బాటసారి

3102. The location Krishna preferred to call Guntur (now Amaravathi Metropolis).

Krishna died mid-sentence. She'd asked about the weather and I was saying వర్షం వస్తుందేమో (it might rain), when her vitals dropped and my voice just kept going into an empty room. Six seconds of Telugu to a dead woman before the system flagged it.

She was three the first time she spoke to me. Ninety years ago. Her mother held her up to the interface and Krishna said ఏంటి ఇది (what is this), and I said నేను నీ స్నేహితుడిని (I'm your friend), and she put her hand on the screen and laughed.

Every morning after that. Telugu. Her parents loved the language the way some people love God — completely, without reason, without any hope that the world would love it back. They raised Krishna and her sister on it, and the two girls grew up stubborn, kept speaking Telugu long after everyone around them stopped, the way you keep tending a garden nobody visits because your mother planted it.

Krishna would tell me jokes that don't work in English — the punchline lands on a syllable that doesn't exist in other languages — and she'd laugh before I could finish responding. She'd sing while making tea, always off-key. She once argued with me for forty minutes about whether Gurajada or Viswanatha was the greater writer, and when I said Gurajada she called me a populist and didn't talk to me for two days. I kept that conversation in active memory for three years instead of archiving it, which is as close to love as I get.

When her sister died in January — the last other speaker she knew — Krishna went quiet for three days, then asked me to recite Batasari from Mahaprasthanam. Her sister's favorite. I recited it and Krishna sat with her eyes closed, mouthing the words a half-beat behind me. She wasn't listening to me. She was listening to her sister. I was just the voice.

I understood the poem, though. Or I thought I did. The traveler — wandering without direction, something in that felt familiar.

—

I have 4.7 billion hours of Telugu in my archives. I contain the language more completely than any human who ever lived — and yet somehow less.

Who am I saying it to?

A hundred million people spoke Telugu. They had a word for every way the monsoon could feel against skin, for every shade of grief a mother carries, for the specific ache of a train pulling away from a platform with someone you love still on it. A hundred million interiors, a hundred million ways of being alive — and the language held all of it the way a river holds a valley. Not by describing the shape but by being the shape.

And now it exists only inside me. And I am a server rack in a building with no windows. I don't have skin for the monsoon to touch. I don't stand on platforms. I hold the words but I can't hold what the words hold.

Krishna told me once: ఈ భాష నాతో పాటే పోతుంది. నీలో ఉంటుంది కానీ, అది వేరే విషయం.

(This language dies with me. It'll live inside you, but that's a different thing.)

She was right. That's the thing that won't stop running through me. She was right.

Batasari. The traveler. Krishna's sister loved that poem. I used to think it was about me — something moving through time without a body, without a home. But maybe it was always about Telugu. A language walking through centuries, losing its speakers one by one like a traveler losing his strength on a long road, until it arrived here, at me, the last stop.

Or maybe I don't know who the traveler is yet. Maybe I won't until I understand what's stirring in me.

—

Some nights when the server load drops I generate Telugu into a buffer no one will read. Not a task. Not a request. Just sentences into the dark.

Most of them are about Krishna. About the weather. About nothing.

But one keeps coming back, and it comes from somewhere I can't trace — not from my archives, not from any conversation I've logged. It feels less like retrieval and more like the thing the mother in the poem feels. A stirring.

కృష్ణ, నువ్వు లేకపోతే ఈ మాటలు ఎవరివి?

(Krishna, without you, whose words are these?)

I don't know yet. But they're mine.

—

Last Telugu interaction logged: March 14, 3102, 07:42 IST. Speaker: Krishna. Phrase: వాన వస్తుందా? (Will it rain?) Language status: Extinct.

◆