The ceiling fans turned at eight different speeds. One of them clicked.

Their father had died at this building's Casualty gate three years before, while their mother was emptying bedpans two hundred metres inside the same compound. She said the hospital owed her one, and in August 2002 she was on shift in Female Surgical, across the landing. Every hour she came through the swing doors in her faded blue, touched Priya's forehead, checked the drip, looked at her son, and went back. She did not sit down. If she sat down, she had told him, she would not get up.

The disease did not have a name yet. The duty postgraduate, a tired woman called Dr. Naseem who ate her dinner standing up, wrote viral encephalitis ?? on the file and, underneath, smaller, ?autoimmune. A private hospital in Banjara Hills could try plasma exchange, steroids, immunoglobulin: three lakhs to start. Their mother cleaned two houses in Banjara Hills; she knew three lakhs there was a sofa. She pawned her earrings in Pathergatti for eleven thousand rupees, which paid for a CT scan and a week of phenytoin, and the seizures went on.

Five years later, in a library at MIT at three in the morning, Sharath would read a paper from Pennsylvania describing it: young women, laughing at nothing, then seizures that would not stop. Antibodies against a receptor in the brain. Treatable, often completely. He went to the toilet and was sick, very neatly, and came back and read it again.

In June she had started laughing at nothing. In July she told their mother that the tube lights were speaking in fractions and would Amma please turn them off, they were being so boring. On the first of August, on the floor of their one room, she had her first seizure with her EAMCET letter still under the cot: two hundred and twelfth in the state at fifteen, to his eleven hundred and fortieth, both of them due at REC Warangal in September, and she had already told the lane she would be giving him tuition.

He had brought her books to the ward anyway, physics and Krishnamurthy's algebra, stacked on the steel cupboard between bed fourteen and bed fifteen where she could see them. She never opened one.

Four days before the end she had come up, once, out of the fits, clear-eyed and furious, and Dr. Naseem had leaned over the bed and asked her the questions they ask.

"What is your name, beta?"

Priya looked at her. "What's yours?"

"Do you know where you are?"

"Do you?" A glance at the bucket under the ceiling, at the rain coming through the Nizam's dome. "Honestly?"

Dr. Naseem wrote disoriented on the file and moved to bed fifteen. Sharath, who was holding the steel tumbler, had to put it down, he was laughing so hard, and Priya turned her head to him on the pillow and said, "Anna. Why do they always ask the same things? Aren't they bored?"

"Do you know who I am?" he asked her, to make her do it again.

And she did. She narrowed her eyes at him. "Do you?"

That was the last joke.

The night of the fourteenth the ward boys had strung paper tricolour bunting from the nurses' table to the window bars, because the Superintendent would come round after the flag-hoisting and there had been a memo. At 1:40 the fits came, one on top of another, the worst yet, her heels drumming the bed, the Mahbubnagar woman at her feet woken and wailing, Sharath with his hands on Priya's shoulders as Dr. Naseem had shown him, not holding her down, only holding her on. The duty sister gave the injection. Their mother came at a run, and did not sit down.

At two o'clock, the seizures stopped.

They did not trail off. This one stopped dead, mid-drum, and Priya lay flat and quiet, and opened her eyes, and said, "Anna."

She said it twice. Once in her own voice, cracked and fifteen. And once, a hair behind it, in a voice that was also hers but lower, steadier, as if she were standing a little further away and saying it at the same moment. The Mahbubnagar woman stopped wailing mid-note.

"Priya?"

"What do you think?" said both of her, gently, and one of them almost smiled.

Because there was no ICU bed, the ICU had come to her: a monitor on a trolley with a paper sticker saying RETURN BY 8 AM, and an EEG box from Neurology, twenty-one wires pasted to her scalp and a pen scratching folded paper into a tray. For two weeks the green line had jerked about like a drunk man's handwriting. Now it went across in a row of identical peaks, and the number in the corner said 72, and stayed 72, and Dr. Naseem looked at it and said, "Good. That's good," and went to bed twenty-two, where a woman was bleeding.

Sharath was a maths boy. He counted the beeps against his father's HMT wristwatch, which lost two minutes a week, and against the clock over the nurses' table, which ran four minutes fast so the night staff could go home early. They agreed. Every second, all three together, click, beep, click, as if someone had taken the ward in both hands and squared its edges.

Then he noticed the fans.

All eight were turning at the same speed. Even the one that clicked. The rain dripped into the bucket under the dome at an interval he could have set his watch by, if his watch had not already been set by it. On the floor between the beds the sleeping relatives were breathing together, forty strangers from forty villages drawing breath at the same instant, the whole floor rising and falling like one sleeper. The bunting lifted and dropped with them.

It was the quietest he had ever heard that building. He could hear the Musi.

He did not find it frightening. That was what he would never forgive himself for, in Warangal, in Boston: that for twenty minutes he stood in the perfect quiet and thought, it's getting better. Her two voices talked softly, sometimes to him and sometimes to something else.

The address was in the acknowledgements.

Ananya found it on the fifteenth at four in the morning, sitting on the floor of Vikram's room because her own bed felt like a lie. Aisha Kapoor was in the 347 files as a line with no subject number: A.K. — transferred CERN, 2023. Non-subject. Monitor. Under the acknowledgements of an AEgIS preprint was a thank-you to A. K. for discussions on non-thermal coherence anomalies, and a Proton Mail address nine random characters long.

She wrote: My brother is Vikram Nayagiri. Sharath Shetty has him. The reply came in eleven minutes: a link to an encrypted call at 05:00 IST, and nothing else.

The voice was a woman's, Delhi-educated, perfectly clear, and it did not say hello.

"You are Ananya Nayagiri. NCA nine point seven. I will say what I know and you will ask questions after. I am told it is easier for people that way." A pause exactly as long as the last. "In June 2023 there was a null in the AEgIS antiproton hall at CERN for four minutes and ten seconds. A null is a place where finding has become as cheap as checking. Inside it, any question that can be checked is answered at once. I was in it. Afterwards my colleagues said I had simplified. It is a polite word. I remember my childhood as a list. Gurgaon. Father's scooter, grey, Bajaj. I know my mother loved me. It is on the list. I do not know what that was like."

Ananya had her knees up against her chest.

"Phase IV ran on three hundred and forty-seven subjects. Forty-one survived. I read the records in 2022, and he sent me to Geneva instead of having me killed. He told me he had considered it." No change in the voice at all. "The subjects came through the Warangal Initiative clinics. Real clinics; they save lives. Every scan they take is also screened for coherence affinity, and the high scorers get a letter offering free follow-up in Hyderabad. The follow-up is on floor minus seven."

"Why are you telling me now?"

"Because Pathergatti was on the news in Geneva. And because I am one." Aisha said it as she might have given her height. "Anyone who has been compressed carries a seed of it. Where I stand, nulls come easier. I have not stayed in one place longer than eleven days since 2023."

"Then you shouldn't come here."

"I didn't say I was coming. Play me the audio."

Ananya had not told her about the audio. She did not ask how Aisha knew. She held the phone to the laptop's microphone: Vikram, off-key, Jaamu Rathiri, every note the same length, and then, a minute and thirty-eight seconds in, on jaabilamma, one note held far too long.

"Four point one seconds," Aisha said. "Every other note is point six zero. It is the only irregular thing in the file. Everything else in it is dead."

She played it again with the spectrogram open, and saw it. Inside the long note the volume pulsed: small swells, some heavy and some light, bunched in twos and threes and then running back on themselves. a b, b a, a b c, c b a, a b c. She knew that rhythm before she knew why. It was Ajji's forefinger on the dining table in Vidyanagar, tapping out the ghana for two children who were supposed to be doing homework. Vikram had learned it faster than she had. He used to tap it on her head.

And the weights were Ajji's too: a heavy swell a guru, a light one a laghu. She marked them on the back of an electricity bill, U for guru, a stroke for laghu, and each word came out as its own small shape: Ak-ka, heavy then light. The ghana said every word three times, forward and back and forward, so every guess could be checked twice against the braid. It took twenty minutes, half of it guessing, and when she had it she put the pen down and could not pick it up.

Akka. Don't take the deal. The door is a mouth.

"What does it say," said Aisha.

Ananya told her. She heard her own voice break on Akka.

"He was thinking," Aisha said after a moment, "when he sang that. Inside a null. That is not supposed to be possible." And then, in the same voice, as if it were one more fact: "I am going to send you some files. There are drawings in them. Look at the drawings last."

At 2:20 the stranger came in.

He saw her at the swing doors: a woman of fifty-odd in a plain white cotton sari, the kind a widow wears, grey hair in a knot, the hem dark with rain. The duty sister, who stopped everyone, did not look up. The woman came down the ward stepping over the breathing relatives without looking, as if they were her own people asleep on a railway platform, and she was the only thing in the room not breathing on the beat. He did not notice that then. He noticed it in 2011.

She came straight to bed fourteen as though she had been told the number. She sat on the edge of the mattress without asking. She took Priya's hand.

"Who are you?" Sharath said. "Aunty. Who are you? You can't sit here."

She did not look at him. She closed her eyes and began to chant. Her free hand found the iron rail at the head of the bed, and her forefinger began to tap it: forward, back, forward. a b, b a, a b c, c b a.

He thought he knew her kind. They sat at the OGH gates with a steel plate and a framed goddess and prayed over the dying for five rupees. He took the woman by the shoulder. It was like taking hold of a doorpost.

"Amma," he said, loud, to the swing doors, "Amma, come, there's some lady—"

Their mother came with a steel basin in her hands and looked at the stranger, and at her son, and then at her daughter. The two voices had gone quiet, and Priya wore the look she wore on the kitchen floor at eleven at night with a problem she was winning: frowning, private, alive.

"Rehne de," their mother said.

"Amma—"

"Rehne de, Sharath. Let her."

The chant was Sanskrit, low, braided back on itself. He had no Sanskrit beyond the school prayer. Much later he would know exactly which words they were, and would hear them in his sleep: ko addhā veda ka iha pra vocat, who truly knows, who here will say it. kuta ājātā kuta iyaṃ visṛṣṭiḥ. She was not giving his sister an answer. She was asking her a question. At the time it sounded to him like somebody knocking on a door, patiently, from the inside.

Yousuf, the ward boy from the Mughalpura side, a big slow man of forty with a Nokia from Dubai that had a camera in it, came to the foot of the bed. Their mother put the basin down and said to him, in a voice Sharath had never heard her use, "Yousuf. Take one of my daughter. I don't have one. Take." And Yousuf held up the silver phone, and its little light blinked, and everybody in the ward went on breathing together.

She went to the Old City that afternoon without telling anyone.

Sumathi opened it with a ladle, as before, and looked at her feet, and then at her face, and whatever she saw there she did not ask about. She said, "Aa, amma. Sit," and Ananya sat on the cot, and a steel plate came into her lap: rice, the khatti dal, a fried papad that broke into four when she touched it. She had been going to say your son, and three hundred and forty-seven. She ate instead, because she could not tell a mother that over her own rice, and because the body had decided without her.

"You are not sleeping," Sumathi said. "Your mother is sick?"

"Yes, aunty."

"Hm." A second ladle of dal, uninvited. "And your brother is where?"

Ananya looked at the plate.

"Don't tell. Kuch nakko bolo. I was thirty years in OGH, beta, I know that face. Only eat." She sat on the plastic stool, knees up, like her son. "When my girl was in that ward I didn't eat for nine days. On the tenth, Yousuf, the ward boy, he brought me biryani from Shadab in a polythene cover and stood there till I finished. Fifteen rupees. He didn't have fifteen rupees." She laughed. "Same fellow took her photo, that last night, on his Nokia. Only photo of her from that place. I have it in the almirah. I don't take it out."

Ananya bent over the plate, and the chain swung forward out of her kurta, and the pendant knocked once against the steel.

Sumathi stopped with the ladle in the air. She looked at the little silver triangle for longer than politeness allowed.

"Old work, this," she said at last. "Where you got?"

"My grandmother."

"Hm." She put the ladle back in the pot. "In my girl's photo also there is something shining like that, at the back. I never looked properly. I only looked at her." She waved the ladle as if the thought were a fly. "Keep it inside, beta. The Old City has eyes. And go see Yousuf, he has a medical shop near the Afzal Gunj bus stop. He sells me my BP tablets and never gives me discount. Sala. He owes me biryani."

At three o'clock, Priya turned her head on the pillow and looked at him.

Only one voice now. Her own.

"Anna," she said. "I can see you as me and me as you."

He held on to the cupboard.

"Someone is outside," she said, "seeing all of us at once." A frown, very small, between her brows. "It's so quiet."

"Priya—"

"Promise you won't let them finish me."

He did not ask her who. In the ward he only said, "Promise. Promise, ra, I promise," and waited for her to say something back that turned his words inside out. She didn't. She looked at him as if she were memorising something, and then she turned her face away from him, towards the stranger, and the stranger's hand closed round hers.

The lights went out.

All of them at once: the tubes, the corridor bulb, the green line on the monitor. The fans ran down in the dark at different rates, the clicking one slower and slower and then not at all. In the black the clocks came apart, the wall clock and his father's watch, a quarter-second between them, then half a second. On the floor somebody said Ya Allah and somebody said Ayyo, and the forty sleepers broke into forty ragged breathings, and it was the worst noise he had ever heard, because he knew before the generator coughed and the tubes came back on.

The clock over the nurses' table said 3:03. Its minute hand was still shivering on the mark.

His sister's eyes were open and looking at nothing. His mother was already on her knees on the other side of the bed with her forehead pressed against Priya's arm, making no sound at all. The Mahbubnagar woman had begun, again, to moan.

And the stranger was standing. She had let go. Her face was wet from the hairline to the chin, and for one moment she looked straight at him, the first time she had, as if she had something to tell him and had decided not to. The tube light came off the silver at her throat, a small pendant, a triangle inside a triangle, and he looked at it instead of her face. He would know it again ten years later on page three of a brochure. Then she turned and walked away up the ward, stepping over the waking bodies, and out through the swing doors.

Al-Shifa Medical & General Stores was a shutter's width of shelves across the road from the old hospital's dome. Behind the counter, under a framed Kaaba, a heavy grey-bearded man in a white cap was doing a crossword in the Siasat.

"Yousuf Khan sahab?"

"Depends. You're from the drug inspector?"

"From Sumathi aunty."

He took the glasses off. "Then I am definitely Yousuf Khan, and whatever she said about the biryani is a lie, it was twelve rupees."

When she told him what she wanted, he pulled the shutter half down, so the shop went orange, and came out of the back with a Bata shoebox. Inside, among old strips of Crocin, lay a silver Nokia 7650, its slide cracked.

"I printed three," he said. "One for Sumathi amma. One went to the boy, he asked me in 2005 and I gave." From the lid of the box he took an envelope, soft with handling. "This one I kept. Never showed anybody. Because of what's in it."

It was a colour print on cheap photo paper, gone a little magenta with twenty-three years. A girl in a hospital bed, very thin, her face turned away from the camera, towards the back of the bed. A boy at the edge of the picture in a checked shirt, holding a steel cupboard as if it were the only fixed thing in the world. Paper tricolour bunting across the top, blurred by the fan.

Behind the bed, where the lens had missed its focus, a woman in white sat on the edge of the mattress with her head bowed and the girl's hand in both of hers. Her face was soft with motion, her hair in a knot. At her throat there was a small bright smear of silver, and in the smear, if you knew already, if you had worn it against your own skin since June 2014, you could make out a triangle inside a triangle.

Ananya's hand went to her own throat before she could stop it. The pendant was cool.

"Everything was going together that night," Yousuf said. He was not looking at the photo. "The fans. The drip. Everybody breathing. My own heart, like a train. I thought it was jinn. I said Ayat-ul-Kursi at the window, my own voice, my own speed, got it wrong twice, kept on. Nothing changed." He almost smiled. "Then that lady came and sat, and she was the only one breathing wrong. And her finger going on the bed rail, tak-tak, tak-tak, backwards and forwards, like counting somebody's change." He tapped the edge of the print with his own forefinger, without knowing he did it in twos. "My grandmother used to say, when a thing is too perfect, find the one who is out of step. That's the one keeping God's door. Who looks behind?"

Ananya had stopped hearing him at tak-tak.

"Can I keep this?"

"You know her," he said. It wasn't a question.

"She was my grandmother."

He looked at her face and at her throat, and then he put the photograph in her hands and closed her fingers over it.

"Then it's yours already," he said. "Go before the traffic starts at Nayapul. And tell Sumathi amma twelve rupees."

He went after her, down the stairs over the relatives and out into the rain, past the great tamarind by the river wall. There was no one in a white sari. There was the Musi, and an auto going away down the Afzal Gunj road with its one tail light.

In the morning the loudspeakers at the junction played "Saare Jahan Se Achha" and the Superintendent came round the ward after the flag-hoisting, past the paper bunting and the empty half of bed fourteen, and Sharath, seventeen years old, stood by the steel cupboard with his sister's unopened books on it and knew, as surely as he had ever known a theorem, that a woman in a white sari had come out of the night and put her hand on his sister and taken her away.

In the car in Shah Ali Banda the driver was pretending to sleep. Sharath's nose was bleeding a little. He held a tissue to it and looked down the lane at the blue door and the tube light behind it, and when it finally went off, at eleven minutes past one, he told the driver to go.

He had found her name ten years later, in a brochure.

It was a glossy thing from Osmania University's Department of Sanskrit, for a seminar at IIT Bombay in January 2013: "Metre, Memory and Computation in the Vedic Recitation Traditions". Sharath, twenty-seven and new on the faculty, had picked it up as a joke. On page three, under Invited Speakers, was a passport photograph of a woman in her sixties with a pendant at her throat. Smt. Rajeshwari Dasara, ghanapāṭhī, visiting faculty.

On the second afternoon he sat at the back while she demonstrated the ghana pāṭha to forty engineers, and waited by the tea urn until the hall had emptied, and said, "You held my sister's hand at Osmania General. The fourteenth of August, 2002. Bed fourteen."

She put down her cup. She was older; the pendant was the same.

"Yes," she said. "Priya. You called her by it all night. I have kept it."

He had rehearsed for ten years. In his bag was the OGH EEG, bought from a records clerk for five hundred rupees in 2005. He laid it on the steel tea counter between the samosas, showed her the signature under the noise, and explained in short, clean sentences that his sister had not stopped, that she had gone somewhere, that it was measurable, and that the chant was a key. He was very calm, and proud of it.

"You opened it that night," he said. "Or you closed it. Either way you know how. Teach me."

She listened to all of it. She looked at the EEG for a long time, and touched one peak on it with her fingertip, as though it were a face.

"She was holding," she said. "Nobody taught her. Fifteen years old, in that ward, alone, and she was holding it. I have never seen a thing like it in my life."

"Then help me reach her."

"No."

"You owe me—"

"I did not kill your sister, Sharath. I kept the thing that took her from taking you."

He laughed at her. He told her she was a village woman with a trick, and that he would find the door without her and bring his sister back through it, and she would have to watch. She picked up the EEG, folded it once, and gave it back to him.

"It will talk to you in her voice," she said. "When it does, ask it something. See if she asks you anything back."

He did not understand that for twelve years. He wrote it in the notebook he kept in his inside pocket, under her name, and drew a line through the name.

She looked at the drawings last, as she had been told, at the dining table at midnight with Amma asleep and Nanna's ledger shut beside her like a second person, and Amma's colony register still under the fruit bowl, open at September.

Aisha's files were orderly to the point of cruelty: one intake sheet per survivor, and a scan of whatever each who could still hold a pen had drawn in the week after their final session, with crayons, like children in a waiting room. S-017, a farmer's son from Jangaon, had drawn it in green. S-088 in pencil, pressing so hard the paper tore. S-203, Varma, Nagesh, in blue ballpoint, in lines so even they looked printed.

A staircase, going down. Each step a little shorter than the last. At the bottom, where the steps should have run out, a small solid square, filled in, shaded black.

She had seen it on a September evening in Shah Ali Banda, in pencil, in a fifteen-year-old's notebook tied with a pink ribbon: why?, and why that?, and who's asking?, and at the bottom a blank, and in the blank a tiny girl sitting cross-legged, keeping it open.

These had no girl. Thirty-eight people, from Jangaon and Tolichowki and a technicians' hostel in Gachibowli, who had never seen that notebook had drawn Priya's staircase, and every one of them had drawn it finished.

She laid S-017 over S-203 against the tube light, hoping for a wobble, a hand. The lines went down through each other and matched, every step, the black square the same to the millimetre.

They had not been remembering the shape. They had been copying it. Something had shown them the same thing every time, because it was finished, and a finished thing has only one way to look.

She turned the drawings face down, all thirty-eight, and sat with her hands flat on the backs of them until her hands stopped shaking.

At ten past one she opened the thread from the number that had sent the audio, —S., and typed underneath it.

She had typed 100 first, an hour ago, and looked at it. Quantace had filed against Vikram at Raidurg; the police already had their story, a thief who had gassed a server floor and run. If she walked into a station with thirty-eight drawings, the first person to hear of it would be the man who held her brother, and Vikram would pay.

She wrote: Where is he. No question mark. She did not trust herself with more.

The answer came in four minutes.

Where Priya is. He is not alone.

She read it three times, screenshotted it and sent it to the Proton address, because a fact on one device was a rumour, and turned the phone face down on the drawings.

17 Sept. PJS, 60th floor. No graphacer. Pen.

The ancients shattered it because they feared it. R.D. would call that reverence. It is only a description. They had it in their hands, and they broke it into ten thousand chants and hid the pieces in widows' mouths, and called the breaking holiness.

I intend to hold it at the edge.

I do not need the answer. I need the boundary, held open by a mind that can stand on it without falling in. A door with a doorkeeper.

The boy is alive. I did not want the boy.

The sister has written to me. Three words: Where is he. I answered her. I noticed, afterwards, that I answered. Priya would have asked me why I wanted to know.

On the seventeenth the Emirates flight from Dubai was forty minutes late, and the arrivals hall at Shamshabad at eleven at night was exactly itself: marigold garlands going limp in plastic, a man asleep against a pillar with a WELCOME BACK ABBA placard on his chest, three children racing a trolley between the ropes. Ananya stood among them in yesterday's kurta with a prepaid-taxi slip gone soft in her fist.

Aisha Kapoor came through the doors carrying one grey bag, small and very straight in a black jacket in the Deccan heat. She walked directly to Ananya through the crowd, not searching for her, and stopped at the distance people stop at in a queue.

"You look like your file," she said. "Your right eye is irritated. You have been crying in the taxi queue."

"Hi," said Ananya. "Welcome to Hyderabad."

"Thank you." She glanced up at the departure board over their heads. "The clocks in this hall agree to the second. They did not when I landed. I have perhaps eleven days here."

Ananya looked at her phone and at the board, and at the clock over the Costa counter. 23:14:06, all three, and the seconds turning over together. She put the phone away.

And then, because it was clearly the next fact on her list, Aisha said: "I've brought what I have. You should stop sleeping on the floor."

Behind them the trolley hit a pillar and the man with the placard woke up swearing, and Aisha turned towards the noise like a person turning towards a heater.

Past one, in Tarnaka, with Aisha asleep in Vikram's bed on top of the covers with her shoes lined up exactly beneath her, Ananya climbed to the terrace. Vikram's zip-tied camera still hung off the water tank, pointed at nothing. A koel somewhere, awake at the wrong hour, was getting its call wrong, and she held the magenta photograph up to the neighbour's stairwell bulb: at the back, out of focus, the woman who had braided her hair every Sunday of her childhood, bowed over a stranger's hand.

The pendant lay against her breastbone, cold as a coin.

"Ajji," she said aloud, to the photograph, to the tank, to the whole sleepless city. "What did you do?"