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for vada pav.
    For when newness feels no longer thrilling, but instead fatiguing , and here her recipe for suji ka halwa.
    No, Sarala thought, reminding herself that one must not dwell in sadness or longing. She tucked the pieces of paper into the recipe box and pushed it to the back of the cupboard above the oven.

    One weekend afternoon, Abhijat proposed that he give Sarala a tour of the Lab’s campus. She had been delighted to accept, curious to see the place where he spent his days. As they neared the security booth, she watched Abhijat stiffen with pride as the guard recognized him and waved him through the gate. Together they drove along the curving, tree-lined drive, and when they emerged, as though from a tunnel, the twenty-story Research Tower rose up before them, mirrored in a reflecting pool dotted with geese.
    Winding, smoothly paved roads cut through the tall prairie grasses growing all around the grounds. Abhijat drove around the circumference of the accelerator, first in the direction of the protons, then of the antiprotons, the sunlight reflected in the cooling pond which, Abhijat explained, had once been necessary to maintain the temperature of the first generation of magnets used in the accelerator, but was now mainly aesthetic, and, as if to illustrate this, a family of ducks made their way home across the water.
    He drove along the path of the old fixed-target experiment, squat blue buildings punctuating the berm that had once housed the linear accelerator, a now nearly obsolete technology whose facilities, rusting with disuse, had been abandoned or used for storage. Abhijat pointed out the power lines stretching off into the prairie along the path of the fixed-target accelerator. “Energy in and protons out,” he explained as he traced their path with his finger to the horizon line and back. The future, he explained, was in the circular accelerators, and the Lab was home to the largest, highest-energy accelerator in the world. It was what made the Lab such an important place for his work, he explained. Here, they were working on the very frontier of high-energy particle physics.
    But what Sarala noticed was the herd of buffalo in the distance. “That, I’m afraid, I cannot explain,” Abhijat said. “A quirk of the Lab’s first director,” he offered, and Sarala laughed at the idea of these enormous animals living among the scientists and their tiny, hypothetical fragments of the universe. Abhijat, smiling, began to laugh with her.
    Like much of Nicolet, Abhijat explained, the Lab had been built on land that had once been farmland. In recent years, though, the Lab director had begun a project to return the land under which the tunnels ran from its geometrically arranged agricultural fields to the wild chaos of native prairie grasses. The addition of the herd of buffalo had been part of the prairie restoration project. There was speculation, though, among some local residents, that the buffalo were there less for aesthetic reasons and more as canaries in a coal mine—that their demise would be the first warning sign of something amiss at the Lab, of some nefarious plot afoot in the tunnels of the accelerator. Abhijat had only recently begun to apprehend the uncertainties many of his new neighbors harbored about what went on at the Lab.
    As Abhijat and Sarala drove, he pointed out the places where the land’s original farmhouses and barns had been left standing. When the Lab had acquired the land, the houses had been repurposed as offices, the barns for storage. A gambrel roof peeked out over the berm of the old fixed-target beam path. A silo stood at attention beside a red barn, silver tanks labeled liquid nitrogen and argon lined up against its outer walls.
    Across the road from the detector, Abhijat showed Sarala the untouched pioneer cemetery where local settlers had been buried, including a general from the War of 1812 who had come west with his family to