Nobody answered their daughter's question that night, not really — Sekar had held her hand until she drifted off still waiting for a reply, and Rama had lain awake afterward turning three centuries' worth of guilt into no better an answer than silence had already given her. But mornings kept arriving whether the question got answered or not, and work kept needing doing, and somewhere in the grinding, ordinary press of that the family kept moving forward because there wasn't another direction available.
Sekar's bark-scraps multiplied fastest.
By the fourth week she'd stopped translating in her head before speaking — Rama could see it happen, the specific half-second lag disappearing from her replies to Ratna, words arriving now the way they arrived in her own native tongue, unmediated. She caught herself dreaming in it one morning and told him so with something between alarm and pride.
"That's not supposed to happen this fast," she said.
