THE STERADIAN TRAIL: BOOK #0 OF THE INFINITY CYCLE by M.N. KRISH Read Free Book Online

tomorrow. Just pull a chair, sit down, fold your hands and supervise like a manager. Just tell me what to do, step by step, and I’ll do everything. But only tomorrow. Today, the only part of dinner I can help you with is eating. I’m dying of starvation.’
    ‘It wasn’t me who asked you to come so late,’ Meenakshi said and started setting pappadams afloat in the oil.
    ‘I wasn’t going to, but the American prof gave me some work to do. I went to the library to look up some journals and totally forgot the time.’
    She picked up a puffy pappadam and sat down at the dinner table, delicately rubbing it with a piece of paper to absorb excess oil.
    ‘Why does he ask you to do his work?’ asked Meenakshi. ‘You help everybody except me.’
    ‘It’s not really his work, Ma. It’s for my own good. He wants to write a paper with me. If I don’t do it, the loss will only be mine.’
    ‘What I’m saying is also for your own good,’ Meenakshi said.
    Even Divya’s Olympian brain had no answer to that one-two punch Indian mothers are so capable of. She clenched her teeth, smashed the pappadam to bits and started eating.
    Meenakshi served her in silence for a while. When Divya was halfway through the final course of curd rice, she spoke again: ‘Forgot to tell you. Venus called as soon as you had left in the morning.’
    Divya’s face lit up. ‘Venus? Really?’ she said.
    ‘Yes. Said he was going to Chengalpet to see one of your friends and wanted to ask if you would like to go with him.’
    ‘Today?’
    ‘Yes,’ Meenakshi said. ‘I didn’t know that even guys from a God-forsaken place like Chengalpet are getting into the Institute these days.’
    ‘Not just that, Ma. This guy also won a gold medal at the Olympiad.’
    ‘Oh, that boy? The same fellow who is now at the bottom of your class?’ Meenakshi said with a touch of sarcasm.
    The mother hen that she was, Meenakshi followed the careers of her daughter’s peers with a lot of zeal. She knew who her immediate rivals were and who weren’t. This boy Nedumaran aka Binary was nowhere in the reckoning. But Divya knew the stuff he was made of and didn’t take kindly to her mother’s attitude towards him. You could be proud of your daughter, but that did not mean that you had to mock others. ‘Yes, it’s the same fellow who also won a silver medal at the Olympiad in eleventh standard, when I couldn’t even get past the second stage,’ she said. ‘He is not even from Chengalpet actually. He is from a place even more remote. I’m sure you haven’t even heard of it.’
    ‘What place?’
    ‘Sadhurangapattanam,’ Divya said and mashed another puffed up pappadam to smithereens on her plate.
     

 
    7
    D urai Raj noticed that, unlike the trip to the airport, Joshua was in no mood for conversation on the ride back to the hotel. His amiable American customer was absorbed in himself and he made no attempts to disturb him. In fact, Joshua’s preoccupation started rubbing off on Durai and soon after blending into the trickle of traffic on GST Road he too got lost in thought at the wheel. The tip that had wound its way back into Joshua’s wallet after making a brief but tantalizing appearance kept gnawing at him on the inside. Was it going to come back? Would he be able to redeem it? If not wholly or in full measure but very substantially? At the stroke of the midnight hour? Would it be his tryst with destiny?
    Joshua had been a hard-won customer for Durai. There was always a mad scramble among the drivers for the guest in room M-729 of the Oceanic. It was an opulently furnished suite generally occupied by visitors from overseas who had historically proven to be the most generous tippers. Anyone who could afford that suite had to be. It was the most expensive suite of the hotel and unlike other rooms its occupancy rates were low; it got booked only for a few days every month, if at all, and remained vacant for much of the year. But when it did host a guest,