77 Shadow Street

not safety in numbers, but there’s at least the feeling of safety.”

Padmini Bahrati

Just before the world went away, Padmini was sitting on a stool behind the reception counter, taking a break, eating some of her mausi’s homemade uttapam, a rice-and- lentil dish. She wondered how her aunt could be such a far better cook than her mother, considering that they were sisters trained by their mother in the same kitchen. To Mausi Anupama, food was like paint and canvas to an artist, but to Padmini’s mother, Subhadra, food was a necessity and the preparation of it was often an annoying distraction.

Subhadra was a mathematician and a famous one, to the extent that mathematicians were ever famous. There were no American Idols on TV celebrating math whizzes instead of singers, and mathematicians were never surrounded by squads of bodyguards and rushed through screaming crowds of fans to limousines. In no danger of being famous, Anupama happily experimented with food, seeking to devise new and better dishes. Subhadra regarded a recipe as a structural engineer regarded the specs for building a bridge, with a sober recognition that one small mistake could lead to a fatal collapse; she measured each ingredient precisely, followed each instruction as literally as might be humanly possible, but even when she used Anupama’s recipes, Subhadra produced an edible though unexciting dinner. On the other hand, Anupama couldn’t balance a checkbook, and Subhadra had ten honorary doctorates in mathematics in addition to the one she had earned.

The lesson that Padmini took from the successful lives of Mausi Anupama and her mother was that, whatever you did, you must do it with passion and total commitment. Padmini was twenty-one, in her first job, after earning a degree in hotel management. She intended to spend two years at the Pendleton, move on to be concierge at a luxury hotel, work her way up to general manager, and one day own a significant hotel of her own. She liked people, she enjoyed solving problems for them and making them happy, and she was good at both math and cooking.

Sanjay, her boyfriend, said she had the right look, too, that she was phatakdi, as sexy as a firecracker, yet with such dignity and class and sisterly charm that she would never inspire envy in other women. Sanjay just wanted to chodo, a word Padmini would never speak aloud in any language. If Sanjay had to choose between food and chodo, he’d probably die of starvation. But he was a good boy, serious about his own career, and she had never known him to lie, not even to get his ever-ready lauda where he wanted it to be.

If looks were an advantage for a concierge and a hotel manager and—ultimately—a hotel owner, they could be a hindrance sometimes. Senator Blandon had taken special notice of her, and his idea of flirting was to tell inappropriate jokes that were just short of smutty and that made her blush. He also found someone who gave him words he could say to her to show that he was cool with her culture. Sometimes he said she was one of the apsaras, which were heavenly nymphs, or he called her batasha, which was candied sugar. He called her Bibi Padmini, which merely meant “Miss.” But whoever was feeding him these words must have had contempt for him, because Blandon also unwittingly called her bhajiyas, which was a fried snack, and akha anda, which meant a “total egg,” and chotti gadda, which meant “little mattress.” He was a supreme test of her patience and composure, but she managed always to pretend to be flattered by his inept attempts to employ the languages of India, and she never laughed in his face.

Thus far on her current shift, Padmini hadn’t encountered the senator, which she took to be divine providence, but at 5:51 by her watch, something worse happened. An electronic squeal abruptly issued from all around her, startling her up from the stool. The magazine she was reading, Hotelier, slid onto the floor. She pushed through the gate, from behind the reception counter, into the lobby. When the fire alarm was tested, it issued an electronic bleat, but this was nothing like that. Nevertheless, Padmini knew that such a shrillness couldn’t mean anything good.

When everything around her blurred and then when the blurry shapes, still familiar, were suddenly distorted beyond recognition, and when the squealing seemed perhaps to be coming from inside her head rather than from the walls, when there was an ominous rumbling as well, she thought that she must be having a stroke. She was only twenty-one, with so many dreams and so few of them yet fulfilled, and the unfairness of it was devastating. But even as she turned in place, squinting to make the smeary scene clarify, she thought of her mother and her father, Ganesh, and her brother, Vikram, and Anupama, and of course Sanjay, and was torn by the realization that she might be severely disabled and a burden to them, or that she would impose grief on them by dying, bring pain to those she loved the most. And then the noise stopped and the world became clear again.

Padmini could believe that a blood clot or an aneurysm might destroy her vital brain tissue even though she was so young, but she could not for a moment entertain the idea that she could ever go mad. She was as steady on her course as if she had a gyroscope in her head and was locked on to a satellite- guidance system. Right reason served as her walking stick, common sense her map.

The lobby that abruptly clarified around her in welcome silence was familiar but wrong. The marble floor was cracked and missing a few pieces, dirty, littered with twists of paper and brown shriveled leaves that must have blown in from outside. Of the cove lighting, only two of four LED tubes were still working. The central ceiling fixture hung dark. Additional sulfurous light came from the southeast end of the space, where a human skeleton sat with its back to the junction of the walls; the bones were a half-seen matrix over which had formed an encrustation of something luminous—perhaps a formation of crystals or a fungus, it was hard to see—that also climbed the corner to the ceiling, where it fanned out for a few feet, as if it had fed on the flesh of the dead man and had then stopped growing. This macabre lamp shed a bleak light that reminded her of nightmares she had as a child, passageways of stone through which she stalked—and was stalked by—Kali, the eight-armed Hindu goddess of death and destruction.

This could not be, but it was. As the concierge on duty, her job was to face the facts no matter how unlikely they seemed, accept the challenge, understand the cause, and put things right as quickly as she could. Her mouth was dry, her heart pounding, but her mind clear and her spirit resolute.

When Padmini realized that the lights of Shadow Street were no longer visible beyond the front doors and the flanking windows, she crossed the lobby, grimacing at the condition of the once-beautiful floor, and stepped outside, onto the receiving porch. In the Tiffany canopy, only a few lights remained operative. The rain had stopped. The sky was clear. The air felt ten or fifteen degrees warmer than it should have been on an early- December night. The street, the buildings that had once shared it with the Pendleton, and the rest of the city were gone.

In the moonlight, for a radius of about fifty yards, the hill appeared to be as barren as the surface of the moon. Beyond, in the dead-calm night, wave after wave of what might have been grass gave off a phosphoric light and swayed like sea anemones in the influence of strangely rhythmic currents.

A shriek in the dark turned Padmini’s head in time, and she saw something pale and bizarre flying at her face. Until now she hadn’t realized that in her right hand she still held the fork with which she had been eating Mausi Anupama’s delicious uttapam. In fact, she gripped it so tightly that her knuckles ached. She thrust with the fork and stopped her assailant at arm’s length, driving the tines into the forehead of what, in the glimpse she had of it, seemed to be a grub the size of a three-pound banana squash with leathery wings and a