For them these were like fables, old wives’ tales, useless musings that brought only more hunger. We were mostly average students, who scored high enough to enter medical school but not enough for a government scholarship. With the opening of the medical college by the refugee camps, our parents prayed at the temple, the mosque, the church, thanking the Lord for the misfortune of others. As long as people suffered, we would be employed. When they spoke of the refugees, they expressed an oversaturated pity, their voices clotted with satisfaction, and before they could turn away, we saw the faint outline of a smile crossing their lips, as if they found a dark-edged pleasure in the image of us holding knives and needles, poking and prodding with our young, inexperienced hands.

  The refugee camps dotted the shoreline, and at night when we heard the ocean we could picture the kerosene lamps lighting square shanties, walls held together by the spit of longing. The third-year students told us that in their first year there was an epidemic of gangrene in the camps, and when they ran out of anesthesia, at least four girls needed to hold each patient as they stuffed cotton into the mouth, rubbed alcohol on the sickly limb, and prayed as they cut down through the skin, scraping into the bone.

  Some of us had never seen a dead body, but the older girls said we would be used to those soon enough. Out of every ten patients in emergency care, eight passed on, while two lived a little longer. Patients wanted one more day, a couple of weeks, some years, which is all a life really is anyway.

  One afternoon we noticed a line scrawled in the margins of Sangeeta’s biochemistry textbook: There’s a way beyond mortality. It was a used book but we couldn’t find the name of any previous owner. Instead we studied each chapter, searching for answers, and at night we dreamed of that secret hatch door in the body, the hidden route to salvation. The boys already believed themselves invincible. Instead of studying, they went deep diving for pearls, never returning empty-handed because luck was on their side, even if they brought back only seashells or a bottle of toddy. Perhaps fearlessness was the elixir to ward off death.

  Our girls’ hostel was less than five hundred meters from the college but the boys’ hostel was much closer, practically adjoined. The boys woke only a few minutes before class and arrived red-eyed with their hair uncombed and in the same trousers they had worn for weeks, smelling again and again of yesterday. After class they ate quickly in the canteen, joking with us, savoring some crude line to forget their hunger. At night they stayed out, sometimes jumped on an empty boxcar following the tracks to another town. We watched as they howled through the evenings, their slim bodies alarming us with only jealousy, perhaps, as we returned to Saint Mary’s at curfew, with Madame Sarojini counting our names on the sign-in paper and checking our tardiness against the clock. A single old television with a knob and metal antlers waited for us in the common area, the floor covered with a green sheet where we sat side by side with our legs folded. On nights when the electrical current was out, we played games of rummy, passing the candle and holding the flame close to our faces, the hot wax dripping against our fingers as we glimpsed our cards and our features, all our doubts and worries, glowing in a brief flash visible to everyone, before we slipped back into dark anonymity. During one of these nights, the older girls told us that we needed to wake early, before sunrise. When we rose the next morning, we bumped into one another, still dreaming as we stood in the courtyard in our nightgowns while the senior student Baseema looked us over. “You’re going to need to separate yourselves from your egos,” she said, and looking at one another—tall, short, fat—the sun slowly blinding us to the world above us, we saw our shadows spread across the dirt in a single black mass.

  Radical compassion was what the older girls called it. We were practicing to become not only doctors but saviors, bodhisattvas who were drawn to suffering and embraced it. Above the doorway of the second-floor hall was a quote by Khalil Gibran, painted in thick cursive. Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding … It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility. Madame Sarojini would walk under those words every day, never lifting her head. How much of the world went unnoticed by us?

  We exchanged class schedules, pretending to be one another. Sonya was Parvati, Radha was Urvashi. Anatomy traded for organic chemistry, and entomology swapped for another animal equivalent like ornithology. At first our professors didn’t even notice that we were becoming one another. Only after Avvaiyar required that we speak in pure Tamil three times a week (Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays) did the professors look at us like we were a pack of imbeciles, as we replied to their questions in a manner we imagined our kings, warriors, and saints must have once. We were sent one by one to the dean, who couldn’t get a handle on our names, which we kept changing, slipping further and further away from ourselves. “English only, please,” he demanded as we explained how the refugees spoke pure Tamil, unlike ours, which was all mixed with English, and he rubbed his head, placing two fingers against his closed eyelids as if to correct his vision.

  We were learning two different systems of knowledge, one structured by a clinical understanding of the body and the other ancient, known before knowing. At night we congregated in the common area and turned on the television, black-and-white static lines chopping up the screen along with music. We weren’t really watching, instead listening to one of the older girls, either Baseema, Avvaiyar, or Leela, speak in a soft whisper, all the while straining our ears because we knew what was spoken dug below the surface of this world. There was much suffering and dying everywhere, and we needed to reach a new consciousness to be of any use. Regular medical training would not be enough. “Like Siddhars living in the forest, half naked, turned inward so deeply, we will uncover enlightened perfection, but unlike the Siddhars, we will circulate ourselves with the people. They will be our forest, our shelter,” Avvaiyar said, and we felt a sudden fear of being apart from this world and vulnerable to it.

  You sleep for only a few hours, sunken in your mother’s mattress. In the morning light a congregation of objects greets you: a rocking horse, two birdcages, eighty-six video cassettes, three globes, a percussion set, a vacuum cleaner, a pair of tennis rackets, a boom box. The TV shrieks from the living room. For a moment you almost forget where you are, wander into the hallway expecting to find a group of girls, and you simply make out one snoring, her naked legs dangling off the couch’s rim, her white lab coat covering her like a blanket. On TV an episode from Soldiers’ Diaries rages along.

  Your cousin Rosalyn finds the noise soothing. She says it reminds her of the womb, but you think it’s probably related to her father. Almost a year back, without warning or explanation, her father stopped speaking. He was a military man, won a few medals during his service, and for the past ten years worked as a contractor for a manufacturing company that creates hybrid appliances. He used to drink beers and chat with his buddies into the evening, his laugh landing like a shovel. The last time you saw him he wore his fisherman’s hat and sat in a red plastic chair in the garden, staring at the toxic flowers.

  On TV a soldier eats a sandwich, pausing now and then to wipe the mayonnaise from his lips, as he recalls his last mission. His face is as soft as cream pudding, and before you turn it off and salvage what is left of your ever-increasing carbon score, he looks straight at you and says, There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who let things stick to them and those who don’t.

  * * *

  For work you dress in the color scheme of a tree. One day you hope your colleagues will mistake you for vegetation and forgo all efforts at conversation. Lately they have been gifting you flowers with downturned, commiserating expressions.

  You are highly proficient and have little ambition, making you an ideal employee. When your boss, Petrov, passes your desk and gives you a thumbs-up, you mirror him, which is much easier than saying what you actually think. Today he’s happily sunburnt, his skin almost matching his final ring of hair.

  On your last assignment you trained a model to respond to customers’ issues about their washing machines. The AI was competent, repeating strings of words that it didn’t even understand. Could an AI really comprehend why someone cried for three hours when the washing machine couldn’t remove the period stain from a favorite dress?

  Once, for a model that was instructed to associate accents with specific countries, you labeled the training data with fruits instead of countries. You are from Papaya.

  * * *

  If you were more precise, you wouldn’t have written radical compassion, it would be suffer beyond for caring, but you sensed something was lost in that translation. You struggle with the word suffering. Two weeks ago, when you cut your finger chopping garlic, you stood there, letting the blood drip out of you. Your hand, a distant scene, you watched, and as the tired viewer, you feigned interest, half-heartedly asked, Does it hurt? Will you make it through?

  * * *

  The movie you watch with Rosalyn is about a woman who befriends her ex-lovers, who happen to be ghosts. The twist at the end—which you saw coming—is that she killed them all.

  Rosalyn has already watched it three times, but watching it with you, she says, is a new experience. As you stare at the TV, you sense her examining you, each crease and twitch of your face a revelation, and you purposefully smile through the gory scenes, like the part when the protagonist reaches into a dog who has swallowed her ex-boyfriend’s heart.

  Rosalyn’s taste lies somewhere between romance and horror. It shouldn’t surprise you her favorite TV program is that old reality show, Soldiers’ Diaries, condensing a day’s worth of violence into a nightly hour-long program for families to consume—a boy’s arm getting blown off or a baby being blinded by shrapnel or an elderly man’s face turning pulpy with bullets.

  So what do you think? she asks when the credits start rolling.

  Still digesting, you say as you chew on the final scene of the film. The protagonist sits under a cherry tree with her latest ghost ex-boyfriend and they both weep—his tears ethereal—and hold hands.

  I’m not saying she’s not a serial killer, Rosalyn says, but you need to think of the subtext of the film, which is really about a woman’s search for wholeness.

  She removes her ice helmet, almost out of charge, so she sinks into the couch, surrendering to the heat. The windows are open, the night air warm and congealed with an occasional spark from a siren. The house is one of the few relics still standing. Without the usual installations and devices—not even an outdated A/C to spritz out recycled cool—it’s wasteful, a carbon score hazard. Your monthly carbon payment is possibly double what you should be handing over to the government. It never seemed to bother your mother, who paid only on the last possible day, when a power cut threatened. She disapproved of the nature of efficiency, all the hidden costs, and while you carry a hint of her mistrust, you still want to believe in this system tracking your accountability, so on a personal level you can feel like you’re doing your part to ensure that life proceeds on this planet.

  At midnight, when the theme song of Soldiers’ Diaries comes on, you know it’s time to retreat to your translation. Helicopters chop up the horizon in a propulsive beat. Young faces flash across a desert landscape.

  What’s the name of that dead girl?

  You pause. Which dead girl?

  In the book you’re writing.

  Oh, it’s Yaadra.

  She nods and repeats the name to herself, the letters stretched out. You know, I think you’re in love with her.

  With who?

  Yaadra.

  A dead girl?

  Uh-huh. Rosalyn shrugs, her eyes fixed on the show. Falling for someone is never rational.

  * * *

  The TV is a translucent screen as thick as your thumb. It hangs like an invisible portrait, where data can flow in and out of the house. Your mother would have hated it. She kept an early version, a massive black box from the twentieth century, in the closet, where she also stored her shoes and coats. Something in the machinery was broken, so she never used it and most likely wasn’t interested in fixing it in the first place. For her it carried symbolic value—Do you know who owned this? What they used to watch while eating dinner?—and you’d watch your image, the silver face of a girl trapped inside the glass.

  * * *

  According to Rosalyn, every cell in your body remembers. She picks up your hair follicle on the counter like a worthy specimen. She’s eating a slice of toast with sunflower butter and dried pineapples. It still surprises you that your young cousin is an associate researcher at a laboratory known for the regeneration of appendages and the growth of third eyeballs. Their latest endeavor—an Alzheimer’s drug—sounds strangely prosaic. But Rosalyn assures you it’s not your usual kind of medication, and from the way she grins, with only one side of her face, you’re afraid to ask more questions. Her supervisor, who goes by V. F., is known for bizarre creations like winged frogs spawned from embryonic stem cells, and you wouldn’t be shocked to find out that he named himself after a childhood hero, Victor Frankenstein. Sometimes you imagine your cousin and V. F. in the laboratory, bloody gloves on their hands and streaks of lightning illuminating their hunched figures as they work on something perfectly diabolical before breaking for lunch, where they sit side by side and eat leftovers and ponder morality and God.

  Rosalyn picks up a teacup holding a baseball from the table. Next to it is a hammer and a stack of travel magazines from the 1960s. It’s an unsaid rule: don’t move any of the objects. To be honest it took Rosalyn a while to figure out how to hopscotch around the house without disturbing the decorum of things, but she’s gotten used to it, and, after all, she’s not paying rent, and freeloaders can’t be choosers.

  She tosses the ball up in the air and it doubles in your perception. What did your mother say about it? Baseball and tea are both imperialistic goods. You blink until it blends into one solid object.

  * * *

  On a Saturday afternoon you meet a ghost in real life. You don’t know it at first as you shoulder your bag of groceries and Rosalyn details the anatomy of a human heart, but your body tingles and you step back to reverse time and the milk slips out and puddles on the ground by your feet and a colony of ants takes shelter but there’s nowhere for you to hide as the heat pins you to the sidewalk, so you’re staring, wide-eyed, across the street to a house you know from a dream of childhood and she’s standing there, her hair the color of magma, and her mouth caught between words under the lights and the cameras. Saleha. Sal.

  * * *

  Rosalyn looks it up, the accident. The first article refers to it as The Trolley (a.k.a. Self-Driving Car) Problem. On a detour, a self-driving car meets another self-driving car in what seems to be an inevitable, fatal accident. In one car, fifty-eight-year-old Mr. Ahmed with early hearing loss and a heart murmur and Mrs. Ahmed, fifty-one and diabetic. In the other, thirty-four-year-old Ms. Lockwood and her three-year-old toddler.

  The manufacturer, Solintel, said the cars exchanged data and attempted to make the best decision. Medical histories and demographic information were included. Pakistani, Muslim, heart condition, diabetic, Caucasian, Christian, baby eczema, and so on.

  The company involuntarily confessed these details through a leak. In the past year, there have been a number of accidents with similar results, and the CEO of Solintel responded that race, age, wealth, and religion had in no way impacted the decision-making process of the cars. These were tragedies, simple as that.

  The comments at the end go on for pages.

  Baby + Mum > Two OLD PEOPLE

  What’s the problem? Our cars work just like how our drones work. With minimal casualties.

  Would a non-white baby have lived???

  AI IS GOD

  Rosalyn closes her eyes like she’s overloaded but then she begins whispering: I remember them, Mr. and Mrs. Ahmed, and that girl Sal down the street, who you used to hang out with when you were a kid. She made those weird collages with like hair strands and nail clippings.

  Rosalyn looks at you, momentarily satisfied at her memory-retrieval capabilities, but then the news sinks into her and she’s wiping her eyes, saying it’s the saddest thing she’s heard, and you’re not sure why she’s getting sentimental about people she has seen only twice in her whole life, but she’s staring at you, waiting for your face to respond, and you remember the time many years ago when you visited her family out in that lonely stretch of Pennsylvania and the four of you went out to dinner and outside the restaurant she spotted a mangy three-legged dog that was clearly abandoned and she wanted to help it, but no one would listen, and throughout dinner, she kept talking about this ashy dog that no one cared about, and her food went cold and she refused to eat, and later you heard the sad rumbling of her stomach as she slept, and you can still sometimes hear it if you listen closely.

  * * *

  This is the story your brain has about Sal:

  You and Sal were childhood friends.

  Sal went off to college.

  You reached out.

  Silence.

  * * *

  Unlike your mother, you don’t safekeep memories. What you remember of your father can fit in a child’s palm. You once found a picture of him squashed inside an old Oxford dictionary between junk and juxtaglomerular. He was dressed in a pirate suit and had a hook hand, beside him a woman in a princess outfit who wasn’t your mother, and a young boy in a ninja costume, who wasn’t you. Later your mother pronounced him dead and ripped up the photo. In your mind he is sixty percent dead and forty percent alive. In a state of uncertainty. You’re a high-probability orphan.