Sanjay Patal–Babcock

Sanjay Patal–Babcock is a relationship of inward companionship that gradually becomes a struggle over Sanjay’s will. From childhood, Sanjay experiences Babcock as a voice and presence within him; years later, that familiar presence urges him to kill and bring victims to Babcock. The shift makes their connection more than an imagined friendship: it is the channel through which Babcock’s influence reaches Sanjay, even as Sanjay ultimately resists acting on it.

Childhood Presence

Since Sanjay was a Little in the Sanctuary, he had dreamed of a voice and a world long gone. In those dreams, a woman in a kitchen used a telephone, an object Sanjay somehow recognized despite never having known the Time Before. The visions did not feel fundamentally different from ordinary childhood dreams, but the voice inside them gave the experience a continuing identity: Babcock.

Sanjay understood Babcock as an imaginary friend, except that the friendship never ended. Babcock accompanied him through the Big Room and courtyard, at meals and at bedtime. The presence was not always expressed in words; it could feel like a separate soul living within Sanjay, with a name and voice of its own. Its language imagined their bond as a joining of two beings into something greater than either alone.

That bond first became visible to others in a circle-time lesson about friendship. When Teacher asked Sanjay to name his friends, he answered Babcock. He then corrected himself, naming Demo Jaxon as his best friend instead. The correction shows that Sanjay could conceal the relationship in ordinary company, but it did not end his private sense of Babcock’s presence.

A Companion Through Loss

Sanjay did not speak of Babcock again in the Sanctuary. Yet the presence remained as a quiet source of companionship, particularly against the slow disappearance of people he had known. Demo, Willem, and Raj were gone; many of the children from the circle had died or been taken up. Sanjay experienced time itself as a process of being gradually worn away, while Babcock stayed with him as a feeling about the world, not merely a voice in a dream.

The content of the dreams also changed. The woman in the kitchen and the vision of the Time Before still returned occasionally, but Sanjay increasingly felt that Babcock was connected to what lay ahead and to Sanjay’s place in it. He believed the Colony could not last forever and that its lights would one day go out. He had abandoned the hope that the Army would return; whatever was coming, he understood, would not be the Army. The old companionship thus persisted alongside a growing apprehension about the future, without Sanjay fully understanding what Babcock expected of him.

The Girl and the Fracture of Self

The arrival of Amy Harper Bellafonte unsettled Sanjay’s previously private bond with Babcock. He had never dreamed of the girl, or believed he had not, but now she seemed to have entered his mind. In sleeplessness, Sanjay sensed Babcock and the Many alongside her and found himself feeling like someone new and strange to himself. He had wanted peace and order, but could no longer trust that the world was as it seemed.

The experience divided his point of view: Sanjay felt as if he were seeing from within and without at once, both himself and not himself. This change matters to the relationship because Babcock’s presence no longer offers only familiar companionship. It is now entangled with the girl and the Many, and with a disturbance Sanjay cannot explain or control. Even his memories of his actions become incoherent: after leaving home intending to find Old Chou, he remembers the lights overwhelming him and finds himself later in the bushes, where Gloria asks what he has done. The account presents Babcock’s influence amid a larger rupture in Sanjay’s agency, without establishing every action that occurred in the gap.

The Demand and Its Limit

In the final dream presented here, Sanjay remembers his daughter Mausami as an infant before closing his eyes and hearing Babcock address him. He is back in the kitchen of the Time Before, where the woman and her telephone return. A knife is in Sanjay’s hand, and Babcock urges him to kill the woman and bring people to him, promising a life governed by that demand. The childhood friend has become a voice issuing commands.

Sanjay lunges, but the knife stops before reaching its target. An unseen force holds his hand, and he cannot complete the act despite straining to do so. The interruption is the decisive limit shown in the relationship: Babcock’s demand has entered Sanjay’s dream and directed his movement, but the command does not secure his obedience. The scene leaves their bond unresolved, caught between years of inward companionship and Babcock’s effort to turn that intimacy into control.