Mudita

They had applied for the same grant, which was foolish, and both of them had known it was foolish, and neither had been willing to be the one who withdrew.

Twelve applicants. One grant. Two years of work in a lab in Pune, and Devika and Sameer had spent eleven months of it at adjacent benches making increasingly baroque jokes about it, in the way people do when a thing is genuinely serious.

The envelopes came on a Friday, to the department, and Radha from admin put them in the pigeonholes at about eleven, and by 11:04 the entire floor knew they were there and nobody would go and look.