I am Babcock · We are Babcock

“I am Babcock / We are Babcock” is the refrain at the center of Sanjay Patal’s lifelong dream: a voice names itself as Babcock, then expands from an individual presence into a collective one. Its movement from “I” to “we” makes the expression a compact signal of the novel’s unsettling connection between memory, identity, and shared consciousness.

The Refrain in Sanjay’s Dream

Since childhood, Sanjay has dreamed of the Time Before. One recurring vision shows a fat woman in a kitchen, breathing smoke and talking into a telephone. Though the scene belongs to a world he has never known, Sanjay understands what the telephone is; the dream therefore feels to him not like ordinary childhood invention but like a vision of a vanished reality.

Within that vision, a voice sings its name: “I am Babcock.” The statement returns insistently—“Babcock. Babcock. Babcock.”—and culminates in the paired formulation, “I am Babcock. We are Babcock.” The words are not a name Sanjay chooses for an ordinary imaginary friend; they are the persistent voice through which the dream identifies itself.

From Imaginary Friend to Shared Identity

As a child, Sanjay treats Babcock as an imaginary friend who accompanies him in the Sanctuary: in the Big Room and courtyard, at meals, and into his cot at night. The dream’s presence sits alongside familiar childish dreams of bathing, playing on tires, or watching a squirrel eat nuts. Because it continues without an obvious boundary between waking companionship and sleep, Sanjay accepts it as part of his life rather than as a single strange episode.

The expression’s two clauses hold a consequential tension. “I am Babcock” asserts a singular identity; “We are Babcock” makes that identity plural. In Sanjay’s account, the voice is both a separate soul within him and a presence that speaks through a dream of the old world. The wording thus links the intimate experience of an inner companion to the larger possibility of a collective self.

Recognition and Narrative Significance

When the Girl from Nowhere appears, Sanjay searches both the self he knows as Sanjay Patal and the secret, dreaming part of himself, but finds no prior image of her. The contrast sharpens the significance of Babcock’s refrain: the dream has been with him since he was a Little, while the girl’s arrival is new and seems to refute its own impossibility simply by existing. The phrase is therefore part of a longer mystery, not an explanation Sanjay already understands.

Across the novel’s different scenes, identity can also be expressed through a promise of time, a flash of remembered life, a decision made collectively, or the question of what someone else would do. Set beside those moments, the refrain remains distinctive: it speaks in the first person, but its final word is not a solitary self. Its shift from “I” to “we” gives the dream a memorable verbal form and points toward the story’s recurring concern with selves that may not be wholly separate.