1. Madhapur, 2010

The Amaravati University cohort of five friends settled into Madhapur the way young tech-savvy tourists settle into a city that is, in 2010, still in the noisy middle of becoming itself. Half the buildings were beautifully constructed as iconic buildings — especially Cyber Towers, Cyber Gateway, and Vanenburg Park. The other half were sites with buildings under construction at various heights. The roads were torn at the edges as roads get torn when fiber-optic cable is being laid by three different telecommunications companies on the same Tuesday, none of whom have told the other two. The new buildings — Cyber Towers and Mindspace and several glass cubes along the road in front of them, and the half-finished tower across from the Westin Hyderabad Mindspace where Tirumala had taken, for the cohort, five connected-room serviced suites with a common area on the eighteenth floor — were so new that the developers had not, in some of them, yet decided what the lobby chandeliers would look like, and the lifts moved randomly between floors trying to figure out the optimum resting floor from which to reach customers fastest. The old buildings on the same streets were so old, and sat so low against the newly constructed and reconstructed roads — one road laid on top of the other, elevating the whole street and probably enriching the well-connected pockets along the way — that they remembered, in their stone, when this stretch of Hyderabad had been a stretch of nothing at all.

Hyderabad was, in January 2010, a city out of breath in a very particular way. The country had spent the previous eighteen months being told that the world was, in 2008, on fire. The world had, by 2010, largely stopped being on fire. The cranes had started up again. The IT sector, which had been furloughing engineers in 2009, was actively hiring them back in 2010, in some cases the same engineers. The new IT Towers had filled their middle floors and were now trying to fill the top ones. The traffic on the road to HITEC City had added three thousand cars between September and January. There was a sense, in the air of Madhapur in the month the cohort arrived, of the city forgiving itself for the previous year. The city was going to be itself again. The city was, even, going to be more than itself. There is this perpetual battle between being a Hyderabadi vs being a Bangalorean. Due to political atmosphere the Hyderabad seems to be loosing this battle in statistics and coolness factor, yet the battle on different chat rooms still goes on, most of the times with similar arguments but different emotions and emojis, by different young brethren. 

It was also a city in which the word Telangana was, at the time of the cohort’s arrival, the word most likely to be said in any random snatch of conversation overheard on any random street. It was said, on autorickshaw radios, in the canteen of the IT-services company in whose lobby Tirumala had spent two casual mornings, in the small lanes around Osmania University where students walked carrying clipboards that were not entirely clipboards and slogans that were not entirely slogans, in the elderly tea-shop near the Charminar where two old men had been arguing about it since 1969, in the tonier restaurants of Banjara Hills where the people who were going to be affected by it spoke about it with the particular care of people whose money had not yet decided which way to be brave. It was a word that, depending on where one stood in the city, meant either a long-overdue justice or a forthcoming nuisance, and the cohort — who knew, in a way none of the people saying the word knew, that the word was going to become a state in four years and four months, provided nothing went wrong — said the word, between themselves, with the private weight of people who knew the answer to a question other people were still asking.

Madhapur itself, in 2010, was the part of the city most apparently insulated from the heat of the word. The IT sector had been gently informed by everybody, from the Chief Minister to the taxi-stand boss, that whatever happened next, the IT sector was the part of the city that paid the city’s bills, and the IT sector should keep its head down and continue paying them. There were rallies and there were strikes and there were buses that did not run on certain Wednesdays, and there were students who came back from Osmania with eyes that were not, when one looked at them carefully, entirely the same eyes that had gone in; but inside the gates of the technology parks, between the glass walls of the half-finished towers, the engineers continued to write the code that, in some other timeline, would write Hyderabad’s particular role in the world. Madhapur was, in this regard, the most peaceful and the most ignorant neighborhood the cohort had ever lived in. They were grateful for both qualities.

The Westin Hyderabad Mindspace sat at the edge of the IT corridor, which was, the cohort agreed almost immediately, a nice place to start camp in India. The hotel itself was a tall, cream-colored tower whose Hyderabad branch had been open for only a year. The carpets in the lobby were so new they still smelled, on certain afternoons, of the factory in Bhadohi that had woven them. The front-desk staff, all young, all of them speaking three languages each between them, treated the cohort with the bewildered courtesy reserved by good Indian hotels for guests whose paperwork was unimpeachable, whose credit cards cleared on the first try, whose nationalities did not entirely add up between the five of them, and whose room-service orders had, by the end of the first week, established that the gentleman of the unusual complexion in suite 1804 was a great fan of any biryani the hotel could put in front of him, and would, after eating it, politely reply to the courtesy phone calls about the food, explain for almost five minutes every good quality of the biryani, list its ingredients, sometimes ask for the name of an ingredient he had never tasted before, and always congratulate and thank the chef, in that same order.

What the city did not see, in the four months the cohort had been on Earth, was the financial work Tirumala and Roy had been doing in the background since the second night at the Langham in Melbourne. The work proceeded, in the collaborative way Tirumala had described to the cohort on the bus from Dubbo, with a particular rhythm. The Anjom device that Roy carried held a high-level history of stock markets, sports-team wins, and foreign-exchange transaction trends; using this information, Tirumala and Roy were carefully placing their money, letting it grow yet not raising any suspicion among the powers that watched for these things. So, for a few days at a stretch, they would deliberately lose money; and then, soon after, they would make up for the losses, never becoming too greedy, yet consistently growing the pot. One thing they believed in: money ruled the era they were in, and they needed to be ready when the time came to nudge things in the right way. The positions they placed, in the late nights of every hotel suite the cohort had stayed in, were positions in markets that 2010’s traders had been unable to see the shape of. The positions were, individually, modest. None of them was, in any month of any of the previous four months, the largest position any market had seen. The positions were, collectively, becoming the financial reality of the cohort’s lives.

By Tirumala’s equal-distribution principle, each cohort member owned — in their own name across a set of six jurisdictions — the equivalent of slightly more than ten million United States dollars. Each cohort member’s holdings were spread across a Swiss bank account in Zurich, an Emirati holding company in Dubai, a Singapore private bank’s investment vehicle, a New York brokerage account, a London private-wealth account, and a Mumbai mutual-fund portfolio. The jurisdictions had been chosen, in Tirumala’s selection, for the particular qualities each one offered: the Swiss for the Swiss patience with money that did not require explaining; the Emirati for the Gulf indifference to where money had come from; the Singaporean for the efficient post-colonial financial machinery; the New York for direct access to American markets; the London for direct access to European markets; and the Mumbai for the necessary domestic-Indian fig leaf the cohort’s holdings would, in the coming years, need to maintain. None of the six accounts in any cohort member’s name was ever, by Tirumala’s arithmetic, the largest of its kind in its jurisdiction. None of them was ever the smallest. They were, in the long way Tirumala had been making them, perfectly forgettable. None of which had, in any visible sense, changed how the cohort lived. They still carried, on any walk out of the Westin, the small black backpacks of the bunker. They still ate, on most lunchtimes, in small unpretentious biryani places at small steel tables on small steel benches. They still paid for most things in cash. They were, in the arithmetic of Hyderabad in early 2010, the most wealthy five guests the Westin had ever had on any single floor. The Westin did not know it. The cohort did not, on most mornings, think about it. The money was, in the background of every morning, simply there.

Roy was, the cohort had been noticing for some weeks, becoming something other than the Roy who had walked out of the bunker. He had been, in Melbourne, a tourist of the Earthee diet — he had eaten, on the Crossroads roadhouse leg, exactly one Tim Tam, and had described it to Tirumala on the bus afterward as “interesting” in the tone Roy used when he meant nothing of the kind. In Madhapur, on the first afternoon, Tirumala had taken the cohort to a hole-in-the-wall biryani place two lanes over from the hotel, at Kothaguda circle, next to a small temple that had been beautified after the road extension. The restaurant was of questionable hygiene, but Roy had eaten, in eleven minutes, an entire single mutton dum biryani intended for two adults; had set the spoon down; and had said the only sentence the cohort had ever heard him say in unironic praise of anything human. He said: “Tirumala. I had no idea.”

Tirumala had been watching Roy across the small steel table. Tirumala did not, smile when he was pleased; Tirumala became, instead, slightly more upright. Tirumala became, on this particular afternoon, almost ramrod.

“Roy-garu,” he said. “Welcome to Hyderabad.”

Roy made the soft three-tone trill that was the Anjom equivalent of laughter. The biryani-place owner, who had been hovering, took the trill as a sound of approval, because there was no other sound in the human ear it could possibly have been, and beamed.

All the cohort agreed: the ubiquitous biryani of their own time was nothing compared to the one they had just tasted. They could not fathom how much a simple biryani’s flavour had regressed in only a few decades.

* * *

2. The Suite

The suite was, in the Westin’s somewhat optimistic terminology, a “residence floor” — five interconnected rooms on the eighteenth floor with a shared central living area, a small kitchenette that nobody planned to cook in, a writing desk in each of the five bedrooms that nobody planned to write at, and a long balcony that ran the whole length of the floor and from which one could see, on a clear morning, the half-finished tower across the street and, beyond it, the green strip that was Durgam Cheruvu and, beyond that, the long uneven hump of land called Banjara Hills. Tirumala had paid for the suite, on arrival, three weeks in advance, with the option of extending. He had paid in a mixture of cash and Indian rupee debit-card withdrawals through the small private branch of an Indian bank in Banjara Hills that had, six weeks earlier, opened a series of NRI accounts for a Mr Tirumala of Doha that the bank’s compliance department had not, on any of the six occasions it had been asked, been able to find any reason to refuse.

The cohort distributed itself, in the way cohorts distribute themselves in shared accommodation, by an unspoken arithmetic of personal pattern that none of them had ever named but all of them obeyed. Tirumala took the corner room facing east, because Tirumala woke before dawn and wanted the dawn to find him before anyone else. Roy took the room next to Tirumala’s, on the same principle that two old friends in the same boarding house take the next-door bedrooms; they did not talk through the wall, but they were on the same side of the suite, and that was a fact each of them privately registered each night as he went to sleep. Devi took the room in the middle, with the largest desk, because Devi had set up her three consoles on the desk and needed the floor-space around them for the cables. Girit took the room next to Devi’s, because the cohort had agreed, without anybody saying it aloud, that Girit was the person Devi was most likely to call for in the bad small hours of the night. Ketan took the room at the far end of the suite, on the other side of Girit’s, because Ketan came in late and left early and did not want, to be observed in either direction.

The living area in the middle of the suite filled up, over the first week, in the way living areas do. There were three different newspapers on the low coffee table, all in different Telugu dailies — Eenadu, Andhra Jyothi, and Sakshi — which Roy had arranged in a fan-pattern and read in rotation over the morning. There was a small stack of paperback Telugu novels Girit had bought at a stand outside the Koti on her second afternoon in the city. There was an empty packet of Hyderabad-style hand-pressed paan from a shop in Charminar Road that Tirumala had been told was the best in the city. There was a console controller that Devi had left on the sofa and that no one had moved because Devi got upset when the controller was moved even when the controller was clearly in the way. There was, behind the sofa, an unlabelled shopping bag containing four small black backpacks the cohort still carried with them every time any of them left the suite. The fifth backpack was, in any moment, on whichever of them had walked out the door last.

Roy’s room, alone among the five, had been modified. On the second day at the Westin, Tirumala had taken the housekeeping supervisor aside in the corridor of the eighteenth floor and had explained, in a soft, confidential Telugu, that the gentleman in suite 1804 had a very rare skin condition and was extremely sensitive to certain detergents, perfumes, and chemicals; would she be so kind as to arrange that his room be cleaned by the same person each morning, with only the products on the list he would now hand her; and would she also arrange that no maintenance personnel were sent into the room in any circumstances without prior notice. The housekeeping supervisor had read the list — it included a particular brand of cucumber-and-aloe wipe that Tirumala had bought in bulk on his second afternoon in the city — and had nodded with the unsurprised competence of housekeeping supervisors all over the world, and had given Roy’s room to the gentlest of her morning staff, a small woman in her fifties named Ponnu, who arrived every morning at six-thirty with the cucumber wipes and the special microfibre cloth and her own personal bottle of mineral water for the room’s spray-bottle, and who became, over the first three weeks, one of the only Hyderabadis Roy spoke to in the suite. She had taken, by the second week, to leaving a small folded note on his writing desk every morning when she was done: a thought, a proverb, the name of a temple she thought he might like, the line of a song. Roy kept them all in the drawer of his bedside table. He had not, the cohort knew, kept anything from Earth before.

By the third day at the Westin, Tirumala had begun drawing, on the back of a hotel laundry list, a biryani map of Hyderabad. The map marked, in his precise pencil hand, every biryani establishment any of the cohort’s accumulating intermediaries — the front-desk girl, the taxi-stand boss, the elderly tea-shop man, Ponnu the morning housekeeper, the IT-services receptionist at the office where Tirumala had spent his two casual mornings — had ever recommended. By the third week the map had stopped accepting new dots; any addition, by Tirumala’s judgment, was a variation on a dot already on it. The cohort ate down the map at the rate of one establishment per lunchtime. It was, by Tirumala’s quiet accounting, the second most productive thing they were doing in any given week. The first was learning the city. The map was a means to the first.

* * *

3. The Veil

Tirumala had been thinking about the help the cohort was going to need in Hyderabad since the third day at the Westin, and the thinking had been, in his own private accounting, an exercise in late guilt. The late guilt was Sorrento. The late guilt was the Sunday morning in the Australian outback when Murthy had walked, with the calm Hyderabad bodyguard’s calm of a man whose calm did not, on any morning of any week, depend on being expected, up the gravel path of the rented house. Tirumala had not, in the operational planning that had taken the cohort from the bunker to that Sunday morning, anticipated Murthy. Tirumala had spent the months since that morning quietly arriving at the conclusion that the failure to anticipate Murthy had not been a one-time failure. It had been the kind of failure that, in a city the cohort did not know, in a time the cohort did not belong to, with the few soft skills the cohort had picked up between them in Melbourne and on the bus from Dubbo, was going to recur.

The kind of help he had decided the cohort needed was not security in the conventional sense. The cohort did not need guards. The cohort did not need a corporate executive-protection team in dark suits and earpieces, the sort of arrangement the Mumbai banks Tirumala had been visiting in his other life arranged for their senior officers. The cohort needed the opposite of that. The cohort needed somebody who could, when the cohort attracted the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of authority — the local police asking why five visibly foreign people were riding the same autorickshaw at midnight, the IT-services HR department wondering why a Mr Tirumala of Doha had spent two casual mornings in their lobby, the curious bureaucrat at any one of the Hyderabad municipal offices the cohort might in some future month need to walk into — make the wrong kind of attention stop being attention. The cohort needed somebody who could, when one of the cohort did something the cohort had not thought through, prevent the something from becoming a thing. The cohort needed somebody who could, in the older Hyderabad phrase Tirumala’s adoptive grandmother had used about people of this profession, hold a veil.

Tirumala spent the next eight days asking. He asked, in the elliptical Telugu of a man who is asking without asking, the private banker in Banjara Hills who had opened the cohort’s NRI accounts. He asked the senior concierge at the Westin, who had heard the question often enough to know which kinds of answers were the wrong kind. He asked the private lawyer in Jubilee Hills whom the banker had suggested. The names that came back were, all of them, the wrong kind of name. They were the kind of name a corporate client would hire. They were the kind of name that had a firm, a logo, a published rate-card, an office, an answering service. Tirumala did not want any of that. Tirumala wanted the name that did not, in any directory of any year, exist.

On the eighth evening, after the cohort had gone to bed, Tirumala did the thing he had been putting off. He went into Roy’s room, in the Telugu way of asking a friend for something one had been hoping not to have to ask for, and he asked Roy whether the device could find a person who, in 2010, had not yet become a person anybody had heard of. Roy, who had been reading, set down his book. Roy said, in the Anjom way of agreeing to a request, that he would see. Roy spent the next two hours with the device. Roy came out of his room at one in the morning, the cohort still asleep, and put a folded sheet of hotel notepaper on the central living area’s coffee table. The sheet contained a single Telugu name, a single Hyderabad landline number, and the Anjom-script note that the name was, in the year Tirumala had come from, the name of a woman who would, by the particular reading of Telugu political discretion the future had quietly settled on, be remembered as the woman who had handled the most difficult things in the city of Hyderabad in the second decade of the twenty-first century without ever, in any year of her career, being named in any newspaper.

The name was Indira Chowdary. She was, in 2010, fifty-three years old. She came from a village near Madanapalli, in the deep south of Andhra, from the kind of long Pedda Kamma family in which the women had — for as long as the families of Madanapalli had been keeping any account of who in the family did what — been the actual deciders, in the ancient royal days and in the everyday modern matter of running farms, marriages, schools, lawsuits, panchayats, and the political weather of the village. When the men were busy with enriching the family or doing what men in those families had always loved to do, it was left to the women to take care of everything else; and they had excelled at it, generation after generation, even winning the hearts of their husbands and sons across the generations. Indira had brought the inherited disposition with her to Hyderabad in her late twenties. She had been, for the previous fifteen years, the discreet PR shadow for a particular sort of client — Telugu film actors who needed scandals to stop being scandals, businessmen who needed a journalist to quietly lose interest, occasional MLAs who needed a young woman’s complaint to never reach a notebook, occasional party functionaries who needed a favor returned without ever, in any future ledger, being seen to have been returned. She had no firm. She had no website. She had a single landline that did not advertise itself. She went purely by referrals; she did not, on any principle her work depended on, accept clients otherwise. The only referral was the landline number itself: it was the passcode for first contact. She was, in 2010, known to almost no one. She would, in the years the cohort had come from, be known to almost everyone in the Telugu sphere. She did not, in 2010, know any of this about herself.

Tirumala did not call the landline from his own phone. He did not call from the Westin. On a Tuesday afternoon at three-twenty, he took an autorickshaw to the Lakdi-ka-Pool electronics market, bought a Nokia burner from a stall whose owner did not, in any way, look at his face, took a SIM card from a separate stall under the name of a man who lived in a village near Karimnagar and who did not, in fact, own a phone, and walked four blocks to a tea-shop on the corner of a lane behind the Old MLA Quarters. He took an auto to Telecom Nagar. He walked from Telecom Nagar back to the Westin through the back lanes — a good walk that crossed the half-torn-down hill being cleared for the new road. The following morning at eleven, he walked back to the same tea-shop, ordered a tea, and dialed Indira’s landline from the burner. She answered on the second ring. She did not give her name. She listened. Tirumala said, in a Telugu he had been rehearsing in his head on the autorickshaw ride over, that he had been given her name by a source he was not, in any conversation he and she might have in the future, going to discuss; that he had a matter of the kind she handled; and that he would like to meet. Indira said, after a three-second pause, the time and address of a tea-room on the third floor of a hotel in Banjara Hills that was, in some specific Hyderabad sense, not a hotel. Neither of them gave a name. The call lasted under a minute.

What Tirumala did not know — and what Indira would not, in any of their future meetings or in any of the years of their working relationship, mention — was that the meeting at the Banjara Hills tea-room was not, by Indira’s standards, the meeting at which the decision to take on the cohort would actually be made. The decision had been made the previous afternoon, in the steady way Indira made such decisions, by the discipline she had refined over fifteen years of taking on clients she could not afford to be wrong about. Indira had spent the twenty hours between the burner call and the meeting quietly asking the people in Hyderabad who had had any direct contact with the cohort over the previous three weeks what they had made of them. She asked the front-desk girl at the Westin who handled the cohort’s morning newspapers. She asked the owner of the hole-in-the-wall biryani place two lanes over from the hotel where Roy had eaten his first biryani. She asked the taxi-stand boss outside the Westin who had driven the cohort, between them, on perhaps twenty separate occasions in the previous three weeks. She asked, in particular, Ponnu the morning housekeeper at the Westin, whom Indira had known socially for some years through the small private network of Hyderabad housekeeping supervisors. Every single one of the people Indira asked had, in the Telugu way of people giving a favorable opinion about strangers they have only briefly known, given a favorable opinion. The cohort, by every account she had been able to gather, were polite, generous, careful with money as quietly rich people are careful with money, and conspicuously uninterested in attracting attention from anyone. They were, in the working formulation Indira had reached by the time she finished her inquiries, rich young people from somewhere else who were, for reasons that were not, on the principle her work depended on, any of her business, trying very hard to stay quiet in a city that did not make staying quiet easy. They were, by her professional assessment, going to be the kind of client she made money on and lost no sleep over. She had, on that assessment, decided to take them. The meeting at the tea-room the next evening was, by her standards, the formality.

They met that evening at six. Indira, when she walked into the tea-room, was a woman of fifty-three in a plain dark sari and the kind of unobtrusive jewelry a woman wears when she does not, on any day of any year, want to be the most noticeable woman in any room. She looked at Tirumala. Tirumala looked at her. They sat. They were brought, by a waiter who did not look at either of them, two glasses of tea and a plate of small Hyderabadi samosas that neither of them had ordered.

Indira did not, when the waiter had retreated, ask Tirumala to talk. She reached into her handbag, produced a folded sheet of paper, set it on the table between them, opened it, and read it aloud in the matter-of-fact Telugu of a woman reading a grocery list. The Westin Hyderabad Mindspace, suite 1804, residence floor, five-room suite booked through a private branch of an Indian bank in Banjara Hills, three weeks paid in advance, option of extending. Five guests. Tirumala of Doha, NRI, twenty-six, on the bank’s books since six weeks before the cohort’s arrival. Ketan, Australian pilot from Melbourne, twenty-five, the late-night walker. Devi, gamer, twenty-three, the cross-trainer at five-thirty. Giri Tanayi, the runner, twenty-four, the morning road. And the gentleman of the unusual complexion in 1804, referred to by the other four as Roy. The cohort’s daily Hyderabad pattern: gym at six, breakfast at seven-thirty, biryani lunch at twelve-thirty, suite by three, suite by six, suite by eleven.

Three small adjustments the cohort had made in the previous week — Ketan switching his swim from seven to five-forty-five; Devi adjusting her cross-trainer level once after the first ten days; Tirumala leaving the Westin twice through the staff back entrance instead of the lobby. Tuesday afternoon at three-twenty: an autorickshaw to the Lakdi-ka-Pool electronics market. A Nokia burner from a particular stall. A SIM card from a different stall, under the name of a man who lives in a village near Karimnagar and who does not, in fact, own a phone. A four-block walk to a tea-shop on a corner behind the Old MLA Quarters. An autorickshaw to Telecom Nagar. A walk from Telecom Nagar back to the Westin through the back lanes, across the half-torn-down hill where the new road was being put through. The following morning at eleven, a call from the burner, from the same tea-shop, to her landline. A two-o’clock return to the Westin. She closed the sheet. She folded it. She put it back in her handbag.

Tirumala did not, on hearing this, react. He became, instead, slightly more upright.

Indira smiled for the first time. She said: “The burner is what told me you were serious. The people who think their own phones are safe are not the ones I work with.”

She said: “You are very young.”

Tirumala said: “I have been told.”

She said: “Tell me what you need.”

Tirumala said: “I think you already know.”

She said: “Tell me anyway. The describing is the asking.”

Tirumala described what he needed, in the Telugu way of describing a thing without giving any particular detail about the thing. He described a kind of help that, when the cohort attracted the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of authority, made the attention stop being attention. He described a kind of help that, when one of the cohort did something the cohort had not thought through, prevented the something from becoming a thing. He described a kind of help that was, on the principle of its work, invisible to the people it worked for. Indira listened. She did not interrupt. When he had finished, she said:

“And the price.”

Tirumala said: “I was going to ask.”

Indira said: “If you have to ask the price, you cannot afford it.”

Tirumala did not, on hearing this, smile. He became, instead, slightly more upright again.

Indira said: “Before we go further, you should know what I am. I work in the two Telugu states. Hyderabad first, then the Telugu sphere that touches Bangalore and Chennai at the edges. If your cohort gets into trouble outside that, you are on your own. I do not have useful contacts in Delhi. I do not have useful contacts in Mumbai. I do not have any contacts outside India. Inside the two Telugu states, there is nothing in your way that I cannot, on a phone call, move. Outside it, I am no use to you.”

Tirumala said: “That is the only sphere we are going to need handled. We are not, in any of the next four years, leaving the two Telugu states.”

Indira said: “Then we can talk about conditions. Three. There will be no written contract; the work I do does not survive paper. There will be no fixed meeting time or place; the work I do does not survive a fixed meeting time or place. You will be my single point of contact in your cohort, and the cohort, on the principle the work depends on, will never, in any city, attempt to contact me directly. Agreed?”

Tirumala said: “Agreed.”

Indira said: “Then we are agreed. One last thing. The people I work with do not call me Indira. They call me Aunty. This is how it has been for fifteen years. You can call me Aunty. I am not, in any meaningful sense, your aunt. But the word is the word the people I work with have decided is the word, and it is, easier to drop in a conversation than the surname I share with several thousand other Chowdarys in this city.”

Tirumala said: “Aunty.”

She said: “One last question, and this one is for my own peace of mind. Who do I think you are?”

Tirumala said: “What does the paper in your handbag say?”

Aunty smiled the smile of a woman who, on this particular evening, was being treated by a young client to the unusual pleasure of being read back to herself. She said: “The paper says you are five young people of independent means from elsewhere, in their second year of seeing the world, who met in Australia and became friends and are now, with the patience of well-off children with time on their hands, exploring the small ancestral places one of you came from. From four countries. Met in Australia. The gentleman of the unusual complexion in 1804 is, by the papers I have been able to verify, from a small Gulf principality the geography of which I do not entirely understand and which is, not my business. The matter of why he is in Hyderabad in 2010 is, on the same principle, not my business.”

Tirumala said: “Then that is who we are.”

Aunty closed her teacup, set it on the table, and said one thing more, in a voice that was no longer the voice of a contract being closed. She said: “You are, for a man of twenty-six, surprisingly difficult to read. I have, in fifteen years of doing this work, met three people who were as difficult to read as you are. None of them was twenty-six.”

Tirumala said: “I have been told that too.”

Aunty laughed, briefly and quietly, in the way Pedda Kamma women of fifty-three laugh when they have not entirely been expecting to. She stood. She picked up her handbag. She said: “I will be in touch.” She left.

The arrangement that followed worked, as these arrangements worked when both parties had agreed not to admit to each other that they were working an arrangement, in absolute quiet. Aunty did not come to the Westin. Tirumala did not, on any morning of any week, telephone her on a fixed schedule. They met — at the tea-room behind the Old MLA Quarters, in a particular quiet corner of the Taj Krishna lobby on Sunday mornings, on a particular bench at the corner of the garden behind the Chowmahalla Palace, in a filter-coffee shop in Habsiguda the cohort would never, in any of their Madhapur lives, have any reason to find — only when one of them sent the other a single-line text message, an hour ahead, asking to meet. They did not, on most weeks, meet more than twice. They did not, in some weeks, meet at all.

Tirumala told the cohort about Aunty the same evening he had agreed to the arrangement. He told them in the central living area of the suite, with the door closed. He told them, in the matter-of-fact way Tirumala told the cohort the things he would have preferred not to have to tell anyone, exactly who Aunty was, what she did, what they were paying her not to do, and what the cohort were never, in any city of any year, to attempt with her. The cohort listened. The cohort understood. The cohort had, from the bunker days, the quiet rule that no member of the cohort would, in any moment, keep an intentional secret from any of the others — and the corollary rule that the cohort was, between the five of them, the place in which any of them could say any thing without being judged by any of the others. Aunty was the inverse of the rule: a secret the cohort kept, together, from everyone outside it. The cohort did not, in any of the months that followed, attempt to make contact with Aunty. They understood that the arrangement worked because they were the part of it that did not exist.

Aunty, in the months that followed, came slowly to find herself in the kind of professional rapport with her client she had not, in fifteen years of Hyderabad work, found herself in before. The boy from Doha was, on every observable measure, a person of twenty-six. He was, in his Telugu, a person of fifty. He noticed things she had built her career on noticing. He noticed them faster. He anticipated things she had built her career on anticipating. He anticipated them sooner. In their later meetings — at the tea-room, in the Taj Krishna lobby, on the bench behind the Chowmahalla — they would, after the business of the day was done, sit at whichever Hyderabad table they had picked for the day and talk about whatever happened to interest both of them: the history of the city’s old film studios, the Carnatic raga of a particular Tyagaraja kriti they both happened to know, the long Pedda Kamma tradition of older women in Aunty’s village deciding the everyday matters of the village before the men got around to noticing, the long Indian art of asking for nothing in particular. Aunty, who had grown up in a Hyderabad in which young men did not, surprise older women, came slowly to find Tirumala’s company the kind of company that, in her own private accounting, she had not expected to find at fifty-three. She did not, in any of those meetings, say so. Tirumala did not, in any of those meetings, expect her to. They simply, every two or three weeks, met.

* * *

4. The Gym, the Pool, the Buffet

The Westin’s residential gym occupied a long room on the ninth floor that smelled, at six in the morning, of new rubber matting and the particular brand of disinfectant favored by Hyderabad hotel-management companies in 2010. The equipment was — by the standards of the five-star hotels in 2010 — almost ostentatiously good: three treadmills, two cross-trainers, a rowing machine, a single Olympic bench, a free-weights area with a curated set of dumbbells from two and a half kilograms to fifty, a stretching mat in the corner. The gym was, in the first week of the cohort’s stay, entirely empty at the hours they used it. By the second month it had a small and faithful group of regulars: two consultants from the technology company on the third floor, an older Sindhi gentleman in his sixties who ran a textile import-export business from a suite on the eleventh, and the cohort, which by the second month was using the gym between them four hours a day.

Devi went at five-thirty in the morning. She was always the first. She walked into the gym in a pair of soft cotton track pants and an oversized university T-shirt of Ketan’s that she had appropriated on the third week, on the grounds that it was loose enough to forgive what it had to forgive. She stretched, badly, for twelve minutes. She got on the cross-trainer, which she preferred to the treadmill on the grounds that the cross-trainer did not require her to actively decide to move her feet. She set it to a level that the gym’s small screen described as “moderate.” She put earbuds in. She listened to her game soundtracks. She did, on most mornings, forty-five minutes.

Girit went at six. Girit ran on the road, not in the gym; Girit had been running on the road for years and had no intention of starting to run on a treadmill in a Hyderabad hotel in 2010. Girit found that it was not easy to run on Madhapur roads, but she discovered the Botanical Gardens nearby and took an auto there every day and ran for more than an hour, surrounded by peacocks, rabbits, and trees. She even bought a monthly membership. But Girit had agreed, on the second week, that she would do twenty minutes of stretching on the gym mats before her run, on the grounds that her splinted wrist had not yet fully forgotten that it had been broken in an Australian valley four months earlier, and the Indian winter mornings were cold enough on Madhapur roads that the wrist sometimes objected. So she stretched. She stretched in silence, on the small mat in the corner, while Devi sweated quietly on the cross-trainer in the front of the room, and on most mornings only their eyes spoke to each other.

Tirumala went at six-forty, after he had completed the morning’s reading of three newspapers. Tirumala did one thing in the gym: he did fifteen minutes on the bench, with a precise sequence of weights, that he had learned from a Mumbai trainer when he was nineteen and had not changed since. He did not, in the gym, look at anyone or speak to anyone. The Sindhi gentleman, who was usually on the treadmill at the same hour, eventually nodded to him on the eighth morning; Tirumala nodded back; they did not speak; by the end of the first month they had not spoken; by the end of the second month they were on the kind of nodding terms that, in Tirumala’s private accounting, would have done as the basis for a six-figure business deal.

Roy did not go to the gym. Roy walked. Roy walked every morning, from seven to nine, in a long loop that took him through the back lanes of Madhapur, past the IT towers, into the residential side-streets where the small houses still stood among the new ones, and back to the hotel along Software Units Layout Main Road. He walked in white kandura on Mondays, dark Western slacks and shirt on Tuesdays, Telugu pancha on Wednesdays, jeans on Thursdays, in the Senegalese boubou he had brought from Melbourne on Fridays, and in any of these on Saturdays and Sundays. The Madhapur shopkeepers, the autorickshaw drivers, the small-eatery owners, the watchmen at the IT-tower gates, the children on their way to school — all of them had, by the end of the second month, given Roy the small nodding acknowledgment that Hyderabad gives to people who have walked the same streets at the same hour for long enough to have become, in some small honorary sense, locals. They did not know what to call him. They called him, when they spoke about him among themselves, the “phorenner who walks.”

Ketan, by then, had stopped going to the gym in the morning. Ketan went, in the evenings, after the others had gone in. Ketan also swam. Ketan was, the cohort had noticed, swimming more and sleeping less and saying less at lunch. Devi, who from her own experience could recognize the early signs of a Ketan in distress, did not say anything to anyone. She simply, on the third week, switched her own gym time to five-fifteen, on the grounds that it let her overlap, for a quiet half-hour, with Ketan coming in from his swim. They did not, in that half-hour, speak. They simply existed in the same room, on different equipment, on either side of the long window that looked out over Software Units Layout Main Road, while the morning light came up on the road below.

The pool was on the seventeenth floor, one floor below the suite, and was — like the gym — almost entirely empty for the first three weeks. It was a long lap pool, fifteen meters, with the standard blue tile and the small bench at one end where the lifeguard sat from six in the morning to ten at night. The lifeguard was an elderly Tamil gentleman named Sundaran, who had been a lifeguard at the Madras Boat Club for twenty-eight years before retiring to his daughter’s house in Hyderabad and, after six months of retirement, deciding he preferred the company of swimming pools to the company of his daughter. Sundaran knew Ketan, by the end of the third week, by name and by stroke. He knew that Ketan swam freestyle when he was thinking about something that had a solution, and butterfly when he was thinking about something that didn’t. He did not know which kind of thinking the freestyle and the butterfly were sorting; he was a lifeguard, not a confidant. But he registered, in his own private record, that the tall young man in suite 1804 had, in the first three weeks of his residency, swum far more butterfly than was healthy for a man whose stroke was otherwise as easy as freestyle.

Devi started eating Andhra food, in the third week, by accident. She had gone downstairs alone to the breakfast room — which, after eleven, reopened as a sort of half-canteen for residents — and had ordered, mostly because she did not know what else to ask for, the afternoon plate of “South Indian Tiffin.” What had arrived was a battered steel plate the diameter of a record album, on which had been arranged: two idlis, one dosa, a small bowl of upma, a single ven pongal, a mound of pulihora, sambar, three chutneys, one papadam, and a spoonful of curd. The whole arrangement could have fed three people. Devi ate the whole plate.

She came up to the suite afterward, slept two and a half hours, woke, and asked Tirumala what upma was made of. Tirumala, sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa, said: “Suji. Onion. Curry leaves. Sometimes peas. Sometimes carrots.” Devi nodded. She said, after a long moment: “I think I am going to start eating breakfast.” She did. She started the next morning, and she ate it every morning for the next several weeks. She ate, in those weeks, more idlis than she had eaten in her whole previous life.

The buffet at the Westin, finally, was the thing the cohort gathered around. It was served from six-thirty in the morning to ten in the residential breakfast room — a long oak-paneled hall on the second floor of the hotel, with eight round tables of six and a long line of chafing-dishes against the far wall. The buffet covered, in its full deployment: idli, dosa, vada, upma, pongal, pulihora, pesarattu, four kinds of chutney, sambar, rasam in a separate tureen, three kinds of curd, cut fruit, three kinds of cereal, a hot-egg station, a Western section with sausages and bacon and beans that nobody in the cohort touched, a small Indian sweets section that nobody in the cohort touched before nine in the morning, and the particular Westin puri-and-aloo combination that, by the second week, three of the cohort’s five had become quietly devoted to. The buffet was, in Roy’s accounting, the second great Earthee institution he had encountered. (The first was the biryani.)

Roy, in the matter of biryani, had become — by the end of the second week — the cohort’s most improbable specialist. He had eaten, in fourteen days, in fourteen separate establishments, fourteen different biryanis. He could, without notes, distinguish between the long-grain Basmati of one shop and the slightly shorter-grain Basmati of another. He could tell, from the yellow of the rice, whether the cook had used Kashmiri saffron or, in the case of the smaller establishments, a pinch of food-colour added at the dum stage to imitate it. He had developed a small spiral notebook in which he wrote, after each lunchtime, his impressions of the day’s biryani in the Anjom hand he had been taught in his early schooling, which his teachers had described, when he was young, as the hand of a future archivist.

The cohort sat, every morning, at the same table — the one against the eastern window, with the morning light coming in across the Cyber Towers — and ate together. They were the only table in the room that was, in any sense, regularly five. The hotel staff had, by the second week, learned their preferences. Tirumala got the small extra dish of pickle that wasn’t on the regular buffet line. Devi got the small extra spoonful of ghee on her pongal. Roy got the particular wedge of papaya that the breakfast chef cut specifically for him because Roy had, in some small unconscious Anjom way, expressed approval of papayas in the second week. Girit got the pot of strong filter coffee that was made fresh, separately, for her table. Ketan got whatever Ketan asked for. Ketan did not, on most mornings, ask for very much.

On Sunday mornings, however, the cohort did not eat at the Westin. On Sunday mornings the cohort drove. They drove, with Subba Rao at the wheel of one of his Innovas, the careful twenty-five minutes across the city, through the small early-morning traffic of Banjara Hills, past the embassies and the small private schools and the Sunday-morning Hyderabad of the families who had been in Hyderabad longer than the city had been an IT city, and they arrived, at eight, at the small white-and-pink portico of the Hotel Daspalla. Daspalla was, in the Hyderabad accounting of 2010, not a five-star hotel; it was a four-star hotel that had been a four-star hotel since 1986 and which had, in the unbroken way of Hyderabad institutions, made its peace with not being a five-star hotel. What Daspalla was, in the same Hyderabad accounting, was the buffet — the long, wide, faintly legendary Sunday-morning buffet that the families of Banjara Hills and Jubilee Hills and Begumpet had been driving to since the late nineteen eighties on the understanding that whatever else Hyderabad had become in the interval, the Daspalla buffet on a Sunday morning had not, in any meaningful sense, changed. The buffet served seventy-two items. The buffet had, in the cohort’s collective accounting after the second visit, the best Andhra meal in the city, the best Hyderabad meal in the city and — in some specific quiet conviction Roy had been holding since the first visit — the second-best mutton biryani in the city, which was a Sunday-morning biryani that the Daspalla kitchen made for the buffet alone and which Roy had eaten, on each of the four Sunday-morning visits so far, in a single helping that he did not, on any visit, attempt to repeat. The cohort sat at the small reserved corner table that the Daspalla’s Sunday-morning manager had given them after the third visit. They ate slowly. They ate more than the Westin’s daily breakfast, but with the Sunday-morning leisure of people who had nowhere else to be on the day the city did not, in any urgent sense, demand anything of anyone.

It was at the Westin buffet, on a Tuesday morning in the second month, that Devi looked at her own plate — half-eaten ven pongal, a single dosa with coconut chutney, a glass of fresh pomegranate juice — and said, in the voice she used for things she had been thinking about for a long time:

“I think we are, all five of us, in this country, going to be all right.”

Tirumala set down his coffee. Tirumala did not, smile when something moved him; Tirumala became, instead, slightly more upright. He became, on this particular Tuesday morning, almost ramrod.

“Devi,” he said. “Welcome to Hyderabad.”

Devi made a small noise that was the closest Devi came to a laugh, and ate the rest of her pongal.

Devi had, by the second month at the Westin, gained five and a half kilograms. Her T-shirts — which she had brought from Melbourne expecting them to fit the way they had always fit — had begun, by the fourth week, to fit differently. Her face was rounder. Her shoulders were rounder. Her wrists were rounder.

* * *

5. Durgam Cheruvu by Night

On the morning of the eighth day, the cohort drove to the original Paradise — which the rest of India knew, in 2010, as a national chain that had opened branches in Bangalore and Pune and one entirely improbable outpost in Coimbatore — but which, in its actual Hyderabadi originating self, had opened in 1953 as a small open-air drive-in cinema café at the precise traffic junction in Secunderabad that the city had subsequently named Paradise Circle in the restaurant’s honour. They were seated by the same waiter who had been seating customers on the family-side of the restaurant since 1981. They ordered, between them, three different Paradise biryanis — the standard mutton, the famous foil-tinned dum, the chicken. Roy spent the next hour and forty minutes in the posture of a man making notes in the margins of a long Telugu poem. He concluded, at the end of the meal, that Paradise biryani was — by some Anjom measure — what biryani would taste like if every village in Andhra had been required, by a single agency, to send one cook to a single school in Secunderabad and to standardise on the resulting curriculum. He paid for it with the gravity of a man tipping a national institution.

Ketan had discovered the lake on the second Friday.

He had not been looking for a lake. He had been looking — in the unstated way pilots look for things they will not admit to anybody, including themselves, that they are looking for — for somewhere in Madhapur that was not Madhapur. He had walked, that Friday evening, out of the back gate of the Westin after the others had gone to bed; he had told the front-desk girl, in his pilot-cover voice, that he was going for a walk; he had walked north along Software Units Layout Main Road for almost twenty minutes, past the cranes that did not sleep, past the IT towers whose windows were lit at this hour by nothing but the cleaning crews, past the half-built lobbies and the future addresses and the construction-board promises of Hyderabad’s next year. He had been looking, in the small private place he was doing his looking, for a road that didn’t end in a building.

The road, eventually, didn’t. The road descended. The construction thinned. The cranes vanished. The street lights got further apart. And on the left, between two new compound walls of two new gated communities that had not yet, in early 2010, decided what name they wanted to put on their gates, was a small unpaved track that wound down between rocks. Ketan had followed it. The track had come out, after perhaps three minutes of walking in the dark, on the edge of a lake.

The lake was the strangest lake Ketan had ever seen, and Ketan had grown up in a generation for which lakes were, in the strictest sense, an extinct category of geography; the cohort’s Amaravati had been built around a river, not a lake, and the lakes of the cohort’s own time were either reservoirs behind dams or the things half-remembered by their grandparents. This lake was, by any sensible definition, in the middle of a city; the new towers of Madhapur rose, in fact, on the western horizon directly behind it. But the lake itself was held in a long irregular bowl of pale gray rock that had been there for ten million years and that the city, in 2010, had not yet figured out how to entirely destroy. The rocks went down to the water on three sides. The fourth side was a narrow gap that opened out toward a hill called, Ketan was told, Khajaguda. The water was — by the standards of any lake in a city of nine million people in 2010 — astonishingly dark and astonishingly still. Above the water, the air smelled faintly of something Ketan could not, the first night, name; it was, he would realize weeks later, the smell of city air refused entry by city rock.

Ketan walked along the edge of the rocks for almost an hour. He found, eventually, a small wooden jetty that somebody had built down to the water, and at the end of the jetty, improbably, three small flat-bottomed wooden boats tied with rope. There was no boatman in evidence. There were three folding chairs on the rocks. There was the suggestion, the faint smoke-suggestion, that a small fire had been recently burning somewhere up the slope. There was, in fact, a smell of beedi smoke. And then there was a man.

The man was old, the man was thin, the man was wrapped against the January cold in a brown blanket, and the man was watching Ketan with the patient unsurprised attention of a man whose job it had been, for a long time now, to watch strangers find this lake. He did not get up. He did not lower the beedi. He waited until Ketan had walked all the way down the rocks to him, which was the small dignity old jetty men afforded strangers all over Asia, and then he said, in Telugu Ketan had only by his third week begun to understand:

“You want a boat?”

Ketan, who had not, in any conscious sense, wanted a boat when he had walked out of the Westin two hours earlier, found, on hearing the question, that he did want a boat. He had wanted a boat for some weeks now and had been unable to name the want. He said, in the halting Telugu the cohort had been teaching him over the suite’s morning coffees:

“How much?”

The old man named a number. The number was so small that Ketan, who had been becoming an expert on the price of things in Hyderabad in 2010, had to stop and translate it twice in his head. It was less than the price of one Westin coffee. He paid in cash. The old man pocketed the cash without counting it. The old man gestured to the smallest of the three boats. Ketan got in. The boat, which had been waiting for him in some sense Ketan would spend the rest of his life trying not to read into too literally, swung gently away from the jetty under the soft push of the old man’s wooden pole, and Ketan was, in that moment, the first member of the cohort to leave the Westin after dark and find something that Hyderabad had been keeping for him.

He went out on the lake for the first time that night.

The lake at night, had two and only two populations. The first was the small handful of older Hyderabadis who had been coming here for forty years to walk at dawn and to drink at dusk and who had, in the way of older men everywhere, decided that the world ought to know it could leave them alone. The second was the young couples of Hyderabad, who came to Durgam Cheruvu after sunset specifically because Hyderabad in 2010 was not, a city that gave young couples anywhere to be. They came in pairs, from the new colonies just behind the lake, from Madhapur and Gachibowli and Kondapur; they came with the conspiratorial step of people who had not told their parents where they were going; they paid the old man at the jetty whatever he asked; they sat in the boats in the dark, two by two, and they did, on the dark water, the things that young couples in every city in the world had been doing in the dark on water since the invention of water. There was no music. There was no electricity on the rocks. The old man steered the boats out into the middle of the lake, anchored them, and went back to his beedi on the jetty until the couples were ready to come back, which was, on most evenings, never less than ninety minutes.

The old man, the cohort would later understand, ran the lake on a system. He kept five small jetty-boats. When a paying couple came he took them out in one and anchored it against the dark rock the regulars had long ago decided was the middle of the lake; and then, in the small clean way of men who have done a thing for thirty years, he jumped — barefoot, light, considering and unconsidering — to a second jetty he had left tied to the rock on a previous trip, untied it, and drove it back to his base on the western bank, where, by the half-superstitious intuition of a man who had been ferrying lake-night couples for thirty years, he believed the next paying customers would shortly arrive. On some nights, when the intuition told him no customer was coming for an hour, he did not return to the bank at all. He stayed on the rock with whoever he had already brought out, in a third jetty he kept tied there for the purpose, and waited the ninety minutes out in silence. Which of the two he did on any given night, the old man decided by an instinct he would not, in any of the years the cohort eventually knew him, explain to anyone.

Ketan, who was not a couple, was an anomaly. The old man, on the second visit, made no comment on the anomaly. The old man simply gave Ketan a boat, took him out to the middle, anchored him, and let him sit. Ketan sat. Ketan sat in the dark on the dark water of a lake that nobody in the world he had come from had ever heard of, in a city that was not, in his own time, going to exist, in a country that was four months away from making a state out of itself, and he sat with the boat rocking very gently under him and the lights of the nearby new buildings a long distance to the west, and he did not, for ninety minutes, think about anything in particular. It was the first ninety minutes of empty in Ketan’s head since Cobar.

He went back, after that, three times a week. He went on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. He always paid in the small worn notes the old man preferred. He never named himself; the old man never asked. He had by the third week, begun to recognize, in the dark on the water, the couples that had now become regulars: the newly minted engineer from Cyber Towers and the small woman in the long red dupatta whose family lived in Banjara Hills and did not know; the IT-services manager and the BPO-team-leader who came together on Fridays and whose long arguments on the boat Ketan, who could hear scraps of them across the still water, suspected were the actual purpose of the boat trips; the older couple from one of the new gated communities, married the cohort learned for twenty-six years, who came on the boat once a month specifically because the old man would, for them, on request, sing one slow Telugu song from the bank of the lake while they sat very quietly on the water. Ketan did not, in the technical sense, know any of these people. He knew them in the small night-water way one comes to know regulars on the floor of a quiet bar. They knew him too. They never spoke to him.

It was, the cohort would much later understand, the only piece of Hyderabad that became Ketan’s and only Ketan’s in the way Ponnu’s morning notes became Roy’s and only Roy’s. Tirumala did not, in the first three weeks, know about the lake. Tirumala had the city by the day; Tirumala did not need the night. Ketan did not bring Tirumala to it. Ketan did not bring anyone for quite some time.

He did not, the first night, sleep when he got back to the Westin at one in the morning. He did not, the second night, sleep either. He lay on his bed in suite 1804 and watched the ceiling and thought about — he could not later have said what. The thinking was the kind of thinking that, in the Amaravati of his own time, he had not, since adolescence, been able to do. He had, in the bunker, been the pilot. The pilot did not think on water. The pilot ran checklists and shouted at sims and was best the cohort had. The pilot did not have a category in his life for sitting in the dark on a lake. The pilot was, in Madhapur, in early 2010, becoming someone he had not yet decided whether to be.

* * *

6. A Bad Day

Bawarchi, on the Friday of the third week, was the precise opposite of Paradise. Bawarchi had opened in 1986 as a small unprepossessing single-room hole at the corner of a service lane behind the RTC Crossroads, in the part of central Hyderabad that, in 2010, was still in the visible decline that the city’s eastward IT migration had been causing for fifteen years. The lane was narrow. The building was peeling. The neon sign over the door read BAWARCHI in a particular shade of red that had not, in any year since the sign had been put up, been repainted. The biryani was extraordinary. It was the specific, idiosyncratic, family-recipe biryani that one particular family of cooks had been perfecting in one particular small kitchen since the year Tirumala’s adoptive mother had been a student at Hyderabad Public School. Roy, at the end, said only: “This is the biryani of a family. Paradise is the biryani of a school.” Tirumala wrote it down.

The young woman’s name was Mink. Ketan met her in the bar at the Park Hyatt on a Friday evening in the second month. He had walked, for reasons that were never afterward entirely clear to him, out of the Westin and across to the Park Hyatt in the new Westside complex, and he had walked into the bar and he had sat at the long bar with his back to the door and ordered a beer; and on the third sip of the beer, the woman two stools down — twenty-five, pretty in the precise corporate-Indian way the Park Hyatt bar was designed to flatter, on her second of what would be three glasses of wine — had looked over and said, in the long elastic English of a particular Hyderabad upbringing, “You don’t look like one of them.”

Ketan had turned. “One of who?”

She had gestured at the room, which was full of consultants from Delhi and Mumbai and Bangalore who had flown in for the week and had been corralled by their firms into the Westside complex on the grounds that the firm-rate hotels had been there since 2009 and the expense system had not yet learned any others. Twenty-five identical men in twenty-five identical pressed shirts, in clusters of three and four, were laughing slightly too loudly at the small high tables along the wall. She said: “Them.”

“I’m not one of them,” Ketan said.

“Where are you from?”

“Melbourne,” he said. The cover was, by now, automatic; the cover was a kind of muscle memory.

“What brings you to Hyderabad?”

“A friend’s wedding,” he said. The lie was, by now, also automatic. He had used it three times in Hyderabad. He had a wedding date, a wedding venue, a wedding bride and groom, and the small details of the wedding family that Tirumala had cobbled together for him in the second week, against exactly this sort of bar encounter.

She smiled. She had a wide, slightly tired smile and the air of a woman who had been at this particular bar on this particular kind of Friday evening too many times. Her name, she offered, was Mink. Her father, she did not offer, was the chief executive of one of the second-tier IT-services companies whose tower they could, by leaning slightly to the right in their barstools, see across the road through the bar window. Her mother, she did not offer, was a former dancer who now ran a small charitable foundation that her father funded. Mink had grown up in Banjara Hills, had been sent to St. Paul’s in Hyderabad, had been sent to Wellesley, had come back, had been doing what she called “interesting projects” at her father’s company, was twenty-five, and was on her second of three glasses of wine on a Friday evening because her parents had, that morning, formally introduced her to a young man from Mumbai whom they had been considering as a potential husband for some months, and whom Mink had, after the meeting, decided not to marry.

She did not tell Ketan any of this. She was good at not telling people things. What she did was she ordered him a second beer, on her tab; she asked him three sharp questions about Melbourne that he answered, with Roy’s bus-from-Dubbo briefing notes still in the long-term memory; she laughed at one of his jokes; and she watched him, the cohort would much later realize from a CCTV still that Tirumala obtained for reasons Ketan would also later not want to know, with the neutral evaluation of a woman whose life had taught her to evaluate men early.

Ketan, in his own private accounting, was doing his best. Ketan, in his own accounting, had been doing his best for some weeks now. There had been the Punjabi woman in the corner office of the IT building on the third afternoon, who had laughed at his hello and gone back to her phone. There had been the Telugu lawyer in the Banjara Hills cafe on the second Saturday, who had been gracious for eleven minutes and then unmistakably gone. There had been the British consultant at the Westin on the second Tuesday, who had drunk one drink with him and gone upstairs alone. There had been, on the third week, the exchange with the girl at the Koti bookshop that had ended, very gently, with the girl’s uncle stepping out from behind the counter and looking at Ketan in the way the uncles of girls in Koti bookshops look at men. Ketan was zero for four in Hyderabad. Mink, at the Park Hyatt bar on the Friday evening of the second month, was about to make him zero for five.

She made him zero for five at eleven-twenty-three, which was when she finished her third glass of wine. She did it gently. She had decided, in the neutral evaluation she had been running for the better part of an hour, that the pilot from Melbourne was, for all his easy manner and his honest broad shoulders and his English and the small wry not-quite-laugh he had let her use to push the conversation past the second hour, a man who was lying to her about something. She was not entirely sure what. She was sure that he was. She had learned this about men a long time before she had been twenty-five; her father had been telling her about men since she was fourteen. She picked up her phone. She said: “It was nice to meet you.”

Ketan said: “You’re going.”

She said: “I’m going.”

Ketan, who had not, in his Amaravati life, been told no by a woman in a bar within the same evening as the hello, said: “Can I — “

She said: “No. But thank you.”

She was kind. She was very kind. She was kind in the exhausting way of a woman who had been refusing men in bars since she was sixteen and had become very good at saying no in a way that did not hurt the man more than the no itself already did. She picked up her bag. She nodded to the bartender, who knew her, and who put her two-and-a-half glasses of wine on her father’s running tab and did not look at Ketan. She walked out of the bar without looking back. The bartender, in the way of the bartenders of the Park Hyatt in 2010, also did not look at Ketan.

Ketan sat at the bar for some minutes. He paid for his two beers in cash. He left a tip. He walked out of the bar. He walked across the lobby, past the small piano on the second floor where a young Goan woman was playing, very competently, a Hindi film standard from the nineteen-seventies. He took the lift to the ground floor. He walked out of the Park Hyatt into the warm Madhapur night. He did not, that night, go to the lake. He walked back to the Westin. He went up to the eighteenth floor. The suite, when he let himself in, was dark; Tirumala had gone to bed, Roy was in his room with his notebook, Devi was on her console with headphones on, Girit was reading on the sofa under the small lamp.

Girit looked up. “You’re back early.”

Ketan did not say anything. He went into his room. He closed the door behind him.

Girit went back to her book. She did not, miss the fact that Ketan had closed the door behind him in the slow way of a person who was being careful not to slam it. She filed the careful-slow door close in the private compartment of her memory where she filed the cohort’s small signals, and she did not, that evening, raise it with anyone.

Ketan sat on the edge of his bed for a long time. He took off his shoes. He took off his shirt. He looked, in the mirror over the writing desk, at his own face. He was, for the first time in his life, looking at his own face the way Girit had been looking at her own face in the dossier scene in Sorrento four months earlier: as a man who had, on this particular Friday evening, been seen by somebody he could not afford to be seen by, and who had been politely told that the seeing was not interesting enough to continue with.

He did not sleep. He read, for an hour, the small paperback Telugu novel Girit had left on the table in the living area, which he did not understand more than one word in four of, and which he read anyway because the alternative was lying on the bed and thinking about the bar. At three in the morning he got up. He went into the central living area. The room was still lit by the small lamp; Girit had gone to bed; nobody else was awake. He sat down on the sofa where Girit had been sitting. He picked up the controller Devi had left there. He turned the controller in his hands. He did not turn on the console. He sat with the controller in his hands until he could see, through the long balcony window, the first gray of dawn coming up behind the Cyber Towers.

At dawn he changed into his swimming things and went down to the pool.

He swam butterfly for an hour. He swam it with the small mechanical fury of a pilot who has been told, in his profession, that he is not the best pilot in the room; and he was, by the end of the hour. He climbed out of the pool. He sat on the edge of the pool. The Tamil lifeguard, Sundaran, looked at him from his bench but did not, on this morning, say anything; Sundaran had learned, somewhere in his twenty-eight years at the Madras Boat Club, when a swimmer was not to be spoken to. Ketan put his head in his hands.

He stayed that way for almost ten minutes.

Then he stood up. He wrapped the hotel towel around his waist. He walked, without changing, back up to the suite. He came into the central living area where the cohort had, by then, gathered for the morning coffee — Tirumala on the sofa with the three newspapers, Roy in the armchair with his spiral notebook, Devi cross-legged on the carpet eating papaya, Girit at the small dining table with a cup of filter coffee — and he stood, dripping faintly onto the carpet, in the center of the room, and he said, in the small flat voice of a pilot who has been falling for some time and has decided to admit it:

“What the hell are we doing?”

* * *

7. The Idea in the Pool

The cohort looked at him.

Ketan said: “What are we actually doing? In this city. In this country. In this hotel. What are we doing.”

Tirumala folded his newspaper. He did not, on this Saturday morning, fold it briskly. He folded it the way a man folds a newspaper when he has been quietly expecting, for some weeks now, that the morning would arrive when someone in his cohort asked the question; and the morning had, now, arrived; and the someone had turned out to be Ketan, which Tirumala had not foreseen but which, on reflection, he did not find surprising.

He said: “Sit down, Ketan.”

Ketan did not sit down. Ketan walked the length of the living area twice, in his hotel towel, dripping pool water on the carpet. He said: “We have been in this country for two months. We have not done one thing about the mission. We have not done one thing. We have eaten biryani. We have gone to the gym. We have read newspapers. We have, between us, watched ten Telugu films and five Hindi films. We have, between us, accumulated sixteen Hyderabad acquaintances and not one Hyderabad friend. We have, in the time we have been here, made absolutely zero contribution to the only thing any of us came here to do. We are amateurs. We are amateurs trying to do the greatest thing any human beings have ever done, and we are doing it with the seriousness of teenagers on a gap year.”

He stopped. He stood in the middle of the living area. He was, the cohort observed, shaking very slightly. He was also, the cohort observed, right.

There was a long silence.

Tirumala said, carefully: “Ketan. The mission is — “

“The mission,” Ketan said, “is to make sure Telangana happens on June 2, 2014. We have fifty-one months. We are in the right country. We are in the right city. We are in the right decade. What are we actually doing about it?”

Tirumala looked at his hands. Tirumala did not, in his life, often look at his hands. He said: “What we are doing about it is the part that doesn’t show. We are establishing — “

“We are establishing,” Ketan said, “a comfortable Indian residence. We are establishing a fund-management portfolio. We are establishing six Hyderabad biryani preferences. We are establishing my swimming stroke. We are not — ” he stopped. “We are not doing the work. The work is somewhere else and we are here.”

Girit looked up from her coffee. She said, very quietly: “Where is that somewhere, if not here in Hyderabad?”

Ketan did not, in the first moment, answer her. He looked at her. He had been swimming for an hour and he had not slept; he was, in the unflattering Saturday morning light of the suite, looking very much like a person who had been in a bar at the Park Hyatt at eleven-twenty-three the previous evening and not yet, twelve hours later, recovered.

He said, in a voice that was no longer the angry voice and no longer the flat-pilot voice, but a voice the cohort had not previously heard from him: “I have been thinking about it on the lake. For three weeks. We are doing the wrong job. The mission is not to manage Vayu Veg. The mission is bigger than Vayu Veg. The mission, the actual mission, is to keep the Reconciliation possible. And we are, in this hotel, on these mornings, behaving as if the Reconciliation is something that will happen on its own if Vayu Veg goes to enough films. It won’t. Vayu Veg is one switch. We have access to a much bigger switch, and we are not touching it.”

Tirumala said: “What bigger switch.”

Ketan said: “The Rama people.”

The cohort did not move. It was Tirumala who immediately grasped the significance of the epiphany. He went into a deep meditative state and blocked out all his senses; he moved his right hand toward his lips and closed them; his eyes moved toward the ceiling — but he snapped out of that meditative sensory block in a blip and looked back at Ketan.

Ketan, who was not paying attention to Tirumala’s body language, simply continued: “The brothers found the temple in our timeline. They found the ancient spaceship. They sent the distress signal. The distress signal brought the Rama people. The Rama people paused the war and facilitated the dialogue that eventually completely stopped the war. Why are we waiting all those years for the brothers to do it when we already know where the temple is?”

Tirumala said, very slowly:

“Why don’t we send the signal ourselves.”

“Why don’t we send it now,” Ketan said. “Before night-zero. Before any of this happens. If the Rama people stopped the Anjom war in the original timeline, we go to the temple, we find the beacon, we send it early. We invite the Rama people now. We stop the war before the war starts. We don’t need Telangana. We don’t need Vayu Veg. We don’t need the brothers. We don’t need any of it. We need one signal, and we know where the signal is.”

Devi said, very quietly: “Roy. Is that — is that possible.”

Roy did not, in the first moment, answer. Roy was looking at Ketan with the expression Roy had only twice before, in the cohort’s long acquaintance with him, given anybody — once on the night of the Eureka in the bunker, and once on the night of the dossier in Sorrento. It was the expression of an Anjom who had been told, by a human, a thing about the world that the Anjom had not, in his own thinking, arrived at.

Roy said, eventually: “I don’t know. I don’t know whether it is possible. We don’t, in fact, know how the original signal was sent. We know that the brothers found the temple. We know that they activated something. We do not know what they activated, because the temple had been their secret for many years, and by the time the historians got to it, the temple had become a national monument and the activation had become a story. There is no human documentation of the mechanism. There is no Anjom documentation of the mechanism either. The Rama people — ” he paused. “The Rama people have never explained.”

“But the temple is there,” Ketan said. “In this year. Right now. Two years before the brothers find it, it is sitting in a village in a delta a few hours from this hotel. Whatever the mechanism is, it is in the temple, in 2010. We could go and look.”

Tirumala said: “Where exactly.”

“You know exactly where,” Ketan said. “It’s near Vijayawada. The svayambhu temple. The shepherd. The whole story.”

Tirumala did know exactly where. Tirumala had been to the place. Tirumala had stood in the courtyard of the Vimana-that-was-not-yet-known-to-be-a-Vimana, and his eleven-year-old self had been more interested in the temple’s resident monkeys than in the temple’s architecture, and his eleven-year-old self had taken a small stone home with him as a souvenir which his adoptive mother had made him take back the following month on a separate trip. Tirumala remembered the village. Tirumala remembered the temple. Tirumala remembered, in particular, the priest in the courtyard who had, after the school trip’s official tour, sat down on the temple steps with the eleven-year-old Tirumala and asked him, with the particular grave attention with which old Indian priests asked small Indian boys, what his family name was.

Tirumala said, slowly: “Ramapuram. The village is Ramapuram. The temple is called the Sri Seeta Rama Lakshmana Hanuma Devalayam — most of the time, simply Ramalayam. It is on the south bank of the Krishna delta, about an hour west of Vijayawada. There are two hills near it. The village is three hundred kilometers from this hotel. We can drive there in six.”

He looked around the suite. He looked at Ketan, dripping pool water on the carpet in his hotel towel. He looked at Roy, with the spiral notebook closed on his lap. He looked at Girit, who had set down her coffee. He looked at Devi, who had set down the papaya.

He said: “Ketan. You are right. We have been amateurs. We are about to stop.”

Ketan, in his hotel towel, said: “Thank you.”

Tirumala said: “Go and put on dry clothes. Then come back. There is a lot we need to think through before any of us gets in a car.”

Ketan, the cohort observed, did not immediately move. Ketan, the cohort observed, was — for the first time in the cohort’s long acquaintance with him — visibly close to tears. He had not been told he was wrong. He had not been told he was an amateur. He had been told, in the small grave Tirumala formulation, that he was right. He had been told that the cohort was about to stop being amateurs.

Ketan turned. He went to put on dry clothes.

Tirumala, watching him go, said to nobody in particular, in the Telugu his adoptive grandmother had taught him: “Some men become themselves in fights with other men. Some men become themselves on water.”

Girit, who had also learned that particular Telugu phrase from her own grandmother in Khammam village, said equally quietly: “And some men become themselves on dry land after a very long night.”

Tirumala looked at her. Tirumala smiled. Tirumala did not, smile.

“Yes,” he said.

* * *

8. Roy Begins

Ketan came back in dry clothes at nine. The cohort had not, in the intervening twenty minutes, moved. The newspapers were still folded. The papaya was still on the carpet. The filter-coffee cup was still on the small dining table. Tirumala had gone, briefly, into his room and brought back a small spiral notebook of his own, which he set on the coffee table; Roy had brought out his Anjom device and placed it next to Tirumala’s notebook; Girit had brought out, from her bedroom, a stack of three books that she had not, until that morning, had a reason to take out.

Ketan sat down on the sofa. He said: “Where do we start.”

Tirumala said: “We start with why. We start with the most important thing nobody in this cohort, not even me, has ever asked Roy about, and we start with it now because if we are about to go to that temple and try to send that signal we need to know what the signal is for, what the war was for, who the Rama people are, and how much of what we know about all three of those things is wrong.”

He turned to Roy.

He said: “Roy. Why did the Anjoms come?”

Roy looked at him for a long moment.

Tirumala said: “Why did the Anjoms come to Earth? Why did they bomb every major city of Earth? Why did they kill billions of people on night-zero? Roy. Why did your people come?”

Roy did not answer immediately.

The cohort waited. Outside the long balcony window, on the road eighteen floors below, the morning traffic of Madhapur was beginning, in the way the morning traffic of Madhapur in 2010 began: the autorickshaws first, the scooters next, the white IT-services buses with the names of the companies stenciled on their flanks taking the engineers out to HITEC City, the small private cars of the consultants and the middle managers. The road was, in the morning sun, finding its day.

Roy said: “I was not going to tell you yet.”

Roy looked at his hands. Roy did not, look at his hands. Roy looked, on this Saturday morning, in the long Hyderabad light, at his own hands the way Tirumala had looked, twenty minutes earlier, at his.

Roy started with: “We Anjoms are very ashamed of everything we did to humans on Earth. We have been trying to make amends ever since…”

He continued: “You will need to be patient. The story starts neither on Earth nor on Anjom. The first contact is not on earth. The story starts on a planet, somewhere between Earth and Anjom, and which, in the records, is called Epsilon by earth scientists. Most of what humans have been told about first contact is, by Anjom standards, gray area. Most of what humans have been told about the war is, by Anjom standards, more gray area. I have been quiet because the silence was the Anjom contribution to the Reconciliation. The silence was, in some real sense, the apology. The apology has, for these many years now, been not telling you the thing.”

He looked up.

“I am about to tell you the thing,” he said. “You will not, after I have told it, be able to un-know it. You will, after I have told it, know things about your own species that almost nobody on your planet knows, and which, on Anjom, are known by a council of seven Anjoms in a room that does not, have windows. I do not, today, have the authority to tell you these things. I am going to tell you anyway. Tirumala is right. We are about to do something none of us has the authority to do, and we are about to do it because Ketan has correctly observed that none of us has the authority not to.”

Nobody, in the silence that followed, contradicted him.

Roy said: “Then I will begin.”

* * *

9. Epsilon

He began the way Anjoms began long stories, which was the way storytellers in the Carnatic tradition began long ragas: with the smallest possible note, played very carefully, for longer than the listener thought possible.

He said: “In a year that humans, in the late decades of the twenty-first century, would later be told to forget, a single ship left the orbit of Earth’s moon and was not heard from again. The ship was the largest interstellar vessel humans had ever built. It had been built on the Moon, in secret, over twelve years, by a coalition that called itself, among itself, the Trillionaire Club. The Trillionaire Club was an informal association of seven of the wealthiest families on Earth — wealthiest by a margin no list, no government, no historian had been permitted to quantify. The first family among them, the family that had organized the others, that had hosted the semi-annual meetings of all seven in the private estate the family had been maintaining for generations on an island somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and that had, by the silent consent of the other six, led the planning of the Vessel from its first drawn line to its final lunar launch, was the Aghran family.”

He paused.

“You may not have heard of the Trillionaire Club. It had spent generations becoming the kind of presence on Earth that did not, in any visible sense, exist. Its members lived in houses no neighbor had ever entered. They flew on aircraft no register had ever recorded. They had bought, between the seven families, a sufficient share of the world’s energy, the world’s water-treatment infrastructure, the world’s seed stocks, the world’s pharmaceuticals, and — toward the end — the world’s deep-space launch capacity, that they were, by then, in a position which one of their own internal documents described as ‘no longer requiring the planet they had been born on.’ They had grown, in the course of those generations, into a kind of citizen no human polity had a category for. They had also grown to hold the rest of the human species in a quiet contempt that had begun, in the family-internal way these things begin, to feel almost like a genetic inheritance. Every Aghran born into the family, every Tanaka, every Ortiz-Mendoza, every Sinha — by some accumulating private mathematics — turned out, in adulthood, to be the same.”

He paused again.

“By the time of the launch, the Club had moved beyond the question of whether to leave Earth and into the question of when. The how had been settled some years earlier: a single vessel, built in secret, sufficient for the seven families and a operational staff, sufficient for the stored gametes and the digital libraries, sufficient for a hundred years of provisions, and sufficient — most importantly — for the long-pulse drive that Earth had not been told the Aghrans had developed. The Vessel was the largest single object humans had ever built off-planet. It had been assembled, over twelve years, in the private bay of the South-Pole-Aitken Crater that the Aghran lunar concession had been acquiring, in pieces, since the early sixties. The Vessel left lunar orbit on the morning of a late August, on a launch the rest of Earth had been told was a test of an unmanned probe. The Vessel cleared lunar orbit. The Vessel went dark. The Vessel did not, in any month of any subsequent year, transmit to Earth again.”

He looked at the cohort.

“Earth’s official version of what happened next was that the Vessel had failed. The Vessel had, the official version said, been destroyed by some unknown mechanical fault — fuel-tank rupture, drive failure, deep-space collision, whatever — and the Vessel had been destroyed somewhere between Saturn and the heliopause. Earth, a few years after the launch, declared the seven Trillionaire families officially bankrupt and their entire fortunes officially in the public domain. The families’ earthly assets, such as could be traced, were liquidated by all the major governments over the course of the following decade, in a coordinated program that was, by some later estimates, the largest single transfer of wealth in human history. The seven families, within a decade or so of the launch, were a footnote. The species moved on.”

He looked at his hands again.

“The Trillionaires had not, in fact, died. They had cut their communications on the twenty-third of August, six days after launch — twelve hours after the last regularly scheduled telemetry — and the Vessel had spent the next many years, by its own clocks, in the long-pulse drive. It had emerged, after a long Earth interval, in the system the Anjoms call by a name humans will never pronounce and which the small handful of humans who have ever heard the name in full have, for ease of speech, called Epsilon. It was the only star system within the Vessel’s range that had been telemetrically identified, from Earth’s solar system, as containing a planet in the liquid-water zone of its star. The Trillionaires had aimed at Epsilon. The Trillionaires had reached Epsilon. The Trillionaires had begun, on Epsilon, the small private second human civilization they had been planning for generations.”

He paused for the third time.

“What the Trillionaires had not been told, because no one on Earth had any way of knowing it, was that Epsilon was not, at the moment of the Trillionaires’ arrival, an unoccupied planet.”

The cohort did not move. Tirumala’s hand had been, the whole time Roy had been speaking, very still on the spiral notebook in his lap. Roy had not been looking at the device. The device was, in fact, switched off.

Roy said: “Epsilon was, by the time the Trillionaires arrived, a small Anjom monastic colony. It had been a small Anjom monastic colony for what was, by Anjom reckoning, a fairly recent monastic age. There were thirty-seven Anjoms on it. They were, by Anjom social categorization, members of the order that on Earth would be most accurately translated as the priest-class — although the translation is, like all such translations, imperfect. They were not priests in the sense that Earth’s priests are; they did not lead congregations, they did not perform ceremonies for the laity, they did not perform weddings or burials. They were not priests in any sense involving the public function of religion. They were priests in the sense that they were the part of Anjom culture which had been deliberately set aside, for as long as the recorded Anjom past had any record, to preserve and to listen.”

He paused. His voice, when he resumed, was the voice the cohort had heard him use only twice before — over the radio above the burning plain on the day of the crash, and in his perfectly antique Arabic at the Emirati consulate. It was Roy’s older voice.

“They were the part of Anjom culture that, for many thousands of Anjom years, had been the part of Anjom culture that decided what Anjom culture was. They were the curators of the language, the curators of the music, the curators of the histories, the curators of the long stories that Anjoms told themselves about themselves. They were, in our small self-understanding, the part of us that knew who we were. They lived, traditionally, on small remote planets, in small remote orders, away from the main Anjom worlds. They lived this way because the work they did required quiet, and because the work they did was the kind of work that, when done in the center of a busy civilization, gets quietly bent by that civilization to that civilization’s convenience. They were, in our long unbroken tradition, the irreducible part of us. They were us. Their primary command was to stay impartial.”

He stopped. He looked, briefly, out the long balcony window. The Madhapur morning was fully up. The cranes on the horizon were already in motion. Below, on the road, an auto-rickshaw horn was demanding the attention of the same cow that had been demanding everyone’s attention every morning since the cohort had arrived. The cow, this morning, ignored the horn.

Roy said: “The Trillionaires landed on Epsilon on the third day of the eleventh month of the Anjom year that corresponds to the year of the Trillionaires’ arrival. They had no idea the thirty-seven priests were there. They had no telemetry that would have detected them. The Anjom monastery was, by deliberate choice, the kind of installation that did not emit on any frequency a deep-space telescope would notice. The Trillionaire scout drones, in their preliminary survey, did not register any biological activity at the latitude of the monastery. The Trillionaires set down the Vessel three thousand kilometers from the monastery, on what their drones had described as the most habitable plateau in the planet’s single landmass.”

He paused. The cohort waited.

“The thirty-seven priests sent a small unarmed delegation to the landing site within forty-eight hours. It was, by Anjom custom, the response any monastic order would have made to the arrival of a new intelligent species on their world. The delegation consisted of seven of the older priests, in their ceremonial robes — robes which, by their order’s tradition, had no metallic content, no powered components, no electronic identifiers, and no symbols that could be misread as weapons. They carried no instruments. They carried no offerings, on the Anjom principle that an offering offered too early can be misread as a tribute. They traveled the three thousand kilometers, in the ceremonial way they had been trained to travel on monastic errands. They arrived at the Trillionaire landing site on the morning of the twenty-fifth.”

His voice was very even now. The cohort had not, since the Eureka night in the bunker, heard Roy’s voice this even.

“The Trillionaires killed all seven of the delegation in eleven seconds with weapons that none of the priests had seen before and would not have recognized as weapons in any case. The Trillionaires then tracked the priests’ return route back to the monastery. They took two further Earth-days to do this; they sent automated drones. The drones found the monastery. The drones identified the remaining thirty Anjoms. The drones returned to the Vessel. The Trillionaires then sent a manned strike team. The strike team had been instructed by the Aghran patriarch — the head of the leading family, a man called Asphara Aghran — to be thorough. They were thorough. The strike team killed every Anjom in the monastery. They left no one alive.”

He stopped. His voice, when he resumed, was the smallest the cohort had ever heard it.

“There was, among the thirty Anjoms in the monastery, one who was younger than the others. She was, by Anjom reckoning, fifteen of our years old. She had been at the monastery for three years. She was not, by the particular tradition of the priest-class, yet considered an initiate; she was a student. When the strike team came into the monastery, she hid. She hid in the small closed alcove behind the monastery’s communications altar — which was not, in any sense any human would have understood, an altar, but which was the instrument by which an Anjom monastic order, in its long isolation, kept in touch with the rest of Anjom culture. The instrument was, like the order, deliberately quiet. It was capable of one outbound pulse. The girl, in the private hours between the moment the strike team entered the monastery and the moment they found her — perhaps four of our hours, perhaps five, the Anjom record is not entirely sure — used the pulse. She did not, in those hours, send a coded brief or a tactical summary. She sent the longest single transmission a fifteen-year-old Anjom priest-student had ever sent: the names of the dead, in the order they had been killed, and a descriptive account of what the people who had killed them looked like, dressed like, sounded like, and — in the detail her brief monastic training had taught her to notice — believed about themselves. The pulse reached the nearest Anjom planet. The girl, by then, was already dead.”

He paused.

“The Trillionaires,” he said, “did not, in the small private corner of their planning, consider that anyone would come for them.”

He paused again.

“As the Anjoms later learned from the captured Aghran, the Trillionaires had been told, by their own preliminary survey of the Anjom monastery — to the extent that any preliminary survey was conducted at all — that the resident species on Epsilon possessed no orbital infrastructure, no detectable energy infrastructure, no broadcast signature, and no weaponry of any kind their scout drones could identify. The Trillionaires concluded, from this, that the resident species was, in the Trillionaire formulation of the moment, primitive. They concluded that the resident species was a planet-bound species of barefoot foragers who had, on their own planet, made no progress beyond the small monastic life their telescopes had observed. The Trillionaires did not consider, in their two generations of preparation, that a species which had achieved a quiet, deliberate, planet-scale isolation might be hiding the rest of its civilization from observation as a matter of long principle. The Trillionaires saw, in the seven robed priests at the landing site, natives. They acted accordingly. They had, in their own internal accounting, removed a small primitive obstacle to the second human civilization they were going to build on Epsilon. They did not, in the same accounting, register that they had committed an act of war against a civilization that spanned across star systems.”

Tirumala, very quietly, said: “And the signal.”

Roy said: “Anjom received it. The council that received it did not, deliberate. The council had not, in the recorded Anjom past, had occasion to mobilize a fleet. The council mobilized a fleet in nineteen hours. The fleet reached Epsilon in what Anjom records still describe as the fastest single deep-space transit in Anjom history. It arrived in the week the Trillionaires were beginning to discuss what to call their new capital. The fleet did to the Trillionaires what the Trillionaires had done to the seven priests, with approximately the same efficiency, in approximately half the time. The Vessel was destroyed in the first few minutes. The Trillionaire settlements on the plateau were destroyed in the next few minutes. All the humans on planet Epsilon died, except one. One was taken alive. He was taken alive specifically because the Anjom fleet commander had decided, in the small grave way Anjom fleet commanders sometimes make such decisions, that someone had to be able to tell the rest of Anjom where the species had come from. He was an Aghran cousin in his early thirties, a man whose name the Anjom record does not, in its care, preserve.”

He looked down. He looked up.

“The Aghran cousin told the Anjom interrogators where Earth was on the second hour of the second day of his captivity. The Anjom interrogators had been prepared, by their training, for a much longer interrogation. They had been prepared for the species of resistance a captive of a powerful family might be expected to offer when asked to give up the location of his own homeworld. They had not been prepared for what they actually received, which was a man who, on the second hour of the second day, asked his interrogators what guarantees the Anjom side could offer for his own continued comfort and who, on receiving the Anjom non-answer, gave them what they had asked for. The Anjom interrogators recorded, in their formal report, that the captive appeared to have no particular attachment to the planet whose location he had just disclosed. The captive was, in the Anjom record, surprised when his interrogators expressed surprise. The interrogators were Anjom. They were, in their long quiet tradition, accustomed to a certain minimum loyalty among the species they had previously studied. The Aghran cousin’s loyalty was, by Anjom standards, well below that minimum.”

He paused for a long time.

“The Anjom fleet turned for Earth. It had been told, by the captive, that Earth had no comparable defensive infrastructure; he had been correct. The fleet arrived in Earth orbit twenty-nine Earth-days after the destruction of the Trillionaires on Epsilon. The fleet commander had received, from the council on Anjom, an instruction that the council itself, in the long internal accounting that followed the war, would describe as the worst single instruction the council had ever issued. The instruction was that Earth was to be unmade as a habitat for the species that had killed the thirty-seven peaceful, unarmed Anjom priests on Epsilon. The fleet, on receipt of the instruction, did what fleets do when they are very angry and have been very recently shown what their priest-class died for. They did, in the eighteen hours that humans would later call night-zero, the thing for which Anjom has not, in all the years since, found a way to apologize. They bombed every urban area on Earth that exceeded five million inhabitants. They killed, in those eighteen hours, three and a half billion humans. They were prepared, in their long operational planning, to keep going.”

He stopped.

The cohort did not move.

Roy said: “They were stopped by two brothers in a small village outside what would later be called Amaravati, in the south of India. The brothers — farmers, by your records, but also, by the Telugu accounting of their families, scholars of the temple — their families had been its priests for nineteen or more generations — had spent the eighteen hours of night-zero inside their temple. They had gathered their extended families, the families of the others in the village, and the families of every household within walking distance, into the inner chambers of the temple. They had bolted the outer doors. They had lit the lamps. They had begun, on the specific assumption that nobody was listening except their own god, to do the only thing they had been trained their entire lives to do at a moment when there was nothing else left to do: they prayed.”

He paused.

“What the brothers knew about the temple,” Roy said, “was, in the village-priest accounting that is itself a kind of long research, considerable. The brothers were not, in any meaningful sense, ordinary village priests. The elder brother had taken his doctorate in materials science at the University of California at Berkeley as a young man. The younger brother had taken his master’s degree in electrical engineering and signal processing at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in the same years. Both brothers, on returning to the village some years later, had quietly resumed the priestly duties their families had been performing for nineteen generations. Both brothers had also, on returning, begun the private research project that would occupy the rest of their lives until the night the world ended: the research project of finding out what, exactly, the village temple was.”

“The brothers had suspected, in the way one suspects what one has been hearing from one’s parents, and one’s parents’ parents, all the way back along nineteen generations of village priests — something great but forgotten, that the village temple was not an ordinary temple. They had grown up in a family in which every priest of every generation for nineteen generations had, in his own time, in his own village-priest way, suspected the same thing. The reasons for the suspicion were many. The svayambhu at the heart of the garbhagriha was, by every measurement the elder brother was eventually able to make on it, not quite a stone — the material was, by his patient careful materials-science accounting, neither granite nor any other rock the regional geology was supposed to produce. It was made of an alloy nobody on Earth, at the time the brothers were making the measurements, knew how to manufacture. The temple’s sasanalu — the inscriptions carved on the inner walls of the garbhagriha — the brothers eventually concluded, after many years of translation work, were not, as the previous nineteen generations of village priests had assumed, religious in nature. They were technical. They described, in a half-archaic Sanskrit and a half-archaic Telugu and a partly invented third script the brothers eventually concluded must be the original engineering language of the people who had built the temple, the temple’s own operating manual. There was, more importantly, the matter that several devotees who came at the quieter hours had been observing, and remarking on, for generations: the temple looked larger from the inside than it did from the outside.”

“There was, in particular, the family account. The account was not, by the brothers’ own description, an account anyone in the family spoke outside the inner circle of nineteen generations. The account, in its simplest form, was a single sentence the children of the family were taught early and were taught never to repeat to outsiders: they came with the temple. The phrase had been passed down, generation by generation, without explanation. The brothers had spent, between them, a substantial portion of their adult lives quietly trying to make the sentence mean something they could verify. Did the first priest in the line bring the statues with him from somewhere else, and around the statues the village had built the rest? Or had the family come, in some sense the inner circle could not now reconstruct, with the temple itself — the structure, the svayambhu, the alloy, the architecture — in the way one might come with a vehicle one had been entrusted to caretake? Was the family account, in other words, an account of an arrival in which the temple was a thing the family had brought, and brought from elsewhere, and brought through what an earlier Sanskrit literature had called — the elder brother was the one who had connected this — the legendary Pushpaka Vimana?”

“What the brothers had not, in their many years of research, been able to do,” Roy said, “was activate any part of the manual. The sasanalu described what the temple could, in principle, do. They described, in particular, a mechanism — the brothers translated the relevant inscriptions into Telugu as ‘the calling of the ones who built’ — by which the temple could, in conditions of unmistakable distress, send a signal to its makers. The sasanalu described the mechanism in considerable detail. The sasanalu did not, in any portion the brothers had been able to translate, describe how to actually trigger it. The brothers had spent five of those years trying — quietly, in the private way two village priests can try such things without alarming the village — every combination of gestures, postures, recitations, sequences of sound, and ceremonial actions they could derive from the description. None of them had worked. The mechanism, in the brothers’ collective conclusion, was protected by a final step that the temple’s original builders had deliberately omitted from the written manual on the principle that the calling of the ones who built was not, in any era, a thing that should be triggered by anyone who had merely read the manual.”

“On the night of night-zero,” Roy said, “with the world visibly ending and the village families gathered for refuge in the temple’s inner chambers, the brothers — in front of the svayambhu, in the half-light of the lamps, while they prayed in the village-priest way of two brothers trying to keep their composure for the families behind them — finally found the missing step. Whether the elder brother found it first or the younger brother found it first the brothers themselves were later unable to agree. What they did agree on, in the accounting they gave the Reconciliation council on the eighty-ninth day of the negotiations, was that sometimes, if you stare at a problem for long enough, the answer flashes in your brain — and that, in their case, it had taken a couple of decades of staring before it did. Their intuition had at last worked. They were able to trigger the distress call. The brothers performed the sequence. The Vimana noticed.”

Unfortunately, the details were not written into the historical record available to Roy: how exactly the brothers had triggered the distress call was a thing the Reconciliation accounts had never fully captured.

He paused again.

“The Vimana,” Roy said, “did not, as distinguishes the Rama people from the rest of the spacefaring civilizations of the galaxy, alert the Anjom fleet, fire anything, or open any channel to the Anjom commander in orbit. The Vimana did the specific thing it had been built to do in such moments. It sent, across the long quiet distance between Earth and the Rama-people homeworld, a distress pulse. The pulse arrived. The Rama people, who keep the kind of watch on such pulses that only a species that has been keeping watch for many thousands of years knows how to keep, received it. They responded in a way that no Anjom had ever, in any recorded incident, seen them respond. They came in person.”

He looked at the cohort.

“A small Rama-people delegation — three of them, by the brothers’ later account, although the Anjom record disagrees about the number — arrived, by means that neither the brothers nor the Anjom fleet commander were ever able to explain, inside the closed garbhagriha of the temple, in the interval between one heartbeat of one of the brothers and the next. They did not knock. They did not announce. They simply, on the next heartbeat, were there. They looked at the brothers. They looked at the families crowded into the inner chambers. They looked, by some particular means that did not require them to step outside the chamber, at the Anjom fleet in orbit. They spoke to the brothers, in a Telugu that no Telugu the brothers had ever heard had been quite that ancient. They said: come.”

“What the Vimana did next, in the particular way the Rama-people Vimanas do such things when their caretakers have called for help and their caretakers and their caretakers’ families are unsafe where they are, was rise. It rose, with its full interior — the brothers, the families inside the temple, the village families inside the temple, the Rama-people delegation, and the great careful weight of stone the brothers had always taken to be the temple’s own foundation — into the lower Earth atmosphere. It did not, in the ceremonial way of the Rama-people Vimanas, attempt to hide. It announced itself. It opened, to the Anjom flagship, the quiet diplomatic channel the Rama people had been keeping in their long diplomatic protocols since the first time a Rama-people delegation had spoken to an Anjom council many of your generations earlier. It asked, in the Rama-people way of asking, for an immediate cessation of hostilities.”

He paused.

“The Anjom fleet commander, who had been told in the grave Anjom briefing that preceded the mission that the Rama people were among the small handful of civilizations Anjom had any reason to defer to — and who had been told, in the same briefing, that no Anjom in the recorded Anjom past had been known to refuse a Rama-people request — paused his fleet. He paused it on the specific second in which the Rama-people channel opened. He paused it before consulting his council, before consulting his staff, before consulting himself. He paused it because he had been trained, in the Anjom way of training fleet commanders, to pause it on exactly such occasions. The fleet, on receipt of the pause, paused.”

“The Rama-people delegation, in the diplomatic way the Rama people prefer when they are stepping into a dispute between two species they have no formal jurisdiction over, did one thing. They took the two brothers — only the two brothers, none of the families, none of the villagers — onto the Anjom flagship. They left the Vimana, with the brothers’ families and the village families inside it, in a low orbit over the village. They said, to the Anjom fleet commander, in the quiet Rama-people Anjom they had been using for diplomatic conversations with Anjom for some thousands of years: ‘These are two of the surviving humans. They are, by every accounting we have been able to make in the short time we have been here, not the humans you are looking for. We will not take sides. We will hold this room. We will not, on the particular principle the Rama people have held for millions of our years, intervene further. You will speak to them. They will speak to you. We will listen.'”

He paused.

“And then,” he said, “the talks began. They did not, as the brothers later described them, go well. The Anjom delegation of two Anjoms, with the rest of the Anjoms simply watching intently, on the first day, was very angry. The Anjom delegation, on the first day, accused the entire surviving human species of having built the Trillionaire weapon, launched the Trillionaire ship, killed the thirty-seven priests on Epsilon, and earned — by every Anjom reading of the Galactic Civilizations Convention of the long Anjom past — the annihilation the Anjom fleet was, by the same first-day accounting, in the middle of delivering.”

“The Anjom delegation, in the particular Anjom way of delivering a charge sheet, had on that first day a long list of words. The Anjom delegation called the human race, in a Galactic-formal Anjom which the Rama-people delegation later translated for the brothers into a polite half-archaic Sanskrit, too arrogant, too ignorant, and too aggressive — not, by any of the standards the Anjom council had been maintaining for the entirety of its long civilization, a species suitable for joining the company of the spacefaring races, and not, in the strict reading of the convention the Anjom delegation was preparing to invoke, possessed of any further right to continue its living at all.”

“The brothers, on the first day, had no idea what the Anjom delegation was talking about.”

“They had not heard of Epsilon. They had not heard of the Trillionaire Club having survived and traveled there. They had not heard of the Aghran family other than some proverbs to describe how not to behave when one has power and riches. They had heard, in the Indian way of hearing such things, that some very rich people had attempted to create a private spaceship in the late twenty-first century, but they had been told the spaceship had failed; they had never heard the words ‘Trillionaire Club’; they had certainly never heard the word ‘Anjom’. They had no framework for the accusation the Anjom delegation was making. They asked, very carefully, for more details. The Anjom delegation, on the first day, refused. The Rama-people delegation, in the Rama-people way, sat very still and said nothing.”

“On the second day, the Anjom delegation — under the firm but careful suggestion of the Rama-people delegation that the brothers were owed the same information any defendant in any civilized species was owed — provided the details. They described the landing on Epsilon. They provided video proofs that were graphic; the brothers closed their eyes for several minutes. They described the seven priests in their ceremonial robes. They described the eleven seconds. They described the strike team and the thirty-seven dead. They described the youngest priest who had hidden. They described the distress pulse the youngest priest had sent. They described the Anjom fleet on Epsilon, the captured Aghran cousin, and the Earth coordinates the cousin had given them. They described the eighteen hours of night-zero. They described the three and a half billion dead.”

“The brothers, on the second day, listened. They did not, as the brothers of a long priestly line listen to terrible news, interrupt. They did not, on the second day, defend Earth. They did not, on the second day, say anything. They sat with what they had been told. They sat with it through the Anjom evening of the second day. They sat with it through the Anjom night of the second day. On the morning of the third day, the elder brother, in a broken Telugu the Rama-people delegation translated into Anjom for the Anjom delegation, said: ‘Sir. We are sorry. We did not know.'”

“On the third day, the brothers began, in the village-priest way of beginning such conversations, to try to explain. They tried to explain that the Aghran family was not, in the Earth sense the brothers were trying to use, the human species. They tried to explain that the seven Trillionaire families had been, in their own time, an enclosed cult that had separated themselves from the rest of the species — a cult which the species had, by the time of its departure, been quietly relieved to be rid of. They tried to explain that the species the Anjoms were currently seeing — the species in the cities the Anjoms had just bombed — was not the species that had left. The species that had left had taken with it everything that had made it itself. What remained on Earth, the brothers tried to say, was, in the eight decades since, the species that had been rebuilding the parts of itself the Trillionaires had been stripping. The species the Anjoms had just bombed was, in the brothers’ village-priest formulation, the better humanity.”

“The Anjom delegation, on the third day, listened. The Anjom delegation, on the fourth day, also listened. The Anjom delegation, on the fifth day, asked one question. The senior Anjom council representative, in the Anjom way of senior council representatives, said: ‘Brothers. The Galactic Civilizations Convention of the long Anjom past — which is the specific document that governs the question of how a spacefaring species responds when one of its planet is annihilated by another species — does not, in any of its clauses, distinguish between the cult that did the killing and the rest of the species the cult came from. The convention is, on this point, very clear. The convention says: the killing of an unarmed-peaceful people, doing genocide at planet level, is, in the Galactic accounting, an offense for which the offending species can — and, by the convention’s own reading, should — be annihilated. The convention was, in all the Anjom centuries since it was written, never invoked. We are invoking it now.'”

He paused. He looked at his hands.

“The brothers, on the fifth day, did not answer. The brothers, on the fifth day, were exhausted. They had not, in the long preceding days, slept more than three hours of any night. They had not eaten more than the small village-priest meals the Rama-people delegation had arranged for them. They had not had a single hour of the private time the brothers needed to think. They had argued, in their Telugu, every argument two village priests of a long priestly line knew how to argue. They had nothing left. They had no more arguments. They had no more frameworks. They asked, in the Telugu way two village priests ask such things when they have nothing else to say, for the day’s session to end. The session ended.”

“The brothers were escorted, by the Rama-people delegation, back to the chamber on the Anjom flagship that had been their temporary residence for the five days of the talks. The chamber was a small one: three sleeping pallets, a low table, a basin, a window onto the long curved Anjom-officer corridor outside. The brothers sat on the pallets. They did not speak. They sat with what the senior Anjom council representative had said. They sat with it for what the Anjom record describes as approximately one of your hours. Then they did, in the Telugu village-priest way of having nothing else left to do, the only thing village priests have when they have nothing else left.”

“They sang.”

“They sang,” Roy said, “a Telugu kriti composed by Tyagaraja, who was a Carnatic saint-composer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and who is, by some accounting of South Indian musicians, one of the three composers in the recorded human past whose work no Carnatic musician will, on any night of any year, decline to perform. The kriti was called — ” he paused. 

“The kriti was called ఎందుకు దయరాదురా శ్రీరామచంద్ర నీ.

“Endhuko dayaradura Sri Ramachandra ni.

“Why does mercy not come, Sri Ramachandra, from you.”

“They sang it slowly. They sang it in the raga it had been composed in, which is a raga called Todi, and which is, in the Carnatic accounting of the ragas, the raga of supplication. They sang it for the duration the kriti is normally sung, which is approximately seventeen of your minutes. They sang it in the chamber that had been their temporary residence on the Anjom flagship, alone, with the chamber’s door closed behind them, on the specific assumption that nobody could possibly be listening except their own god.”

“They were wrong about who was listening.”

“What the brothers did not know — what the brothers had not, in their five days on the flagship, thought to ask — was that the Rama-people delegation had, on the Rama-people principle that some things are too important to be left to chance, quietly arranged for the chamber’s internal communications to be open. The chamber’s internal communications had been open, by the Rama-people’s quiet arrangement, to the flagship’s ship-wide announcement channel for some hours. The brothers had been speaking, in their Telugu, on the flagship’s ship-wide channel without knowing it. The Anjom officers on the bridge, on the gun decks, on the engineering decks, in the medical wing, in the council chambers, in their own private cabins — every Anjom officer on the Anjom flagship — had been hearing the Telugu of two village priests who had been told they were going to be annihilated and who had nothing left to say about it. When the brothers began to sing, the Telugu was replaced by the Telugu sung-supplication of the Tyagaraja kriti in raga Todi. Every Anjom on the flagship heard it.”

“The Anjom fleet commander,” Roy said, “heard them. He was, in the way the commanders of Anjom fleets are sometimes briefly nothing more than the men they were before they became commanders, the descendant of three generations of Anjom monastic singers. He listened to the seventeen minutes of Tyagaraja in the private silence of his own cabin. He did not move. He did not, on the official record, breathe. He waited the careful traditional Anjom wait at the end of a sung supplication — which is the wait one waits when one is not, after all, sure that the singer has finished — and then he opened his own channel. He sang back.”

He looked, briefly, at his hands.

“He sang an Anjom piece — for which there is no human translation, but which corresponds, in the Anjom-musicological accounting that the Reconciliation council later approved, to a piece in the same emotional mode and the same melodic shape as the Tyagaraja kriti the brothers had just sung. The piece was called, in the closest English transliteration the Anjom phonetic system permits, ‘Kotreshvan dh’ai mavari’ — which means, in the gloss the council also approved, ‘I have heard the asking, brother, and the asking is the same.’ He sang it for the duration the piece is traditionally sung in the Anjom monastic tradition, which is approximately twelve of your minutes. The brothers, in the meeting chamber, heard him. The brothers did not, as two Telugu brothers of a long priestly tradition would not have known how to respond, respond. The brothers wept. The Anjom fleet commander, in his flag cabin, also wept. The Rama-people delegation, in the diplomatic way the Rama people prefer, said nothing at all.”

“What happened next,” Roy said, “was that the fleet commander, who had spent his entire long operational career executing instructions he was not authorized to reconsider, reconsidered. He withdrew the invocation of the Convention. He withdrew it on his own authority. He sent, that night, the longest single field transmission an Anjom fleet commander had ever sent back to the council on Anjom: a detailed account of the seventeen minutes of the Tyagaraja, the twelve minutes of the Anjom piece he had sung back, the five days of talks that had preceded the singing, the Telugu village-priest argument the brothers had been trying for three of those five days to make about the difference between the cult that had left Earth and the species that had remained, and the small specific request, attached at the end, that the council reconsider the Convention’s application to this case.”

He paused.

“The council, on Anjom, received the transmission. The council did not, in all the Anjom centuries it had been a council, refuse a fleet commander’s request of this particular kind — a request made in the field, with the field commander’s full knowledge that the request could end his career and quite possibly the careers of every commander after him for some generations. The council met for three Anjom days. The council voted. The council withdrew the Convention’s invocation. The council issued, on the grave fourth day, the first formal apology the Anjom species had issued in the recorded Anjom past. The Reconciliation, in the slow way the Reconciliation has unfolded for next several years, began.”

He stopped.

“The silence,” he said, “and the apology. And all these years of Anjom presence on Earth. And the cohort I am part of. And the bunker. And every Anjom you have ever met. All of it has been one long Anjom attempt to make the Aghran story — which is the story of how a private association of seven human families bought enough quiet on Earth to commit, on Epsilon, a private war that the rest of their species had no idea had been started — into something the surviving humans would not, in their own accounting, have to carry. We have carried it for you. We have carried it because we killed three and a half billion of you for a thing only forty-eight of you had done. And we have carried, alongside it, the private question that the Reconciliation council found themselves, on the seventy-fourth day of negotiations, entirely unable to answer.”

He looked, for a long moment, at his hands.

“How,” he said, “had a Telugu brother in a small village outside Amaravati and an Anjom fleet commander in the flag cabin of the Anjom Sixth Fleet, who had — in any meaningful sense of any meaningful Anjom-human astronomy — never been in the same star system at the same time in the entire recorded past of either of their species, known how to sing in the same supplication-mode about the same kind of difficulty in the same kind of musical syntax? How had the species that had built Tyagaraja and the species that had built the Anjom monastic-singing tradition done that, independently, on planets that had never, in their entire mutual history, exchanged a single bar of music? The council asked the Rama-people delegation, on the seventy-fourth evening of the negotiations, the same question. The Rama-people delegation, in the Rama-people way they answer such questions, declined to answer. The council asked again. The Rama-people delegation declined again. The council was told, on the eighty-second day, that the question was the council’s to ask, not the Rama-people’s to answer.”

“For all these years,” he said, “we have been trying. The student exchanges that you have grown up with — the Anjom students who came, in twos and threes, to small Earth music schools; the Earth musicologists who traveled, in the small handful of cases they were permitted to travel, to the small Anjom monastic colonies; the long Carnatic-Anjom cross-program at the conservatory in Amaravati, where one of the principal teachers is, as you know, an Anjom — all of it is the these-years unfinished Anjom attempt to understand a coincidence that, by every model of musical evolution either species has, ought not to exist. And we do not, in the long private accounting of those of us who have spent careers on the question, expect to understand it in our lifetime. We have, in the meantime, decided to be careful with each other. We have decided that the answer, when it eventually comes, will come from people who have, in the unmusical way one builds the foundations for understanding such things, learned to live in the same rooms.”

He stopped.

He was, the cohort observed, very still. He was sitting on the floor of the suite at the Westin Hyderabad Mindspace in Madhapur in January 2010, in the same loose gray shirt he had been wearing at breakfast, with his hands flat on his thighs in the Anjom posture the cohort had once seen him take only on the radio above the burning plain on the day of the crash.

Ketan said, very quietly: “Roy.”

Roy said: “Yes, Ketan.”

Ketan said: “We’re going to the temple.”

Roy said: “Yes, Ketan. We are.”

* * *

10. What We Know About the Temple

Tirumala took the rest of Saturday off.

He did not, in any visible sense, take it off. He sat on the sofa with his spiral notebook and read, in silence, three small books that had been on the lower shelf of his closet since Melbourne: a Telugu-language history of the Krishna delta from a small Vijayawada press that the cohort’s intermediaries had sourced him during the Westin weeks, a British-period archaeological survey of the temples of South India that he had been told was the best of its kind, and a slim photographic monograph which showed, in seventy-three black-and-white plates, the Sri Seeta Rama Lakshmana Hanuma Devalayam at Ramapuram. He read all three the way Tirumala always read his books: with a small soft pencil, marking margins, making lists, never folding a page. By the end of Saturday afternoon he had made, in his spiral notebook, a master list of forty-one things the cohort needed to know about the temple, of which seventeen were things the cohort already knew and twenty-four were things only the village would tell them.

He called the cohort together at six in the evening. The light over Cyber Towers was the particular Madhapur orange the cohort had begun to think of as belonging to them. The living area smelled of the small batch of fresh coffee Devi had brought up from the breakfast room. Roy was sitting on the carpet in the same loose gray shirt he had been wearing in the morning. Ketan was on the sofa, in dry clothes, in a upright posture none of them had previously seen him hold for this many continuous hours. Girit was at the dining table with her three books open in front of her. Devi was on the carpet next to Roy, with her console untouched in the corner.

Tirumala said: “Briefing.”

He had, on the back of one of the laundry-list pages he had previously used for the biryani map — those laundry-list pages had quietly become his pocket notebook — drawn an elevation of the temple as it would have looked in 2010: the vimana-tower at the center, the four narrow gopurams at the cardinal points, the inner garbhagriha behind a low antarala, the small mandapam in front of the main entrance, the courtyard wall, the two staircases down to the river, the small priest’s house behind the north wall. He had also drawn, on the same laundry-list page, an elevation of the village itself, with the temple at the eastern edge, the two hills (Pedda Konda and Chinna Konda), the village houses arranged along the single main lane, the well, the small primary school, the small panchayat office, and the small mud track that led from the village down to the river’s edge. The whole sketch was perhaps twenty-five centimeters across. It was, the most concentrated piece of cartography any of them had ever seen.

He laid the sketch on the coffee table, and said:

“In our own time, this temple is the second-most-visited monument on Earth. It receives, in any year, between twelve and fifteen million human visitors, and between one and three thousand Anjom visitors, and a small number of Rama-people visitors who do not, in any sense humans have ever been able to verify, leave any kind of trace of their visits. The village around the temple has, in our time, been resettled and rebuilt several times. The two hills have been preserved by an act of Indian parliament. The Krishna no longer runs in its 2010 bed because the Krishna was reorganized, diverted half a kilometer to the south to accommodate the new visitor approaches. The 2010 village, the 2010 river-course, the 2010 hills, are all still there. We are going to see them.”

He paused.

“What we know about the temple, in our time, can be roughly divided into three categories. The first is what archaeology has been able to establish. The temple is, by the standard methods, very old. The lower architectural layer is, by carbon-and-thermal analysis, at least seventeen hundred years old. The upper layer, including the vimana, is at least nine hundred. The sculptures are of multiple periods. There is no recorded founder. There is no inscription. There is no foundation grant. There is no donative record. There are no patron records. The temple, in the archaeological sense, has no documented origin.”

Girit said, “Which is unusual.”

Tirumala said: “It is unusual as a genuinely svayambhu temple is itself unusual. The records are missing because the records do not exist. The temple was not built by anyone. The temple appeared.”

He paused.

“This is the second category. The traditional account. The temple is, by the long uninterrupted tradition of the villagers of Ramapuram and the seven priest-families that have served it for a known fourteen generations, a svayambhu temple. Svayambhu means self-manifested. In most cases, in the Indian tradition, svayambhu refers to the central deity — a single statue or stone that has, by the traditional account, not been carved by any human hand but simply appeared. The Ramapuram temple is the only known temple in India in which the entire structure is described as svayambhu — the courtyard, the walls, the gopurams, the antarala, the garbhagriha, the murtis, the inscriptions that don’t actually exist. The whole thing, the tradition says, was simply there, on a morning in the very distant past that the tradition no longer remembers the date of. The villagers say, in their own phrase, that the temple came down from svarga — from divine space.”

Devi said: “And we now know that’s exactly what happened.”

Tirumala said: “Yes. The Vimana — the original Sanskrit word for a divine flying-craft — is, in this case, the literal Vimana. The temple is the visible upper portion of a concealed structure that, in some way the cohort that worked on it after the Reconciliation has never fully explained, contains an active beacon, an active subsurface structure, and an active long-range communications system that the Rama people are able to receive. The brothers, in our timeline, will discover this. We are going to discover it now.”

Roy said, very quietly: “If we can.”

Tirumala said: “If we can. Yes. And here is the third category — the popular legend. There are, in the published record of the temple, two stories that the cohort needs to have in front of itself before we go. The first is the founding story, which I have just summarized: svayambhu, divine descent, no recorded origin. The second is a recent story — recent in the sense that it happened in the lifetime of people who are still alive in 2010. It is the story of the great deluge of 1964.”

He paused. He looked at his notes.

“In August 1964, the upper Krishna received an unprecedented monsoon. Between the twenty-third and the twenty-seventh of August 1964, the catchment received, by some estimates, four years’ worth of monsoon rainfall in five days. The dams upstream held; the river did not, by official accounting, breach its banks until the twenty-eighth. But in Ramapuram, on the morning of the twenty-seventh, the river rose seventeen meters in three hours. The villagers later said that there was no rain in Ramapuram on the morning of the twenty-seventh. The sky was clear. The rain was a hundred and twenty kilometers upstream, in the catchment, and the catchment was on a particular geological gradient that delivered the rain to Ramapuram in a single sudden surge. The river entered the village at eleven-twelve in the morning. Most of the villagers had already evacuated to the higher of the two hills — Pedda Konda, to the south. The handful who had not made it to Pedda Konda took refuge on Chinna Konda, the lower hill to the north. From either hill, looking down at the village, the villagers could see the water reach the temple at eleven-twenty-eight; the water completely cover the temple at eleven-thirty-one; the water continue to rise above the temple for the next nineteen minutes. By twelve-thirty, the entire village was under water. The water remained at that level for the next thirty-one hours.”

He paused.

“When the water finally receded, the villagers came down off the hills. The village had been completely destroyed. The houses were gone. The school was gone. The panchayat office was gone. The well had been filled with silt. Several animals had drowned even after slipping the knots around their necks or legs. The temple stood.”

He paused.

“The temple, on closer inspection, had not been touched. The walls were not damp. The courtyard had not been silted. The murtis were dry. There were no waterlines anywhere on the stone. The temple looked, on the morning of the twenty-ninth of August 1964, exactly as the temple had looked on the morning of the twenty-seventh, except for one detail. There was, in the courtyard, a small herd of sheep that had not been there before the flood. The sheep numbered thirty-seven. They were healthy. They were dry. They were chewing the grass that should not, given the flood, have still been growing in the courtyard.”

He paused.

“With the sheep was a man.”

Girit said, very quietly: “The shepherd.”

Tirumala said: “The shepherd. His name was — and is — Yellaiah. He was, in 1964, sixteen years old. He had been the shepherd since he was twelve. He had not, on the morning of the twenty-seventh, made it to either hill. He had been at the river’s edge with his sheep, and when the water started rising very fast, he had recognized that he had perhaps a few minutes to live. He had, with the small calm of a shepherd whose family had been shepherds in this particular landscape for multiple generations, herded his entire flock of thirty-seven sheep into the temple courtyard — the only place he could think of that was higher than everything around it. But he had not known how high the water would rise that day. He had climbed the small banyan tree at the center of the courtyard. He had held onto a branch with both hands. He had watched the water enter the temple. He had watched it rise to his knees, then his thighs, then his chest.

And then, at exactly that moment, a very bright light came out of the inner sanctum of the temple. The figure of Hanuman walked out of the inner sanctum. Hanuman lifted one hand. The water stopped rising. The water that had already entered the temple flowed back out, against gravity, as though somebody had drawn an invisible bowl around the temple courtyard and the water was now on the outside of the bowl. Fish swam above his head in the water that should not have been there. He had watched, for thirty-one hours, the village underneath the water and the temple standing dry inside the water; he had not, in any of those thirty-one hours, climbed down from the banyan tree. He had watched the water recede. Hanuman walked back into the inner sanctum. The light went out. He had climbed down from the tree. He had counted his sheep. There were thirty-seven. He had walked his sheep out of the temple courtyard. He had walked, with his sheep, to the edge of the village. The villagers, coming down off Pedda Konda, had met him there. From that day on, Lord Hanuma’s name was always on his tongue; he kept praying. He had become a different person — like a yogi who had reached the samadhi state — and he kept meditating on Hanuma, the memory of the saving repeating, continuously, in his mind. He had lost his anger and his stress, and went on with his day-to-day activities like water on a lotus leaf.”

He paused.

“He has, by the standard of the village, been a kind of living rishi since 1964. He is, in 2010, sixty-two years old. He still lives in Ramapuram. He still eats only the prasadam from the temple and the water of the river. He still herds his sheep; he has become a Karma Yogi. He lives in a small hut behind the temple. He is looked after by his granddaughter, who is twelve years old in 2010, and whose name is — ” he checked his notes — “Padma. We are going to meet them both.”

He set down the laundry-list elevation.

He said: “Those are the three categories. Archaeology, tradition, recent eyewitness. Between them, they describe a temple that — ” he stopped. “That we already knew was a Vimana. That we now know contains an automated shield mechanism strong enough to hold a thirty-one-hour flood off a structure of its size. And that we now have a fourth question about, which is — ” he paused. “Who was the Hanuman?”

The cohort sat with that for some time.

Roy said, quietly: “It may have been the automated mechanism. The shepherd may have seen a hologram, a projection, an emergency interface designed by the Vimana’s makers to communicate with whatever local intelligence the Vimana detected in distress. It may have presented itself, in the form the shepherd was culturally equipped to understand, as the local equivalent of a rescuer.”

Tirumala said: “That is the rational hypothesis.”

Roy said: “Yes.”

Tirumala said: “And the other hypothesis is.”

Roy did not answer for some time. Roy looked at the laundry-list elevation. Roy looked at the small drawing of the inner sanctum that Tirumala had penciled in the center. Roy said, in a voice the cohort had heard him use only twice before that day, which was now three times in eight hours:

“The other hypothesis is that somebody came on that day too. Like the brothers’ day. Just earlier. The other hypothesis is that the Rama people did come, in 1964, to one shepherd and his thirty-seven sheep, in a flood that no Anjom telemetry has ever found a record of. The other hypothesis is that there are reasons to come that do not require, in the Rama people’s accounting, a war.”

The cohort sat with that, in the long Madhapur evening, for a longer time.

Tirumala said: “We leave tomorrow. Sunday morning. We will spend the first night in Vijayawada, in a hotel where we will not, in any conspicuous sense, be noticed. We will be in Ramapuram on Monday morning. We will pay our respects to the temple, to the priest families, and to Yellaiah. We will, in the coming days, try every approach Roy can think of for finding the interface. We do not, in any single visit, want to make the village curious about us.”

Devi said: “And if we do find it?”

Tirumala said: “Then we send the signal. And we wait. And we see who, if anyone, comes.”

* * *

11. The Shepherd Legend

There was, by Sunday morning, a small additional briefing — the kind of briefing Tirumala thought important enough to do before they left, and not so important that it needed to be done the night before. He gave it at five in the morning, at the breakfast table in the central living area, in the private hour before the rest of the hotel was awake.

He said: “There are three things about Yellaiah I want all of you to understand before we are in front of him.”

He sipped the coffee Devi had made him. He had been up since three.

“The first thing is that Yellaiah does not, by any account ever recorded by anyone who has spoken to him since 1964, claim that what he saw was anything other than Lord Hanuman. He does not, in any sense, say I saw something that resembled Hanuman or I saw what I have come to understand was Hanuman or I have a story I tell because it works better that way. He saw Hanuman. The figure walked out of the inner sanctum. The figure lifted a hand. The figure was, by Yellaiah’s first-person account, indistinguishable from every Hanuman murti he had ever venerated in any temple of his life. The figure was very large. The figure was the color of old brass. The figure had the small dignified self-containment of a deity who has been waiting, for some time, to be allowed to do the single thing the deity is good at. The figure, Yellaiah will say if asked, was Hanuman.”

He paused.

“The second thing is that Yellaiah is not, in any sense any of you would recognize, a fanatic. He is the calmest person, by every account I have been able to find, in his village. He has, since 1964, refused all offers to leave Ramapuram for a more comfortable life. He has refused all offers to be filmed. He has refused all offers to give a public speech. He has refused all offers to write a book. He has refused, in particular, the specific Hindu religious revival movements that have, on three separate occasions in the previous thirty years, tried to make him the figurehead of a small ascetic order. He does not preach. He does not bless. He does not, even at the village level, instruct. He simply lives in the small hut behind the temple. He simply eats the prasadam. He simply looks after his granddaughter. He simply tells, if asked, what happened in the temple during the flood.”

Tirumala paused again.

“The third thing is the granddaughter. Padma. She is twelve. She has been Yellaiah’s primary caretaker since she was eight, when her mother — Yellaiah’s daughter — died of a complication of childbirth that the Ramapuram clinic could not, in 2005, manage. Padma is, by the research I have been able to do, an extremely smart child. She is at the top of her class at the village school. She speaks Telugu, Hindi, and remarkably good English. She is, by every account I have been able to find, the only person in the village who has ever told Yellaiah that she does not entirely believe him about the flood. She loves her grandfather. She loves him with the small fierce protectiveness of girls who have been their grandparent’s primary caretaker since they were eight. She does not, in any sense, contradict him in public. She does not, in any sense, agree with him in private either. She is — ” he looked at the cohort — “in 2010, the only twelve-year-old in India who has the small specific intellectual problem of not entirely believing the only adult on earth who has ever taken her seriously.”

Girit said, quietly: “And you are telling us this because.”

Tirumala said: “Because Padma is the person in the village most likely to ask us the question we don’t want to be asked. And Padma is the person in the village whose question, if she asks it, we cannot lie our way past. She will hear us. She will hear us the way we are listening to Roy this week. She will be the test of every answer we give. We need to be ready for her.”

He looked around the table.

“And one more thing.”

He set down his cup.

“If, at any moment in any of the four days we are in Ramapuram, any of you finds yourself in a conversation with Padma in which she is asking a question, do not lie to her. Decline to answer. Change the subject. Be polite. Be charming. Be however the particular conversation needs you to be. But do not, in any answer to any question she asks, lie to her. She will know. She will not, in any way she can articulate at twelve, know why she knows. But she will know.”

He drank the rest of his coffee.

“I learned this,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “from the only sixty-two-year-old shepherd in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 who knows that I learned it from him.”

He smiled. He stood up. He said: “Let’s go.”

* * *

12. The Drive South

The first decision the cohort had to make, on the Saturday evening after Tirumala’s briefing, was how to get to Ramapuram. They considered three options. The train — Secunderabad to Vijayawada overnight, then a taxi for the last hour — was the option the cohort, in their own time, had never had a chance to try; a 2010 sleeper-class compartment on a slow Andhra night was the kind of private experience they were quietly looking forward to. The bus — long-distance APSRTC from Mahatma Gandhi station, every two hours — was the option nobody seriously argued for. The rental car was the option Tirumala had been steering them toward since the start of the conversation. The train, he said, would attract the wrong kind of attention. Five visibly mixed foreigners boarding at Secunderabad with no apparent reason would be noted by the railway-station observers, asked about, talked about; the noting would, by the long Indian tradition of railway-station gossip, reach the village before they did. The cohort agreed, with the collective sigh of people giving up a thing they had been looking forward to, on the car.

The second decision was the cover story. The Aunty formulation — five young people of independent means exploring an ancestral place — had been good enough for Hyderabad. It would not, by village calculation, be good enough for a place where strangers were a phenomenon worth interrupting one’s day for. They needed a more specific cover. Devi suggested, in her tentative way of suggesting things she had been considering for some hours, the one the cohort settled on: Girit was writing a book. A serious book — about the svayambhu tradition in the Krishna delta temples, perhaps — whose subject and bibliography she would be able to discuss in detail with any village teacher or priest who asked. Girit was the one who could most credibly hold a notebook and ask a long question about a temple; she was the bookish one, she had the Telugu, she had the patient academic affect of a person whose face people felt comfortable talking to. The other four would be her friends and research assistants. The trip was, by the cohort’s collective story, a research trip.

The third decision was where to stay. The cohort had assumed, by every account in the published record, that there would be no accommodation in Ramapuram itself — no lodge, no guesthouse, nowhere a small group of foreign-looking strangers could check in without being conspicuous. They would, they agreed, stay in Vijayawada — the nearest city, about an hour by the slow rural road — at a hotel chosen for its invisibility. Tirumala, on Aunty’s quiet earlier suggestion, had identified the hotel during the week: a new four-star property near the riverfront that catered to the kind of corporate-Andhra traveler who did not, want to be noticed. They would drive to the village every morning and back to Vijayawada every evening. The cohort had not yet been told, by any of the things they were about to be told, that they were going to spend exactly one night in the Vijayawada hotel before the priest family at Ramapuram offered them rooms in the priest house — an offer they would be unable to refuse, and that would, by the second morning, make the Vijayawada arrangement entirely moot.

They took one car. Tirumala had originally requested two through one of his intermediaries — a Hyderabad rental company whose owner, a man named Subba Rao who had served as the personal driver of an early-nineties Andhra Pradesh agriculture minister, had been engaged by Tirumala to provide, on twenty-four hours’ notice, two Toyota Innovas with two drivers each who would not, in any subsequent conversation with anybody, recall the names of the five passengers, the destination, or the duration of the trip. Subba Rao had, on hearing the request, asked Tirumala if Tirumala was sure he did not, in fact, want one car and one driver who would, in any subsequent conversation, recall nothing of the trip. Tirumala had thought about this for a moment and had then said that yes, on reflection, the one careful driver who remembered nothing would be the more useful arrangement. Subba Rao had nodded and had said, in the slow soft Telugu of his particular profession, that he would, in this case, drive the car himself.

They left at five-thirty on the Sunday morning. The morning was cold by Hyderabad standards — a thin gray cold that softened, by the time they crossed Vanasthalipuram, into the warm Hyderabad daylight the cohort had begun to recognize. Subba Rao drove the cohort in his Innova. He had argued Tirumala out of a backup car the previous evening, on the principle that a spare Innova in a small Andhra delta village attracted more attention than it deflected — and that, in any case, there was no force in the world less interruptible than a Telugu village’s hospitality, and whatever the cohort needed in any emergency the village would, in two phone calls, provide. 

There were, in the Andhra-village calculus of how one chose to appear, two viable images one could project. The first was the super-rich image — flaunted, conspicuous; it drew all kinds of unnecessary attention from folks who were better avoided. The second was the calculated rich-person image — money in hand, the value of money quietly understood; it drew attention from the right people, and the wrong people stayed away. 

Subba Rao took the National Highway 9 in the small slow rural way that Hyderabad-to-Vijayawada traffic moved in 2010 — through Suryapet, through the long cement-gray expanse of the central Andhra plateau, past the small towns, with Vijayawada at the end of the day. The highway, in 2010, was still heavy with lorries and still only two lanes — one in each direction. Several times Subba Rao drove fifty percent over the speed limit to overtake a fully loaded lorry moving at the slow steady pace of long-haul highway traffic. Especially when the road is downslope or flat these lorry drivers are too proudful to give little space and slow a little to allow cars overtake them. But when the road is uphill Tirumala observed, the lorry with heavy load really struggles to pull its weight and maintain speed. That’s when Subba Rao zooms past them. Tirumala, in the front passenger seat, kept quiet, trying not to backseat-drive, but after a couple of such overtakes he understood that this was simply the way to drive on a two-lane, heavy-traffic highway.

They stopped, on Subba Rao’s recommendation, at a roadside dhaba an hour out of Hyderabad for breakfast. The dhaba had the standard 2010 highway-dhaba offering: idli, dosa, vada, upma, a thumb of sambar, two chutneys, a steel tumbler of filter coffee. The food was, by Devi’s early-morning verdict, easily the third-best idli the cohort had eaten in India. The toilet was the problem. The dhaba had two toilets, one labelled Gents and one labelled Ladies; the Gents was, by Tirumala’s later report, of the standard the cohort had been preparing themselves for as long as they don’t breath in; the Ladies was, by Devi’s report after a one-second inspection, of a standard the cohort had not been preparing themselves for at all. Devi and Girit did not, as two young women look at each other when they have decided a thing without speaking, use the Ladies. They got back in the car. It took forever for Devi and Girit to un-see the toilet status. After watching silently so many trees hurling behind the fast-vrooming car they could divert their attention to something else. The car drove on.

They stopped again, two hours later, at Hotel-7 in Suryapet. Hotel-7 was a new highway hotel off NH 9 that Tirumala had identified, on Aunty’s quiet earlier briefing, as the exception to the Indian highway-toilet standard. Hotel-7 had a clean tiled toilet. The tiles had been laid in the previous year. The water ran. Devi and Girit used the toilet. They came out, by Tirumala’s quiet observation, in the soft expression of two young women who had been preparing themselves to not use any clean toilet for the next four days and had been, by the intervention of Hotel-7, briefly spared. Devi said, on the way back to the car: “Every roadside place in this country should be Hotel-7.” Tirumala did not, in the moment, contradict her.

They reached the small Andhra village half an hour outside Vijayawada in which Subba Rao had been telling Tirumala, in the Telugu of a driver who knew the road, the cohort should stop for lunch. The restaurant was a concrete-walled, tin-roofed building at the side of NH 65 with no signboard and no name and no menu. The owner, a man in his sixties named Veerabhadra Rao, served exactly one thing: the full-meals of his particular Andhra tradition. The plate, when it arrived at each of their five places, was the kind of plate the cohort had not, in any of the previous two months in Hyderabad, seen — five small katoris of curry and dal and chutney and rasam and curd arranged around a steel mound of rice, with the Andhra centerpiece of a bowl of chicken curry the color of the late-monsoon Krishna river, with the chicken bone showing through the gravy like the private bone of a private animal. The cohort ate. They ate for forty minutes. They ate the rice and the dal and the curry and the rasam and the chutney. They ate the chicken. They ate, between them, perhaps three additional servings of the chicken curry. The food was, by their collective verdict, the best Telugu food the cohort had eaten in 2010. The food was different from the Hyderabad biryani. The food was, in the Andhra accounting of food, not better — by the agreement of biryani lovers there is no such thing as better than biryani — but it was a different kind of best. Veerabhadra Rao brought, at the end of the meal, a banana to each of them; the cohort ate the bananas. Veerabhadra Rao then brought, in five small steel cups, the kind of vanilla ice cream the concrete-walled, tin-roofed roadside restaurants of 2010 Andhra were quietly capable of serving when the kitchen could be persuaded; the cohort ate the ice cream. And then, in the small ceremonial closing the careful Andhra food tradition reserved for guests who had been properly fed, Veerabhadra Rao brought, on a small steel tray, five sweet paans — each one a fresh betel leaf folded around the small Andhra ingredients of gulkand, fennel, candied coconut, and a trace of slaked lime — the kind of sweet paan a 2010 Andhra roadside restaurant served when its owner had decided, in the small private way Andhra restaurant owners sometimes decide such things, that the meal had been properly received. The cohort ate the paans. By the end of the paans the cohort could not, by any reasonable standard, eat anything else.

They reached the hotel in Vijayawada at four in the afternoon. The hotel was, in the way of the new four-star properties Tirumala had described in the planning, a glass-and-concrete tower set back from the river. The front desk processed the cohort’s NRI paperwork in the seven minutes a four-star front desk in 2010 Vijayawada processed such paperwork. The cohort were given three rooms: a suite for Tirumala, a double for Roy and Ketan, a double for Devi and Girit. They slept the four hours that Veerabhadra Rao’s lunch had quietly demanded. They woke. They ate, with the restraint of people who had eaten a single meal the size of three, the small hotel-buffet dinner. They went back to bed. They slept the long sleep of people whose first day on a day operation had been, by their own measure, easier than they had been preparing themselves for.

They left the hotel at six on the Monday morning. The road, after the Vijayawada bypass, narrowed at every turn. The asphalt thinned. The land flattened. The light changed. The cohort, who had been raised in the Amaravati of decades later, who had been schooled on photographs of the Krishna delta of their own time — the dual carriageways, the Amaravati skyline, the long ranks of solar panels on the delta’s wet ground, the maglev tracks running parallel to the river — were now passing, in their borrowed Innova, through the Krishna delta of 2010, which was a Krishna delta nobody in the cohort had ever seen. There were paddy fields. There were small canals fringed with palms. There were buffalo at the edge of every small irrigation tank. There were, in the middle distance, the small mud-walled, thatched-roof shapes of houses that, in the cohort’s own time, no longer existed; that, in the cohort’s own time, were preserved in two specific outdoor museums and otherwise extinct. There were barefoot boys driving small herds of gray goats along the verges. There were barefoot girls carrying brass pots of water on their heads in the balance their mothers had taught them in the line of Telugu daughters.

Roy, in the back seat, raised his voice over the rumble of the road. He was not exactly asking Subba Rao, and not exactly asking Tirumala — he was asking whichever of them answered first: “How far now.”

Subba Rao, who had been told the destination but not the reason, said: “Twenty-two kilometers. Perhaps forty-five minutes on this road.”

The cohort had, between them, one private Earth language. It was Latin. It had been the first-year foreign-language requirement at Amaravati University, where the cohort’s four human members had taken it; Roy had picked it up later, on his own initiative, and had found it — easier than Chinese. The agreement, struck on the bus from Dubbo, was that in any mixed company where the cohort did not want to be understood, they would speak in Latin. Tirumala had, in the weeks before they left Melbourne, confirmed what they had hoped: of the handful of Earth languages none of the people the cohort was likely to meet in Hyderabad in 2010 was likely to know, Latin was both the most discreet and the one the cohort, between them, spoke best. Subba Rao, like every other Andhra driver of his generation, did not speak Latin.

Roy nodded. He turned to the back. He shifted, in the casual way the cohort had been shifting for months now, into Latin. He said, in a lower voice: “We are, by every Anjom telemetric expectation I was briefed, supposed to be detecting, at this range, the passive field of a Vimana of this antiquity. We are detecting nothing. The device is — ” he looked at the Anjom device, which he had placed on his knee — “reading the Krishna delta exactly the way it would read any small Andhra delta with no Vimana in it. The temple is, by every reading I can ask the device to take, silent. To a casual onlooker, the device looks like the bulky wristwatch foreigners are supposed to wear for health reasons.”

Tirumala said: “Is the device working.”

Roy said: “Yes. I have checked it. The temple is dark.”

He did not, look up from the device for the rest of the drive.

They turned, at twelve-twenty, into a smaller lane that left the main road and pointed east. The lane was, by the standards of the morning’s roads, in remarkably good repair; the cohort learned that it was the responsibility of the temple board to keep the lane between the highway and the village free of potholes, and the board had been doing this, with the contributions of pilgrims and volunteers from the village. The lane wound between paddy fields. It came over a small rise. It descended into a small wide bend of land between two small hills that the cohort recognized, before any of them said it aloud, as Pedda Konda and Chinna Konda. And between the two hills, on the south bank of the Krishna, in a small grove of tamarind trees whose leaves were the particular green of trees that have been growing in the same place for several centuries, stood Ramapuram.

The village was perhaps eight hundred meters long. It was perhaps four hundred meters wide. It had perhaps a hundred and forty houses, of which perhaps seventy were the small mud-walled thatched-roof houses of the cohort’s grandmothers’ memory and perhaps seventy were the small concrete-walled tin-roof houses that had been built in the years since 1964. The single main lane ran from the lane the convoy had come down, through the village, past the primary school, past the panchayat office, past the well, and ended at the eastern edge of the village in a clearing in the tamarind grove. In the center of the clearing, with its back to the river and its face to the village, stood the Sri Seeta Rama Lakshmana Hanuma Devalayam.

The cohort did not, for a moment, speak.

The temple was — and the cohort had been prepared, by the seventy-three black-and-white plates of the monograph, for the temple to be — exactly the temple. The proportions were right. The four small gopurams at the cardinal points were right. The vimana-tower was right. The small mandapam in front of the main entrance was right. The low courtyard walls were right. The staircases to the river were right. The banyan tree was right. The temple was, by any standard the cohort could apply to it, the temple.

What was different was the village around it. The village was, in 2010, smaller than the cohort had ever seen it. The lanes were narrower. The houses were closer. The well was still being used. The cars in front of the panchayat office were the small cars of a particular Andhra 2010 vintage that the cohort’s grandparents had owned. The village school had children in it. There were, on the wall of the panchayat office, hand-painted Samaikyandhra posters in green and red — the slogans of the coastal-Andhra movement that, in roughly four years, would lose its fight against Telangana statehood. There were, on the wall of the small tea-shop opposite the panchayat office, hand-painted advertisements for Coca-Cola and Hero Honda motorcycles and a 2009 Telugu film called Magadheera that had been the year’s biggest hit. The village was, on this small ordinary January morning, alive. The village was, in the Tirumala phrasing, alive in a way no version of this village in the cohort’s own time would ever be alive again.

Tirumala said, very quietly: “This is where we are.”

Subba Rao, who had been driving in silence and who had been told only that the cohort was visiting the temple, said in the voice of a driver who knew when he was useful and when he was not: “Sir. The temple is at the end of the lane. Shall I park here, or shall I take you all the way down.”

Tirumala said: “Park here. We will walk.”

They got out of the car. The road dust rose around their ankles. The smell of the tamarind grove came over the village. Somewhere in the middle of the village, a small transistor radio was playing the news in Telugu in the voice of All-India-Radio Vijayawada at twelve-thirty. The news was about the price of paddy. The news was about Telangana. The news was about the proposed sale of the small state-owned fertiliser plant in Ramagundam. The news was about a small cricket match in Bangalore. The news was, in every detail, the news of 2010.

The cohort walked down the lane toward the temple, in the single-file order of guests in a place that did not yet, in any sense, know they were coming. The villagers, watching them from the small mud verandahs and the small concrete door-fronts, did not, for the first thirty seconds, say anything. They simply looked. They were, doing the Telugu village assessment of strangers that begins with the clothes and the shoes and the way the strangers walk, and ends with whether to greet them or not. They greeted them. The cohort returned the greetings.

* * *