The Eternal Watch

Sankranti. Wednesday, 14 January 2026.

The campus was empty except for the peacocks and the security guard, who had tied a kite to the flagpole of the Himalaya block so he could eat his breakfast with both hands.

"Madam, holiday," he told Ananya at the gate, mouth full of pulihora. "Today also you're coming?"

"Ten minutes, anna. I have to check the fridge."

"Fridge." He shook his head at her with enormous pity and went back to his kite, a cheap red paper one with Mahesh Babu's face on it.

The lab was on the ground floor of the old CQST building, with a dilution refrigerator borrowed from TIFR Hyderabad standing in the middle like a brass wedding lamp: a dry one, a pulse tube and a compressor in the corridor, no helium bath to top up. The door had two signs. The printed one said LABORATORY FOR IRREDUCIBLE SYSTEMS · IIIT-H / TIFR-H. Under it, in Vikram's handwriting on a sheet of A4, in marker, taped crooked: SACRED INEFFICIENCY. PLEASE DO NOT OPTIMISE. The Registrar had asked her twice to take it down. She had said she would ask her brother.

She checked the fridge. Mixing chamber at eleven millikelvin, the pulse tube chuffing at its steady one-point-four hertz, the one perfectly regular thing in the room, which she had decided to forgive. She stood beside it with her eyes closed for longer than the check required.

On the bench under the window sat the rest of the machine, the parts that made visiting physicists smile politely. A contact microphone taped to the glass, listening to Gachibowli: the ORR hiss, the peacocks, the guard's radio half a tone flat. And in the control code, a subroutine her students called the Guest. Every chip they built spent a sliver of every cycle walking the Collatz sequence on numbers nobody had ever checked, halve if even, triple and add one if odd, a question nobody alive could prove would stop. The processor carried it as a pilgrim carries a stone up a hill. It did its real work anyway, a little slower, a little warmer.

Deshpande had printed a card for the wall, in the font of the ones outside every fridge room at Quantace. NO RUN WITHOUT A QUESTION.

The whiteboard took up the back wall. In November, standing on a lab stool, she had copied onto it from Blackwood's notes the structure carved on a wall in Kashmir: the recursion whose final term swallowed its own variables. She had copied it term by term until the last one. There she had drawn a question mark, large and lopsided, and left a space of white around it the size of a hand.

Ψ = f(Ψ, f(Ψ, f(Ψ, … ?))) [The last term used to eat the others. Now it waits for whoever asks next.]

Bhavana, her first-year PhD student, had asked about it on her second day. "Ma'am, it's not closed. Is it a placeholder?"

"It's load-bearing," Ananya had said, and heard her father in her mouth, and let it stand.

She sat on the stool and pulled up the day's mail. A photograph from the pāṭhaśālā near Vijayawada, the one whose boys had gone perfectly regular in September: twenty-three new students squinting on a temple step, four of them girls in pavadas. The head teacher had written underneath, This is irregular. We are told this is good. An email from IISc asking, politely, whether sacred inefficiency was a metaphor. She typed No and deleted it and typed Come and see the fridge and sent that.

Her hands on the phone were an old woman's hands, the knuckles standing up like knots on a tamarind branch. Ajji's fingers, at thirty. Amma had held them once in November and turned them over and said, "Chee, chee, lotion ra, at least," and then gone quiet and kissed them, which was worse.

The pendant was warm under her kurta, on a new chain. It had been warm since Deepavali. She pressed her thumb to it and hummed a line of Ghantasala without meaning to.

On the way to the car she passed the guard, who had got a second kite up beside the first, a green one, and was flying both from the flagpole, pleased with himself.

"Madam, see. Two."

"Which one's winning?"

He considered it seriously. "Nobody knows, madam. That's why it's nice."

By noon the Tarnaka terrace belonged to Padma garu's grandsons, three of them, who had arrived at seven with a bundle of kites and a spool of glass-coated manja and had been screaming ever since. The sky over Tarnaka was a crowded bus. A woman two roofs over shrieked "Katte! Katte!" every time anyone's kite came down, including her own.

Vikram had a kite up too. He was fairly sure he had never been any good at this.

He had checked. Nanna's account, which he had been reading at the dining table every evening since October a register at a time, said so in the second book, in the old right-handed hand: Sankranti 2009. V. lost six kites before eleven. Wept. Recovered. Lost a seventh. Worst flyer in Tarnaka, possibly Secunderabad. Vikram had laughed, and then sat with it, because he could not remember the six kites or the weeping. He knew them as he knew the capital of Mongolia. He had been told.

It was like that with most of before. It was like that entirely with Ajji. He knew she had tapped the ghana on the table with two fingers. He knew she had died on the Kurnool road in 2015, and that he had loved her. He had read it in his father's fountain pen. Sometimes at night he tapped the rhythm on the bedside table, and it meant nothing to his hand, and he did it anyway, for her, like leaving a light on.

"Vikram anna, it's broken again."

The ten-year-old was holding out Vikram's old tablet, running the thing he had been building in the evenings since November, a joke that had become eleven thousand lines of code and a grant application. It was called Enduku. It asked children questions. It never, under any circumstances, answered one.

"What did you ask it?"

"Why the sky is blue."

"And?"

The boy read the screen with deep contempt. "It said, 'Why do you think it isn't green?'"

"So? Why isn't it green?"

"Anna." The boy looked at him the way the whole of Tarnaka's under-twelves looked at him, as a large and hopeless case. "Because it's blue."

"Type that."

The boy typed it. Enduku thought, in a slow, wobbly way Vikram had spent a week getting right, and asked, Blue like what? The boy said a bad word and went back to the manja.

"Thaggedhe le," Vikram told the tablet, and let his kite drift down to the height of the tamarind.

On the shaded half of the terrace, Amma had six schoolgirls in a ring on a durrie with a steel plate of nuvvula undalu in the middle as payment. She was teaching them the uyyalo, in the wrong season. She clapped the beat, and the girls clapped it back too carefully, and she stopped them.

"No, no, no. You're clapping like a bank. Again. And this time, Divya, you make the next line. Anything. Your cycle. Your chemistry madam."

"Aunty, I can't make a line."

"Everybody can make a line. Uyyalo." She clapped. "Go."

Divya went red and sang something about her chemistry madam's moustache, and the ring collapsed, and Amma laughed the laugh that had come back whole when the Schrödinger equation had not, big and undignified, going up at the end. Vikram had been told it was the same laugh as before. He believed it.

Sumathi aunty came up the stairs at one, puffing, with a tiffin carrier in each hand.

"Kaiku itna upar rehte, you people. One day I'll die on your staircase and then you'll see." She lifted the lids for inspection, bagara rice, mirchi ka salan, double ka meetha, and turned Vikram's face to the light and examined it like a vegetable. "Better. Still thin. Eat."

Akka came up behind her with a box of laddus from Almond House and her hands in her kurta pockets, as she kept them now when people were looking. Sumathi aunty pulled one out and held it, knuckles and all, and said nothing, and Akka let her.

They ate on the terrace on newspaper, with the kites overhead. Sumathi aunty set out one extra plate, filled it with bagara rice and salan, and put it at the end of the row with a steel tumbler of water beside it. Nobody asked. She saw Vikram watching.

"My son is on duty," she said. "He doesn't come home, that one. But I'll keep his plate." Then she said, to the plate, "Kaiku itna late, beta?" and went back to her salan.

Vikram looked at Akka. Akka was looking at the plate. Her thumb was on the pendant.

The postman had come that morning, on a holiday, which in Tarnaka counted as a miracle. The postcard was the rock memorial at Kanyakumari with too much blue in the sea. The back was in Aisha's small, dead-level capitals.

DAY 9. THE SEA HERE DOES NOT DO THE SAME THING TWICE. I HAVE MEASURED IT FOR 9 DAYS. I THINK I LIKE IT. THIS MAY BE WHAT YOU CALL A JOKE. TELL VIKRAM THE PUN WAS STILL BAD. TWO MORE DAYS, THEN SOMEWHERE ELSE. A.

"She likes the sea," Amma said, delighted. "Who is she?"

"A friend, Amma," Akka said. "She stayed in Vicky's room."

"On top of the covers," Vikram said. "With her shoes on. For eleven days. I was told."

He took the card back and read the last line again, and laughed, one short bark, at a pun he could not have repeated.

"What did I say to her?"

"Something about biryani," Akka said. "It was terrible. She laughed."

"She laughed," Vikram said, as if it were the capital of somewhere, and held the card out towards the shade net. "Nanna. Put her in."

Amma had stopped listening. She had the steel plate of nuvvula undalu in her lap, and without looking she had taken out four and set them on a square of newspaper by her knee, apart from the rest, and folded the paper over them the way you do for someone who has gone out and will be back. Akka watched her do it and did not ask who they were for.

Akka put the postcard on the folded paper, picture side up, too much blue in the sea, and left it there.

At the far end of the terrace Nanna sat in his chair under the shade net with the last register of the account on a lap desk, adding something in the margin with his left hand. It had taken him until December to make the letters come out the right way round; now they came large and slow and leaning backwards, a child's hand. He looked up and caught Vikram's eye.

"Nanna. Did I really eat eleven laddus in 2011? It's in book three."

"Twelve," Nanna said, and went back to writing. "I rounded down. For your dignity."

Rukhsana's building in Mehdipatnam was four floors of pale green distemper behind the Rythu Bazaar, and her husband was on the roof with a pink kite, fighting a boy on the next building for the lane. Down in the flat, Farzana lay in the good bed by the window that the settlement had paid for, with the radio on. Ananya had sat with her half an hour, holding her hand, telling her about the lab and the Guest, while Rukhsana watched from the doorway with her arms folded. That was how it went, every month. Neither of them had ever called it forgiveness.

Then Rukhsana had put a plate of sesame laddus in her hands and pointed her at the stairs. "Farzana's girl is on the roof. She's failing maths. You're supposed to be clever."

Zoya was fourteen, on an upturned paint bucket with a Class IX notebook on her knees and a pencil behind each ear, ignoring her khalu's kite war with great dignity. She had her mother's eyebrows. Ananya had seen them once, on a micro-SD card, on floor minus seven, and she put that away and sat down on the parapet beside her.

"Your khala says you're failing."

"Khala says I'm failing so that you'll come up." Zoya held out the notebook without looking at her. "Ma'am gave a project. Add one plus half plus one-third plus one-fourth, go on, and find what it comes to. Everybody else wrote two. Or three. I did it on Khalu's calculator till a thousand terms and it's seven point something and it's still going. It doesn't converge. It's just slow. It's slow like it's lying."

Ananya looked at the page. Neat columns, rubbed out and redone, the partial sums creeping up the margin, an ink blot where somebody had called her for tea. At the bottom, in capitals, heavily underlined: DOESN'T CONVERGE. A small hot pressure came up behind Ananya's eyes and she let it stay there.

Her phone buzzed against her hip.

It was the evening video from Kashmir. In November she had sat at the dining table with Ajji's blue ballpoint under the Blackwood page, The Razdans still keep the temple in the valley, Gauri said, if anyone in this family ever wants to ask, and had asked. It took a Pandit association in Jammu and a week. Since then, at the lighting of the lamps, Omkar Razdan had sent her twelve seconds from the temple that Blackwood had walked into with a lantern. He was twenty-six, a software tester in Srinagar on weekdays, and his family still kept the temple, and nobody from Gauri's line had come asking since she walked south in 1901. Most evenings there was nothing to see: snow on the step, the flames, Omkar humming some film song badly.

Tonight the flames leaned.

All of them, in the rows of little brass lamps down the dark wall, at once, a hair to the left. Then back. Then left. The same hair. The same interval. In the corner of the frame Omkar's breath showed white, going out in time with them, and he had stopped humming. Ananya felt the pendant under her kurta go from warm to warmer, like a hand warming as it closes.

Then somebody off-screen dropped a steel vessel and swore in Kashmiri, and Omkar laughed, startled, and the flames went back to being flames, every one its own way. The clip ended on his thumb.

She watched it twice. Her knuckles ached. Somewhere far under everything a man who had been a solver was sitting with his sister, still asking her the one question that would never be allowed an answer. She thought, for no reason, of Sumathi's steel plate at the end of the row.

On the parapet, the pink kite and the enemy kite went at each other for the last time. Rukhsana's husband sawed his string hard across the other boy's, the manja sang, and one of the strings, nobody could afterwards agree whose, parted with a small clean snap.

Everybody on four roofs looked up.

The free kite should have dropped. Cut kites tipped and slid and fell into somebody's tamarind, into the lap of a boy who would run six lanes for it. This one caught something on the way down, a draft off a water tank, a last breath of wind off Golconda, and turned over, and went up. Not along any line: in hitches and skids, sideways over the mosque's green minaret and back, higher than it had ever been on a string, a pink scrap getting smaller in the orange light. Rukhsana's husband stood holding a slack string and laughing. From somewhere down the lane a man's voice started the Maghrib azaan, and then another, a little behind the first, from further off, the two of them not quite together, and the kite kept going.

Zoya had not watched it at all. She was looking at her own column of numbers, frowning, pencil in her teeth, and Ananya saw the crease come in between her brows, left of centre, a little deeper on one side.

"Akka," Zoya said. "What if it never ends?"

Ananya took the other pencil from behind the girl's ear and turned to a clean page.

"Then we keep asking."

Past midnight the terrace in Tarnaka was quiet. Two kites had died in the tamarind and hung there, turning a little. Downstairs, Krishna knew, Lakshmi was asleep with a laddu crumb on her pillow, and Vikram was asleep at the dining table with his cheek on the fourth register, and Enduku would be asking the dark Why do you think so? until the tablet dimmed.

Krishna had asked to be left up here. Annu had put a shawl round his shoulders and the lap desk across his knees, and kissed the top of his head, and gone down.

The account was finished: nineteen registers, the maroon one from July at the bottom. He had closed the last on Deepavali and not opened another, because he had not known what came next.

He knew now. His daughter had brought it home at dinner, second-hand from a roof in Mehdipatnam, with her thumb on her grandmother's pendant.

He took the new register out of its brown paper, a plain black one from the stationery shop at Tarnaka X Roads, and uncapped the pen. He wrote in the inside cover first, slowly, leaning backwards, in the hand that belonged to someone just learning: a list. Lakshmi. Annu. Vicky. Padma garu. Sumathi. Rukhsana. Zoya. Aisha. Karthik and Deepak. Omkar. Sravya with the whistle. The women of Tank Bund. Nag. Priya. Sharath. Then, under them, after a while, one word.

Us.

Annu had told him who else had said it, and in whose voice, fondly. He looked at it for some time and could not have said whether he had written it about all of them, or to someone. He left it as it was. Then he turned to the first clean page, and held the pen a moment above the white, and wrote, left-handed:

Chapter One.