Conservation of Reality

The India Meteorological Department said rain at half past three.

Krishna heard it on the television bolted high in the corner of the neuro ICU waiting hall at NIMS, beside a sign that said in three languages that attendants must not sleep on the floor. The attendants slept on the floor, their bedsheets spread under the steel chairs as if on a railway platform.

It was Tuesday, the thirtieth. Saddula Bathukamma. Lakshmi had been asleep for two days, since the 108 had taken her off the Tank Bund steps with Padma in the back holding two fingers to her neck all the way to Punjagutta.

He sat in his chair at the end of the row, beside the glass door he was allowed through only at eleven and at five, with his register open on his knees, and did not write in it. His right arm was strapped across his chest in a blue sling. The stairs had taken the last of that shoulder somewhere between SL-4 and SL-5, with a sound like a wet stick breaking, while his own voice went on shouting load paths.

"Half past three," the girl on the news was saying. She stood on the lawn outside the IMD office in Begumpet with a closed umbrella, beside a scientist from the forecasting centre: a thin man in a checked half-shirt with three pens in the pocket.

For three months the forecasts had been right to the minute. All week the channel had been asking the man in the checked shirt how IMD had become so accurate, and all week he had said he did not know, in a voice that got smaller every day.

Three thirty came up on the clock in the corner of the screen. The sky behind the scientist was low and grey and did nothing.

On the floor, the grandmother from Warangal who had been sleeping on her son's lungi sat up.

"Sir, it is three thirty-five," the anchor said.

"Yes, madam."

"Your forecast was three thirty."

"Yes, madam." He looked up at the sky with the expression of a man waiting for a bus that has always come.

Three forty. Krishna's left hand had closed on the beads in his lap. Three forty-five. A crow landed on the IMD signboard behind them, missed its footing, flapped, and landed again, badly. Krishna could not remember when he had last seen a bird miss anything.

At three fifty the first drop hit the scientist on his glasses.

It was one fat drop, and then another a foot to the left, and then a gust came across the Begumpet lawns, turned every leaf on the neem over to its pale side, and blew the rain in sideways, anyhow, straight into the camera. The anchor's umbrella went up and inside out at once. And the man in the checked shirt laughed.

He laughed out loud on live television, with his head thrown back and the rain running into his collar, and shouted over the wind, "Twenty minutes! Madam, twenty minutes late! I was wrong!" He waved at the sky as if it had come to pick him up.

In the waiting hall the grandmother from Warangal began to laugh, and then her son, and then a young man in a Chelsea shirt whose father had had a stroke on Sunday during the frozen hour. Krishna laughed until the sling hurt, and went on after it hurt. Outside the high windows the rain reached Punjagutta late and uneven, blowing through the ventilator grilles onto the families' bedsheets, and nobody moved to take them in.

He turned the register on his knee and wrote, left-handed, in letters that looked like a nine-year-old's:

30.9.25. IMD: 15:30. Actual: 15:50.

Because he was an engineer, and an engineer records the residual, he added under it:

t_actual − t_forecast = 20 min

[The city is late again.]

At five o'clock the nurse let him in and pushed him to Lakshmi's bed with the phone held up in his good hand, and on the phone was Padma's video from Tank Bund: the women at dusk in the rain, lowering the last Bathukammas of the season onto a lake that slopped at the steps the way a lake is supposed to. Mallamma from the Reddys' lane was there with both hands bandaged white and a Bathukamma balanced on her head, because she could not hold it. Padma had carried Lakshmi's stack, the tangedu and the purple gunugu, and she said to the camera, crying and scolding at once, "Akka, yours is going now, I'm sending it, you'll have to trust me, I did the top tier wrong." She put it on the water. It rocked badly and did not sink.

Lakshmi lay under the monitor with her hair in a plait somebody else had done. Her hands lay outside the sheet, and they were not the hands she had taken to the bund. Her heart kept the time it liked on the screen above her: a little fast, then slow, then a skip that made the nurse glance over and then away again, unworried. Krishna watched the skips as if they were a cricket score.

The news came to Ananya in the hospital: sideways, on other people's phones, in pieces.

Aisha had gone on the Monday at first light, her eleven days spent. She had stood in the Tarnaka gateway with her one grey bag and her shoes on and said, "I have stayed the number of days I stay." Ananya asked where. "Somewhere with a sea. A sea is never finished." She shook Ananya's hand once, correctly, and then, as if reading the next item off a list: "When your brother wakes, tell him I laughed. I would like it to be on the record."

On Wednesday the CBI registered a case against Quantace Industries, its directors and "persons unknown". Raghav, Deshpande and Meera Malhotra gave statements in open court, Meera refusing a microphone with two fingers, her father's diary under her arm. On Friday the government pleader began reading the names of the Project P subjects into the record. It took him most of two days. Farzana Begum, thirty-six, Tolichowki. Outside the CSR hospital Rukhsana told a reporter, "Today they said her name in the court. Two times, because the first time the man said it wrong. That I wanted."

Prof. Mehta resigned from the Institute by email, citing his health. Ananya read it at Lakshmi's bedside and put the phone face down.

Her own statement she gave at the Commissionerate in Basheerbagh, to an inspector who explained, kindly, that she was the last person known to have seen Sharath Jai Shetty.

"Where was he?"

"Under the Core. By the mixing-chamber plate."

"And then?"

"Then I came out with my brother. He didn't."

The inspector read it back. Last seen SL-5 basement facility, PJS Tower, evening of 28.09.25. Witness did not see him leave. "Madam, the papers are saying Dubai."

"The papers are wrong."

He looked at her for a while, and at her hands on the desk, and printed it for her to sign.

Deshpande had searched the Sanctum before dawn that Monday, on her knees with a torch, and again with the police. Nothing of Sharath: no body, no shoe, no blood of his but a smear by the rail. Nanna had been watching Nag at the end, and Raghav had been at the wall with his face to the curve; when either of them looked again, the rail was empty. The administrator the Centre put over Quantace announced that the Sunya Core would be held cold until the inquiry had its baseline, then warmed under expert supervision. The expert supervision was Deshpande.

They cremated Nag at Mahaprasthanam on the Sunday. Karthik began Endaro Mahanubhavulu without asking anyone, off the beat, on purpose, and badly, and Nag's mother, who had not cried, put her hand over her mouth and laughed at how bad it was, and then cried.

Nine days after Tank Bund, on the seventh, at the five o'clock visit, the rain came forty minutes after the forecast and the nurse met Ananya at the glass door before she could wheel Nanna through it. The nurse was trying not to smile and failing.

"Sir," she said, to Nanna. "Your wife is awake. She wants to know who has been feeding you."

Lakshmi had been home four days before anyone let her near the stove, and she had used them.

By Sunday the twelfth, the Bathukamma committee of Street No. 3, Tarnaka, which had in previous years been three women and a notebook, had a WhatsApp group of sixty-one, a treasurer, a sub-committee for hands, and a chart on the fridge in her writing: whose hands had been burnt on the night, who was taking whom to Gandhi for dressings, with Doctor-garu pencilled against six of them whether she liked it or not, who needed her husband spoken to. Mallamma's name was at the top with two stars. Padma had been appointed to speak to husbands. The water-tanker man, who had come two hours late on Thursday and asked for an extra two hundred, had been spoken to from the cot, in a Kanpur Hindi so pure that Padma wrote some of it down, and on Friday he came at six in the morning and would not take tea.

"She was lying in a coma for nine days," Padma told the doctor, "and she has woken up a Collector."

"District Collector," said Lakshmi, from the cot on the verandah, without opening her eyes. "Don't downgrade me."

Some things had not come back. She knew it the way you know a tooth has gone, by putting your tongue where it was. Krishna had left his register open at an old page, and on it, in his handwriting from before the sling, was a line with a trident in it and a little hat on an H, and she had looked at it with interest, as she might look at a kolam from another state. Then she had seen his face in the doorway.

"What?" she said. "Is it something I used to know?"

"You used to teach it," he said. "To me. Badly."

She laughed. It came up out of her whole, the old laugh, the one that went up at the end, and she had watched it hit him in the chest like a cricket ball. He had gone and sat in the study with the door shut for some time after that, and she had let him.

The yellow Meco multimeter had gone the same way. On Friday she had taken the steel biscuit tin down from above the fridge for Padma's dead mixie, found the meter lying on the jeweller's screwdrivers, and turned its dial through all the clicks. Ohm. Volt. A little horseshoe. She could read the words on it and use none of them. Her thumb stopped on one setting by itself and she could not have said why. "Arre, pagal," she told it, and put it back in the tin, on top, where her hand would find it.

So, no maths. She could live without maths. What she could not live without was being in her own kitchen on a Sunday morning, so on Sunday morning she was in it.

She ground the batter in the old Sumeet. She did not measure the dal. She had never measured the dal; that was the whole point of the dal. Green moong soaked overnight, a thumb of ginger, four green chillies and then a fifth because Vikram was home, a fistful of jeera, salt with the fingers. The Sumeet screamed like a jet on the ORR and the neighbour's dog screamed back, as it had every Sunday for twenty years, and she stood with her hand on the jar lid and her eyes shut and listened to the two of them disagree.

The lane off Shah Ali Banda had its noise back. Ananya heard it from the main road: a pressure cooker going off out of turn, two televisions on two channels, somebody's grandson practising the same four bars on a Casio and getting the third bar wrong every time. The milk in the degchis boiled over now. She could smell it, scorched, on the steps.

It was the same Sunday, the afternoon. She had come three times since the night and turned round at the mouth of the lane three times. This time Imran bhai had seen her from his Chetak and shouted "Aunty! Physics wali aayi!" down the whole length of it, so there was no turning round.

Sumathi opened the blue door with a ladle. She looked at Ananya's feet, and then at her face, and this time she did not say sit.

"TV mein bol rahe hain," she said. "Every channel. Three hundred and forty-seven. My son's name they are saying like a film villain. And this one," the ladle went sideways, at the house opposite, "Lalitamma, is telling the whole lane I should go on TV and cry." She did not move out of the doorway. "They say he ran. Dubai, they say. Singapore." Her eyes did not leave Ananya's. "You were there. Tell me where he is."

So Ananya told her.

She told it standing in the lane, because she had not been asked in, with the Casio going wrong behind her. She told her about the chair, and the light, and the three hundred and forty-seven, and Farzana, whose eyes opened every Thursday. She had practised it on the bus making it smaller, and at the door the words came out the size they were. She told her about the photograph from Yousuf's Nokia, the woman in the background, out of step, holding the girl's hand. That was my grandmother, aunty. She didn't take her. She kept her company so she wouldn't be alone. She told her about the girl of fifteen made of light, and her son on his knees holding her, and that Priya had answered him with a question.

Sumathi's face moved at that. Only her mouth.

"And he stayed," Ananya said. "He's still there, aunty. He's keeping her company. He can't come back, because if he does..." She did not have the end of that sentence in any language. "I left him there. I gave him my Ajji's pendant, and I told him to hold, and I brought my brother out and I left your son."

The slap was fast. It was a ward attendant's slap, thirty years of OGH in it, the flat of the palm across her cheek hard enough that her head went round and the lane went white for a second on that side. The Casio stopped. Across the lane Lalitamma's door, which had been open a crack, opened fully.

Ananya did not put her hand to her face. She stood there with it burning.

Sumathi was breathing hard through her nose. Her hand was still up. She looked at it as if it belonged to someone who had come in without knocking. Then she lowered it, and her eyes did what her mouth would not.

"Twenty-three years," she said. "Twenty-three years I didn't know who was sitting with my girl. Twenty-three years I thought at the end she was alone in that bed, with me asleep on the stool like a buffalo." Her voice cracked right down the middle and she went on through the crack. "Your grandmother. Holding her hand. And my son thought—" She stopped. "He thought she took her. That's why. All this. For that."

"Yes, aunty."

"And now he is holding the hand." It was not a question. She stood with it. "My Sharath. Holding the hand."

"Yes."

Sumathi turned around and went inside.

That morning, in Tarnaka, Vikram was at the table. He had been home since the ninth. He had come back to them from the Between thinner, with the teal scarf still knotted round his left wrist so tight that the nurses at NIMS had had to cut it, and he had asked for the pieces back and tied them round again. He slept a great deal. He had not known his school for the first three days, and had made Krishna write it down for him, St. Joseph's, Habsiguda, and kept the paper in his wallet. He knew Annu completely. He looked at her across the table sometimes, when she was reading, and said nothing, and Lakshmi knew what he was looking at.

In the pūjā room there was a photograph of her mother in a sandalwood frame with a dry garland on it, and on his second night home Lakshmi had found him standing in front of it in the dark.

"That's Ajji," he had said. Not a question. The way you say a capital city.

"Yes, ra."

"Nanna wrote down that she used to tap on the table. When she did the chanting. Like this." He tapped. It was right, the ghana rhythm, the three and the two. "I don't remember her," he said. "I know I did. I've read it. I've got it in the register, all of it, she used to give me the burnt bit of the halwa, I used to hide in her sari when you came to hit me." He tapped again. "My hand remembers her and I don't."

Lakshmi had not said anything. She had put her arm round him, and they had stood there, and in the frame her mother had looked at them both with that expression of hers, amused, as if waiting for somebody to say something intelligent.

Now the tawa was hot. She tested it with water from her fingers and the drops skated and vanished. She poured the first ladle and spread it in a spiral from the middle outward with the back of the ladle, thin, thinner, as her mother had, and it stuck, and tore, and came off in green rags.

"First one's for the crows," said Vikram from the table.

She turned. He was looking at the tawa, surprised at himself.

"How do you know that?"

"I don't know." He frowned. "Is it right?"

"It's right." She scraped the rags onto a steel plate and held it out to him. "Go on, Manager-garu. You take it."

He took it out to the compound wall, where the crows were already sitting, because the crows of Tarnaka knew the Sumeet better than anyone. Through the kitchen window she watched him put it down on the wall and step back. The crows came in their usual rabble, three of them at once and none of them in turn, shoving, one falling off the wall and flapping up again cursing, a big one stealing the whole piece and dropping it in the Reddys' drain. Vikram stood by the neem in his old Quantace T-shirt with his hands in his pockets and laughed at three crows fighting over a burnt dosa as if it were the funniest thing he had ever seen.

The second one came off the tawa whole. She did the onions on it and the chopped ginger and a few cashews, the way Ajji had done it for her first day at BARC, and folded it over, and slid it onto his plate with the allam pachadi that Padma had brought round in a dabba that morning and would not stop mentioning. Ananya came in from the verandah with her hair still wet and stopped in the kitchen doorway, and Krishna pushed himself one-handed to the other side of the table, and nobody said anything, because all three of them were watching Vikram's hand.

He tore off a corner. Dipped it in the pachadi. Ate it.

He chewed for a long time.

Lakshmi had told herself she would not stand over him. She stood over him. She held the spatula across her body and watched his face do what faces do when they are looking for something in a room they know, a switch they have put their hand on ten thousand times in the dark.

"Tastes like..." he said.

He stopped.

He tore off another piece and ate that too, slowly, and she saw it happen, saw him not find it. His eyes filled. His mouth was still full and his eyes filled, and he looked up at her from the plate like a boy of seven, her son, who had come home.

"I don't know, Amma," he said. "Tastes like..." He swallowed. "Tastes like more."

Ananya stood on the step. Somebody in the lane had started the Casio again, softly, as if to see whether it was allowed. She thought she should go. She was working out how to go, which foot, when Sumathi's voice came out of the kitchen with no change in it at all.

"Kaiku khadi hai bahar? Andar aa. Chappal outside."

She went in. She sat on the cot. A steel plate came into her lap before she had finished sitting: rice, the khatti dal, a spoon of gongura, two sweet puris on the side that she was not allowed to refuse. Sumathi stood over her with the ladle, as she had stood over her son.

"Eat."

Ananya looked at the plate and could not.

"Eat, I said." A second ladle of dal came down on the rice, uninvited, and then Sumathi's hand came down after it, the same hand, and mixed the dal into the rice with her fingers, quick and rough, and made a ball of it, and held it up in front of Ananya's mouth the way you hold it up to a child who has come home from somewhere and does not know how to be in a house yet.

Ananya opened her mouth. Sumathi fed her.

It was sour with Lalitamma's tamarind and hot with the chilli oil, and she could taste all of it. She was crying before the first mouthful went down, crying with her mouth full and her cheek on fire, and Sumathi made another ball and fed her that too, and another, and said nothing at all except once, "Chew. Chew properly. You scientists never chew."

At the door old Kamala-bi appeared on her stick, having crossed the lane at the speed of scandal, and looked at the two of them and the red handprint coming up on the grown woman's face.

"Achha," she said, in the loud voice of the deaf. "So first you hit, then you feed. Same like with your own. Now she's also yours?"

"Kamala-bi, go home."

"I'm only asking."

"Go and ask your own house."

Kamala-bi went, grievously wronged, and Ananya laughed with rice in her mouth, and choked, and Sumathi hit her on the back, hard, the second blow of the afternoon, and gave her water.

When the plate was empty Sumathi took it away and stood at the kitchen door with it, her back to the room.

"He never ate properly," she said. "You tell him. If you go there, if you can go there, you tell him his mother says he is too thin."

Lakshmi put the spatula down.

She did not know she had done it until she was holding him, his head against her stomach and her chin on the top of his head, his hair smelling of the hospital soap still, of all the days. He was crying without any sound, his shoulders going, and his hand came up blind and found her sari at the hip and held it, a fistful of it, like a child holding on in a crowd at the Numaish, and she stood and let him. Behind her she heard Krishna put his good hand over his face. She heard Annu come round the table. She felt Annu's arms go round them both from the side, awkward, too tight, her daughter's knuckles hard against her back, and the three of them stood in the kitchen with the tawa smoking.

"The tawa," said Krishna, at last, thickly.

"Let it burn," said Lakshmi.

It burnt. The third pesarattu went black and filled the kitchen with smoke. The smoke alarm the Reddy boy had insisted on installing in July went off in its high, stupid shriek, nobody could reach it, and Vikram lifted his wet face off his mother's stomach and said, "Amma, even the ceiling is crying," and all of them laughed so hard that Padma came running across from next door with a bucket.

Lakshmi made him seven more. He ate every one.

She watched him look for it all the way down the stack, and go on eating, and ask for another. It was gone as her maths was gone, and he was sitting at her table, and he was hungry.

Deshpande came to Tarnaka on Deepavali evening, when the colony was already going off like a war. She came in a government Innova and stood in the gateway in a cotton sari with a file under her arm while the Reddy boy's nephews lit a string of a thousand ladi at her feet without noticing her.

"The Core reached ambient at 14:10," she said, when the ladi had finished. "I thought you would want to hear it from me."

Ananya took her up to the terrace, because it was the only place they could hear themselves. From there the whole of Tarnaka was burning in small pieces: chichubuddis on every parapet, the mothers on Street No. 3 shouting at children in the orders of a committee.

Deshpande did not open the file at once. She talked to it, as she talked to a log.

"After the pulse tube restarted, the MXC never got back below fourteen millikelvin. It should have gone to nine. I did a load fit." A rocket burst over the Osmania trees and she waited it out. "Unexplained three microwatts at plate centre. Not drifting, not decaying. Steady for three weeks, behind sealed shields, with nobody touching the fridge. So we warmed up to find it."

She opened the file. Inside it, in a polythene evidence bag with a chain-of-custody form stapled to it, was the pendant.

"On the plate," she said. "Dead centre, under the point where the doorway closed. Face up, with the chain broken."

"I put it in his hand," Ananya said. "In there."

"Then it came back through the door without him." Deshpande did not look up from the file. "Nobody on this side put it there. The graphacer was on the floor by console 3. We have sealed it. It is still speaking. It answers anything you ask. Every answer is correct." She said it as she would say a pump had failed, and Ananya saw her fingers tighten on the file. "I have told the administrator that nobody asks it anything."

On Deepavali evening the lane off Shah Ali Banda lit its doorsteps one by one, and Sumathi, who had not lit a lamp since 2002, went to the niche above the almirah, where Priya's notebooks lay under a pink ribbon gone grey. The clay lamp was the plain kind from the man at Lal Darwaza. She filled it with oil from a steel tumbler. She rolled two wicks between her palms, not one, and laid them in the lamp with their heads apart, so that they would not burn as one flame.

She lit the first. "Priya," she said to the flame, in the ordinary voice of a mother calling a girl in from the lane. Outside, Kamala-bi's grandson set off a bomb under a bucket, and the whole lane swore at him in three languages.

Up on the Tarnaka terrace, between rockets, Deshpande held out the form first. "Sign here. And here. Date and time."

"Madam. It's my grandmother's."

"Then there will be no difficulty signing for it." Deshpande waited, pen out.

Ananya laughed, the first time that day, and signed, and Deshpande tore the bag open along its perforation and tipped the pendant into her palm.

It was warm.

Not warm from a hand or from a pocket. The plate it had lain on for three weeks had been a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero and then, slowly, the temperature of a basement. It lay in her palm the temperature of a person, and the heat came up out of it steadily, the way heat comes up from a sleeping child's back, and it did not fade while she held it.

She closed her hand on it. She could feel the Sri Yantra's grooves against her skin, the little triangles Krishna had measured with a compass at the dining table.

"He is still holding," Deshpande said. She looked out at the fireworks, and after a while she said, "Happy Deepavali, Dr. Nayagiri," and went downstairs, and Ananya heard Lakshmi catch her at the door and refuse to let her leave without a dabba of ariselu.

Sumathi lit the second from the first.

"Sharath."

The two flames stood up in the niche and leaned, and pulled at each other a little in the draught from the door, and did not agree, and did not go out.

"Every night now," Sumathi told the flames. "Both of you. Till I'm finished." She stood a long time with her back to the open door, and her shoulders were not steady. Then she went and put a second plate on the cot, rice and the khatti dal, and covered it with another plate, and left it there.

Downstairs, when the colony had gone quieter, Ananya took the teen notebook out of Ajji's chest, dragged out from under her bed into the pūjā room, where it sat on the eighteen old registers Vikram had carried down from the loft for Nanna. Nanna was at the dining table with his register, writing with his left hand, slowly, the letters bigger than they used to be and leaning the wrong way. He said he was only writing things down for Vikram. She had seen how many pages it was.

She sat beside him and opened the notebook at the page. Sixteen-year-old Ananya's nested functions, the laghu and the guru in their boxes, the frustrated line across it all, and in the margin, in a hand rounder than hers was now:

Doesn't converge. Pattern suggests solution but function never terminates.

She uncapped her pen. Her hand, on the page, was an old woman's hand. The knuckles had come up over the last three weeks like roots through a road, and she had stopped hiding them at the hospital. She had watched hands like these turn the pages of a hundred diaries and tap the ghana on this same table. They were Ajji's knuckles, at thirty.

The pendant lay beside the notebook, on the page where the function never terminated, still giving up its heat into the paper as if something far below the city had its hand round the other end. She held the pen as Ajji had held hers, because it was now the only way her fingers would close, and in the margin, beside the girl's line, she wrote:

It's not supposed to.