THE STERADIAN TRAIL: BOOK #0 OF THE INFINITY CYCLE

by M. N. KRISH

  52

  ‘We think, no, we know the notebook’s trying to say something,’ Joshua said to Divya after filling her in, sending her head into a crazy spin. ‘It isn’t apparent to us, but maybe you could take a look and see? Three thinking heads better than two.’ Then turning to Lakshman, ‘Why don’t you show her the copy?’

  Lakshman handed over the sheaf of papers hidden in the file folder to Divya. ‘I hope you can read Tamil,’ Lakshman said.

  Fortunately, unlike many of her compatriots in Madras, she could. ‘Yes sir,’ she said.

  She thumbed through the pages somewhat slowly, dwelling on each for a good many seconds, her brain cells on fire.

  ‘Sir, can I make a copy of this for myself?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to spoil the only copy you have.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Lakshman. ‘Ask Chamundeeswari to help you.’

  Divya returned in a few minutes with the copy. She switched off the fan and evened out the unequal piles of books, papers and file folios on a table. She numbered the pages of the notebook in order and carefully spread them out from one end to the other like a hand of cards.

  ‘Please look at this, sir,’ she said.

  Joshua and Lakshman marched from one end of the table to the other like they were inspecting a guard of honour. The first few pages had only the chants written by Mrs Janaki Ammal and nothing more. The names of cities and towns started appearing only later. There were no more than five or six names on each page.

  ‘Sir, if you notice,’ Divya said, ‘the names on the pages are not all different and unique. They look like that for the first few pages and then begin to get repeated at different intervals.’

  Lakshman went through the pages and verified it himself. ‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said.

  ‘It is almost as if they’re written in some peculiar order, sir, following some particular pattern.’

  ‘My God!’ Lakshman said.

  ‘Keep going, keep going,’ Joshua said, perking up.

  ‘If we can figure out what’s driving that pattern, maybe we’ll learn something,’ Divya said. ‘I don’t know if we can do it manually; it might have been possible if we had the whole notebook, but we have to work with incomplete information and may need to find some other way to fill in the gaps or extrapolate things.’

  ‘You mean using some algorithm?’ Joshua asked.

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘What kind of algorithm?’

  ‘May be some pattern recognition or machine learning routine, sir, I’m not sure exactly. I can’t tell beforehand what will work. It’s going to be a trial and error process.’

  ‘Do you want to use the high-performance machine in the department?’ Lakshman asked generously.

  ‘Let me try on my PC first, sir. I can try to recycle some of my old programs there.’

  ‘Okay, but if you need more computing power, let me know,’ Lakshman said. ‘But before you go, can you help us draw up a list of all the places first? In English so Joshua can also have a look?’

  ‘Sure, sir,’ Divya said. ‘That’s what I was going to do first. I’ll type them up in the lab and come back soon.’

  She gathered the sheets on the table, switched on the fan and dashed off to the lab.

  She returned in a little over half hour with three copies of printouts. ‘There are nineteen unique cities in the notebook, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly nineteen?’ Joshua asked.

  ‘Yes sir, exactly nineteen. I checked twice,’ Divya said.

  She passed a copy each to Lakshman and Joshua. They went through it eagerly, Joshua pushing his glasses up the nose-bridge and Lakshman down.

  Chidambaram

  Cuddapah

  Dwaraka

  Ernakulam

  Hardwar

  Kanchipuram

  Kottayam

  Lucknow

  Madras

  Madurai

  Mayavaram

  Nepal

  North Madurai

  Thanjavur

  Tirunelveli

  Tirupathi

  Trichy

  Trivandrum

  Villupuram

  53

  There was silence for a couple of minutes. When it became unbearable, Divya said, ‘I’ll go home and get started, sir.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lakshman nodded.

  ‘Can I have a look at the map before I go, sir?’ Divya asked Joshua. ‘You said you have a photo of it in your camera.’

  Joshua and Lakshman exchanged a look of wild surmise. Three thinking heads better than two indeed!

  ‘You’re right. It’s still in my camera,’ Joshua said. ‘Let’s download it on Lakshman’s computer right now.’

  Joshua dug out the camera from his briefcase and copied the images on Lakshman’s desktop. Lakshman clicked through them one after another and homed in on what looked like the best shot. He blew it up to fill the screen and turned the monitor around.

  Divya looked at it intently for little while. Soon her face brightened up. ‘Sir, can I have a copy of this?’ she asked Joshua.

  While he was emailing it to her, Lakshman asked, ‘How long do you think it’s going to take to run the programs?’

  ‘I’m not sure, sir. Writing the code and debugging it alone will take me till evening. I’m hoping to let it run through the night and see if it outputs something useful by morning.’

  ‘Can you come and report to us tomorrow?’ Lakshman asked.

  ‘Yes sir, but there’s another thing I need,’ Divya said.

  ‘Seems like you’re executing a little salami slicing strategy yourself,’ Joshua said with a smile. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘The transcript of the interview with Janaki Ammal, sir. Can I have it?’

  ‘Sure,’ Joshua said.

  Lakshman began hunting for the copy buried somewhere in his desk.

  ‘Before you ask us yourself, do you need a copy of Ramanujan’s biography?’ Joshua asked.

  ‘No, thanks, sir,’ Divya said. ‘We have one at home.’

  ‘Here,’ said Lakshman, finally managing to locate the transcript on his desk. ‘You can keep this.’

  ‘Sir, there’s another thing I wanted to ask before I go,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything else we have,’ Lakshman said.

  ‘I think there is,’ Joshua said. ‘The Sulba Sutra paper. I need to look for it in the server. Maybe you could help me connect before you go.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Divya said. ‘But what I was going to ask was just a question, sir.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Should I work alone or am I allowed to get some help?’

  Joshua stared at the ceiling for a few seconds before speaking. ‘I’d like you to keep everything confidential, but not at the expense of making progress. Choose who you approach very carefully; it has to be someone you can trust. Even so, don’t tell them everything – follow a mini-max strategy. Give out as little information as possible from your end but extract as much as possible from others.’

  ‘Yes sir, I understand.’

  ‘When can we expect to see you here tomorrow?’

  ‘Is nine o’ clock okay, sir?’

  ‘Make it ten,’ said Joshua. ‘Nancy should have uploaded the MP3 on to my homepage by then. We can listen to it together; not that I’m going to understand anything . . .’

  54

  Divya got cracking as soon as she reached home. Meenakshi was occupied with a black-and-white movie on TV and Divya locked herself in her room to avoid the songs that blared out every twenty minutes; these crazy old melodies had a way of worming into her head, causing her to hum them for days on end.

  She gunned her PC and, before it booted up, fished out the copy of Janaki Ammal’s notebook from the Eastpack. She switched
off the fan, drew the windows shut and spread the sheets out on the floor in a long row. Then crouched down on her knees and scanned through them, panning through a few times quickly at first and then going over them slowly, lingering on each page in great detail.

  The cities and towns interspersed between the chants . . .

  They weren’t written at random but in some incomprehensible pattern. There was something peculiar about the order in which they flowed from page to page. It was almost as if . . .

  She stopped short and warned herself not to jump to conclusions but to take a logical and systematic approach. She ferreted out some of her old code and began rejigging them. Her goal: build a suite of programs to decode the pattern in the notebook and if possible, the logic behind it. She crunched away till late in the evening, debugging and testing on a small dummy input file. It was past dinnertime when she managed to hammer the programs into some semblance of shape. Her father Chander was back from work and she had dinner with him, watching Vanathi on TV, clearing her jaded head before the big push at night.

  The dispute between the producers and the leading lady had been settled amicably. The day’s episode ended with Vanathi stirring out of her coma – a bangled hand wiggling its fingers – with her husband watching through a little glass window on the ICU door.

  Meenakshi remained riveted on the sofa, shedding tears of joy.

  ‘See – don’t ever let your BP shoot up because of a stupid serial,’ Divya warned her and returned to her room.

  She gave the programs the once-over, ran them with a new set of dummy data and began preparing for the big job: running them on real data. She carefully gathered the sheets spread on the floor and began keying them into the computer, converting the pattern in the notebook into an input file for the programs. She wasn’t sure what to do with the numeric labels accompanying some of the cities and towns. Since she didn’t have the notebook in full, only three-fourths of it, it didn’t seem like she could squeeze anything out of them. She decided to ignore them for now and focus on the sequence of the entries first; since the programs could make no sense of names, she created a numeric code for each of the nineteen towns in the list. After verifying and making sure what was on the notebook was correctly translated in the input file, she let the machine crank through it. She set the programs running and turned her attention to the other materials in her possession.

  She dug out the interview transcript and went through it, leafing through cursorily to get the hang of it and then taking her time to pore over in depth . . .

  That done, she pulled up the photo of the map. She knew the internet connection at home would be slow so she’d burnt the file on a CD in the lab before coming home. She copied it to the PC, blew it up big on the screen and sat scanning through it for a while with the programs running in the background.

  The list of nineteen cities fluttered in a corner of the table almost as if begging for attention. She grabbed it and began checking it against the map. The labels on the map were all a blur but she knew roughly where the places were located . . .

  All three pieces of information that she had in front of her, the cities and towns in the notebook, the map on the door and the interview transcript, somehow seemed linked to each other by a tenuous thread, something as flimsy as a filament of spider spit, almost invisible, but there nevertheless.

  But what was that link?

  By now she’d memorised every single one of the nineteen entries on the list, but that did not stop her from going through them again. Once. Twice. Thrice. What started out as a hunch, an intelligent guess, transformed more or less into a conviction. The list of places was indeed trying to say something. There was something about those places. Something special. Something unique. At least something in common.

  But how to tell?

  This was not something she could figure out on her own. She sat scratching her head for a while, scouring the net, scrambling through the sheets, but could not make any progress whatsoever. She had a copy of Ragami’s biography on Ramanujan in Tamil and she spent some time browsing through it. It reinforced some of the things Janaki Ammal had said in the interview but did not lead to any earth-shattering breakthroughs. She skimmed through the Sulba Sutra paper Joshua had dredged out of his server as well. It was interesting in its own way but had nothing of relevance for the current situation.

  She didn’t want to wait till the morning for the programs to finish running. There was no guarantee how that was going to go. They could either execute successfully and throw up something – useful or useless, or run out of memory and crash, dumping no results whatsoever.

  There was a much better alternative than that, but it entailed doing the unthinkable: swallowing her pride and picking up the phone.

  55

  Divya had been livid with Venus for the last two days, ever since the Titanic fiasco. On the outside, she looked calm and placid like the iceberg that wrecked the Titanic, but on the inside she was simmering like that volcano Mount Vesuvius before it annihilated Pompeii. The last time she spoke to Venus was right after the movie. Even then the only words, no, word that came out of her mouth was the super-snappy ‘okay’ after she climbed onto his bike and mummified herself with her dupatta. When he stopped in front of her house, she had stomped off without even looking back or saying bye. What was worse, he hadn’t even bothered reaching out to her after that. Forget grovelling apology, he hadn’t even called her in order to get snubbed squarely as he deserved to be. Divya had been gritting her teeth and biding her time till he called or tracked her down in the department but had to shelve those plans in the interest of the project on hand.

  Lumping her ego, she called him and asked him to come to her house as soon as possible.

  ‘Your mom needs another three thousand Sri Ramajayams by morning or what?’ Venus asked.

  ‘You can ask her when you come,’ Divya said. ‘Bring your laptop. That’s more important than you.’

  ‘It’s not my laptop,’ Venus said. ‘It’s my boss’.’

  ‘Whatever. But bring it.’

  ‘Why? What’s up?’

  ‘Come here and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow? I can meet you in your lab in the morning.’

  ‘No, I need it right now. You can leave it in the veranda, ring the bell and go.’ The edge in her voice was unmistakable.

  ‘Right, I operate a courier service just for you. I’ll come trembling in this cold, deliver the laptop at your doorstep and go away,’ Venus said. ‘Are you still mad about the movie or something?’

  Divya hung up.

  It would take Venus about forty-five minutes to get there and she decided to see what the programs were doing in the meantime. If they spat out anything useful, she might still be able to cut him out of the picture and win some of her pride back. That would be the right revenge: ask him to come home and turn him away at the doorstep. Not too different from his taking her to a theatre and ditching her without even a tub of stale and soggy popcorn in hand.

  But it was bad news that lay in wait for her on the PC . . .

  The programs had crashed, dumping nothing in the output files. Some serious runtime error.

  She balled her fists and let out an ear-piercing scream before pulling up the source code and kicking off the debugging marathon.

  ~

  Chander wasn’t aware of Divya’s little SOS to Venus and so was surprised to see him outside the doorstep so late in the day.

  ‘Your daughter wanted my laptop urgently,’ Venus said and stood right there in the veranda before Meenakshi arrived and invited him into the house, discreetly rolling her big eyes at Chander.

  Divya had shut herself in her room and did not even hear Venus at the front door. Meenakshi knocked on her door and let her know he was there.

  ‘Did he bring his laptop?’ Divya asked.

  ‘Wh
y do you make him run around like this so late at night, in this weather?’ Meenakshi muttered under her breath. ‘Vandana will surely ask me tomorrow.’

  ‘I needed something urgently,’ Divya said and walked into the living room.

  Two minutes of family chitchat in front of the TV and Divya summoned Venus to her room while Meenakshi went to prepare a hot cup of Boost for her future son-in-law.

  ‘Why this urgency? What exactly do you need?’ Venus asked Divya.

  ‘I need your project database,’ Divya said.

  Venus was working on Geographic Information Systems for his final year project. He had worked with a telecom company and collected data about all important cities and towns on the map of the country and archived them in a database for further analysis.

  ‘What for?’ he asked.

  ‘I need to know something about some places,’ Divya said.

  ‘What places?’

  ‘Some cities and towns.’

  ‘What cities and towns?’

  ‘Why do you keep nagging me?’ Divya snapped. ‘Can’t you just let me look at your database? I’m not going to eat it. I’ll just take a look, if needed run some programs and that’s it.’

  ‘Why can’t you just tell me what exactly you want?’ Venus said. ‘The database is highly confidential and you expect me to give it to you without asking anything?’

  ‘Why not? You don’t trust me?’

  ‘I could ask you the same thing,’ Venus said. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing exactly? For all you know I may even be able to help.’

  ‘It’s also confidential like your database,’ Divya said.

  ‘Okay, you do your confidential thing and I’ll do mine.’ Venus picked up the laptop and got ready to leave.

  Divya gave him a laser-eyed stare and he put the laptop back on the chair.

  Silence.

  Divya had no choice but climb down from her high horse.

  ‘Okay, I have these nineteen places and I’m trying to figure out if they’re connected to each other somehow, if there’s something in common between them,’ she said.