In 1968 Madras, Mariamma and her classmates enter the Red Fort anatomy block under the Latin motto meaning “The Dead shall inform the Living.” She notes colonial relics now claimed by India, uneasy attenders watching, and feels Big Ammachi’s comforting presence as she carries fresh grief for Baby Mol and Big Ammachi. She silently recommits to the quest her grandmother set for her.

Inside the formalin-bright dissection hall, Professor P. K. Krishnamurthy bellows for attention, singles out Chinnaswamy Arcot Gajapathy, and uses him to dramatize the creed: the cadaver is their teacher. He makes Chinnah shake the cadaver’s hand, then uses Chinnah’s body to teach anatomical position and relational terms. Mariamma steadies her roommate Anita and receives a “bone box.” She recalls studying Gray’s Anatomy and her unusual gift for reconstructing three-dimensional structures from images.

The class moves to the lecture hall, watched by portraits of past white Heads of Anatomy. Dr. Jamsetji Rustomji Cowper, the Indian HOA, arrives gently, wins them with humility about the soul and certainty about development, and begins embryology. He draws ambidextrously, charting fertilization to blastocyst with clarity.

Cowper then models neurulation with a chalk duster cloth, forming the neural tube and “primitive gut,” a moment that enthralls the class. Mariamma imagines herself as the embryo of Philipose and Elsie, feeling awe and connection. Cowper muses on ontogeny echoing evolution and formally welcomes them.

Leaving the Red Fort, Mariamma holds both the embodied cadaver-teacher and Cowper’s reverence for life’s origins in mind. With Ammachi’s presence as solace, she feels her purpose—to illuminate and one day cure the family’s Water Condition—ignite anew.