Schrödinger's Choice

On the twenty-seventh of September 1908, at a quarter past four in the afternoon, a clerk of the Residency weather office at Chaderghat chalked the next day's forecast on the board by the gate, where the Company's notices went.

He was a careful man, paid by the month, and in eleven years he had never written an hour on that board. He wrote Heavy rain. Then the rest came to him whole, the way a sum comes that has already been done somewhere else: River to rise from midnight. At the Afzal Gunj bridge by eight. Highest at eleven. He stood back and read it and did not know where it had come from, and because it was neat he left it up.

The rain began at nine. The Musi came up the steps of the ghats in the dark, on time. At eight in the morning it was over the parapet of the Afzal Gunj bridge, and at eleven, to the minute, it stood at its height, and every clock in the city, which had never agreed on anything, said so.

The freight lift at the back of the loading bay had no buttons either. It had a grey plate the size of a playing card, and Raghav's token was a grey fob the size of a thumb, and when Ananya touched one to the other at eleven forty on Monday night the doors closed on their own and the car went down without asking where.

Rohini Deshpande stood with her back to the wall and her handbag held in front of her in both hands. She had come straight from a dinner. There was a thread of mogra in her hair.

"If this is a stunt," she said, "I will write you up. With your name, in the proper format, to the committee."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't ma'am me. You never did before."

The lift passed SL-5 without slowing, the Sanctum going by on the other side of a few metres of concrete. The pendant under her kurta had been faintly warm since the Outer Ring Road. At SL-6 the plant room came through the walls, the deep chest-hum of pumps, and then the car settled at SL-7, and the doors opened.

The corridor was clean, with sanitiser dispensers and a potted areca palm, recently watered, the soil still dark. Deshpande looked at the palm. The door at the end said S-LAB in the brushed-steel lettering of every meeting room on 24. The fob opened it.

There were twelve chairs.

Dental-catalogue recliners in cream leather, two rows of six facing a glass wall with a dark control room behind it. Above each, on an articulated arm, hung an emitter the size of a tawa, angled down at where a face would be. On a steel rack by the door, on twelve padded stands, sat the crowns.

Ananya had seen one on Farzana Begum's head in a video at Nimrah, and had not understood that it was beautiful: a lattice of silver-grey filament, light as a hairnet, a sensor bead at every crossing. Each stand had a printed label. S-322. S-340. S-311. The last one on the rack had no label, only a strip of masking tape with a pencilled question mark.

Deshpande did not go to the chairs. She went, because she was Rohini Deshpande, to the logbook.

It lay on a stand by the glass, a hardbound register with numbered pages, and above it in a clip frame hung a card Ananya had seen outside every fridge room on 23 through 25. NO RUN WITHOUT A LOG. NO LOG WITHOUT A NAME.

"That's mine," Deshpande said. "I wrote that in 2017."

She opened the register at the front. March 2019. Date, time, subject number, operator initials, duration, outcome. The operator's handwriting was an ordinary convent hand, sloping, an ink blot where the pen had rested during a phone call. 2020: the slope had begun to come upright. 2022: the letters were all one height, and the ink blots had stopped. Deshpande turned faster. 2024. 2025. By this June the columns looked printed, every seven crossed at the same point, every outcome filled in with the same careful word down the page, threshold, threshold, threshold, deceased, threshold.

"They kept my rule," Deshpande said.

Her voice had gone quiet and precise. She put the register down, square to the edge of the stand, and pressed her palms flat on either side of it, and the shaking went from her wrists into her shoulders.

"Look at it. The man who wrote this. By the end he is perfect. I used to tell my students, if your lab notebook is too neat you are lying to me." She laughed, one dry breath. "He wasn't lying. He just stopped being able to make a mistake."

"His initials are on the survivor list," Ananya said. "Aisha has the intake sheets. He's one of the forty-one."

Deshpande looked at the cushions, which still held, faintly, the shape of the backs of heads. Then at the stand with the question mark.

"That was going to be you," she said.

"Or my mother."

The woman who had once denied her a single unsanctioned run crossed the room in her dinner sandals and took down the crown from the question-mark stand. It weighed nothing. She stood with it a while, the mogra thread slipping out of her hair on to her shoulder.

She set the crown back on its stand, exactly centred.

"All right," she said. She did not wipe her eyes. "I signed off the gas-handling for SL-5 and I let him tell me in writing that I had no authority. Later I will be responsible properly, with lawyers." She took her phone out of the handbag and opened a blank note, thumb ready. "Now. Tell me what you need. In plain English."

On Tuesday night the dining table in Tarnaka had eleven things on it that were not food, and the laptop was propped against the steel dabba of rava laddus so that the faces on the call looked up at everyone from below.

Deshpande was in her study in Banjara Hills with a lamp behind her and a notepad already half full. Raghav was in a car, streetlights going over his face. The third tile was Karthik and Deepak, shoulder to shoulder in a Chikkadpally kitchen.

Ananya had meant to keep those two out of it, and had sent the link anyway, because Vikram's repo was on her list and nobody else alive could read it.

Amma had cleared a space in front of her chair and put nothing in it but her hands. She began in her BARC teaching voice, and within a sentence it slid into the story voice from Ananya's childhood fevers.

"Daksha wanted a yajña with nothing left over," she said. "You know him, thalli. Every aunty's husband who re-counts the change at the kirana." She smoothed the tablecloth. "And his daughter would not have it. Ajji said Sati spoiled it. She was the thing that could not be counted. The fire was not the brave part. Any fool can be burnt. The brave part was standing in her father's house in front of all his priests and saying no. We keep the no. Nobody in this family walks into fire."

Nobody at the table moved. On the laptop Deshpande's pen had stopped.

"Then her body was cut," Amma said, "and the pieces fell all over this country. Fifty-one places. Jogulamba is one of them, two hundred kilometres from this chair. In our family we said, each one is a piece of the question. You scatter her so she can never be put together in one place. Because if she was ever whole in one place, somebody would answer her."

She looked at Ananya then, directly.

"In the Hiraṇyagarbha hymn the rishis ask the same thing at the end of every verse. kasmai devāya haviṣā vidhema. To which god shall we offer? They never answer it. In time the tradition made the question itself a god. Ka. His name is Who." "Your Ammamma loved that. A god called Who. She used to say it to the milkman."

"Amma."

"She is not the answer, thalli," Lakshmi said. "She is the one who keeps asking."

Aisha, at the end of the table, had been sitting with her hands folded. She said, into the pause, "That's correct."

Everyone looked at her.

"Not the goddess. I have no information about the goddess. The structure is correct." She unfolded her hands. "Ananya asked me to say the vacuum part before the plan."

"Say it," Ananya said.

"Everything is on a ladder. You have seen the bottom. Passwords. Clocks. Traffic. On the ORR on Sunday, breathing." The cab driver's chest had risen when hers rose. "Above that, soft matter. Then chemistry. The top rung is the vacuum, the empty space everything sits in. Physicists think it may not be the lowest state available. If it is not, it is only still here because finding the lower state is hard. A null makes finding cheap."

"Metastable," Deshpande said from Banjara Hills. "Oh, God."

"If the null reaches that rung, it finds the lower vacuum. A bubble of it forms. The bubble wall moves out at very nearly the speed of light." Aisha tilted her head at Ananya. "You did the number in August."

Ananya had, on the back of a run sheet at four in the morning, with pride.

$$ t = \frac{d}{c} = \frac{19\ \text{km}}{3\times10^{5}\ \text{km/s}} \approx 63\ \mu\text{s} $$

[From SL-5 to this dining table. The light telling you it has started arrives with the thing itself.]

"It will not hurt," Aisha said. "I want to say that because people ask. Nothing will hurt, anywhere, and then nothing will be anywhere. There will be no one to find it dark." She folded her hands again. "That is all of the vacuum part."

Karthik's tile had gone perfectly still. Raghav's car had stopped under a light.

"Right," said Nanna, after a long time. "Now tell us how we stop it."

"Not all of it," Aisha said. "Not tonight, and not at one table. It knows what is finished or decided. It cannot know what is improvised. Everything you settle, it has, the moment you settle it. So nobody here gets the whole plan, and nobody writes it down. Each of you gets the first move. The second move you make up when you are standing in it."

"That's not a plan," Deshpande said. "That's a jam session."

"Yes," Aisha said.

So Ananya gave them first moves and nothing else. The golden point on SL-5 was a door, and Vikram was in the room behind it, and she would go in on a tether and close it from the inside. She did not say what she had come out without on Sunday.

"In the file he left," Aisha said, "your brother held one note for four point one seconds inside a null. I have listened to it two hundred and six times. Everything that has ever gone into it was solved at the speed it could be checked. It has never once waited for anything. Your brother made it wait four seconds. That is the only irregular thing I have found in two years."

Four seconds. Across the table Nanna's thumb stopped on a bead.

"Raghav sir." The car had begun to move again. "The ground-floor fire stair, on the twenty-eighth. Five levels down to the Sanctum, unlocked and unwatched. Nanna's chair has to get down it."

"The lift—"

"The lift will have been optimised by then," Aisha said. "Not moving is optimal for a lift."

Raghav nodded once. She thought of his wife eating alone since 2021, and said nothing.

"Madam." Deshpande's pen lifted. "On the day Nanna will bring numbers for the Core's flux-bias lines. You get him and the numbers to the console."

"What numbers?"

"He doesn't know yet," Ananya said. "That's the point."

"Karthik. Deepak." Both faces snapped up. "Vikram's repo on 43. qe_dont_laugh. It doesn't answer, it asks; he built it as a joke, to throw junk questions at the scheduler. I need it running from 43 into the Sanctum feed for as long as you can keep it up."

"Akka," Deepak said, and swallowed. "We'll do it. Only if we are dying, you have to tell my mother it was a work thing, OT, not a girl thing."

"I'll tell her it was a girl thing," Ananya said, "and that the girl was very beautiful," and Deepak's mother's voice came from somewhere behind them in the Chikkadpally kitchen, "What girl?", and Karthik laughed so hard he fell out of the frame, and at the Tarnaka table Nanna laughed, and then Amma, and it went round the room, even Deshpande in her lamplight with her hand over her mouth. Only Aisha did not laugh. She watched them do it with her head on one side, the way she had watched the myna.

By Wednesday the dining table had become Krishna's, and nobody argued.

He had the drawing board from the loft, last used in 2009 for a Nagarjuna Sagar spillway gate, balanced across the wheelchair arms; his Staedtler compass; and the pendant, which Annu had taken off her neck at breakfast and put into his palm without a word. He laid it on a folded white handkerchief, face up, like a patient.

He had seen the Sri Yantra a thousand times in his life without looking at it once. He looked at it now as he would have looked at a cracked weld.

Nine triangles, four up and five down, and out of their crossings forty-three smaller triangles in rings around a single point. It is hard to draw correctly. The lines have to meet in threes all over the figure, and if one is off by a hair a triple meeting opens into a tiny extra triangle and the whole thing is wrong.

He put the compass point on the bindu and swung, and after an hour he had no vocabulary for what he saw, so he used his own.

The triple points were the knots. Every one of them was a place where three fields, crossing, came to nothing together.

"It's a stress plot," he said aloud to the empty room. "Ayyo. Amma. It's a stress plot with the load in the middle."

Annu had sketched the chip for him from memory on the back of the electricity bill: eighty-one tiles under the big flux-bias magnet, and under each tile its own flux line carrying a few milliamps, all of them set by software to a dull, even pattern. You only changed the numbers. He began to work out a current pattern on the 81 flux lines, shaping the field across the chip, not the room: laid along the nine triangles, so that the field had knots in it, and a centre which the whole geometry agreed about and which no single piece of it produced. A shape that was all remainder.

He could not prove it would do anything. He could say exactly where it would crack, if it cracked. He wrote that down, left-margin, in fountain pen.

"Nanna. Tea."

Annu put a cup on the only clear corner of the board and looked at the triple points.

"You can't go down five floors of fire stair," she said. "You heard Aisha."

"I can't walk, Annu. I can still calculate where things break." He tapped the margin with the pen cap. "Raghav and your Deshpande madam can carry the chair. I'll carry the numbers. Now go and help your mother before she climbs on a stool."

She went. Through the open front door he could see the verandah. It was the fourth day of Bathukamma, and Lakshmi was on the floor out there with Padma from next door and the Reddy grandmother, and between them, on a brass thambalam, a Bathukamma was going up: tangedu the yellow of turmeric, gunugu plumes dyed pink and green and a violent Hyderabadi purple, laid in rings, flowers outward, each ring smaller than the last, every tier pressed down with the flat of the hand. Padma was complaining that the tangedu was thin this year. The purple was running on to Lakshmi's fingers.

Ring on ring, narrowing upward, on a round plate, inside a square of rangoli with four gates.

Krishna put down his cup.

He looked at the pendant, and out at the stack, and back at the board, at the forty-three triangles in their rings, which the pūjā books called a Meru when it was built up instead of drawn flat. Ajji had called the pendant a Meru. He had thought it was a figure of speech.

The women had been building it, every autumn, in every lane, for as long as anyone could say. Nobody had given them the drawing. They made it by hand, all at once, badly, two hundred slightly wrong mountains of flowers in every colony in Telangana, and they carried them singing to the water, and no two were ever the same.

He started to laugh, and could not stop. It came up out of him like laughing at a funeral, and he had to hold the drawing board on the chair. Annu came running from the verandah with a plume of pink gunugu in her hand and her face frightened, and Lakshmi behind her with her purple fingers, and he could only point at the flowers and then at the pendant and then at the flowers, wheezing, the tears going sideways into his ears.

"Nanna, what, what happened—"

"Your mother," he said. "Annu. Your mother and Padma garu. All those hundreds of years. Not one of them did the maths." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "Not one of them needed to."

Lakshmi looked at the board over his shoulder for a long time, at the triple points, at the rings. Then she put one purple fingertip on the left margin.

"Third line. You've carried a one that isn't there."

She had been right about his carries since IIT Kanpur.

"Abhi bhi, Krishna," she said. Then she looked at the pink plume in her daughter's hand.

"You've spoilt my gunugu," she said, "holding it like that," and took it back, and he laughed again until he cried properly.

That night Ananya found her mother on the back step with the purple still in the creases of her fingers, rubbing coconut oil into them to take it out, and not managing.

Two lanes over a loudspeaker was playing Bathukamma Bathukamma uyyalo for the eleventh time since dusk, and under it, closer, real women sang the same song live and slightly behind, arguing with it. The Reddys' dog had opinions. Ananya sat down on the step below her mother's and leaned her back against Amma's shins, as she had at eleven, and felt her mother's hand come down on her head.

"Your father has decided we're a field," Lakshmi said.

"He's right."

"Of course he's right. He's always right when he laughs like that." The hand moved in her hair. "He knows what it means too. He hasn't said, so I will."

Ananya closed her eyes.

"Somebody has to stand at the other end of your tether, Annu. Not a machine. You heard Aisha. It has to be breath, and it has to be many, and it has to be making itself up as it goes. The women will be on Tank Bund on the twenty-eighth anyway. I'll hold from the lake, with them, as long as you're inside."

"Amma, no. This is Sati."

"Sati didn't come back," Lakshmi said. "I'm coming back, to fight Padma about the tangedu. I've been holding since October 2015, awake and asleep, without anybody's permission. At least this time I'll know I'm doing it."

"You don't know how long it'll be. Look what eleven minutes did to my hands." Ananya turned round on the step and took her mother's hands, the purple ones, and held them hard. "Ajji's hands at sixty were eighty. You forgot your own wedding photo. You forgot neem. If you hold the whole city for a whole night—"

"Then I'll forget more," Lakshmi said.

"I'm choosing this, Annu. It's not happening to me, and it's not your idea, and it's not because you went into that room alone on Sunday and came back without Ajji's jasmine." Ananya's breath went, and her mother nodded, yes, she knew. "I was a physicist before you were born and I am telling you what I am going to do. Don't you dare make it your guilt. You have enough guilt for a joint family. This one's mine."

The loudspeaker two lanes over finished, and in the gap the live women came through clear, a high voice leading and the others answering, uyyalo, each one arriving at it a little differently.

"Promise," Lakshmi said.

"I can't promise that."

"Then lie to me, like you're lying to him." Amma's thumb found the knuckles of her right hand and pressed, just where they ached. "You've got good at it. You hold it right here, in the hands. Your Ammamma held lies there too. Hold one more for me."

Ananya held her mother's hands and did not answer, and after a while her mother laughed and said the coconut oil was useless and she would go to Tank Bund with purple fingers and let the whole colony talk.

It came to her on Thursday, from the wrong direction, as the answers to the real problems always had.

She was on the floor of Vikram's room with a sheet of his A4 on a library book, because Aisha had said at breakfast, in her flat way, "He let you find things. Make a list of which," and gone back to her upma.

Ananya ruled a line down the middle of the page. On the left she wrote Permitted, arranged or used. On the right, after a while, Not.

The left filled fast. The Quantace health line that routed Amma's ambulance to the CSR hospital, where a scan of a sleeping woman had turned up her daughter. Vikram's job: an ordinary hire in 2019, a good engineer from Tarnaka, and then, once the family line surfaced in the imaging, a piece on the board. The raise Raghav froze, the push behind the forgery; Raghav had told her on Tuesday that the freeze came down from 60 with no reason attached. The opening, perfectly aligned. Mehta's budget, with the blue Q on the remittance. The 4B box and the micro-SD in its back corner, a box that told its owner it had been opened, and was meant to. The audio from —S. The pool car, which had already decided the route.

He had not needed to find her. Her brother had been on his payroll for six years.

The right-hand column she wrote slowly. Vikram's broken note, four seconds held in a place that did not wait. Amma's register laid against her own job log on a Sunday night, from a photo of a page Nanna had taken back. The run out of Nimrah to Imran's stall, which she had not known she would make until her feet were in Laad Bazaar. Yousuf, because Sumathi had waved a ladle and said he owed her biryani.

Every item on the left was a door held open, and every door had been held for a woman who had to arrive alive, and willing, and on time. A man who needs you willing will sign for nearly anything, if you ask in the right voice.

Under the sheet lay the 1908 page in its Xerox sleeve. The rain was foretold to the hour by a Company clerk, and the river obeyed. Aisha had asked the other question over the same upma: "Why the twenty-eighth? The Phase IV files say date TBD until the eleventh of September. On the eleventh it changes. No memo."

The eleventh. The morning after Vikram went in.

She went back through Sunday in the Sanctum as you go back through a proof. Sharath by console four with his jacket in his hand, touching the crescent behind his right ear twice: The twenty-eighth. Sunday. The night the river obeyed. She had heard it and not heard it. She had been thinking about Vikram's face through the gold.

It was the diary's sentence, on a page that had spent ten years in Ajji's chest, in a house Sharath Jai Shetty had never entered. He could have the flood date from any history of the Nizam's city, from the plaque under the tamarind tree at Osmania General. But the verb was not in any of those. The verb was on the page beside her knee.

Somebody had given him the sentence. Somebody who had read that page through Amma's sleep and Ananya's own, and spoke to him through the crescent behind his ear.

He thought he was a man choosing a night to open a door. He was a man being told when to hold it.

She wrote it at the bottom of the sheet, across the line, because it belonged in neither column: the date — not his. The twenty-eighth was Bathukamma Sunday: the women on Tank Bund, the Mecca Masjid crowd at Maghrib, under one sky. It wanted the whole city's noise in one place, so it could learn it all at once.

In the kitchen Aisha was drying a steel tumbler with great thoroughness, and Amma was at the stove.

"It picked the day," Ananya said. "Not him."

Aisha put the tumbler down. "Yes," she said. "I thought that was likely. I did not know how to say it so you would hear it."

Lakshmi turned the flame down and stood with her back to them a moment.

"So it's coming to where we'll be," she said. "Good. Saves us the auto fare."

Sharath had wanted a date in June, and had not been given one.

He had everything else by then: the chairs, the count, the girl's number. The calendar said TBD all summer because every night he asked, on 60 with two fingers behind his right ear, and every night the voice he had carried since 2002 answered him as she always had, with a question. Why do you want to know, Anna?

On the night of the tenth of September, with the Nayagiri boy gone into the gold, he stood at the glass with the rain coming over Gachibowli and asked again, without hope, out of habit.

The twenty-eighth, Priya said, pleased, as if she had been saving it for him. The night the river obeyed.

He typed it into the calendar before it could change. He liked the phrase; he said it to himself in the lift for days.

It did not occur to him to wonder why, after twenty-three years, his sister had given him an answer.

On Friday night they ate as if nobody would ever be hungry again.

Amma made pesarattu as she made it for birthdays, ground in the old Sumeet with green chillies and ginger, the first one torn up for the crows because it always came out wrong.

Padma from next door came in with a dabba of allam pachadi, "because you people buy it from Ratnadeep, I know," and stayed. On the laptop, Karthik and Deepak were eating their own dinner in Chikkadpally, and Deepak's mother leaned into the frame in her nightie with a pesarattu on a steel plate and held it up to the camera, competitively.

"Tinnara?" she demanded of Tarnaka. "Everybody has eaten?"

"Aunty, yours is too thick," Lakshmi told her.

"Mine are soft, yours are papads," Deepak's mother said, in a Telugu of great ferocity and joy, and the two women went at it across Hyderabad while their sons put their heads in their hands.

Everyone talked at once. Karthik told the story of the Frankfurt spirit clock and Vikram's garland, and halfway through it Padma began to cry into the pachadi. "He used to steal from my dabba," she said, when Lakshmi put an arm round her. "Every time, at the gate, before it reached your table. Since he was six. Tonight it came in full." Lakshmi held her and did not stop talking, about Manager-garu and his ironed shirts, about the maintenance dues Padma still owed, until Padma laughed wetly and blamed the ginger.

Ananya ate four pesarattus. On the fifth she thought of Vikram inside the gold, whether he could taste anything at all, and put it down, and Amma took it off her plate without a word and ate half and gave her back the other half. She ate it.

Later, when Padma had gone and the laptop was shut, Nanna wheeled himself into the kitchen, where Amma was scraping the tawa.

On the shelf above the fridge was the grey Philips with the broken handle and a shoebox of cassettes in Ajji's handwriting. He found the one he wanted without looking and pressed play, and the kitchen filled with hiss, and then with Ghantasala, from 1961, from Ajji's Sunday mornings with the amla oil, huge and grieving and joyful. Siva Sankari, siva ananda lahari.

"Krishna," Amma said, scraper in hand, "I'm washing up."

"Come here, Lakshmi garu."

She came. He took her wet hands, and since he could not stand he turned the chair instead, slowly, one hand on the wheel, a small circle on the tiles between the fridge and the gas cylinder, and she stepped round it with him, barefoot, her hand on his shoulder. Out of step with the song, then in, then out again. Ghantasala went up into the high part, and Amma laughed and put her forehead against Nanna's, and the purple in her fingers left a mark on his collar.

Ananya stood in the doorway with the dish towel. Aisha came and stood beside her in her white canvas shoes, laced to the top. She had worn them in the house for nine days, and Amma had said nothing for nine days, which in Tarnaka was a kind of love.

"You can take them off," she said. "Nobody is going to make you run tonight."

Aisha considered her feet. "I would like to keep them on," she said. "In case." Then she watched the kitchen for a long time.

"They are not in time," she said eventually.

"No."

"Good," Aisha said. Then, in the same voice, like a fact she had come across: "I would like them to do it again."

At a quarter to midnight Ananya went up to the terrace with the black Quantace phone.

The colony had gone quiet by Tarnaka standards: one loudspeaker far off towards Lalaguda, dogs.

She sat on his upturned paint bucket, and at five to twelve the phone lit in her hand.

"Doctor." Behind him she could hear the Sanctum, the pulse tube at 1.4 hertz, patient. "Forgive the hour. I wanted to know you were sleeping."

"I'm not." That was true, and she let him have it. "I need something for Sunday. I'll need my mother's voice in my ear. Hers and the women's, from Tank Bund, live, raw, in a bud behind the hair. You said it yourself: fear makes a metronome." She made herself say the next part softly, a daughter's part. "Give me something to be in love with."

She felt him listen, and behind his listening something else listening too, through the crescent. She kept her face on the neem and her mind on her mother's purple fingers, which was not a trick. It was only where her mind wanted to go.

"Nobody holds alone," he said at last, slowly, as if it were a line he admired. "Yes. Have your boy on 43 route it. I'll sign the request myself."

"Thank you."

"Sleep, Doctor." The line went dead.

The lie had been easier this time, and that frightened her. She had asked for a weapon, and he had signed for it.

She sat on the bucket with the phone in her lap. Her right hand had curled itself shut. She opened it, slowly. The knuckles ached, a deep, old, rainy-season ache, as if all of the week's lying had gone into them and settled there to stay. She rubbed them with her left thumb, hard, the way Amma rubbed in oil, and they did not stop. Down in the lane the Bathukamma stood in the dark, one white plume at its top, and a night wind that nobody had predicted came through the neem and moved it.