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your leader, it’s labelled TACHYON DISLOCATOR . A few other cases contain more devices Uzma cannot understand. Their labels are of no help either, the names written in Sundar’s sleep-hand all gibberish, a child’s attempt at science-fiction names for the future-tech doodles in his school diary, names as meaningless to Uzma as “iPod” or “Twitter” would have been to her mother in the seventies.
    The final case, in the corner of the room, is large and empty. This is clearly where Sundar’s statue-with-wires-and-things will go once it is finished. None of this makes any sense. Uzma is suddenly reminded, again, of television, of Adam West Batman reruns, of villains with colourful lines and even more colourful costumes, building doomsday devices considerately labelled DOOMSDAY DEVICE so Batman and Robin knew exactly where to go CRASH ! when dismantling the villain of the week’s secret underground lair.
    “What is this stuff?”
    Tia shrugs. “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t even know what to call these things until he labels them in his sleep.”
    “I don’t know the first thing about science,” Uzma admits, “but this is very Doctor Who, yeah? Do a lot of Indian scientists do this?”
    “Invent stuff in their sleep that no one understands? Maybe they all do. Maybe Id-Design is really popular among scientists. Who knows?” Tia says.
    “I don’t know if I can live here. It’s not safe.”
    “Well, if he did something naughty, I’m sure he would marry you afterwards. He’s a gentleman.”
    “Be serious, Tia. How can you share a house with this guy?”
    “He’s a complete sweetie when he’s awake,” Tia says. “And you’ll barely see him if you don’t come up here. The only time Aman ever meets Sundar is in the dining room, when Sundar’s eating tomato rice.”
    Narayan, possibly hearing the magic words in his sleep, lurches towards Tia, and Uzma feels a lot better as she sees her new friend recoil sharply.
    “Aman said it was a bad idea for you to meet him for a while,” Tia says, regaining her composure. “But listen, don’t get scared by all this. It’s kind of cool to have a mad inventor living upstairs, no? And he totally looks the part.”
    Before Uzma can reply, there’s a loud banging on the door. Tia opens it.
    “Okay, something very strange is happening on TV, and I think you need to see it,” Aman says. He’s dishevelled, wide-eyed, clearly very excited.
    “Stranger than this?” Uzma asks in a voice of ice, gesturingdramatically towards Sundar and his statue.
    Aman opens his mouth to speak, chokes on his first word and looks around the room thoughtfully. He registers Tia’s amusement, Uzma’s indignation, and the intrepid Sundar, currently engaged in pulling a large length of glowing green wire out from under a stuffed one-eyed emperor penguin. Sundar chooses this moment to trip and crash into his pile of raw materials. When he stands up, there’s a clothespin attached to his nose.
    Aman meets Uzma’s gaze squarely and grins.
    “Much stranger than this,” he says.
    Uzma races into the living room just behind Aman. They fling themselves on a sofa, the TV is turned on to DNNTV, India’s most trusted, most popular and least modest English news channel.
    A very pretty reporter — standard issue, fair, well-ironed hair, early twenties, terrible fake American accent, wearing a blazer in the channel’s colours — stands with a heavy DNNTV microphone in front of a large white building that seems to have done something to annoy a mob of about a hundred people, who are all productively occupied hurling bricks, bottles and other handy projectiles at its windows. The red bar on the screen underneath the reporter’s face announces that her name is Namrata, and she is in front of the NH Sukumar Hospital in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. A scrolling ticker under the bar also announces that a sweet-shop owner from Amritsar has set a new Guinness World Record for eating sweets, and a former