Part-1 : Book One : Telangana must happen!

Anjom

Book Two

The Morning Run

1. Three Days West of Anywhere

They hitchhiked west, and the country did not so much pass beneath them as decline, in its polite slow way, to notice they were there. The dirt was the colour of an old brick. The grass was the colour of a brick that had been through a kiln a second time. The sky was the colour the cohort had not, in their adult lives, been able to put a name to, and after the first afternoon none of them tried.

It had been Tirumala’s decision. Tirumala had, in the third hour after the crash, looked at Roy’s scales catching the late sun, and at Girit’s splinted wrist swinging awkwardly at her side, and at Devi’s pinched, careful face, and announced that they were not going to walk. He had said it in the tone of a man closing an argument that nobody had yet started.

“Hitch,” he said. “There is a road. There are trucks on the road. We are five people beside a road. The arithmetic is simple.”

“Five people beside a road,” Ketan said, “with a wrist, a face like a fish, and a girl who looks like she has not eaten in a week, will get arrested in any country.”

“Not by an Australian truck driver,” Tirumala said, with a confidence that was, like most of Tirumala’s confidences, both unfounded and accurate. “Australian truck drivers do not arrest. They diagnose. We will be diagnosed. We will not, in the diagnosis, be unfriendly.”

He was right. He was, of course, right. He had not, by twenty-three, been demonstrably wrong about a stranger.

The first ride came at the second hour, and it came in a shape none of them had been expecting. It was a road train of an unusual sort — two flatbed trailers, the first stacked with capped pallets of mine consumables, the second carrying a long aluminium pod that did not, at first glance, look like cargo. It had small square windows down its flank, a roof vent, an external step, and the fading stencilled name of a mining contractor along its side. A donga, in the local idiom: a self-contained crew hut on rails, fitted with bench seating along both walls and four folding bunks and a swamp cooler and, on the better-equipped runs, a small fridge. Doug’s was one of the better-equipped runs. It was, just at present, completely empty. He had dropped a drilling crew at a remote bore two days back and was repositioning the pod, deadhead, to Cobar, where another contractor’s gang was due to take it out on the Monday.

All of which information Tirumala extracted from him in the first ninety seconds at the roadside, in the way Tirumala extracted these things, which involved standing exactly the right distance from the cab and addressing exactly the right hand-gesture to the man in it.

His name was Doug. He had a wife in Bourke and a daughter in Sydney and a long grievance against the price of diesel which he had every intention of explaining at length to whoever was foolish enough to climb into the cab beside him. He was fifty-three. He was eating a meat pie one-handed. He was listening to country music. He had pulled over, eventually, with the bored helpful air of a man who had picked up four strangers on this stretch of road over his career and knew the etiquette of the fifth. The etiquette of the fifth was that there was, by long-haul convention, room for one in the cab beside him, and not, by long-haul convention, room for any others anywhere.

“Five of you,” he said, when Tirumala had finished introducing the cohort to him over the engine. He said it the way Australian men said five-of-you to one of them, which was a calculation done out loud.

“Five,” Tirumala said. “One in the front with you, four in the pod. They will not move anything. They will not break anything. The lady on the right has a wrist that will, frankly, not allow her to break anything in any case. The gentleman with the unusual complexion has, in the last fortnight, been very kind to his sister. I would like him to remain unbothered, which the pod will do for him.”

Doug looked at Girit’s splinted wrist. Doug looked at Roy’s face. Doug looked at Devi, who was swaying very slightly where she stood. Doug looked, lastly, at Tirumala, who was clean and short and dark and had two gold bracelets visible on the same forearm and was speaking the kind of English Doug had not heard outside a private school.

“Mate,” Doug said, eventually, “the regs say one. The regs about the pod say none. The contractor’s insurance about the pod says, in capital letters, none.”

“The regs,” Tirumala said gently, “were written for a road on which insurance inspectors are in fact found. I notice we have not, in nine hours, seen a single one. We have seen a mob of kangaroo, which was, with respect, not interested.”

Doug grinned. It was a slow, unpolished grin, the grin of a man who had been waiting some weeks for a stranger to put it into precisely those words.

“Hop in,” he said. “But the four in the pod don’t get out at any roadhouse. Not the windows, either. Anyone sees mine crew where mine crew shouldn’t be, the contractor loses the pod, and the contractor losing the pod is the contractor losing my contract. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Tirumala said, who had not, until this exact moment, said yeah in his life, but who said it perfectly.

The four of them filed into the pod, each of them carrying the small black backpack they had, in the twelve days since the crash, not parted with. Doug unlocked it with a small worn key from a chain on his belt and stood at the step with the patient air of a man supervising a school excursion. Inside, the pod was hot and clean and smelled faintly of diesel and very strongly of the soap mine crews evidently used. The bench seating ran the length of both walls. The folding bunks were pinned up. There was a fridge — empty — and a small fan that whirred when Doug flicked the switch by the door. There were, in a pigeonhole near the front, four hard hats in the contractor’s colours, and Ketan, who had not yet learned not to, took one off the pigeonhole and turned it in his hands.

“Don’t,” Doug said, mildly, from the step. “Pod stays as the pod was. Bloke who collects Monday counts every hat.”

Ketan put the hat back. Doug nodded. Doug closed the door behind them. Doug walked, with the slow rolling stride of a man who had spent thirty years getting in and out of a cab, back to the cab; and Tirumala, who had drawn the front seat — Tirumala drew the front seat, every time, in the matter of front seats — climbed up beside him.

For the next ninety kilometres, in the cab, Tirumala told Doug a story about the cohort: Indian students, broken-down rental car, sunstroke, the gentleman with the unusual complexion in the back was the son of a Gulf businessman who was on the trip for reasons Doug had quietly decided not to enquire about. Doug, who had been told stranger stories on this road, nodded, and turned up the country music, and pressed a thermos of milky tea on Tirumala which Tirumala drank, gravely, all the way through.

In the pod, the four of them sat in the slow swaying near-quiet of a long aluminium room on wheels. The bench seating was uncomfortable in the back and tolerable at the front. Roy, who had the longest legs, took the back. Girit, splinted wrist on her lap, took the seat by the small square window on the left, and watched the country come and not so much go as decline. Devi sat across from her and watched Girit watch. Ketan, after twenty minutes, lay down on the long bench with his arm under his head and slept for the first time in four days.

Doug dropped them at a roadhouse Doug called the Crossroads. He gave Tirumala a packet of Tim Tams for the road and a folded paper map of New South Wales on which someone had drawn, in biro, a small heart over the township of Bourke.

“Why the heart?” Ketan asked, when Tirumala unfolded the map for the third time.

“It is where his wife is from,” Tirumala said.

“You have known him three hours.”

“He needed to tell someone,” Tirumala said. “I was, at that moment, someone.”

Roy, the moment they were out of Doug’s hearing, made the soft three-tone trill that was the Anjom equivalent of laughter. Devi did not laugh. She had not laughed since the rabbit, and Ketan had begun to worry about her in the small, careful way men worried about women they had grown up calling sister. He had also, for the first time in his life, stopped checking the simulator scoreboard in his head. There was no simulator. There was no scoreboard. There was, perhaps, no university.

The second ride, at the Crossroads, came from a place none of them would have predicted. It was an elderly couple in a caravan — grey nomads, in the local term — and the wife had taken one look at Devi at the petrol pumps and said something to her husband and walked across the forecourt to Tirumala with the brisk decided air of a woman who was about to refuse to take no for an answer. Her name was Margaret. Her husband was Ted. They had spare seats. They were going as far as Cobar. The young lady, Margaret said firmly, should not be standing in the sun.

“My daughter-in-law is Sri Lankan,” Margaret added, as though closing the matter. “I know how to feed Indians. Get in.”

They got in. The caravan smelled of toast and a long marriage. Margaret produced, from a small fridge in the front, a tupperware of homemade samosas that Tirumala, after the first bite, informed her were better than his mother’s; and Margaret beamed at him for the rest of the leg. Ketan, on the back bench with Roy, slept for the first time in several days. Roy slept beside him, the soft Anjom breath that was almost a snore. Devi sat at the small kitchenette table opposite Margaret, and Margaret — who had grandchildren but had not, for a long time, had a granddaughter — talked to Devi about nothing in particular for almost three hours, and Devi, who in any other week would have been unable to listen, listened, and at the second hour even said something back. It was, in Tirumala’s later judgement, the most useful three hours any of them had spent on the continent.

Ted let them out on the verge of the Mitchell Highway outside Cobar at sunset of the third day. Margaret, very seriously, pressed her phone number on Tirumala on a slip of paper, with the instruction that if any of them got into any sort of trouble in Australia, ever, they were to ring her, and her son in Brisbane would, in fact, drive across the country to fetch them if it came to it. Tirumala took the number. He took it with both hands. He would, in the years that followed, never throw it away.

By the time they were standing on the verge of the Mitchell Highway, the cohort had — between the two rides — covered the better part of nine hundred kilometres of country and not, between them, walked more than three. Roy’s scales had not, after all, taken the sun. Girit’s wrist had not, in the worst of it, been jolted. Cobar was, in the dusk, an orange sodium smear ahead of them. It had, Roy who had read everything informed them quietly, a petrol station, a motel, and a bus.

Tirumala, looking at the orange smear and at his own remaining bracelets the way a banker might look at a thinning ledger and a thinning patience — the gold sovereigns at the bottom of the five backpacks beside him on the verge were a separate ledger entirely, and one he had no intention of opening unless he absolutely had to — said, in the soft conversational tone he used for serious decisions, “Right. So. We need a bigger city.”

“Sydney,” Ketan said.

“Melbourne,” Tirumala said. “Sydney is where they look for you. Melbourne is where they let you have breakfast first.”

Nobody asked him how he knew this. Tirumala knew things about cities he had never been to the way other people knew things about cousins they had never met.

* * *

2. The Suite at the Langham

It took them six days to reach Melbourne, three buses, two cash transactions in which Tirumala played increasingly creative variations on the role of bewildered tourist, and one unfortunate incident at a service station outside Dubbo in which Roy, attempting to buy a meat pie, was asked whether he was all right, love, his face was a bit, well, you know, peeling like. Roy had said yes, thank you, sunburn, and Roy and the cohort had then walked very calmly out of the service station and into the bus, and Tirumala had said, the moment the doors closed, “We need to do something about your face.”

“Yes,” Roy had said, with great dignity. “I have been thinking the same.”

The Langham was a thirty-six-floor luxury tower on the south bank of the Yarra, the kind of hotel whose lobby served afternoon tea to a calibre of Asian tourist of which the cohort would be a barely noticed sub-category. Its front desk, Tirumala had been quietly delighted to discover, took cash.

The Langham, in Melbourne, faced the river and the river was not on fire and the river was not running the wrong way around anything, and Devi, when she stepped out of the taxi onto Southbank and looked at the Yarra in its honest greenish thread, made a small involuntary sound that was, perhaps, the closest she had come to a laugh in a week.

Tirumala paid in cash. He paid for two adjoining suites on the thirty-second floor and he paid for two weeks in advance and he paid in a soft mixture of hundreds and fifties that he had acquired, over four days, in a series of conversations the rest of the cohort had not been invited to. The girl at the front desk had looked at the cash, and then looked at Tirumala — short, dark, very polite, three gold bracelets visible, a fourth peeking at the cuff — and had decided, in the unspoken way of front-desk girls everywhere, that he was either Indian royalty or the son of an Indian gangster, and that in either case the cash was real and the bookings were her best of the week.

“Mr Tirumala,” she said warmly, handing him five keycards. “And — your friends. Welcome to Melbourne.”

“You used your real name,” Ketan said in the lift.

“I used,” Tirumala said, “the only name I will ever sign in this country. None of us, going forward, will sign anything else. New papers, old names. There will be a Tirumala on the passport. There will be a Tirumala on the lease. There will be a Tirumala on the gym membership I am about to forge for Ketan. We do not, in our line of work, need new names. We need new histories.”

“Why?” Devi said softly.

“Because,” Tirumala said, “five of us, in five days, in different rooms, under five names we are not used to answering to, will slip exactly once between us and be five times caught. Names we already answer to, we do not slip with. The lie is the history. The lie is not the name.”

Devi, who had been very quiet in the lobby, looked up at the floor-counter as it climbed past twenty, and said, in a voice almost like her old voice, “There’s a Sega in the room. I saw the brochure. There’s a Sega, and a PlayStation, and one of the old big televisions.”

“Of course there is,” Tirumala said. “I booked the suite that had the consoles. I knew you would want them.”

Devi did not say thank you. Devi did not, on the whole, say thank you. But she stood, when the lift stopped, just a little closer to Tirumala than she had before, and Tirumala, who noticed these things the way other men noticed weather, did not mention it.

* * *

3. Bracelets, Casinos, Crown

Tirumala and Roy had explained, on the bus from Dubbo, what was about to happen, and the cohort, by general agreement, had decided not to ask too many questions. Tirumala, when given questions, became expansive; Roy, when given questions, became courteous in seventeen ways before answering; neither of them, when given silence, became inefficient. The cohort preferred silence.

On the first afternoon in Melbourne, he walked into a small jeweller’s in the Block Arcade with one of his bracelets and a small leather pouch of gold sovereigns — the latter being his share of the cohort’s emergency fund, which the cohort had agreed to draw down only by mutual consent and had, after a long quiet conversation the night before, drawn down this morning — and walked out, two hours later, with a number that had four commas in it and a handwritten card from the jeweller’s father. The jeweller’s father had emerged from the back room in the middle of negotiations to inspect the workmanship of the bracelet (the sovereigns were a less interesting transaction; they were sovereigns, and one weighed them and paid spot) and had subsequently invited Tirumala to dinner. Tirumala had declined dinner and accepted tea and stayed for two pots of it, and the jeweller’s father had told him, near the end, that the bracelet was older than it looked — older, in fact, than any workmanship he had seen outside the Salar Jung museum, which he had visited in 1987 — and Tirumala had said, with perfect grave courtesy, that it had been in his family for some time. The jeweller’s father had looked at him a long moment and then said only, “Yes. It has.”

Tirumala did not sell the other two bracelets. He did not, on the same morning, draw any further on the cohort’s reserve of sovereigns. He never did, in any of the iterations of any of his hustles, in any of the years that followed, sell the grandmother bracelet, or touch more of the cohort’s sovereigns than the situation absolutely required. Some things even Tirumala would not put a number on. Other things, even Tirumala did not, on his own authority, put on the table.

On the first evening, with the cash converted at three different bureaux into a respectable bank account at a respectable bank, he went to Crown. He did not gamble, exactly. He sat at the lower blackjack tables and lost very precisely for two hours, and then he sat at the higher blackjack tables and won, less precisely but more visibly, for three. The pit boss who came over to congratulate him was a man named Stavros who had, within forty minutes, told Tirumala about his daughter’s piano lessons and his mother’s gallbladder, and Stavros, when Tirumala cashed out, had personally walked him to the door and said, in a voice meant to be heard by exactly nobody else, “Son, you come back when you want, but not too often. We notice the ones who don’t lose.”

“I will be exactly as often as you would like me to be,” Tirumala said.

Stavros had grinned at him then, the wide humourless grin of a man who had, perhaps, once been someone very different, and said, “You’re the most polite cheat I’ve ever met.”

“I am not cheating,” Tirumala said gently.

“I know,” Stavros said. “That is what is worrying me.”

After Crown there was the rest, and the rest was Roy’s. Tirumala had brought the cash back; what the cash had to become — bank accounts, brokerage positions, currency hedges, a careful invisible web — was the kind of work that needed the small Anjom device, and the device, though it had been in Tirumala’s pocket since the bunker, was not Tirumala’s. It was Roy’s. They had agreed, on the bus from Dubbo, that this would be the division. Tirumala on the surface, where humans had to be charmed; Roy in the understorey, where humans could not, in 2010, follow. Neither of them, alone, was enough. The device — which looked, to anyone who saw it, like a slightly too-thick wristwatch, which was not in any meaningful sense a wristwatch, which connected to the hotel’s wifi and the wifi to the soft, obliging, faintly trusting internet of 2010 — sat now in Roy’s lap in the smaller suite, and Roy read it the way Tirumala had once watched Roy read Telugu epigraphy in the bunker: with the slow patient absorption of a man who had been told, somewhere very young, that this was the manner in which one ought to read.

He did not steal. Roy was, by every standard he had ever been measured against — Anjom standards, human standards, the slightly impossible Library-of-Amaravati standard of the books he had read — a moral animal; he did not steal from people. He took small, well-judged positions in markets that he had, the day before, checked the future of, because the checking was the part no human in 2010 could have done. Tirumala, beside him on the carpet, watched. Tirumala fed him names. The American technology company was Tirumala’s suggestion, on the grounds that, in the original timeline, Tirumala’s adoptive grandmother had owned shares in it and had once described its founder as a boy who needed feeding. Roy bought it. They moved no single sum large enough to attract attention. They moved a great many sums.

By the end of the third night, the cohort’s bank accounts — there were six now, in three banks, in four currencies — were, in Tirumala’s careful judgement, sufficient. Not lavish. Not flagrant. Sufficient for what was coming. The judgement was Tirumala’s. The execution had been Roy’s. They had not, between them, slept more than nine hours in three nights.

“How much?” Ketan asked, when Roy finally set the device down and Tirumala finally closed the curtains and the two of them lay, in their different postures of exhaustion, on the carpet.

“Enough,” Tirumala said, “to fly five people from Melbourne to Hyderabad in business class with papers, and to live in Hyderabad for four years without working, and to bribe the right people in Hyderabad without flinching. Not enough to bribe the wrong people. So I will be very careful about whom we offend.”

“That’s an answer,” Devi said from the door, “that is exactly long enough not to be an amount.”

Tirumala, on his back, eyes closed, smiled into the ceiling.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

* * *

4. Five Sets of Papers

The papers took them a further three nights, though “the papers” was, as Tirumala and Roy had to keep reminding the cohort, the wrong word for what they were doing. They were not, in any meaningful sense, forging papers. They had refused, on principle, to forge papers; forged papers, in their quietly held view, were the work of small-time criminals and worried governments, neither of which the cohort had any business being mistaken for. What they were forging was the records beneath the papers. Records were the soft electronic understorey that lay beneath every paper document in the world, and in 2010 the understory was, to Roy, a forest he had been reading the night sounds of since he was small — and to Tirumala, the part of the forest in which human voices could still be heard above the leaves.

They explained the principle to the cohort on the third afternoon, in the larger suite. Roy sat cross-legged on the carpet with the device in his lap. Tirumala sat on the sofa above him with a notebook and a pen.

“We do not give you passports,” Roy said. “We give you the records that passports come from. Then each of you walks into your own consulate, asks politely for a passport, and the consulate, looking at the records, gives you one. The passport you receive in your hand will be real. It will be, in the strict legal sense, your passport. We will not, by the time we land in Hyderabad, be carrying a single forged document between us. We will be carrying five real ones, issued by five offices that believe, in good faith, that they have always known us.”

“And the records?” Devi asked.

“The records,” Tirumala said, “are not real. The records are very good lies. The records will, by the time the consulate looks at them, have been very good lies for between two and seven years. A consular officer does not check whether a record is true. A consular officer checks whether a record is old. Old enough records are, by the operational definition of consular offices everywhere, true.”

Roy did the planting in the order of difficulty, easiest first, the way Tirumala had always done his school homework. The order of difficulty had been Tirumala’s suggestion. He had been a quietly excellent student in a way that had embarrassed his adoptive parents at parent-teacher evenings; he had refused, on principle, to be top of his class, on the grounds that being top of one’s class drew attention, and Tirumala did not draw attention. He had come second. He had come second the way a fine knife came second to a louder knife. When his mother had once asked him why, he had said, “Amma, the second-best boy never has to be at any function.” Roy had listened to this story, on the first night of the planting, while his hands kept moving over the device, and he had made the soft three-tone trill that meant, among other things, that he agreed.

Planting identities for the cohort, they applied the same discipline. They did not give any of them new names. The names they had — Ketan, Giri Tanayi, Tirumala, Devi, Roy — were the names they would, under any stress, answer to first; the names they would, after a glass of wine in a stranger’s house, write at the bottom of a guest book without thinking. Those were the only safe names. What Roy fabricated, on the device, was everything beneath the names: birth registrations, school enrolments, tax file numbers, electoral rolls, immigration arrivals, passport application histories, social media accounts of the sort one could afford to make sparse. What Tirumala fabricated, on the sofa above him, was everything above the names: the gait of each cohort member walking into the lobby of their consulate, the eye-contact, the names of streets and aunts and the kinds of chai one drank when one was nineteen. Between them they planted, in the end, eleven different databases on three different continents.

Giri Tanayi, on the digital understorey, became Giri Tanayi of Adelaide — born Hyderabad 1988, settled with an uncle’s family in Adelaide in 1999, Australian citizen since 2006, postgraduate student of comparative literature at Melbourne. The Department of Immigration database showed her arrival on a particular afternoon at Adelaide Airport on a flight that had, in fact, landed. Her citizenship ceremony at a particular town hall in 2006 had photographs that did not, in fact, contain her, but the photographs had not been opened by anyone in four years and would not, this month, be opened. On the fourth morning she walked into the Australian Passport Office at the GPO on Bourke Street, queued forty-five minutes, paid the standard fee in cash, signed in her own hand, and was, eight working days later, in possession of a real Australian passport that the Department of Immigration had, in good faith, believed her eligible for since the age of nineteen. She looked at her own photograph in it for a long time without saying anything.

“It is a good photograph,” Tirumala said.

“When did you take it?” Girit said.

“While you were thinking about something else,” Tirumala said. “You were always thinking about something else. It was a very efficient time to take photographs of you.”

Ketan walked into the same passport office on the same morning. Born Chandigarh 1985, settled in Melbourne 1997, naturalised 2004, pilot for a small Tasmanian charter outfit that — Tirumala had been quietly delighted to discover — actually existed and had a chronic difficulty keeping track of its rosters. His Tasmanian charter licence, on the relevant aviation database, had been issued in 2007 by an examiner who had subsequently retired to a farm in Gippsland and would not, in any plausible future, be telephoned for verification. Ketan said, when shown his digital trail the night before, “Why a pilot? Couldn’t you make me an engineer?”

“You are a pilot,” Tirumala said. “It will show in the way you walk through airports. We cannot afford the way you walk through airports to be a lie.”

For himself, Tirumala took the role he had been quietly preparing for since the third bus. He was Tirumala, NRI from Doha, in Melbourne for a postgraduate degree in finance that he had no intention of completing. The Indian Consulate-General on St Kilda Road, on the fifth morning, issued him a fresh Indian passport — his previous one, the records politely indicated, had expired in October; his application from Doha had taken past three months to catch up with him in Melbourne, which the clerk, a Mr Anand, agreed was about the going rate. Mr Anand had questions about an uncle’s village near Tirupati and, by the end of the fifteen-minute conversation, an invitation to a family wedding two years away that did not, in any timeline, exist. Mr Anand was delighted.

Devi went to the United States Consulate-General on the corner of St Kilda Road and Dorcas Street on the sixth morning. She went as Devi of San Jose — born 1988, dual American citizen, currently (the records said) drafting a non-fiction book on the history of South Asian diaspora gaming culture. The American consulate, Tirumala had warned her, was the most exacting of the five offices they would be approaching, because the State Department’s records had, since 2002, the habit of cross-referring themselves; he had planted her, accordingly, in eleven separate cross-references, including a high school yearbook scan in Cupertino, a community college transcript from Foothill in 2008, and a 2009 W-2 from a coffee shop in Mountain View where she had not, in any timeline, actually worked. The consular officer, a gentle-eyed woman in her thirties, asked Devi four questions, of which Devi answered two from her own life and two from the file Tirumala had spent an hour walking her through the night before. She received her passport in eleven minutes flat. It was, the officer said, a good photograph.

“That is what they always say,” Devi said, in the suite that evening, with her real American passport in her real American hand, and she did not, for once, sound small.

Roy was the hardest, and Roy was the last. Roy was, by some measure, the most difficult identity Roy had ever planted. He had not planted himself before. The manuals he had read in the Library of Amaravati had not, on the whole, anticipated the project. He sat at the device for most of one night with Tirumala beside him on the rug, and the two of them argued the texture of the identity the way two of Tirumala’s grand-aunts in Hyderabad had once, in Tirumala’s hearing, argued the texture of a saree for a wedding it would have been improper to attend in anything less.

In the morning they announced their answer. Roy, on the understorey, was to be Sheikh Roy Al-Mehri, of the Emirate of Sharjah, a minor royal of a minor branch in a long line of minor branches, traveling with a small household and a fondness for international universities. Roy had planted his own records across the relevant Emirati and Australian databases: a birth certificate filed in Sharjah in 1979, a family registry updated in 2001, an Australian student visa issued in 2007 that he had not, in fact, ever taken up. The passport, importantly, was not a forgery. It was a real diplomatic passport, which Roy obtained from the Consulate-General of the United Arab Emirates in Melbourne on the seventh morning, after he had walked into the chancery in white kandura and ghutra, addressed the duty consul in his perfectly antique Arabic, and been received with a respect Roy bore with the long-practised gravity of a man who had been mistaken for important persons more than once in his life. The duty consul looked at Roy’s face for slightly longer than the duty consul had perhaps intended. The records said there was no question. The duty consul, who trusted records more than faces, smiled and reached for the seal.

“Roy is not a Sharjah name,” Roy had said, the night before, looking at the family tree he himself was about to plant on the screen of the device.

“It is now,” Tirumala said. “We have written seven Roys into the Al-Mehri family tree, between us. Three of them are dead. Two of them are children. One of them is a cousin of yours who emigrated to Toronto in the nineteen-eighties and has not been heard from since. The last one is you. The genealogy is on a server in Dubai that nobody in the Al-Mehri family has accessed in four years, and nobody will, this fortnight, decide to start.”

“Why Emirati at all?” Roy asked.

“You speak Arabic,” Tirumala said. “You speak it the way Anjoms speak languages — beautifully, and a hundred years out of date. Emirati Arabic of the nineteen-fifties is, to a modern Gulf border officer, indistinguishable from the Arabic of an elderly aristocrat. They will not correct an elderly aristocrat.”

“I am not elderly,” Roy said.

“You are old enough,” Tirumala said, “and Anjom enough, that the difference does not show.”

Roy was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You have thought about this for some time.”

“I have been thinking about it,” Tirumala said, “since the conservatory.”

“You knew we would have to do this.”

“I knew,” Tirumala said, “that we would never come back the way we left. One does not, ever, in any story I have read. I prepared what I could prepare. The rest of it — the device, the night sounds in the understorey, the part that has now made you a man with seven cousins on a server in Dubai — that I could never have done alone. You did. The least we could do, between us, for all of us, was that you would not, on top of everything else, have to learn to answer to new mouths — and that, when the moment came, you would not have to show a border officer a forged passport. You would simply have to show him a real one. Of yours.”

Roy looked at him a long moment, and then he said, very softly, in the register the cohort had heard only once before — over a radio above a burning plain — “You are my best friend.”

Tirumala, who had been adjusting his bracelets, paused. Tirumala did not, as a rule, blush. He looked away, now, and he did not say anything for almost a minute, and then he said, very quietly:

“I know, Roy.”

On the eighth evening, on the carpet of the suite, the cohort had five real passports stacked between them — one Indian, one Emirati, two Australian, one American. They had been issued by four different governments. They had been signed by five different officers. They had been, between them, photographed and stamped and laminated by people whose job it was to be hard to lie to. They were, to within the tolerance of the relevant databases, genuine.

“Forging documents,” Roy said, looking at the stack, “is for amateurs.”

“We are not amateurs,” Tirumala said.

* * *

5. The Burkha and the Cream

Roy was not, in the strict sense, a man who blended in. Roy, in Melbourne, was — as he had been in Amaravati, and as he had been everywhere — Roy: a six-foot-two creature in a perfectly cut shirt with a skin like the side of a small clean fish, who walked into rooms in a way that made the rooms make a little room for him.

The first thing he tried was hats. He tried, in the course of one morning, a wide felt hat, an Akubra, a French beret bought on a whim from a man on Bourke Street, and a turban that he had wound with the help of a Sikh taxi driver who had insisted on doing it properly. The turban was the most successful — Australians, Roy discovered, were so determined not to be racist about turbans that they looked anywhere except at the wearer of one — but the scales on his cheeks and his neck still showed, and at the third café of the morning a small girl with a milkshake had said, in a clear high voice, “Mummy why does the man look like a fish,” and Mummy had hushed her with the embarrassed haste of someone who agreed and was not going to say so. Roy had paid for his coffee and left.

The second thing he tried was the burkha.

This was not, in Roy’s defence, his own idea. The idea had come to him while wandering through Brunswick on Sydney Road, in the part of Melbourne where Lebanese bakeries and Somali grocers had settled in among the Italian delicatessens like a second crop on the same land. He had stopped, on Tirumala’s recommendation, at a small fabric shop run by an Egyptian woman called Um Sara, and he had begun, in his perfectly antique Arabic, a conversation that had ended forty minutes later with Um Sara weeping gently and pressing a bolt of black silk on him as a gift.

“You speak,” she said, dabbing at her eyes, “like my grandfather.”

“I have been told,” Roy said gravely, “that I speak like several people’s grandfathers.”

“Your grandmother,” she said, “would she have worn this?”

“My grandmother,” Roy said, after a careful pause, “wore something not unlike this, yes.”

He was being, by Anjom standards, almost honest. His grandmother — his grand-aunt-of-the-female-line, to be precise about Anjom kinship in a way that English would not allow — had, in her ceremonial youth, worn a silk veil dyed with the deep red-black of the dye trade, and the cloth in Um Sara’s bolt was within a shade of it. He had taken the bolt. He had paid, generously, in cash. He had asked Um Sara whether she knew a tailor.

She knew a tailor. Of course she knew a tailor. By the end of the week the tailor had made him, on his exact measurements, a full burkha — the loose black abaya, the niqab over the nose and the mouth, the fine black gloves. Roy had stood in the tailor’s mirror in it, and the tailor, an Iraqi widower in his seventies, had looked at the reflection and said, in a voice of professional appreciation that was not entirely free of bewilderment:

“Sir, may I say. You will fool no one.”

Roy considered this in the mirror. The burkha was beautiful. The burkha covered his neck and his cheeks and his forearms. The burkha did not cover his eyes, and Roy’s eyes were the colour of pondwater lit from underneath, and the burkha did not cover his height, and Roy was a hand and a half taller than any Egyptian woman the tailor had ever measured.

“I see,” Roy said.

“Sir,” the tailor said gently, “I have been making clothes for sixty-one years. You are not the first man to come to me wishing to be a woman, and you are not the first man to come to me wishing not to be himself. You are the first man to come to me wishing to be both, and I am telling you, with respect, that the cloth cannot do both at once.”

Roy paid him. Roy thanked him. Roy took the burkha home, folded, in a paper bag, and on the way back to the Langham he stopped at a Myer department store on Bourke Street, in the cosmetics floor that smelled of every flower the planet had ever decided to monetise, and he stood at a counter for the first part of an hour, and a sales assistant, a Vietnamese-Australian woman in her thirties whose name tag said Linh, came over to him.

“Sir,” she said, very kindly, “are you all right? Can I help?”

Roy looked at her. Roy was, by Anjom standards, in distress. Roy did not show this in the way humans showed it; his scales did not redden, his breathing did not quicken; what happened to Roy in distress was a faint, almost subliminal stillness, as though some internal organ had stopped while it considered the situation. Linh did not, of course, see this. What Linh saw was a very tall, very handsome, very unusually-skinned gentleman with a paper bag under his arm and an expression of polite despair.

“I am looking,” Roy said, choosing his words with the slow precision of a man translating from a language none of those around him would have recognised, “for something to put on my face.”

“Foundation,” Linh said immediately.

“I — “

“Foundation,” Linh said again, with the gentle certainty of a doctor diagnosing a sprain. “You have lovely skin, sir, you really do, but the texture — there’s a finish you can get that — sir, would you mind, may I?”

She held up a small tube. She held it the way nurses held up syringes. Roy, who had faced, in his youth, an Anjom ceremonial council and once, briefly, a small Earthee child with a fork, recognised expertise when it was being offered. He sat. He let her work.

She worked for thirty-five minutes. She used three tubes of three different colours. She used a small flat brush and a small round brush and what looked, to Roy, like a sponge in the shape of an egg. She talked the whole time — about her son, who was eleven and obsessed with rugby league, about her sister, who lived in Footscray and would not visit her, about the new range of mineral foundations the company was running a promotion on this week — and when she was done she turned the swivel mirror to face him, and Roy looked at his own face, and Roy did not say anything for a long moment, and Roy had to consult himself, the way he occasionally consulted himself when something on Earth had moved him in a way Anjom physiology had no provision for.

His scales were gone. Not gone, of course — they were beneath the cream, the way a riverbed was beneath a river — but they were not visible. His face, in the mirror, was the face of a slightly olive-skinned Gulf gentleman in late middle youth, with very fine features and the kind of skin Linh’s company would have charged extra for in its advertising.

“I will,” Roy said carefully, “take six of each.”

“Six?” Linh said.

“Six,” Roy said. “I travel a great deal.”

Linh sold him six of each. The total came to almost two thousand dollars. Linh’s commission for the month, after that single sale, was the largest of her career, and Linh — who was not a woman who cried in front of customers — went into the staff toilet afterwards and cried quietly for two minutes, because her son needed boots and now he could have boots, and she did not know that her crying was being heard, very faintly, on the other side of the door, by an Anjom whose hearing was rather better than the building’s architects had assumed.

Roy walked out of the store and onto Bourke Street, and a pigeon, looking at him, took off without comment. It was, by some distance, the best thing that had happened to him in 2010. He went back to the Langham. He put the burkha, folded, in the back of his suitcase. He did not throw it away. There was something of Um Sara’s grandmother in it, and Roy, who may never meet his own grand-aunt-of-the-female-line again, kept it for her. Even born planets apart, he is surprised to see this invisible emotional connections on earth.

* * *

6. The Console

Devi did not, in the first eight days, leave the suite.

This was not, the cohort agreed quietly among themselves, healthy. It was also not, the cohort agreed quietly among themselves, the worst thing that had ever happened. Devi at fifteen, after night-zero, had not spoken for two months; Devi at seventeen, in her first semester at Amaravati, had locked herself in a library carrel for nine days and emerged with the highest first-year mark in the history of the engineering faculty and an eating disorder it had taken the cohort three years to coax her out of. Devi, when overwhelmed, became small. Devi, when small, played.

On the second day in Melbourne, Tirumala — who knew, the way Tirumala knew everything that involved another human’s preferences — had walked into JB Hi-Fi on Bourke Street and walked out with a copy of every game from the previous three years that had been reviewed favourably in any language he could read, and a sixteen-year-old shop assistant named Daniel who had been, by the third minute of conversation, irretrievably in love with Tirumala in the soft uncomplicated way teenagers loved adults who took them seriously. Daniel had carried the boxes to a taxi. Daniel had refused a tip. Daniel had gone home that night and told his mother that he had met a real-life Indian prince, and his mother had said yes dear and not asked any further questions, which was a small loss to subsequent biographies of Tirumala.

Devi played Mass Effect for the first three days. She played it the way pilgrims walked, slowly, without skipping anything. She did not play it because she enjoyed it. She played it because it had a spaceship in it, and the spaceship had crew, and the crew bickered with each other in voices not unlike the cohort’s, and Devi — Devi who hated arguments — found that she could, for the first time in her life, listen to people argue without panic, because she could turn the people off whenever she wanted.

On the fourth day she discovered Grand Theft Auto, and on the fifth day Ketan, returning at lunchtime from somewhere none of them had asked about, found her at the console doing something that, after some minutes of watching, he realised was systematic. She was driving the in-game cars. She was driving them, exclusively, away from the in-game pedestrians. She had not, by the end of the hour he watched her, hit a single person. She had also not, he noticed, hit a single rabbit.

He sat down next to her on the carpet. She did not look at him.

“You used to play these,” she said. Her voice was perfectly steady. “Before.”

“I did,” Ketan said. “Badly.”

“You played them to crash. You’d crash on purpose.”

“I was practising the simulator,” Ketan said. “I told myself.”

Devi nodded. She did not stop driving. The little in-game car continued, with extreme care, down a perfectly empty road that nobody but she was looking at.

“When we get to Hyderabad,” she said quietly, “I am going to be useful. I am. I just — I need to be here, for one more week. With these. I need to remember what people are like. The version of them I can switch off.”

Ketan, who had come over to drag her out into the daylight, who had come in with a small speech prepared and a brisk older-brother voice in his throat, sat for a while in silence next to her. Then he reached over and picked up the second controller, and he picked the worst car on the screen, and he drove it, very deliberately, into a wall. Then he drove it into a second wall. Then he drove it into a hydrant.

Devi, after the hydrant, did something none of them had seen her do in nine days.

She giggled.

She giggled the way she used to giggle in the bunker, the small startled giggle of a girl who had forgotten she could, and the sound of it, in the suite at the Langham, was one of the better noises the building had heard that year.

* * *

7. The Captain

Ketan had begun, by the second week, to go out at night.

He went out the way Ketan went out — with the easy certainty of a man who did not, in his bones, expect to be turned away from anything. He had not in his life been turned away from a place that served drinks, and Melbourne, on this front, did not disappoint him. He drank lightly. He paid for the drinks of women who did not, on the whole, drink lightly. He smiled the smile that had, in the conservatory bar at Amaravati, made the third-year music students miss their cues.

Cohort honesty being what it was, none of the others believed for a moment that he was simply drinking. Ketan, between girlfriends in Amaravati, had been a courtship of one or two weeks; Ketan, between girlfriends in Melbourne, was an emergency.

He found her on the fourth night, in a small bar on Little Collins Street that played New Orleans jazz badly and Vietnamese pop worse. She was sitting alone at the bar. She was drinking a tonic water with a slice of lime, and she was reading a paperback Ketan recognised because he had read it himself, in translation, at fourteen — Catch-22, in a small Penguin edition with a coffee ring on the cover. She was perhaps thirty. She was perhaps thirty-five. She had the kind of cropped dark hair that women did not have unless they had a job that required them to wear a helmet, and she had the kind of posture women did not have unless they had been told, from the age of four, to stand up straight.

Ketan sat one stool away from her and ordered a beer and did not look at her for almost five minutes. It was, by Ketan’s standards, an act of extraordinary patience. When he did, finally, look at her, he looked at the book.

“Yossarian,” he said. “He’s always Yossarian. Even when he’s pretending to be Major Major.”

She lifted her eyes from the page. She was not, he noticed, surprised. She had clocked him the moment he sat down. He could see her clocking him still, in the back of her face, with the patience of someone who had been clocked herself by men in many bars in many cities and was prepared to be polite about a new one.

“Major Major is the only honest officer in the book,” she said. “That is also the joke.”

“You’re a pilot,” Ketan said. He said it before he could stop himself. It was not a guess; it was the shape of her shoulders, the way her left hand sat slightly turned in her lap, the way her eyes had scanned the bar’s emergency exits twice in the first ten seconds. He had done all those things, always.

She looked at him for a beat longer than was polite. Then she laughed. It was a short, dry laugh, not unkind.

“Captain Imelda Reyes,” she said. “United States Air Force. On leave. You?”

“Ketan,” he said. “Charter pilot. Hobart, mostly.”

“Hobart,” she said, with the slow polite emphasis of a woman who had been to Hobart and had thoughts about it. “Charter. What do you fly?”

“Twin Otter, mostly,” Ketan said, and Roy, who had spent an evening on the bus from Dubbo briefing him on the de Havilland Canada DHC-6 in case this question ever came up, would have been quietly proud. “A Caravan, when the boss isn’t watching. You?”

“F-16,” she said.

The word landed in the bar with the slow ridiculous weight of a thing dropped, somewhere in the room behind them, that none of the other drinkers had noticed. Ketan, who had grown up reading old aircraft books in a country that did not, as a rule, fly F-16s, had the brief and powerful sensation of a boy who had been talking confidently about cricket and suddenly found himself sitting across from Tendulkar.

He recovered.

“How long?”

“Nine years.”

“Combat?”

“Some.”

“Where?”

She looked at him. She looked at him with the very small, very specific gentleness of a woman who had been asked this question before by men who did not understand that they had asked something almost indecent.

“Places,” she said. “You know. Where they send us.”

“Right,” Ketan said. He was, somehow, not embarrassed. He had been embarrassed in conversations with women perhaps three times in his life, and this was not going to be the fourth. He raised his glass. “To the places they send us.”

She raised hers. “To the places they send us.”

They drank. They talked for four hours. They talked, at first, about machines — about thrust-to-weight, about how an F-16 felt the moment after release of ordnance, about how a small charter plane felt the moment after release of a tourist over Bruny Island — and then, somehow, they talked about other things: about her mother, who lived in Tucson and grew tomatoes; about his uncle, who in this version of his life had taught him to fly out of Moorabbin and who did not, in real life, exist; about Tucson; about Hobart; about whether jazz musicians were happier than rock musicians; about whether ground crew were happier than pilots. (They agreed, by the end, that ground crew were happier than pilots, and that this was the secret pilots did not, on the whole, admit.)

She did not, at any point, flirt with him.

Ketan had been flirted with, professionally and amateurly, in five languages, in three countries, by a great range of human and one humanish being he was not at liberty to name. He had not been flirted with for four hours by a woman who looked at him exactly the way she looked at the bartender. It was novel. It was, after the first hour, restful. It was, after the second, almost moving.

“You are not interested in me,” he said, at the bar, near the end. He said it without offence.

“No,” she said pleasantly. “I am not. I am interested in talking to a pilot. I have not talked to a pilot, who isn’t a pilot of my own, in a year.”

“Why not?”

“Because they always,” she said, smiling now, “want to be interested in me. And then I have to manage them, and I am tired of managing them. You, Ketan, are the first pilot I have met in a year who has not, in the first hour, attempted to manage me back. It has been a pleasure.”

Ketan, who had in fact begun the evening hoping to manage her, considered this. Then he laughed.

“It’s been a pleasure,” he said.

“Same time tomorrow?” she said.

“Same time tomorrow,” he said.

They sat at the bar of the small Little Collins place every night for the next five nights. They never left the bar. They never exchanged numbers — she was leaving in a week, she said, for a posting she would not name; he was leaving in a week, he said, for India — and on the sixth night, the last night, she paid for his drink without comment and said, near the door, “If you live, Ketan. Live.”

“You too,” he said.

She walked out into Little Collins Street and turned right, and Ketan stood at the door for almost a minute watching the place she had been, and Tirumala, who had been waiting for him in the lobby of the Langham an hour later, took one look at his face and said only, “Pilot?”

“Pilot,” Ketan said.

“Married?”

“No.”

“Sleeping with you?”

“No.”

Tirumala nodded slowly. “That,” he said, “is the best thing I have heard you say about a woman.”

Ketan, going up in the lift, did not disagree.

* * *

8. Wind, Speed, and Other Names

The meeting in which the cohort decided what to do about the actor took place in the larger suite, with the curtains drawn, on the eleventh evening at the Langham. Tirumala had prepared. He had pinned, to the bedroom door, a sheet of A3 paper on which he had hand-written, in the slightly self-mocking calligraphy of a man who had once topped his school in Telugu handwriting, two columns.

The left column was titled, in red marker: WHAT MUST HAPPEN. Under it: <Telangana, 2 June 2014. Amaravati groundbreaking, 2017.>

The right column was titled, in blue: WHAT MIGHT GO WRONG. Under it, a single name: <V. Veg.>

“Why those words?” Ketan said.

“Vayu,” Tirumala said. “Wind. Veg. Speed. It is what the posters call him at home. It is what his fans shout at him on the streets in Hyderabad when they see his car. We can shout the same thing without giving anything away.”

“Vayuvegam,” Girit said. It was the first word she had said all evening. “From the Bhagavatam. Krishna, leaving Mathura, faster than thought. Wind-speed.”

“From the films,” Tirumala corrected gently. “From the films first. The Bhagavatam, second, because the writers of the films had read the Bhagavatam. He himself, I should say, has read neither.”

Roy, who had been listening with the patient attention of a man at a briefing in a language he was still polishing, said, “Why is he here? Why Australia?”

Tirumala produced, with the small flourish of a man producing a card from a sleeve, a printout. It was a gossip column from a Hyderabad evening paper. It had been faxed, then scanned, then translated. The translation was Tirumala’s. It read, in part:

“…the heart-throb of Telugu, Vayu Veg, has been spotted, sources confirm, at a private retreat on the Mornington Peninsula in Australia. Friends close to the star say he is ‘in seclusion’, following the tragic loss of his Australian companion — a young woman he had hoped, those close to him say, soon to make his wife — in a road accident on the first of January this year. Industry insiders speculate that the actor, whose last three films have set unprecedented openings, is at a turning point in his life and career. There has long been talk of a political vehicle, and the rumour is, in the last six weeks, no longer only rumour. Vayu has not, of course, commented…”

“Political vehicle,” Ketan read aloud, over Tirumala’s shoulder. “He is going to start a party.”

“He is,” Tirumala said. “And in this timeline, he is going to start it soon — within the year, perhaps two. Out of grief. In our original timeline he also started one — but in 2015, well after Telangana had already come into being. A small thing. Regional, sentimental, more cultural pride than electoral muscle. It occupied him for a decade and then became a joint venture and then finally at the tail end of his life made his chief minister to Andhra Pradesh, Amaravati was well established as capital by then. He is known for several good things and some missed opportunities. In our original timeline he was, by 2015, also a married man — that marriage kept him whole. The whole man started a small party at thirty-eight. The grieving man, in the timeline we are now standing in, will start a big one at thirty-three.”

“You are sure of the year,” Roy said quietly. “Are you sure of the size?”

“Less sure of the size,” Tirumala conceded. “But the size matters less than the season. The 2015 party arrives after the split is already a fact. The 2011 party arrives before it. That is the relevant difference.”

Roy nodded once and let the room have the silence back.

“So we want him to start the party,” Devi said.

Tirumala did not answer immediately.

Girit said, quietly, “No. We do not, at least not immediately, instead we want him to start after Telangana is already a reality”.

She had been, the cohort realised, looking at the printout for almost a minute. She lifted her eyes. Her eyes were the colour they went when she had been thinking too hard for too long, which was the colour, Roy had once said, of the river at Khammam in the second hour after rain.

“In our original timeline,” she said, “he started the party — but only after Telangana was already formed, and the party did what Tirumala said. A small thing. A late thing. But that was the timeline in which his girlfriend lived, and married him. In this timeline — the new one, the bad one — his girlfriend died. He is grieving. He will go into politics out of that grief, sooner than he should, and he will end up empathising more with the common man than any film star ever has — and he will win, and he will run on a single promise: he will keep the state united. He convinces voters state split is a spar among elite for scraps. It won’t alleviate poverty or improve lives. The Telangana movement will collapse against him. The state will stay one. There will be no new Andhra and no Amaravati to make a capital of. And Hyderabad will, by the time night-zero comes, hold eighty percent of the Telugu population of southern India.”

There was a long silence.

“So,” Ketan said carefully, “if we leave him alone — “

“He starts a real party,” Girit said. “And the party works. The grieving film star with crores of admirers and a dead beloved is, exactly, the man this state has been waiting to be told it should not be split. The Telangana movement collapses against him. The state stays one. The brothers in the farm outside Vijayawada end up growing mangoes outside Hyderabad, because Vijayawada has hollowed out into Hyderabad, because everything has hollowed out into Hyderabad. By the time night-zero comes — “

“Eighty percent,” Roy said, very softly.

“Eighty percent,” Girit said.

Devi, who had been very quiet, said: “We are planning to make a grieving man happy. So he does not start a party. So he does not keep a state whole. I want us to be sure we are willing to call this what it is.”

“It is what it is,” Roy said. “He did not do anything to deserve us. Nor did anyone in Hyderabad, in our original timeline, who is in this timeline going to die. We are choosing whom to inconvenience.”

“I am not asking us not to,” Devi said. “I am asking us to have said it.”

“We have said it,” Tirumala said, gently.

“And if we cheer him up?” Ketan said.

“He grieves through it,” Girit said. “He grieves through it and back into films. He does what he was always going to do if his girlfriend hadn’t died — except he is going to have to do it without her. Over the next two years, slowly, he becomes again a film star who is occasionally photographed at temples. The politics of Andhra continues without him entirely. The Telangana arrives, on its own schedule, in June of 2014. Other actors start other parties, as actors always do; but the party we cannot have is this party, this year, this man, this grief.”

Tirumala put down his marker pen. He had been holding it the whole time. He set it on the desk with the careful attentiveness of a man who has just heard, for the first time in some weeks, an argument he had not yet thought of.

“Girit,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You are saying we should cheer him up.”

“I am saying,” Girit said, “that of the two possible Vayu Vegs we can plausibly make out of the one standing in a paddock outside Sorrento — the grieving one who is here now, who will, within a year, go into politics and keep the state whole and end the world, and the convalescent one we have not yet built — only the second of them does not end the world.”

Devi, who had been listening with her chin on her knees, said softly, “So we make a film star happy.”

“Yes,” Girit said.

“How?” Ketan said.

Tirumala, looking sidelong at Devi, said, “Traditionally — “

“No,” Roy said. He said it very quietly, and the cohort, who knew Roy’s voice well by now, turned to him. “Traditionally, in the films, in the books, in the gossip columns — yes. But this is not a tradition. This is a job. We are not, here, attempting to seduce him. We are attempting to make him feel, for a long enough stretch of time, that he is interesting.”

Tirumala considered Roy. Tirumala respected Roy in the deep, slightly embarrassed way one respected anyone who had read every book in the Library of Amaravati. He nodded.

“Fine,” he said. “Then which of you — “

He did not finish the sentence. He looked at Devi. He looked at Girit. He looked at Devi again, because the answer was, in the way these answers were, obvious. Devi was the beauty. Devi was the voice. Devi was the face that had been filmed badly in the old films because the old films had not known what to do with it. If a film star was to be made to feel interesting by a member of the cohort, it was going to be Devi.

“Devi,” Tirumala said.

“I will try,” Devi said. She was looking at the carpet. She was, Ketan noticed, picking very deliberately at the loose thread of her sleeve. “I will try. But — “

“But what?” Tirumala said gently.

“I do not know how to talk to a film star,” Devi said. “I do not know how to talk to most people.”

“You will,” Tirumala said. “You always do. Walk into a room. Be Devi. The rest is engineering.”

Girit, in the corner, said nothing. She was reading the gossip-column printout for the third time, very slowly. She put it down. She tucked her hair behind her ear with the splinted hand and winced. She did not volunteer.

* * *

9. Devi Goes First

The Mornington Peninsula is, in late January, the part of Australia that other parts of Australia tell stories about. It is grass that someone has been paid to think about. It is a string of small wineries and large houses and one or two restaurants of the sort that recommend that you book ahead and then, when you book ahead, ring you back to ask whether you really meant to. Vayu Veg was, in the way of his profession, staying in a house that had been built for him by a Mumbai industrialist who owed him a favour and who, having owed it for a decade, had eventually built a house for him in another country to discharge it.

Tirumala had located the house in two afternoons. He had, before the second afternoon, located the industrialist; located the favour; located the architect; located the architect’s intern; located, via the intern, the cleaner who came twice a week; located, via the cleaner, the small private vineyard that delivered the actor’s wine; and located, via the vineyard, the small private restaurant in Sorrento at which the actor had been seen, twice in the last fortnight, at the same corner table on Tuesdays. It was, Tirumala said, an unimpressive piece of work; in his original Amaravati he could have done it before lunch.

Devi went on a Tuesday.

She went in a dress Tirumala had bought her — pale, simple, the colour of a sandstone the cohort no longer had access to — and shoes Tirumala had to argue her into, and a small clutch handbag that Tirumala had taken from his own room because he had bought it as a gift for a girl he had not, in the end, sent it to. She did not look like the cohort’s Devi. She looked like the Devi the old films would have filmed, if they had known how. She looked like an answer to a question that, in restaurants of this sort, was never asked.

She sat down at the bar of the restaurant at six in the evening with a copy of a novel she had not read in her clutch and a glass of wine she did not, in fact, drink in front of her, and she opened the novel, and she read it, and she waited.

Vayu Veg came in at seven.

He came in the way a film star came in, which was the way a man who knew, at all times, what was behind him came in. He came in alone, dressed in a linen shirt and dark jeans, with the careful slight stoop of a tall handsome man who had been told too many times, by directors, that he was tall and handsome. He nodded to the maître d’. He went to his corner table. He did not look at the bar. He had, Devi understood, instantly, a system: he did not look at the bar because looking at the bar would involve looking at a woman, and looking at a woman in a restaurant of this sort would involve, within a minute, the woman knowing who he was. He did not, this evening, want to be known.

Devi waited fifteen minutes. Devi closed her novel. Devi got up from her stool and walked, with the perfectly easy walk Tirumala had spent an hour rehearsing with her in the suite, the long way around the dining room to the door marked Restrooms; and on the way back, exactly as planned, she paused at the corner table, and looked at the actor with the look Tirumala had practiced with her, and said, without smile, without flutter, with the perfectly steady voice that was the voice she used for consoles:

“You’re reading the wrong menu.”

Vayu Veg looked up.

It was, the cohort would learn later from a discreet camera Tirumala had installed in a flower arrangement on the next table, a perfect look. The look of a film star caught off guard, not by a fan — film stars were caught off guard by fans hourly — but by a woman who had not, evidently, recognised him.

“I beg your pardon?” he said in English.

“That’s the dinner menu,” Devi said. “It’s the wine list you wanted. They’re identical bindings. It is an annoying restaurant.”

Vayu Veg looked at the menu in his hand. The menu in his hand was, indeed, the dinner menu. He had been reading it without seeing it. He looked at the menu on the other corner of the table. He looked up at Devi.

“You are right,” he said.

“I am sorry to interrupt,” Devi said, who was not.

“You have not interrupted,” Vayu Veg said. He was, the camera would later show, looking at her in the careful way men of his profession looked at women when they were preparing to be charming. “Will you sit?”

“For a moment,” Devi said. She sat. She had, by Tirumala’s calculation, exactly seventeen minutes before his entrée arrived; the kitchen had already been briefed by an entirely different intermediary to slow the order by six minutes, which would give her twenty-three. In that twenty-three minutes she was to be, by Tirumala’s instructions, intermittent. She was to be present, and then to be elsewhere, and then to be present again. She was, above all, not to mention India.

She executed every instruction with the precision of a woman who had spent eight days on a Mass Effect dialogue tree. She was funny without trying. She was attentive without leaning forward. She mentioned a vineyard in the Mornington Peninsula she had visited that afternoon — a vineyard she had not, in fact, visited, but a vineyard the actor’s house had wine from, a vineyard he could not, therefore, claim to know better than she did. She was, for twenty-three minutes, exactly what Tirumala had told her to be.

Vayu Veg was polite.

Vayu Veg was, in fact, more than polite. He was attentive. He laughed at the right moment. He asked for her name, and when she said “Devi” he repeated it with the small inflection that suggested he had decided to remember it. He asked about San Jose, when she mentioned San Jose, and he had questions about San Jose that were not the questions men in restaurants usually had about San Jose. He was a good listener, the cohort would conclude afterwards, in the way that all very famous people were good listeners — they had learned, professionally, that the moments in which they were not listening were the moments other people remembered.

But.

There was a but. Devi felt it before she could name it, somewhere around the eleventh minute. There was the smallest, finest, most expensive kind of distance in him. His eyes did not, ever, settle. He looked at her cheek; he looked at her wrist; he looked at the candle; he looked, with very slight courtesy, at her collarbone; he did not, at any moment in the twenty-three minutes, look at her in the way the actor in the film looked at the heroine in the film. He was not, Devi understood, interested in her. He was being interested at her, professionally, with the warmth of an extremely well-mannered man.

At minute twenty-three, on cue, the entrée arrived. Devi stood up. She thanked him. She said it had been a pleasure. He stood, half-stood, in the way men in restaurants of this sort half-stood, and he said it had been a pleasure also, and he said, with the very small careful note of finality, “Enjoy the rest of your evening, Devi.”

It was, by the cohort’s reading later, the kindest possible no. It was kinder than no. It was, honestly, almost a thank-you.

Devi walked out of the restaurant. She walked along the seafront for ten minutes before she got into the rental car where Tirumala was waiting for her, and when she got in she sat for half a minute without speaking and then said, without preamble:

“He doesn’t like skinny girls.”

Tirumala stared at her.

“He — what?”

“He doesn’t,” Devi said. “It’s not me. It’s the body. He looked at me the way he would look at a very polite painting. He likes — ” she gestured, vaguely, at her own shape, and then made a different, softer shape with her hands — “different.”

Tirumala did not start the car for a long moment. Tirumala had, in his briefing, ruled out almost every possible failure of this evening. He had not ruled out this one.

“That,” he said, finally, “is news.”

“It is,” Devi said, who had begun, against her will, to smile, “news.”

* * *

10. The Morning Run

The cohort meeting the next morning was unusual chiefly for what was not said. Devi reported. Tirumala took notes. Roy, who had read everything, did not say anything at all, but at one point — when Devi described the half-stood half-stand at the corner table — he made a small, surprised face that, in an Anjom, was the equivalent of a low chuckle. The face passed before any of them could comment on it.

“So,” Tirumala said, eventually, “we revise. He likes — “

“Chubby,” Devi said firmly. “He likes chubby. I watched him at the bar later. The waitress was chubby. He looked at the waitress. He doesn’t realise he was looking at the waitress. He is — “

She paused. She looked, with apology, across the room. Girit was sitting on the floor near the window, doing something with her splinted wrist that involved a small length of rubber tubing she had got from a physiotherapist on Collins Street. She was not, on appearances, listening.

“He likes,” Devi said, more quietly, “women who look as though they are not interested in being looked at.”

Girit, on the floor, did not look up.

Tirumala, very gently, said, “Girit.”

“No,” Girit said.

“Girit, I am not — “

“No,” Girit said. “I am not — I am not doing that. I am not — I cannot.”

There was a silence. There was the particular silence the cohort had developed for Girit’s no’s, which they had learned, over a year, not to push at; Girit’s no’s, when pushed at, became things much harder to take back than no.

Roy said, very softly, “You run every morning.”

Girit looked at him. She looked at him for a long moment. He looked back at her with the calm attention of a man who had observed something other people had not noticed and was prepared to be wrong about it.

“You run,” he said again, “every morning. You ran in Amaravati. You ran on the bank of the Krishna. You have not run since we landed. You miss it.”

“Yes,” Girit said.

“There is a path on the Yarra,” Roy said. “From Federation Square along the river toward Richmond. I walked it this morning. There are runners. The actor runs there. He runs at five-thirty. The vineyard intern’s brother is a maître d’ at his hotel and confirmed it.”

Girit looked at Roy. There was something — there was the thing the cohort had, more than once, speculated about, the thing between Roy and Girit they had no name for, the thing that had begun in their first month in the bunker when she had snapped at him about his fish-skin and he had said, with perfect calm, that he had been called worse by his own grandmother and would she like to hear what, and she had laughed despite herself for the first time that semester. It was not a romance. The cohort had decided, at some length, that it was not a romance. It was something more annoying. It was an alliance.

“You are saying,” Girit said carefully, “that I should run.”

“I am saying,” Roy said, “that you should run. As you would have, anyway, in a sane week. If you pass him, you pass him. You do not have to do anything else.”

Girit was quiet for a long moment. She looked at her own splinted wrist. She moved it, experimentally. It moved. It hurt. It moved.

“I cannot run with this,” she said.

“You can,” Roy said, “if you bind it differently. I have the bandage. I will show you.”

Tirumala said nothing at all. Tirumala had learned, over a year, when to say nothing.

The next morning at five-twenty, Girit Tanayi was on the Yarra path, in track pants and a faded Amaravati University T-shirt that Tirumala had earlier insisted she change out of (she had refused), her hair tied back, her splinted wrist re-bound in a tighter, smaller wrap that Roy had spent an hour on. She did not stretch. She had not, in eight years of running, stretched. She walked the first two minutes. She lifted into a jog. She lifted, by the third minute, into the loping easy stride that had carried her along the Krishna for hundreds of mornings, and the Yarra, in its small chilly thread, received her without comment.

She passed the first runner — a thin retiree in fluorescent yellow — at the four-minute mark. She passed the second — a young woman in earbuds — at the seven-minute mark. At the twelve-minute mark she came up behind a tall man in a black tracksuit who was running with the deliberate, slightly show-off stride of a man who knew he was being looked at by no-one, and who was running, therefore, for himself, which was the worst possible time to be overtaken.

She overtook him.

She did not realise, until the moment of overtaking, who he was. She glanced sideways, the way runners did, the brief uninterested glance, and the profile met her, and the profile was the profile from the gossip-column printout, and she nearly stumbled, and she did not stumble, and she went past him as she would have gone past any other runner, with the small civil nod runners gave one another in the gray hour before dawn.

She heard him, behind her, accelerate.

She heard him, behind her, accelerate again.

She had not, since she was eleven, allowed anybody to overtake her on a morning run.

She kept the pace. She kept her own pace. He came up alongside her, breathing harder than she was breathing, in the way men who lifted weights breathed when they were trying to run, and at her shoulder he said, in the friendly indistinct mumble of a man who was about to say something not indistinct at all:

“Excuse me. Excuse me. You — what is your pace?”

“I do not know,” Girit said. She did not look at him. “I do not have a watch.”

“You — ” he was, the cohort would observe later in some of the more cherished footage of their lives, frankly panting now — “you run very fast.”

“I have always run,” Girit said, perfectly steadily. “It is not fast. It is only mine.”

Vayu Veg, the matinee idol of three Telugu generations, the heart-throb of crores of women, the man whose film posters in Hyderabad railway stations had to be hung on the inside of the boarding platforms because too many girls got off the trains at his face, ran beside Girit Tanayi in silence for almost two kilometres of the Yarra path. He did not, in those two kilometres, ask her name. He did not, in those two kilometres, manage to keep his pace exactly even with hers; he overshot, twice, and had to slow; he undershot, once, and had to lengthen his stride embarrassingly to catch up. He had not, in his adult life, been embarrassed by his own legs. He was embarrassed now. He was, very faintly, delighted.

At the small jetty near the rowing club, Girit stopped. She did not stop because she was tired. She stopped because she had, the previous morning, walked the route in advance with Roy, and the small jetty was the point at which the path doubled back. She put her hand on the railing and bent over, very slightly, the way runners bent at the waist, and she let her breath out in two slow controlled exhalations.

He bent at his waist beside her. He breathed less controlledly.

“You are,” he said, between breaths, “either an athlete, or a refugee.”

It was a strange thing to say. He had meant it, the cohort would conclude later, as a compliment in the manner of compliments delivered in Telugu films — half flirtation, half observation, the tonal trick that Telugu writers had taken from Tamil writers who had taken it from Bombay writers who had taken it, ultimately, from the long-ago Sanskrit court poets. He did not, however, know that he was speaking to the worst possible recipient of that compliment.

Girit straightened up. She looked at him for the first time, properly, full in the face. He was very tall. He was very handsome, in the way the gossip columns said he was. His skin, even in the gray pre-dawn, had the careful gleam of a man who had been moisturised in a green room by a professional. His eyes were brown and very awake.

“I am,” she said, “a refugee. From Hyderabad. My family — “

She stopped. She had been about to say <my family — all of them> in the way that, in front of strangers, she sometimes said it; but he was not, in any sense, a stranger she had to perform for, because he had not asked. He had asked something else. He had asked something he had not, in his life, been answered seriously.

She said, instead, much more quietly, “I have been running since I was eleven. It is the only thing I have done every day of my life.”

Vayu Veg, who had been breathing too hard to be performing, who was, in that moment, not performing anything for anybody, said, “I would like to know why.”

“Buy me a coffee,” Girit said, “and I will tell you why.”

It was, the cohort would later agree, perhaps the most surprising sentence Giri Tanayi had spoken in her adult life. It surprised her too. She heard it leave her mouth with the faint, slightly removed interest of a scientist hearing one of her own samples answer the phone.

He bought her a coffee.

* * *

11. Seven Days

They spent seven days together.

Not seven consecutive days. Seven days, spread across nine. He had, the second morning, a long conference call he could not move; the fourth night, a private screening in Toorak he could not skip; the seventh afternoon, an obligation to fly briefly to Sydney for a charity launch he had not, in advance, been able to invent his way out of. But in the nine days they spent seven days together, and in the nights in which he did not have screenings they spent the nights together, and Girit, on the third morning, gave up running and slept in, which the cohort agreed unanimously was the most alarming development since the rabbit.

They talked. That was the strange thing, the thing the cohort had not entirely predicted. They were supposed to talk; that was the brief; that was the engineering. They were also, by Tirumala’s predictions, supposed to bicker, supposed to spar, supposed to circle one another the way two cats in a small living room circled the same bowl. They did not bicker. They did not spar. They talked the way two people talked when they had each, separately, been waiting for a long time for the other one to arrive.

On the first afternoon, in the café at the rowing club, they talked about Hyderabad. Girit told him about a Hyderabad that did not exist anymore — the lanes around Charminar in the rain, the smell of the dust kicked up by autorickshaws on Tank Bund, the tea-shop near Osmania she had gone to as a child with her father — and Vayu Veg listened, the cohort later saw on the recording, the way he had not, in the film magazines, ever been photographed listening, which was without his face. He listened with his whole face turned off. He asked one question. He asked, “Which tea-shop?” and Girit, who had not been asked which tea-shop in thirteen years, told him; and he laughed.

“I have been there,” he said. “On my first day in Hyderabad, in 1996. I was nineteen. I had run away from Madras. I had eleven rupees. I drank one cup of chai at that shop, and the man — “

“Mahmood,” Girit said.

“You knew him.”

“Of course I knew him. He gave me a sweet bun every Saturday morning until I was nine. He gave me two when my mother — ” she paused — “two, on certain Saturdays.” 

Mahmood, in fact, had not given her a bun. The tea-shop near Osmania was real and Girit had been there with her father as a child, but the proprietor she remembered from those Saturday afternoons had been somebody else; Mahmood — the name, the bun-on-certain-Saturdays, the two-for-the-boy-who-would-not-eat-lunch — came from one of the half-dozen books on Vayu Veg’s life that Girit had read at seventeen in the Amaravati dormitory. The famous anecdote of his first day in Hyderabad in 1996 — eleven rupees, a cup of chai, a stranger’s two buns — appeared in every one of them. Girit had spoken the proprietor’s name into Vayu Veg’s pause because the pause had been a shape she recognized; the shared-childhood beat she added on top of it she invented in the next half-second, on the back of the same shape. 

“He gave me,” Vayu Veg said, “two on the day I left Madras. He had never seen me before. I asked him why he gave me two. He said, ‘Beta, you have the face of a boy who is not going to eat lunch ‘”

“Yes,” Girit said. “That is what he said. To everyone.”

“To everyone,” Vayu Veg said softly.

He looked at her then. He looked at her, the cohort would observe later in some of the most thoroughly preserved footage in the cohort’s archives, the way the actor in the film had not, in fact, looked at the heroine in the film: properly. With the small, tired, surprised expression of a man who has not had to look at anyone properly in some time, and has discovered that he can.

On the second afternoon, after he had returned from the conference call, they walked along the river, and they talked about books. He had not expected her to be a reader; he had not expected anyone in Australia to be a reader; he had certainly not expected the running woman from the path to have opinions, considered opinions, on the early-century debate between Gurajada and Viswanatha — opinions that did not, on either side, line up with his own.

“Viswanatha,” he said, “is the better writer.”

“Viswanatha,” Girit said, “is the better writer of long sentences. Viswanatha is better commercial write, Viswanatha is better conservative writer, Gurajada is the better writer of people. Both in the end want what is good for people, but from different schools of thought and different understanding frameworks. The difference is the entire twentieth century.”

He blinked. He was, the cohort had been told by the vineyard intern, a man who blinked when he was about to disagree. He did not, this time, disagree. He said:

“My grandfather quoted Viswanatha at funerals.”

“Mine,” Girit said, “quoted Gurajada at weddings. Different uses.”

“Both my grandfathers,” he said, “are dead.”

“Both mine,” she said, very quietly, “also.”

They did not say, for a long time after that, anything. They walked. They walked along the Yarra, in the late afternoon light, two people not quite walking together, exactly, not quite walking apart. A cyclist passed them. A small dog passed them, leashed to a child. The river was the colour of an honest river, neither apologetic about its city nor proud of it.

On the third evening — the evening on which she had not, that morning, gone for her run — they were in his house on the Peninsula, on the long verandah that looked across the lawn to a strip of water that was not, in any sense, the Bay of Bengal, and he poured her wine he did not entirely approve of and they argued about Sri Sri.

“Sri Sri,” he said, “is a poet for men who want to feel angry without doing anything about it.”

“Sri Sri,” Girit said, “is a human being with infinite empathy and suffered for it, like several others throughout history. Sri Sri, is a poet for men who have done so many things about their anger that they need a way to put the anger down at night. You have not read him recently.”

“I read him,” he said, “in college.”

“You read him,” Girit said, “in the year you were trying to be the kind of boy who read him. That is not the same as reading him.”

He looked at her. He looked at her over the wine he did not approve of, and the look on his face was the look the cohort had begun to recognise — the look of a film star, in his late thirties, with crores of people in love with him, being argued with by a chubby girl in a bandage.

He said, very slowly, “Tell me something about myself.”

“What?”

“Tell me something about myself,” he said. “You have read me for the better part of two days. Tell me something. I will tell you whether you are right.”

Girit looked at him.

Girit, in the cohort, did this with people. Girit did not do this with film stars. Girit took a breath. She looked at him for almost half a minute. Then she said:

“You think you are alone because nobody understands you. You are alone because you have, in all these years of fame, never spent more than ninety consecutive minutes with anybody who was not either being paid or hoping to be.”

“Do not condescend to me, Girit Tanayi,” Vayu Veg said quietly. “I have been read by better critics than you.”

She did not flinch. “Better critics have been paid to read you,” she said. “I am the first who is not.”

“That,” he said, “is exactly the kind of sentence — “

“I know,” she said.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Go on.”

“You believe this is loneliness. It is not loneliness. It is the operational consequence of your job. You can fix it. You have, however, not been able to think of it as a thing that can be fixed, because you have, since you were nineteen, been told that it is noble.”

He was very still for a moment. Then he said, “That is — “

“And,” Girit said, who was on her feet inside the sentence now, who was, at this point, doing the Girit-thing that the cohort had a great deal of practice at watching from the safety of the bunker, “you are about to start a political party. Out of this loneliness. Because you have confused loneliness for vocation. You have not asked the people you would be trying to lead what they want. You have asked yourself what you feel. Those are different questions. The party will fail. The party will fail not because you are a bad politician — you would, in fact, be an interesting politician — but because you are starting it for the wrong reason and the reason will show through everything you do and the people you would be trying to lead will, within six months, smell it on you. You will lose. You will, more importantly, take some other people with you when you lose, people who deserved better. Do not start the party without answering ‘why’ to your own heart.”

He stared at her.

He stared at her for a long, long time. The wine he did not approve of sat between them in two glasses that had stopped, in the silence, mattering.

Then he said, very softly:

“Who are you.”

“Giri Tanayi,” she said. “Comparative literature. Melbourne.”

“That is what is on your passport,” Vayu Veg said. “Who are you.”

Girit Tanayi looked at him.

She did not lie. She did not, in this moment, manage to lie. She had, in seventy-two hours, lost the muscle for it; the muscle was small and easily lost. She said:

“I am a girl who lost her family on the worst night of my country’s history, and I have been running ever since to stay ahead of it, and I am tired, and I would like to put it down for an evening, and you are the first person I have met in twelve years who looked at me as though putting it down was permitted.”

She heard herself. She heard the sentence go out into the verandah air the way a stone went out into still water, and the air did not, somehow, swallow it. She did not try to take it back.

Vayu Veg, the matinee idol, the heart-throb of three generations, the man who was about to start a political party for the wrong reason, set down his wine.

He said, in the voice he did not, on the whole, use on film, “Put it down, Girit.”

“Girit,” she said. “You — “

“I have been told it,” he said, “by everyone who has spoken to you in this house. The cook. The gardener. Your driver. The driver, by the way, is the worst spy I have ever met; he could not stop smiling at me when he dropped you off. You are Girit. Be Girit. Put it down.”

She did not, of course, put it down. Nobody who had been carrying that particular load for twelve years put it down in an evening. But she put it down enough, in the next four nights, that on the morning of the seventh day she woke in his bed and laughed, in the early light, at something neither of them would afterwards remember, and the laugh — Roy had once said about Girit’s laugh that he had heard it perhaps four times in a year and that each time he had wanted to find a recording — the laugh, on this morning, was a recording the room was not equipped to make.

But the seven days, spread across nine, contained one morning the cohort would, in its private accounts of the operation afterwards, refer to only as the fifth. It was the morning Tirumala had not prepared for. It was the morning Tirumala had, in some careful private place inside himself, known he was not going to be able to prepare for. It was a morning made by a man named Mr Murthy. It was also a morning unmade — just barely — by Tirumala on the burner phone and Roy on the device, both of them awake before dawn and both of them, on this morning, better than they had ever been.

Roy was on the device at five-forty in the morning, which was Roy’s normal hour with it. He had finished the night’s market work an hour earlier. He had been about to close the camera feeds and sleep — Tirumala, two metres away on the rug, had been asleep for the first time in three nights, and Roy did not begrudge him the rug — when the kitchen camera at the Mornington Peninsula house, which had been quiet since midnight, lit up.

A man Roy did not recognise let himself into the kitchen. He used a key. He did not turn on the main lights. He turned on the small lamp over the stove. He set down a briefcase. He filled the kettle. He sat down at the table and opened the briefcase.

Roy, in the smaller suite at the Langham, watched the man read a file by the light of the stove lamp. Roy did not wake Tirumala for almost a minute. He watched the man. He watched the way the man drank his tea. He watched the way the man held a page in two hands and read it twice without moving his eyes. Then he woke Tirumala.

Tirumala sat up on the rug. He did not, in any sense, look like a man who had been asleep. Tirumala, on three nights of no sleep, never looked asleep; he looked merely paused.

“Who?” he said.

Roy turned the device. The face of the man in the kitchen — pulled, sharpened, run against every photograph the Anjom device could find on the obliging 2010 internet — was already on the screen. Beside the face was a small column of text, scrolling as Roy’s algorithms found more of the man’s life.

“Mr K. Murthy,” Roy read. “Andhra Pradesh state police, 1988 to 2008. Three commendations. Head of personal security for Sri Vayu Veg, January 2008 to present.”

Tirumala looked at the screen. He looked at the briefcase on the kitchen table. He looked at the file in the man’s hands.

He said, “Oh.”

He picked up his phone — the local burner, not the Anjom device — and called a number it had taken him most of a day to acquire when they had first arrived in Melbourne. Lalita answered on the third ring. Lalita was Vayu Veg’s cook of six years, a Telugu woman from Vijayawada whose nephew Tirumala had, in the course of one long phone conversation a week earlier, helped to obtain admission to a junior college in Hyderabad. Lalita was not, in her own private estimation, on Tirumala’s payroll. She was, in her own private estimation, returning a favour. The distinction was important to her.

“Lalita-garu,” Tirumala said. “There is a man in the master’s kitchen. He arrived ninety minutes ago. He has a briefcase. He has been reading a file. I need photographs of every page, as quickly as you can take them.”

“I have not, sir, been in the kitchen this morning.”

“You will, in the next ten minutes, find a reason to be in the kitchen. Take the photographs with your phone. Send them to this number. Delete them from your phone afterwards.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lalita-garu — the man is the master’s own. Be careful.”

“I have been with the master six years, sir. I am always careful.”

She hung up.

It took her twelve minutes. She entered the kitchen at six-twenty with a basket of vegetables for the day’s lunch. She nodded to Murthy. Murthy nodded back. He did not, on principle, prevent the kitchen from being a kitchen. Lalita put down the basket. She washed the vegetables. She made breakfast sounds — the kettle, a clatter of plates, a knife on a board — that gave the room the texture of a kitchen at work. After ten minutes she leaned across the table for the salt and, with the unhurried courtesy of a woman who had been cooking in this kitchen for six years, shifted Murthy’s briefcase six inches to her left, into the spot the briefcase always sat in when the family ate breakfast there. Murthy noted, in the practiced way of a man whose career had been noticing, that the briefcase had been moved. He did not attach any significance to it; the briefcase had been moved because the kitchen was being a kitchen. He went back to his page.

She did not photograph the file while he sat at the table. Lalita’s father had been a constable in Vijayawada for thirty-one years; she had grown up knowing, in the bone-deep way constables’ daughters knew, what photographs taken in front of policemen meant. She waited.

At six-thirty-one Mr. Murthy stood, excused himself, and went down the hall to the bathroom. Lalita waited five careful seconds. Then she did everything at once: she crossed to the table, photographed the open file from three different angles in six quick frames, sent every frame to the number Tirumala had given her, deleted the frames from her phone, and was rinsing dal at the sink when Murthy walked back in ninety seconds later. He looked at the briefcase. The briefcase was where he had left it. He looked at her. Lalita, at the sink, was humming — very softly, in a Vijayawada Telugu — something her own mother had once hummed at this very sink, which is to say nothing a man who had just used the bathroom needed to think about. He went back to his page.

At six-thirty-two in the morning, in the smaller suite at the Langham, Tirumala and Roy received Lalita’s photographs. They read the five pages, in the order in which the photographs had captured them, in the harsh blue light of the device. Mr Murthy did not, the file made clear, believe in long files. The first page said that the uncle in Adelaide who had supposedly received Girit from Hyderabad in 1999 had not, on inspection by a friend of Mr Murthy’s who lived two streets from the relevant address, in fact existed; the neighbour had been there since 1994, did not know the uncle’s name, and did not recognise the girl from the photograph. The second page said that the Glenelg town hall ceremony in 2006 had been real, the rolls had been real, the name had been on the rolls; but no photograph taken on the day, in any frame Mr Murthy’s man had pulled, contained her face. The third, fourth, and fifth pages were on Girit’s supposed Khammam grandfather, on a Hyderabad social-column photograph that matched a planted Adelaide town hall photograph in ways Murthy found suggestive, and on Mr Murthy’s professional assessment of the cover as textbook.

Tirumala read all five pages in two minutes. Then he said, very quietly, in the dialect of his adoptive mother’s mother:

“We have an hour. Maybe less.”

“Forty minutes,” Roy said. “He has finished his tea. He is about to ask for the master.”

Tirumala went, in the next sixty seconds, into a kind of motion the cohort had not previously seen him in. He woke Devi by the simple expedient of removing the console from her hands. He woke Ketan by telephone — Ketan was, that morning, three blocks away on Little Collins Street, which is a story for another time — and Ketan was at the Langham in under eight minutes by foot, which for the distance was rude. Tirumala explained, in two sentences each, what needed to be done. He sent Ketan to Girit’s iPhone — a brand-new iPhone 3GS the cohort had bought her, in case of an emergency of exactly this category, on the third night — with a packet of jpegs, captioned and dated, that Tirumala and Roy had been pre-staging for several days against exactly this possibility. He also asked Ketan to be on standby to extract Girit if things go south. He don’t want to leave Girit alone in those circumstances. He sent Devi, on the burner phone, to a junior IT clerk at the Adelaide town hall who owed Tirumala a small favour from a Crown blackjack table two weeks earlier, with an instruction so specific that the clerk, when he received it at his desk in the seven a.m. South Australian light, did not understand it; he simply executed it, because Tirumala had been polite enough to phrase it the way Tirumala phrased every instruction, which was as though it were a small favour from a much older brother.

Roy, meanwhile, worked the device.

In the next thirty-one minutes, between six-thirty-two and seven-oh-three Melbourne time, the following things were done. A property tax record for an Adelaide address two streets from the relevant one was amended to list a Mr Ramana Tanayi as resident since 1998. A voter roll for the Glenelg ward was amended to include the same Mr Ramana Tanayi for the same period. A digital archive of a small Telugu community newsletter in Adelaide, hosted on a server in Sydney that had not been backed up in four years and would not be checked for four more, was amended to include photographs of a 2003 Sankranthi function at which a Mr Ramana Tanayi appeared in the back of the third frame, with his arm around a girl who, on close inspection, was Girit. Six of the twelve photographs the Glenelg town hall had on file from the 2006 citizenship ceremony were silently amended to include Girit’s face in the third or fourth row; six were not, on the grounds that all twelve suddenly including her would have been a flag a man like Murthy would have noticed within seconds. The Adelaide phone directory for 2004 was amended to list Mr Ramana Tanayi at the relevant address. A photograph of Mr Ramana Tanayi himself — generated by the Anjom device from a composite of seven other Telugu men of approximately the right age, build, and family resemblance to Girit — was uploaded to a small social-media profile that had, until that morning, belonged to nobody. The profile was given six friends, four likes, and three years of slow occasional activity. None of this would have fooled a sustained, weeks-long investigation. All of it would, in the next thirty minutes, fool a man or at least confuse him enough to self-doubt his own sources.

Tirumala, when he set down the burner phone at seven-oh-three, said: “It will do.”

Roy said nothing. Roy was on his fourth coffee of the night. Roy’s hands, when he set down the device, were not entirely steady.

“Now,” Tirumala said, “we hope she sees the text.”

Vayu Veg came down at half past seven. He was in track pants. He had been about to go for his run. He looked at Mr Murthy in the kitchen the way a man looked at a fact he had not yet been told but already knew. He poured himself coffee. He sat down at the table.

“Show me,” he said.

Mr Murthy showed him.

Vayu Veg read the five pages in the order they had been written, with the patient cinematographer’s attention of a man whose job was, in part, the reading of pages. He read the fourth page twice. On the second reading he set down his coffee. On the second setting-down, he placed both hands flat on the table.

“Where is she,” he said.

“In the bedroom, sir.”

“Bring her.”

“Sir, with respect — “

“Bring her, Murthy.”

Mr Murthy went to fetch her.

In the bedroom, Girit was sitting on the edge of the bed in Vayu’s shirt. Her iPhone, on the nightstand, had buzzed at six-thirty-eight, six-forty-one, six-fifty-five, and seven-oh-four. The first three had been Tirumala. The fourth had been Ketan, with the packet. She had read every message. She had, by seven-oh-five, scrolled through every photograph Ketan had sent. She had memorised, in the careful way she had memorised the eight Telugu-novel passages of her undergraduate viva, the name Ramana Tanayi. She had memorised the Adelaide address. She had memorised the Sankranthi function in 2003. She knew, when she walked out of the bedroom, what she was about to do. She did not let Mr Murthy see this on her face when he came in to call her.

She came out in Vayu’s shirt. She had not, in the way of women who had spent five mornings of the past week in this house, brushed her hair. She saw the file on the table. She saw the look on the face of the man at the table. She did not, the cohort would later understand from Mr Murthy’s debrief, slow her step.

She sat down across from Vayu Veg. Mr Murthy, who had been a policeman long enough to recognise the line a man should stand behind, stood behind it: at the corner of the verandah, two and a half metres away, hands folded.

Vayu Veg pushed the file across the table to Girit and gave her enough time to read it. He and Murthy watched her face the whole time. What they saw were small intermittent smiles, and, at the end, a single short laugh — the laugh, it would have struck a careful observer, of a teacher who had just finished marking a thoroughly misunderstood research paper from one of her students.

Vayu Veg said, “Tell me who I have been talking to.”

It was not a film line. It was not, in any sense the cohort would have predicted, a film line. It was a flat, almost gentle question, in the voice of a man who had decided, before his coffee was cold, that he would accept whatever answer he was about to receive.

Girit did not lie about the things she was not lying about. She was, on paper and in life, Giri Tanayi of Khammam. She had been with her grandparents in Khammam on the night Hyderabad had — and here, in the kitchen of his house, she paused; she did not say what Hyderabad had — gone wrong. Her parents and her aunts and her two younger brothers and the cousin who had taught her to braid jasmine into her hair had all, in the same hour, stopped existing. She had been eleven. She was twenty-two now.

She did not lie about the things she was, on this morning, prepared not to lie about. The uncle in Adelaide, she said, was her mother’s brother — a Mr Ramana Tanayi who had moved to Australia in 1998, who had received her when she had come from Hyderabad in 1999, with whom she had lived for the better part of three years before she had moved out into the dormitory at Melbourne. He was a small, quiet man. He kept to himself. He had, she said, the kind of life that produced very few photographs.

“Mr Murthy’s man,” Vayu Veg said carefully, “has been to the relevant address. He says no such man exists.”

“Mr Murthy’s man,” Girit said, “has been to one of the relevant addresses.” She pulled her iPhone out of the pocket of Vayu’s shirt. She turned the screen toward him. “My uncle lived at the next-but-one address on the same street until the end of 2005. He moved one house at the end of 2005. The neighbours since then are correct; the neighbour before that — Mr Murthy’s source — is also correct, about a man Mr Murthy’s man did not, perhaps, ask about by the right first name. Ramana, not Raman.”

Murthy, very still, took out his own phone. He scrolled his own dossier. He frowned.

He said, “Sir, with respect — these photographs were not in my source ninety minutes ago.”

“They are in mine now,” Girit said. “May I show you mine?”

She held out her phone.

Murthy, after a beat that was longer than Mr Murthy normally allowed himself, took the phone. He scrolled. There was a photograph dated 2003, captioned “Sankranthi in Adelaide, with Mama-garu and the Krishna Society children.” There was a photograph dated 2005, captioned “Mama’s new house, before the lawn.” There was a photograph dated 2009, captioned “Mama at sixty.” Each photograph had metadata. Each photograph had been on this phone, the metadata indicated, since some time before this phone had been given to Girit.

Mr Murthy stared at the phone for a long time.

He scrolled back to the citizenship ceremony photographs in his own dossier. He scrolled through them slowly. In three of the twelve — frames he had personally pulled the previous Wednesday, in which he had personally checked for Girit’s face and not found it — there was now, in the third row, the face of a young woman who was, unmistakably, Girit. In the other nine, there was no such face.

He set his own phone down on the table.

He set Girit’s phone down beside it.

He said, very quietly, in the voice of a man who had been a policeman long enough to know what he was looking at, even when he was looking at something he did not yet understand:

“Sir, I am no longer sure what I am looking at.”

Vayu Veg looked at the two phones on the table. He looked at Mr Murthy. He looked at Girit. He did not look at Mr Murthy again.

He said, “Murthy.”

“Sir.”

“Take the file. Go back to Hyderabad. I will not, today, decide which of you two is more careful. I will, today, decide which of you two I trust. Go back to Hyderabad.”

“Sir, with respect — “

“I know what you are asking. I am answering. Take the file. Go back.”

Mr Murthy stood. He was, on his face, the man he had always been: dignified, careful, quiet. He was, in his private interior, a man who had not, in twenty-two years of state police service, lost an investigation. He had not, in this house, lost this one. He had merely been ordered to set it down. He set it down with the small careful precision of a man who fully intended, in his own time, to pick it back up.

“Sir,” he said, “I will go to Hyderabad. May I ask, before I go, one thing?”

“Yes.”

“May I keep the file?”

Vayu Veg looked at him for almost a minute.

“Yes,” he said, finally. “Keep it. Do not act on it unless I telephone you. I will not be telephoning.”

Mr Murthy nodded once. He picked up the file. He placed it carefully into his briefcase. He closed the briefcase. He turned. 

That was when Vayu Veg called him back. He walked over to where Murthy stood, shook his hand, and said, in the voice he had spent thirty-three years learning to use with people he genuinely needed not to lose, “Thank you for taking care of me. This is why I keep you near me. Leave this one alone, for now.” Murthy, who had not been thanked by his employer in that register for some time, did not know what to make of it. He simply walked out of the kitchen, through the lawn, to the car that had been waiting on the gravel since five-thirty in the morning. He was driven, in the same car, back to Tullamarine, and from Tullamarine to Hyderabad, and from Hyderabad — when the day was over — to a small house in Madhapur in which his wife of thirty years was making biryani.

That night, after his wife had gone to bed, Mr Murthy sat down at his kitchen table. He took the file out of his briefcase. He read it again. He read it a third time. He did not burn it. He opened a small leather notebook he kept for cases he had not yet finished. He started a new page. He gave the new page no heading. He wrote one short paragraph, in the small neat hand he had been writing in since the police academy in Vijayawada in 1986.

The truth was protected. Not by the cohort’s care, which had been imperfect; not by Lalita’s loyalty, which had been real but small; not by Roy’s device, which was, all things considered, only a device. The truth was protected by its sheer implausibility. There was no shape on Earth, in 2010, for the truth. Mr Murthy was, in this one respect, no different from any other man who had ever investigated something larger than his world could hold.

In the kitchen, the actor and the refugee sat without speaking for some time.

It was Vayu Veg, in the end, who broke the silence. He did not break it the way film stars broke silences. He broke it the way men in Telugu villages broke silences, which was to ask after the woman’s grandfather.

“What was your grandfather’s name?” he said.

“Rao,” Girit said.

“Of course,” he said. “Rao.” It was a name a great many grandfathers had. He did not mean of course in the dismissive sense. He meant it in the careful sense, the way one might say of course about a thing one had not asked because one had not, until that moment, known one wanted to ask.

He poured her, in the next minute, a second cup of coffee.

He said, when he had set the pot down: “He will keep looking, you know.”

“I know.”

“He is the most stubborn man I have ever met. He will be looking for the rest of my life.”

“I will keep my mouth shut,” Girit said, “for the rest of his.”

Vayu Veg, after a moment, almost smiled.

He said: “I cannot tell you I have made a wise choice. I have made the choice I am going to make. You will not be asked again, by me. You are not, between us, going to be asked again. The other things — the things you have not told me, and the things behind the things you have not told me — are yours. Tell me later if you wish. Do not tell me if you do not.”

She did not, for a moment, say anything.

Then she said, “When you come to the tea-shop. When you come, and we drink the chai that is worse than Mahmood’s. I will tell you, then, one more true thing about myself.”

“Only one?”

“Only one. The rest is mine.”

“The rest is yours,” he said.

In the smaller suite at the Langham, two hours later, Tirumala turned off the burner phone, closed the camera feed, and slid down the wall to sit on the floor. He had not, in twenty minutes, sat down. Roy was already on the floor opposite him. The Anjom device, between them on the carpet, was warm to the touch and would be warm to the touch for several hours yet.

“We almost lost her,” Tirumala said.

“We did not lose her,” Roy said.

“We will not, next time, be this lucky.”

“We will not, next time, be this unprepared.”

They were both, at the same time and from different fatigues, right.

It was, in the careful reckoning of the cohort afterwards, the closest she came to being lost. She did not, on that morning, know that Mr Murthy had not, in fact, set it down. Tirumala did. He would, when he heard the next day from Lalita that Mr Murthy had taken the file home with him, blame himself for the uncle in Adelaide for some weeks. Girit, when he tried to apologise, would not let him. Roy, who was always the most accurate of the cohort about ongoing risk, would, in the quiet of the smaller suite that evening, file Mr Murthy under a category he had previously reserved for the Anjom orbital fleet: things that, although they were not at this moment looking, had not at any time stopped.

* * *

12. The Argument

It was on the sixth night that they had the argument.

They had the argument because Vayu Veg had said, with the casual air of a man rehearsing a position he had held for some years, that he had made himself. He had said it about himself the way he had said it about himself in eight separate interviews in the previous two years; he had said it with the small, slightly pious lift in the voice that the makers-of-themselves had, in every country in every century, when they were performing the speech for the camera.

Girit, on the sofa, in his shirt that did not fit her, put down her glass.

“You did not,” she said pleasantly, “make yourself.”

He turned to her. He was not annoyed, yet. He was, perhaps, faintly intrigued. He had been contradicted, lately, by Girit in ways that had pleased him; this was a new way.

“I,” he said, “left Madras with eleven rupees.”

“You did.”

“I,” he said, “slept on the floor of a studio for nine months.”

“You did.”

“I — “

“You,” Girit said, “slept on the floor of a studio that belonged to your father’s third cousin. Who, when your father died, sent word to Madras through three intermediaries that there was a floor in his Hyderabad studio if a boy of your father’s caste was willing to lie on it. You did not, at nineteen, know about the three intermediaries. You knew that you came north, and that there was a floor, and that the floor — and you — were briefly young together. You believed the floor was an accident. The floor was not an accident. The floor was a caste.”

He stared at her.

“You,” Girit went on, “got your first role because the assistant director on your first film had been to your uncle’s wedding in Vijayawada in 1985. You did not, at twenty, know about the wedding. You knew about your audition. The audition was real. You were good at your audition. But the audition was not, in the Indian sense of the word, the reason. The reason was the wedding. The reason has, in this country, almost always been the wedding.”

“You — “

“You got your first lead,” Girit said, “because in 1999 a senior producer in Hyderabad needed a young man of a particular sub-caste — not your caste, but your sub-caste, which is a smaller and more particular thing — to play a role he had been writing for his nephew, who had at the last minute refused to act in films because his fiancée’s family had objected. The senior producer needed a boy who could be photographed at the wedding ceremony at the end of the film, in a particular kind of aura, in front of a particular kind of priest, in front of a particular kind of audience, without the audience laughing. Three boys in Andhra had the qualifications. Two of them were too short. You were the third. You did not, at twenty-two, know about this. You knew about the role. The role was the connections.”

“That,” Vayu Veg said, “is not true.”

Girit looked at him.

“There were not three boys with the training,” he said. “There were eleven. I have, in twenty-two years, met four of them. The producer selected me because I was the best of the four for that role. Not the only one with the training. Not the only one of suitable height. The best at the audition. Your grandmother has told you a story that flatters your grandmother. The connections was a factor. It was not the factor.”

Girit was quiet for a moment.

“You are right about the count,” she said. “I was wrong about the count. I will give you the count. And the audition. You were good at the audition. You would have been considered. You would not, however, have been considered without the background of your family or caste. Of the eleven, the producer would not have looked outside his sub-caste, even for a better actor. That part of the floor, I will keep. The sub-caste was a precondition. The audition was the choice. The role was both — in the order it was both.”

Vayu Veg did not say anything for some time.

“How — ” he said finally.

“My grandmother,” Girit said, “was your producer’s sister-in-law’s cousin. I have, since I was eight, been told all the stories I should not be told. They are the same secrets. They are spoken differently.”

She had not, in fact, been told the stories by her grandmother. Girit’s grandmother had been a quiet Khammam woman who had told her granddaughter perhaps two stories about Hyderabad in her life, both about a sweet. The stories Girit was telling Vayu Veg in his kitchen had come from a book she had read at seventeen — a thesis published in Telugu, in a year that had not yet happened, by a sociologist at the University of Hyderabad who had argued, with a great deal of evidence, that what passed in Indian public life for individual ascendance was, in every case the sociologist had been able to document, a collective ascendance: that the man who appeared to have made it was, almost always, a vehicle through which a small unseen group — caste, sub-caste, religion, sub-religion, alumni network, classmates from a particular hostel, the fellowship of the third cousin’s studio, sometimes nothing more than a tight friend-group of seven boys from one neighbourhood — pushed one personality forward and benefited, through him, from his rise.

The thesis had picked one case study to anchor the argument. The case study had been a Telugu film star who had grown up sleeping on a floor in Hyderabad studio, who had become the biggest matinee idol of three Telugu generations, who had — in the last decade of his life — gone into politics, become Chief Minister of his state, and held the office until his death, fifteen years later, in the chair from which he ran it.

The case study was Vayu Veg. Girit had read the book twice. She had read it because, in the dormitory at Amaravati, it was the kind of book that bookish girls who did not, on the whole, have anywhere else to be on a Saturday afternoon, read. She would not, in this kitchen, in this house, in this country, say so. To say so was to say where she had come from, and where she had come from could not yet be said. So she had said, again: “My grandmother.”

He looked at her, and the look on his face was the look of a man who had spent twenty years polishing a particular small mirror and had, just now, been shown the back of it.

“You are saying,” he said carefully, “that I am not — “

“I am not,” Girit said, “saying you are not what you are. You are a wonderful actor. You worked, and you suffered, and you slept on a floor that, even with a third cousin’s grace, was still a floor; and you became something other men of your country, with the same floors and the same connections, did not become, because something inside you was harder than the floor was hard. That part is yours. That part is the only part that is yours. The rest is — “

“The rest is the group,” he said.

“The rest is the group,” she said. “In India social ascendance by one individual is rarest of rare thing, it’s always group ascendence. There is only social ascendance by some, and the one who is selected by the some to ascend gets to carry the name. You carry the name. It is your name. It is also not only your name. This is true of everyone in this country who has risen. It is true of the politicians. It is true of the engineers. It is true of the cricketers. It is, with a particular cruelty, true of the actors, because the actors are encouraged, by their managers, to forget the some.”

“My managers,” he said, “have never spoken of the some.”

“Your managers,” Girit said, “are paid in proportion to how thoroughly you forget the some.”

He laughed. He laughed in the slightly cracked way of a man laughing at himself for the first time in some weeks.

“You are saying,” he said, “that the party — “

“The party,” Girit said, “is the worst version of forgetting the some. The party is one man trying to be a group with himself. It cannot be done. There has been, in the history of India, exactly one man who attempted it and succeeded, and that man was Gandhi, and Gandhi succeeded only because he had, in fact, in advance, identified the some so precisely that he could pretend, in public, to be one. You have not identified the some. You are not Gandhi. You are a film star who has been hurt, and you would like to do something useful with the hurting, and that is honourable, but the honourable thing is not the party. The honourable thing is to find a some and be useful inside the some.”

“A some,” Vayu Veg said.

“A team,” Girit said. “A caste, if you like. A sub-caste, if you prefer. A village. A campaign for a single river. A campaign against a single dam. A school you will not put your name on. A hospital you will not put your name on. Anything. Do not start the party. Do not name a thing after yourself. Find a some.”

He was quiet for a long time. He drank his wine, which he did not, by this hour, approve of any longer at all.

“What if,” he said finally, “the some does not want me?”

Girit, on the sofa, in his shirt, with a wine she had not asked for in one hand and a splinted wrist in the other, smiled at him.

“That, Mr Veg,” she said, “is the first sensible question you have asked me.”

* * *

13. Tullamarine

He drove her, on the morning of the ninth day, to Tullamarine.

He drove her in his Audi, in dark glasses he did not need, on a Sunday on which the airport was not, by Australian standards, busy. He had insisted on driving her. The cohort had been against the insisting — “He cannot,” Tirumala had said with feeling, “be seen with you at Tullamarine, his publicist will have a coronary” — but Vayu Veg had insisted, and Girit had not, in the end, said no, and Tirumala had finally said, with the resigned air of a man whose plans had been overruled by his own success, “Fine. But sunglasses. Both of you.”

She wore sunglasses. He wore sunglasses. In the Audi, in the sunglasses, in the Sunday morning, they did not speak for the first twenty minutes.

Then, on the long flat run of the Tullamarine Freeway, with the airport already visible as a small gray promise on the horizon, he said:

“Come and see me.”

“I will be in India in a week,” Girit said. “I have not — “

“Come and see me,” he said again. “Whenever. Wherever. I will — ” he paused — “I will not, this time, behave like a film star. I will pick you up. I will take you to the tea-shop. We will see whether the tea-shop is still there. If Mahmood is still there — “

“Mahmood,” Girit said softly, “died in 2008. My uncle wrote to me.”

“Then we will go to where the tea-shop was. We will drink chai from the place that has replaced it. It will be worse chai. We will pretend it is the same chai. We will pretend it is — “

“You,” Girit said, “are not, in real life, this kind of man.”

“I am not, in real life, this kind of man,” Vayu Veg said. “I would like to be, for the length of one afternoon, this kind of man. Come and see me. I beg you. Promise me you will come and see me.”

Girit looked, through her own sunglasses, at the long flat Australian road. The road did not, in its particulars, resemble the road they had landed on, but it was, in the deeper way Australian roads resembled each other, the same road. She thought of the small white sedan that had turned around. She thought of the rabbit. She thought of Tirumala, who had forged a Doha postgraduate out of thin air. She thought of Devi, who had giggled in a suite for the first time in nine days. She thought of Roy, who walked through Melbourne with a face he had bought at Myer.

She thought, last, of the some.

“I will come,” she said. “In a month. Or two. Perhaps three. I will come.”

“Special treatment,” he said. “Every time. The smallest car. The worst chai. The best of everything else.”

“Yes,” she said.

He turned the Audi off the freeway into the departures lane. The cohort was already, the cohort was by now Ketan in a thin Australian rental shirt with Tirumala beside him in a discreet linen jacket and Devi in jeans she had not been seen in for nine days and Roy in a white kandura and a ghutra wound by his own hand, looking, all five of them, as though they had been invented by five different novelists. They saw the Audi. They saw the Audi pull in. They saw the door open.

Tirumala, very softly, said, “That.”

“That what?” Ketan said.

“That is the rented Audi,” Tirumala said, “of Mr Vayu Veg. Doing kerbside drop-off. At an international airport. In a country in which he has been quietly hiding for a month. We are, all of us, about to be in tomorrow’s papers.”

But they were not.

They were not, because Vayu Veg did not, in fact, get out of the car. He sat. He sat with both hands on the wheel of the rented Audi. He turned, in the seat, toward Girit, and he did not, in the moment, touch her — Vayu Veg did not, in the films or in the real life, touch women in cars in public — but he looked at her, and he said something, and she said something, and she got out of the car, with her small suitcase, and she closed the door, and she walked, without looking back, to the cohort.

The Audi pulled away. The Audi pulled away the way other Audis pulled away. None of the porters looked up. None of the photographers had been told. None of the tomorrow’s papers would carry it.

“What,” Devi said, very quietly, into Girit’s ear, “did he say.”

“He said,” Girit said, “thank you.”

“What did you say?”

Girit took off her sunglasses. Her eyes, in the Australian morning, were the colour they were.

“I said,” she said, “you are welcome.”

* * *

14. Hyderabad

Singapore Airlines, business class, the long way around, with a connection at Changi at which Roy spent ninety minutes in the lounge being addressed politely as Your Highness by a Singaporean steward who had been briefed, with great care, on the protocol for minor Emirati royalty and who had spent his lunch break reading it twice. Roy responded in the antique Arabic. The steward, who did not speak Arabic at all but who had been told that the Sheikh was old-fashioned, smiled and nodded and brought him a second espresso, and Roy, who did not drink espresso, drank it gravely out of courtesy.

Tirumala spent the lounge layover quietly making three further bookings on his phone.

Devi spent it asleep, with her head on Ketan’s shoulder, in the way she had once slept on her own brother’s shoulder, before her own brother had stopped existing in the same instant as her mother. Ketan did not move.

Girit spent it at the long window of the lounge, looking out at the taxiway. She did not, in the ninety minutes, look at her phone. She did not, in the ninety minutes, look at Roy. She was, after a fashion, running again, although she was sitting absolutely still.

Roy, eventually, came to stand beside her.

He did not say anything for a long time.

Then he said, without looking at her, “Was it useful?”

Girit, after a pause, said, “Yes.”

“Was it,” he said, more carefully, “only useful?”

Girit, after a longer pause, said, “No.”

Roy nodded. He nodded in the small, unmistakably Anjom way that the cohort had learned, in time, meant something between acknowledgement and condolence.

“Good,” he said. “That is, I think, also useful. Differently.”

She did not, in any of the years afterwards, ask him what he had meant.

* * *

Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, in 2010, was new in the way that buildings two years old in India were new: not quite new in the engineering sense, not quite old in the staining sense, with the slight unmistakable smell of an air-conditioning system that had been turned off, just once, for maintenance, and had never quite forgiven the building for it. To the cohort, none of whom had ever in their adult lives seen this airport from the inside — to the cohort, in whose original timeline this airport had stood for the better part of a year as the most photographed and most useless building on Earth, before being slowly dismantled to make way for the longer runways the post-Reconciliation transports had needed — to the cohort, the airport was almost shockingly fresh. The signage was new. The carpet at gate 14 had not been replaced yet, which Tirumala recognised instantly, because the carpet at gate 14 had, in the original timeline, been replaced in 2015 after the visit of a foreign dignitary whose name Tirumala still, perversely, remembered.

They came through immigration as five different problems for five different officers.

Ketan was waved through by a tired man at counter eight in less than thirty seconds. Tirumala was waved through by a friendlier man at counter nine in less than twenty. Devi was held for almost five minutes by a young woman at counter twelve who had questions about the working-holiday visa and whose questions, Devi found, she could answer with the perfectly polite uninterest of an American who had been to India twice before. Girit was waved through by counter ten without comment. Roy, as His Excellency the Sheikh, was met at the head of the queue by an Indian Ministry of External Affairs liaison Tirumala had not, in fact, arranged, who had been despatched in error from a different delegation and who escorted him through customs with a deference Roy bore with the long-practised gravity of a man who had been mistaken for important persons more than once in his life.

They reassembled on the concourse, beside the long row of waiting drivers holding white cardboard signs.

One of the signs, Tirumala noted with a quiet professional pleasure, said TIRUMALA — and the man holding it was the cousin of the Hyderabad driver Tirumala had befriended, six weeks ago, by telephone, from a hotel suite in Melbourne, in a manner none of the rest of the cohort could quite follow.

The air smelled like home. It smelled like home to all five of them, in five different ways. To Ketan it smelled like the gym at the bottom of his old building in Banjara Hills, which did not, yet, exist. To Devi it smelled like her therapist’s office in Jubilee Hills, which did not, yet, exist. To Tirumala it smelled like the corner where his adoptive grandmother had bargained, in 2003, with a jeweller, over the third of his bracelets. To Girit it smelled like the lane behind Mahmood’s tea-shop in Old City, which she had walked, with her father, on a Saturday afternoon, in a world in which she had still had a father. To Roy it smelled, faintly, of jasmine — but it also smelled, very faintly, of the chemistry that had, in his childhood on Anjom, been used to seal ceremonial parchments, and Roy, who had told no one this and would tell no one this, took it as a sign.

Girit, standing on the concourse with her small suitcase, looked up at the high glass roof. The high glass roof was almost brand new. The high glass roof would, in some other version of this country, never be replaced; in some other version it would be smashed, eventually, by something a fleet had dropped from very high up. In this version — in the version they had come to ensure — the high glass roof would be kept clean for many, many years.

And she knew, on the concourse, that when Vayu Veg eventually came to Hyderabad — as he had promised her he would, in the Audi, on the way to Tullamarine — she would have to walk this lane with him. She would have to drink the chai that was worse than Mahmood’s, beside a man who had, in a paddock outside Sorrento, given her back to herself for one week. And then, gently and gently, she would have to lie to him for the rest of his life. The seeing had been real. The premises had been false. The cost of the cohort’s plan, in the careful accounting she would never make on paper, was being, by her, paid. She had perhaps thirty seconds before Tirumala would notice and come to stand beside her. She used the thirty seconds. Then she straightened her shoulders. Then she did not think about Vayu Veg again, that day, until much later, in the dark.

She did not say anything. The rest of the cohort had begun, by ones and twos, to walk toward the exit; Devi was already laughing softly at something Ketan had said about an advertising hoarding on the wall; Roy was being escorted to a car the Ministry liaison had insisted on summoning. Only Tirumala, behind her, was still on the concourse.

He came up to stand beside her. He did not, this time, say anything either.

They stood, the two of them, in front of the high glass roof. The home that would not be a home again for them in their own time made its small, ordinary, well-lit Sunday morning around them.

After a long moment, Girit said, very quietly, in Telugu:

“Telangana ravali.”

Tirumala, equally quietly, in Telugu:

“Telangana ravali.”

The Telangana must come. The Telangana must happen. In four years, in this timeline, in this version of this country, in this universe — and this was the only universe — it would.

They went out through the sliding doors into the Hyderabad morning, the small black backpacks of the bunker still on their shoulders, and the Hyderabad morning, having no idea of what it was being saved from, received them without remark.