Recognition
Chapter 4: Recognition
Harikrishna Patel was making tea when the lights went out.
Not unusual—the old house on Elmgrove Avenue had temperamental wiring, and October storms sometimes knocked out power for hours. At seventy-eight, Dada had lived through enough small disasters to know the difference between inconvenience and catastrophe.
This felt different.
He set down the kettle and listened. Outside, car alarms were beginning to wail—too many, too random. The neighbor’s dog was howling, a long mournful sound that raised the hair on his arms. And underneath it all, something else. A vibration that seemed to come from the earth itself.
Dada smiled.
He’d been waiting for this day for sixty years.
The front door burst open, letting in a gust of unseasonably warm air and his granddaughter’s voice, high with panic.
“Dada! Are you okay? The power’s out everywhere, cars are dying in the street—Dada, why are you smiling?”
Priya stood in the doorway, wild-haired and paint-stained, carrying an enormous canvas under one arm. Her tank top clung to her skin, damp with sweat and urgency, and there was something electric in the way she moved—like she was vibrating at a frequency just beyond normal perception. Behind her, two women he didn’t recognize—one with the efficient posture of someone used to managing crises, the other with the watchful eyes of a librarian who’d seen too many secrets.
“Come in, beta,” Dada said, switching to English for the guests. “Close the door. Would you like tea?”
“Tea?” Priya stared at him. “Dada, the world is ending and you’re offering tea?”
“The world is not ending. The world is remembering.” He moved to the stove, where the gas burner still worked despite the electrical failure. “And yes, I think we all need tea.”
The older woman—the librarian—stepped forward. “Mr. Patel, I’m Elena Vasquez. We need to talk to you about what’s happening.”
“I know what is happening.” Dada measured tea leaves into his clay pot with practiced precision. “The question is, do you?”
Priya set down her canvas and moved to his side, the way she had as a child when adults were discussing things she wanted to understand. “Dada, I’ve been having dreams. About people underground. Beautiful people who move like they remember something we forgot.”
“Ah.” Dada nodded, unsurprised. “And you, Maya, yes? You organize things, bring people together?”
Maya startled, her carefully maintained composure cracking for the first time. All her lists, her preparation, her need to organize the world into manageable categories—none of it applied here. This situation refused to be catalogued.
“Priya talks about you. The woman who sees patterns, who prepares for what others cannot imagine.” He poured hot water over the tea leaves, inhaling the cardamom-scented steam. “You feel responsible for everyone’s safety, even when safety is impossible.”
“Mr. Patel,” Elena said, “we found historical records. Patterns of power failures, seismic activity, going back over a century. Always in the same locations, always preceded by—”
“By people like my granddaughter having dreams of the underground kingdom.” Dada’s voice was gentle but certain. “Yes, I know.”
The three women stared at him.
“You know?” Priya’s voice was small, uncertain. “Dada, you never said anything.”
“What was I to say? ‘Beta, someday you will remember the people who live in the deep places, and they will call you home’? You would have thought your old Dada had lost his mind.”
He strained the tea into four cups, the ritual automatic after decades of practice. The vibration from below was growing stronger, and he could see the women beginning to feel it—Maya’s hand going to her chest, Elena’s fingers drumming against her thigh, Priya swaying slightly like she was hearing music only she could detect.
“In Gujarat, in my grandfather’s time, we had stories,” Dada continued, handing out the tea. “The Patala-loka, the underground realm. Most people thought they were just stories. But some families, they remembered differently.”
“Remembered what?” Maya asked.
“That the people below and the people above were once the same. Before we forgot how to listen to the earth, how to move with the natural rhythms, how to be…” He searched for the English word. “How to be authentic. Yourself, without pretending.”
Priya’s hands were shaking as she held her tea cup. “The people in my dreams, they’re not dreams, are they?”
“No, beta. They are memories. Of who we were before we learned to live in cages of our own making.”
Elena leaned forward, her academic detachment dissolving. For thirty years, she’d studied historical patterns like cold facts. Now she could feel history breathing, awakening, demanding to be lived rather than merely recorded. “The historical records show contact attempts. Always during periods of technological transition. Industrial revolution, electrification, computers, now—”
“Now the old systems are failing because new ones are trying to be born.” Dada sipped his tea, watching their faces. “But birth is always painful. Especially when what is being born is threatening to what came before.”
The house trembled slightly—not an earthquake, but something deeper, more intentional. Like the earth itself was taking a breath. The wallpaper curled at the corners as though inhaling. The floorboards trembled not from impact, but from recognition.
“They’re coming up,” Maya said. It wasn’t a question.
“Some are coming up. Others…” Dada looked at Priya with infinite gentleness. “Others are being called down.”
“Called down where?”
Before he could answer, the sound began. Not the distant humming they’d heard at the library, but something closer, more immediate. Voices singing in harmony so perfect it made the teacups ring like bells.
Priya gasped, nearly dropping her cup, her body responding before her mind could catch up. Her skin flushed, pupils dilating like she was hearing something that bypassed her ears entirely and spoke directly to her nervous system. “That’s it. That’s the sound from my dreams.”
“Where is it coming from?” Maya was already moving toward the window, her organizational instincts seeking a problem to solve.
“Everywhere,” Elena said softly. “It’s coming from everywhere.”
Dada set down his tea and moved to the old wooden cabinet in the corner of the kitchen. From the bottom drawer, he pulled out a bundle wrapped in faded silk.
“Dada?” Priya watched him unwrap what looked like an ancient book, its pages yellow with age, script flowing across them in languages she couldn’t read.
“My grandfather’s journal,” he said. “Written during the last time the boundaries grew thin. 1923. He was a textile merchant, but also… how you say… a bridge-walker. Someone who could move between the worlds.”
He opened to a page marked with a pressed flower, reading aloud in his accented English: “They do not speak in words, but in memory. They do not ask to be followed, only remembered. When the earth calls, those who hear must choose—the cage they know, or the freedom they cannot imagine.”
The singing grew louder, more complex. Through the kitchen window, they could see neighbors emerging from their houses, looking around in confusion and wonder. The afternoon light had taken on a golden quality, as if filtered through honey or dreams.
“It’s happening everywhere,” Maya breathed, watching as ordinary suburban reality transformed into something mythic.
“Yes. And now we must choose.” Dada opened the journal to a page marked with a pressed flower that still held traces of color after a century. “Do we try to hold onto the old world as it dies? Or do we help birth the new one?”
Priya stood up abruptly, her tea forgotten, moving with the fluid grace of someone whose body had remembered something her mind was still catching up to. Her breathing had changed, deeper, more connected to the rhythm pulsing up from the earth. “I have to go to them.”
“I know, beta.”
“But I’m scared.”
Dada moved to her, taking her paint-stained hands in his weathered ones. “Of course you are scared. You are about to become who you really are. That is the most terrifying and wonderful thing that can happen to a person.”
The singing reached a crescendo that made the house itself seem to vibrate with joy.
“Dada,” Priya whispered, “will you come with me?”
His smile was radiant with love and infinite sadness. “My journey is different than yours, child. I am here to help others find their way. But you…” He touched her face gently. “You were always meant to go deeper.”
Outside, the singing was joined by other voices—human voices, people from the neighborhood beginning to harmonize with the underground chorus as if they’d always known the melody.
Maya and Elena exchanged glances, both feeling the pull of something vast and transformative.
“The choice,” Dada said quietly, “is always the same. Fear or love. Control or trust. The cage we know, or the freedom we cannot imagine.”
Through the window, they watched as their neighbors began walking—not running in panic, but walking with purpose toward something that called to them from beneath the familiar streets of their ordinary world.
“Time to choose,” Dada said.