Quantum Entanglement

Nanna noticed it first, because he always noticed first. On Thursday morning he rolled his chair to the door of Ananya's room at ten past six and said, in a voice he kept for eclipses and India–Pakistan finals, "Annu. Come and see your mother."

Lakshmi was in the kitchen making upma, and she was making it correctly. The rava was roasting dry in the kadai to exactly the colour of a biscuit. The mustard seeds had gone in first, then the urad dal, then the curry leaves, which spat and made her step back and say "chee" at them as if they were the neighbour's children. She had put on her reading glasses and was frowning at the green chillies, deciding. Her phone was propped against the sugar dabba, and on the colony group, under a forward about papaya leaves for dengue, she had already put a link and the word Source?

"You're standing there like a gas inspector," she said, without turning round. "Either cut the onion or go and brush."

Ananya cut the onion badly, in slabs, and her mother took the board from her and did it again in small even squares and said, "Twenty-nine years old. A PhD. Look at this, Doctor-garu." It was the old voice, the one with the spatula in it. Ananya had not heard it since June. She stood by the fridge and watched her mother's back and tried not to make any sound at all, in case sound was what broke it.

"Is Aisha awake?"

"She's in Vikram's room," Ananya said. "She sleeps with her shoes on."

"Then leave her." Lakshmi tipped the onions in. "Sit, Annu. Your face is doing the thing."

Ananya sat at the table next to Nanna. The Nokia printout was in her kurta pocket, folded into four. She took it out now and unfolded it and put it flat on the oilcloth, and Nanna looked at it and then away, and her mother stirred the kadai and did not look at it at all.

"She was there," Ananya said. "Ajji. At OGH, the night Priya Shetty died. He thinks she took his sister. Amma, what did she do?"

Lakshmi put the lid on the kadai and turned the flame down and wiped her hands on the towel over her shoulder. Then she came and sat, and put her glasses on top of her head, and picked up the printout by its edges, as Ajji used to pick up a letter from the post office.

"She kept her company," she said.

It came out over the upma, and then over the second tea, with the plates pushed aside and the Tarnaka morning getting loud outside the grille: the milk van, the Sri Chaitanya bus, the man who sold brooms shouting brooms. Lakshmi told it as she used to tell Mahabharata stories at bedtime, out of order, with footnotes. Halfway through, without stopping, she got the steel biscuit tin down from above the fridge and had the mixie's sticking switch apart on the oilcloth, and the yellow Meco multimeter beeped for her the first time she touched the probes across it. By the second tea the switch was back in.

"Your Ammamma told me when I was fifteen. I believed it at BARC, with a spectrometer, which is harder to argue with. Don't cite me."

A teacher in Kashmir, Acharya Vidyasagar; something in a temple there in 1899, after which the pandits "became simple". One disciple, Gauri, walked south in 1901 with an Englishman's notebooks sewn into a silk manuscript wrapper, and stopped in Mysuru, where the Wodeyars fed scholars. "Not her. They fed the men. She cooked in a Brahmin house on the Agrahara and learnt in the back room." Lakshmi tapped the table. "Gauri was a woman, and her people were weavers. By the rules of the people who wrote the rules, she should never have opened her mouth, and nor should any of us after her. Your Ammamma was proud of that. She said the rules were written by people who wanted the answer."

"She told the Osmania Sanskrit department that," Nanna said. "At the head's farewell."

Ananya had her notebook open without deciding to, writing Gauri, 1901, Mysuru, weavers in the lab hand, and her mother put two fingers on the pen. "Don't write it like a log. Just hear it."

"We don't fight," her mother said. "We don't break. We hold. You sit with the thing and keep a question open next to it, and keep it open, and you get old." She held up her hands. They were fifty-four years old and they looked seventy, and Ananya had been calling it the illness since June. "In 2002 Amma felt it from Vidyanagar, eight kilometres, her pendant hot on her chest at two in the morning. She got to the ward at twenty past. The girl was holding it, Annu. Fifteen, no teacher, her brain on fire, holding the door by herself. It was too far in her to save. So Amma sat on the bed and held her hand so she wouldn't be alone in there, and held the rest of the ward. At three the girl let go. Amma came home at five and lay in the pūjā room for a week."

"Rasam," Nanna said quietly. "Only that."

"He thinks she shut the door on his sister," Ananya said.

"From where he was standing, she did." Lakshmi folded the printout along its creases and gave it back. "That's the worst thing about holding. From outside, it looks exactly like letting go."

Then, because she was lucid and knew it would not last, she fetched from Ajji's chest, from under Ananya's bed, a brown diary page in a five-rupee Xerox sleeve, and read it aloud: 1908, the rain foretold to the hour by a Company clerk, the river obeying, a hundred people up the tamarind at Afzal Gunj, and the writer singing the first half of the night while across from her Hafiz Mohammed Ismail, the qawwal from the dargah, kept the other half. When my breath went he came in, and when his went I came in. We did not discuss it.

"Someone of ours was in that tree," Lakshmi said. "And someone not of ours. It was never only us. It's anyone who can keep singing when the water's coming." She slid the page away. "But the ones who know the ghana without a slip get fewer. Ajji's list had sixty-something names in 1980. The last time I saw it, nineteen. A code with redundancy survives errors, Annu. It doesn't survive losing the copies. We are the copies."

Nanna had the beads out. His thumb stopped on one and stayed there.

"Amma," Ananya said. "Why are you so clear today?"

Her mother looked out at the neem.

"Because it has what it wanted, for now," she said. "It's busy with your brother. It isn't leaning on the house." She took the plates to the sink. With her back to them she said, in the spatula voice, "It won't last, so don't waste it crying. Finish your tea."

Ananya heard your brother and put her cup down before she spilled it, and did not ask busy how.

The clarity lasted until a little after four in the afternoon. Krishna watched it go as he had once watched a dye trace go turbulent in a flume at Kanpur: not all at once, but at one point first, and then everywhere. Folding clothes on the bed, Lakshmi held up one of Vikram's T-shirts, the black one with the Pushpa font on it, and said, "Whose is this?" in a pleasant, curious voice, and then heard herself, and put it down very carefully, and went to lie in the puja room with the door half open.

Aisha Kapoor came out of Vikram's room at six, in the same shoes, and ate two chapatis standing at the counter in exactly the time it took, and said "Thank you, that was sufficient," and went back in. She did not avoid his eyes.

"Annu," Krishna said, when the door had shut. "Who is she? Really. A stranger from Geneva is sleeping in your brother's bed, with her shoes on, and I don't know her father's name."

"She was in a null at CERN, Nanna. Two years ago. She's the only one who came out thinking." Ananya did not tell him about the eleven days, because he would count them.

He wrote A.K., Geneva, in V.'s room in the register, which was how he agreed to things.

By nine the house had its night noises: the fridge, the neighbour's serial, the neem at the grille. Ananya sat across the dining table from him with her laptop shut and her hands flat on it, which was how she sat when she was waiting for a result she already knew.

He opened the maroon register and uncapped the pen and did not write anything.

"Nanna."

"I know." He put the cap back on. His hand did the small tremor it had started doing in July, and he let it, because she had already seen it. "In July you asked me what happened near Kurnool. I told you a road story."

"You said she was quiet."

"She was quiet." He looked at the pen. "That was not a lie, beta. That was the whole truth with the middle cut out."

He had gone over it so many times that it had worn smooth. He had never said it aloud.

"She chanted in the car. Always. Twenty years I drove that woman, and every trip, under her breath, the whole way. She once did it through a puncture on the Srisailam ghat road. I was changing the tyre in the rain and she was sitting on a stone with an umbrella going ab ba abc, and when I finished she said, 'Your wheel nuts are not symmetrical, Krishna,' and she did not stop chanting to say it. She could do that. Talk in the gaps."

Ananya laughed, and put her hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled.

"That day she was tired. Alampur takes it out of her; she used to say the Devi is generous but she makes you queue. We crossed the Tungabhadra at five. After the bridge, the four-lane, the light going orange. And she stopped." He held up one finger. "Just stopped. In the middle of a pada. In twenty years I had never heard the middle of a pada. I thought she had fallen asleep. I looked at her. She was awake, looking straight ahead through the glass. Not frightened. Looking."

He had counted it every sleepless night since, on the beads, against the tick of the fan.

"One. Two. Three. Four," Krishna said. "Four seconds of nothing. The car was so quiet I could hear the indicator I'd forgotten to switch off. And then the lorry came over the median."

The fridge compressor cut out. The house got quieter, and he wished it hadn't.

"I've done the calculation," he said. "Of course I've done it. Sand lorry, overloaded, say thirty tonnes, front offside tyre. The closing rate. If she saw the tyre go, she saw it before I did. So maybe she saw it coming and there was no point chanting through it. That's one. Or she chose: she let go of the thing she'd held for fifty years to look at what was coming with her own eyes, for once. That's two." His voice had started to go and he pushed it through, like a chair up a ramp. "Or she was seventy years old and she had been awake at dawn and dusk for fifty years and she was tired, Annu, she was just tired, and she stopped for four seconds to rest, like anybody would, and the road happened to be there. That's three. And I have never known which. And I have never told your mother, because if it's the third one, then the thing she was holding got its four seconds, and your mother was at home that night doing the night shift for her, and she would think—"

"She would think it was her," Ananya said.

"She would think it was her. Or me. I had been talking the whole way from Alampur about the JNTU pension revision. What if I was the noise that broke her count?" He put the heel of his hand against his eyes. "I diagram everything, na? I couldn't diagram four seconds."

Then he was crying. He had not cried at Kurnool General or on the day they told him about T10, and this was a big man's crying that shook the chair on its brakes.

Ananya came round the table. She did not say anything. She took his head in both hands and pulled it against her stomach, as he used to hold hers when she was nine and furious over long division, one palm over his ear, until the shaking changed rhythm, and changed again, and never once settled into anything regular.

"Nanna," she said at last, into his hair. "Whichever one it was, she stopped. She didn't stop because of you. Nobody stops because of the pension revision."

He laughed into her kurta, wet and helpless.

"And she held for fifty years before that," Ananya said. "That's the number. Not the four."

He did not believe her. It helped anyway.

Later, when she had gone to bed, he opened the register and wrote it down, in fountain pen, in a hand that shook: 3 Oct 2015. 17:12 approx. She stopped for four seconds. I never said. Told Annu tonight. Then, underneath, he drew a small axis and marked four ticks on it, and sat looking at the space between the ticks until the fridge came back on.

The news was on in the hall on Friday morning with the sound low, the way Nanna liked it. Between a cinema audio launch and a traffic advisory for Bathukamma week came a pāṭhaśālā near Vijayawada: a tin roof, boys in white dhotis, an old acharya with sandal paste on his forehead and a hearing aid. On Tuesday the evening recitation had gone "perfectly regular", he said. Every breath the same, every boy the same. "I stopped them and they didn't stop. One of them said, 'You were going to ask us to stop.' Before I asked." He had sent them home to play in the mud and fight their brothers. Then Alampur, and Ananya put the tea down on the television stand without meaning to: the kund round the Jogulamba sanctum had begun to steam, warm to the hand, and the committee wanted extra buses before Navaratri.

"Amma is warm," the priest said, and touched his eyes. "She is sitting with something. We don't ask what."

"Two hundred and one kilometres," Aisha said from Vikram's door, and Ananya jumped. "From here to Alampur, by road. The fast practices go first. The priest is correct not to ask." She shut the door.

On Friday night Amma was clear again.

It came on after dinner, thinner than Thursday's, and she spent it putting things where they went: Vikram's black T-shirt folded on the ironing board, the agarbatti stand wiped. At twenty to twelve Ananya was at her desk with the laptop shut, and from habit she looked at the clock in the corner of the phone and thought, Amma would be starting now. Ajji's hour.

At a quarter to twelve the pūjā-room door went, and her mother's voice began, low and even.

It was not the August chant, the one that ran away with her. It was the short japa, the one she had kept every night since the October Ajji died. She sat upright on the low stool with her glasses pushed up into her hair and the lamp lit, awake to the ends of her fingers, the way a person keeps an appointment.

In Vidyanagar there had been another door like this one, with the same lamp behind it, and every night of her childhood Ananya had walked past it to the bathroom with her earphones in.

She pushed this one open and went in and sat down on the floor beside her mother. She had never done it before. The tiles were cold through her kurta. The camphor caught in her throat. Amma did not stop and did not look round; she moved her knee an inch to make room, and went on. Ananya did not chant. She knew the words, every one of them, and she let them go past her and sat in them, as you sit in rain you have stopped running from.

At five past twelve her mother finished, and put out the lamp with two wet fingers, and went to bed. Ananya sat on in the dark until her legs went to sleep.

At half past five Lakshmi woke her by pulling her toe, as she had woken her for Class X exams.

"Terrace," she said. "Bring a mat. Don't bring the phone."

The clarity had held through the night. Her mother climbed the stairs one at a time with a hand on the wall. On the terrace the sky over the water tank was still grey-blue and the air had the wet, cooked smell of a Hyderabad September before the sun gets into it. Somebody's geyser. The neem put its top branches over the parapet and dripped.

Aisha was already there, sitting on Vikram's upturned paint bucket with her shoes on, looking at nothing.

"I asked her," Lakshmi said. "She can tell us if it comes. She says it's the only thing she still likes."

"It is the only thing I still notice," Aisha said. "That's not the same, but it's close."

They sat on the mat facing east, mother and daughter, knees nearly touching. Lakshmi took Ananya's wrist and put two fingers on it, where the margins of the registers said Ajji used to put hers.

"First, you breathe," she said. "Not nicely. Not yoga class. Just your own breath, the one you have, badly. Ajji used to say the chant rides on the breath like a boy on a cycle carrier. Don't steer. Now. Pada first. You know it."

Ananya began. na asat āsīt no sad āsīt tadānīm. Her voice was thin in the open air and she hated it. She took it into krama, pair by pair, and her mother nodded without opening her eyes.

"You're counting," Lakshmi said. "Stop counting. You want to know the next syllable before you get there. You can't. The only way to know the next syllable is to say it. That's the whole thing, Annu. That's why it works."

Ananya said the next syllable. She did not know it until it was in her mouth.

Aisha said, "It's here."

She said it in the voice she used for bus timings. Ananya opened her eyes.

Nothing had happened. The morning had simply got tidier. The crows on the Reddys' cable had spaced themselves out, evenly, all facing the same way. Over the colony a flock of pigeons came up off the temple roof and did not scatter. They wheeled as a sheet, each bird the same distance from each of its neighbours, and turned at the corner of the sky with a click she could almost hear.

From the house behind, somebody's pressure cooker whistled. It whistled again. Ananya found she was waiting for the third, and it came exactly when she expected it, and the fourth, and the fifth, as if the dal in that kitchen had been solved.

Below in the lane the Reddys' younger boy was bowling a tennis ball against the compound wall before school, as he did every morning, badly. Thock. The ball came back to his hand. Thock. The same spot on the wall, the same arc, the same catch. The boy had stopped moving his feet. He looked delighted.

"It followed me," Aisha said. "I'm sorry. I am what it follows."

The pendant was hot against Ananya's breastbone, coin-in-the-sun hot. Her mother's fingers were still on her wrist, and Ananya could feel her own pulse going under them. It was slowing. It was evening out. Tock, tock, tock, like the ball.

"Don't stop," Lakshmi said. Her own voice had gone thin. "Annu. Don't stop."

The first thing Vikram noticed about the Between was that nothing in it was louder than anything else.

There was no floor. There was no up. He had checked, early on, by dropping his phone, and the phone had stayed exactly where he let go of it, as if falling were a question that had been answered and the answer was no need. There was light, the even grey of a monitor showing nothing. It cast no shadow.

And there was the Answer. He had no better word. It was not in front of him or behind him. It was around him, and it was patient. It did not push. It was waiting for him to finish, the way a teacher waits for a slow boy to reach the end of a sum she can already see.

"Nice place," he said. "Very minimalist. Very Gachibowli." His voice did not echo.

He had worked out three things in his first hour. One: the Answer could read him think as easily as he could read a packet capture. Two: when he did something even he hadn't known he was going to do, there was a small hitch in the grey, like a video call buffering, and he felt more like himself. Three: anything that left this place left as sound, at the hot edge, at Pathergatti, where someone who knew the house might be listening.

So he had sung. He had picked "Jaamu Rathiri" because it was the song he had ruined for her on Tank Bund, and he had sung it badly, as he always did, and a minute and thirty-eight seconds in, on jaabilamma, he had held one note far too long. Inside the length of it, with the breath, he had put Ajji's ghana, the way she tapped it on the dining table with two fingers: long short, short long, long short long. Akka. A step, and a step back. Don't take the deal. The pair, and the pair reversed. The door is a mouth. The triplet, braided. It took him a little over four seconds, and at the end of them his chest was burning and he let the note go and sang the rest of the verse wrong on purpose so that Akka, if she ever heard it, would correct him in her head and notice the one place where he hadn't made a mistake.

The Answer had allowed it. That was the part that frightened him later. It had let the note out, a toy a child is allowed to keep because it doesn't matter.

He tapped Ajji's ghana on his thigh with two fingers, as he had tapped it with a spoon at six until somebody took the spoon away. na asat · asat na · na asat āsīt. He got it wrong on the fourth word and started again and got it wrong somewhere else. Each wrong was a small warmth.

Time leaked in at the rim, where the heat was. Every so often, very faint, as if through a wall, he heard the Fajr azaan from somewhere in the Old City: one muezzin, a cracked old voice that always went sharp on the second Allahu akbar. He had heard it ten times, and he had been hungry only once. Ten dawns out there. Most of one day in here. He did the division and didn't like it.

After a while he was hungry again, and he thought about food, and that was how he found out what the place cost.

He thought of pesarattu. Amma at the tawa, the spatula, the batter hissing, the green chilli, the ginger. He had the words. He reached for the taste behind the words and the taste was a summary. Savoury. Green. Good. It was an entry in a list. He knew he had loved it. He did not know what it was that he had loved.

"No," he said. "No, no, no. Give that back."

The grey did not give it back. It did not take it either. It had simply noticed that the taste of pesarattu was redundant, given everything else it knew about him, and had stopped storing it separately.

He tried to remember his school. He had a uniform, blue and white, and a PT teacher with a whistle, and a best friend called something that began with S. He had the bus. He had the name of the bus route. He did not have the name of the school. It had been a long name, with a saint in it. It had been on the gate.

He said, "Okay."

He said, "Okay. Akka."

He said, "Akka has a crease."

He said, "Akka has a crease between her eyebrows. It is on the left. It is deeper on the left. It comes when she is reading."

He said, "It comes when she is angry. It comes when she is right. It is always there when she is right."

He said, "It is a small line. It is a vertical line. It is one centimetre long."

The sentences were getting the same length. They were coming out like beads, each the same weight, each in the same place, and he was saying the crease so that the crease would stay, and the saying was going regular, and the regularity was the thing that was eating him. He could feel the patience leaning, very gently, towards the next sentence before he said it.

It was going to be It is one centimetre long. He could feel it coming.

She went on with the ghana, faster, harder, the right-hand pages, forward and back. It held for a minute. Then she felt the thing she had felt at the Core a hundred times without knowing what it was: a gentle lean towards the next syllable, as if the morning was mouthing it along with her. The ghana had rules. It had learnt them. The cooker whistled on the beat of her own breath.

Recited is learnable; only composed is safe.

She did not know Anushtubh from the inside. She knew Telugu. She knew what was in front of her. She opened her mouth without the next word, the way you step off a bus that hasn't stopped.

"Vepa chettu meeda kaaki," she said, in the meter, eight syllables, more or less, "nuvvu ekkadiki eguruthaavo naaku teliyadu."

Crow on the neem, I don't know where you're going to fly.

The crow on the neem did not know either. She felt it in the pendant, a hitch, like a fan blade catching.

"Again," her mother whispered. "New one. Don't say it twice."

"Tammudu, nee paata tappu," Ananya said, and her voice cracked on it, and she folded the crack into the line and went on, "nenu sarichestha, nuvvu vachchi vinu."

Brother, your song is wrong. I'll correct it. Come back and listen.

Then the grey hitched, and he had not done it.

It came in at the rim, where the heat was, where the azaan came from, and it did not come as sound. It came as a correction. Somebody out there had his song, the one he had sung wrong on purpose, and was giving it back to him in a meter it had never had, in a voice with a crack in it that had been folded in and kept going. He knew whose crack that was.

The patience did not know what to do with that. He felt it look away from him, the way a teacher looks up at a noise in the corridor, and in the gap he did not say the sentence about one centimetre.

"And when she was eleven," Vikram said, very fast, in Telugu and then in English and then in a Telugu that was not quite any Telugu anybody spoke, "she fell off the Vidyanagar compound wall trying to get my cricket ball out of Murthy uncle's guava tree and she didn't cry, she stood up with the ball in her hand and blood on her knee and made that crease at me like I was the one who had fallen, like I was the idiot, which I was, and then she laughed, and the crease stayed in the laugh like a thumbprint stays in dough, and Ajji came out with turmeric and Akka said 'It's not even bleeding, Ajji,' while it was bleeding onto her chappal, and I thought, that is the bravest liar in Hyderabad, and I am going to be that one day, and I never was, and that is fine, that is fine, somebody has to hold the ball."

The grey hitched, and hitched, and hitched. Far off at the rim, so faint it might have been his own blood, a pressure cooker shrieked late, and a woman shouted for her dal.

He was breathing hard. He had her: the crease and the knee and the chappal. He did not know how long it would stay.

"Thaggedhe le," he told the Answer, in his worst Allu Arjun, and sang the first line of "Jaamu Rathiri" into the grey, in the wrong key, deliberately, so that she would have to correct him again.

She corrected him. She did not remember the next ten minutes as words. She remembered them as work: pulling each line up out of a well that hadn't been dug yet. The drip off the neem. Amma's glasses on her head. The geyser. Aisha's shoes. She mixed them into the ghana's frame and broke the frame and rebuilt it, Sanskrit and Telugu, pair and triplet and nonsense, and none of it could be said twice. Her pulse went ragged under her mother's fingers. Somewhere in the eighth minute the pigeons came apart over the temple into a mess, flapping, colliding, one of them falling sideways off the air and catching itself, and the cooker whistled late, a long ugly shriek, and a woman's voice shouted "Ayyo, the dal," inside the house behind.

In the lane the tennis ball hit a stone and went into the gutter, and the Reddy boy swore, in beautiful Hyderabadi, words he was far too young for, and ran after it.

"It's going," Aisha said. Then, a moment later, with something that was nearly interest: "It's gone."

Lakshmi took her fingers off Ananya's wrist and looked at her watch, the old HMT that had never kept time in its life. "Eleven minutes," she said. "Your Ammamma's first was six."

The pendant was cooling on her chest. Ananya looked down at her hands in her lap. They hurt. The knuckles hurt like her mother's in the rains, a deep old ache in the joints. She tried to make a fist and the fingers came in stiff and slow.

Her mother took both her hands and rubbed the knuckles with her thumbs, hard, as if working amla oil into a scalp.

"Now you know what it costs," Lakshmi said.

Afterwards the three of them sat on the terrace without speaking, and the colony got loud. Scooters. A banana hawker. The Reddy boy's mother calling him in for his bath, and his refusal, and hers. A temple loudspeaker began a Bathukamma song too loud, and somebody turned it down, and somebody else turned it back up.

A myna came over the neem and landed on the parapet a metre from Ananya's aching hand.

It landed badly. It came in a little long, skidded on the wet cement with its feet going in two directions, flared, overcorrected, bumped its own tail on the ledge and stood there with its feathers all wrong, looking round, furious and dignified, as if daring anyone on the terrace to say a word.

Ananya laughed, a loud stupid laugh, and then she was crying at the same time and could not tell where one stopped. The myna shook itself, and hopped once to the left for no reason at all, and her mother was laughing too, holding her hands, and Aisha was watching the bird with her head on one side.

"It didn't know where it was going to land," Ananya said, wiping her face on her wrist. "Amma. Look at it. It didn't know."

The myna looked back at her. Then it took off, sideways, wrong, into the whole untidy morning.