Antar shot a quick glance at the 'Time of Conversion' prompt, at the bottom of the three-dimensional wraparound image. It said 5.25 p.m. Antar gasped: that could only mean that someone had started loading the Sim Vis system at about the time that Ava stumbled upon Murugan's ID card.

Now Murugan was standing in the lobby of a large auditorium and two women were running up the stairs. They came closer and suddenly Antar recognized Tara except that she was in a sari. She was talking to Maria who was wearing a sari too.

He felt a cool soft touch upon his shoulder and his hand flew up to take off the Sim Vis headgear. But now there was a restraining hand upon his wrist, and a voice in his ear, Tara 's voice, whispering: 'Keep watching; we're here; we're all with you.'

There were voices everywhere now, in his room, in his head, in his ears, it was as though a crowd of people were in the room with him. They were saying: 'We're with you; you're not alone; we'll help you across.'

He sat back and sighed like he hadn't sighed in years.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to Raj Kumar Rajendran of the Department of Computer Sciences, Columbia University for his advice on certain details. I am especially indebted to Alka Mansukhani of the Department of Microbiology, New York University Medical Center: her ideas and support were essential to the writing of this book.

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh is one of India ’s best-known writers. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, and The Hungry Tide. His most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, is the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy. Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel, which was published in 1986. The Circle of Reason won the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of France 's top literary awards, and The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award & the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001. The Hungry Tide won the Hutch Crossword Book Prize in 2006. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy.