She picked up her phone to text her father: "Baba, do you have Abba Jan's notes for the 4th semester too?"

Ayesha was a Computer Science student. Her world was Python and JavaScript, not qafiya and radif . But her minor was Urdu, a quiet rebellion against her father who said, "Learn coding. Poetry won't pay rent."

The third semester. Dabistan-e-Delhi and Dabistan-e-Lucknow – the competing schools of Urdu poetry. The Delhi style: stark, philosophical, steeped in the pain of a crumbling empire. The Lucknow style: ornate, lyrical, obsessed with the craft of the word.

Below it, in her grandfather’s margin notes, was a translation into a mix of English and Hindi, and a single line in his sharp handwriting: "This is what recursion feels like in human form. The call that keeps referring to itself without a base case."

Ayesha stopped breathing.