Year’s Best SF 15 Read Free Page B

kafir!”
    They punched each other, wrestled the other to the ground. Finally, with cut lips and bruises, they stared fiercely at eachother and staggered away. The next day they played gulli-danda in the street on opposite sides for the first time.
    Then they ran into each other in the school library. Abdul Karim tensed, ready to hit back if Gangadhar hit him. Gangadhar looked as if he was thinking about it for a moment, but then, somewhat embarrassedly, he held out a book.
    â€œNew book…on mathematics. Thought you’d want to see it…”
    After that they were sitting on the wall again, as usual.
    Their friendship had even survived the great riots four years later, when the city became a charnel house—buildings and bodies burned, and unspeakable atrocities were committed by both Hindus and Muslims. Some political leader of one side or another had made a provocative proclamation that he could not even remember, and tempers had been inflamed. There was an incident—a fight at a bus-stop, accusations of police brutality against the Muslim side, and things had spiraled out of control. Abdul’s elder sister Ayesha had been at the market with a cousin when the worst of the violence broke out. They had been separated in the stampede; the cousin had come back, bloodied but alive, and nobody had ever seen Ayesha again.
    The family never recovered. Abdul’s mother went through the motions of living but her heart wasn’t in it. His father lost weight, became a shrunken mockery of his old, vigorous self—he would die only a few years later. As for Abdul—the news reports about atrocities fed his nightmares and in his dreams he saw his sister bludgeoned, raped, torn to pieces again and again and again. When the city calmed down, he spent his days roaming the streets of the market, hoping for a sign of Ayesha—a body even—torn between hope and feverish rage.
    Their father stopped seeing his Hindu friends. The only reason Abdul did not follow suit was because Gangadhar’s people had sheltered a Muslim family during the carnage, and had turned off a mob of enraged Hindus.
    Over time the wound—if it did not quite heal—became bearable enough that he could start living again. He threwhimself into his beloved mathematics, isolating himself from everyone but his family and Gangadhar. The world had wronged him. He did not owe it anything.
    Aryabhata is the master who, after reaching the furthest shores and plumbing the inmost depths of the sea of ultimate knowledge of mathematics, kinematics and spherics, handed over the three sciences to the learned world.
    â€”The Mathematician Bhaskara, commenting on the
6th century Indian mathematician Aryabhata,
a hundred years later
    Abdul Karim was the first in his family to go to college. By a stroke of great luck, Gangadhar went to the same regional institution, majoring in Hindi literature while Abdul Karim buried himself in mathematical arcana. Abdul’s father had become reconciled to his son’s obsession and obvious talent. Abdul Karim himself, glowing with praise from his teachers, wanted to follow in the footsteps of Ramanujan. Just as the goddess Namakkal had appeared to that untutored genius in his dreams, writing mathematical formulas on his tongue (or so Ramanujan had said), Abdul Karim wondered if the farishte had been sent by Allah so that he, too, might be blessed with mathematical insight.
    During that time an event occurred that convinced him of this.
    Abdul was in the college library, working on a problem in differential geometry, when he sensed a farishta at the edge of his field of vision. As he had done countless times before, he turned his head slowly, expecting the vision to vanish.
    Instead he saw a dark shadow standing in front of the long bookcase. It was vaguely human-shaped. It turned slowly, revealing itself to be thin as paper—but as it turned it seemed to acquire thickness, hints of