The Students and Teacher Unions Struggle in Jawaharlal Nehru Univeristy.

The Winter of Our Discontent

After Prof Jagadesh Kumar took over the JNU Campus as VC, the scholarly community had quite a few shocks. To tell the truth, every day was a shock. Almost as soon as he had come in, some extreme left wing students decided to test the temperature. So they invited some Kashmiri youth, mourning the death of their cultural hero, Burhan Wani, and  they danced around a bonfire, letting off their sorrow and loss with clapping and rants. Now, among young people, this can be a sign of normalcy, but the paid right wing press swooped in and complicated the case by  taping fictitious footage, so clumsily, that it was easily recognizable. Then they accused JNU students collectively of being traitors to India.

Every time someone says Pehan Chooth   or sister fucker, on the streets, he should be arrested by the same count, since the truth value of abuse and curses are by the same count to be authenticated.

Once the JNUSU President was taken prisoner and bundled off in a jeep to jail, and then others too, who were seen to be equally incendiary, the police arrived in campus as if this was their rightful home, and the tv crew also set up outside the gates, filming endlessly. The years passed with great difficulty, as most of the time, 6500 students and 550 teachers were constantly protesting, while fulfilling their academic obligations as well as they could.  The right wing teachers actually condoned by their silence,  the beating up of a Muslim  PhD student, Najeeb, who never was seen again, and whose mother has become an honorary resident of the kerbstones of JNU, now that the steps to VC office are out of bounds to demonstrators.

The rightwing administration and right wing wardens and right wing Vice Chancellor were given a clean chit by the CBI, who maintained that the missing student Najeeb had joined the Islamic State! We were already living in Amit Shah and Modi’s  Gujeratified India, where Muslims are abhorred, and everything is done to make Aliens of them. The democratic principles of India are not so hard to undo,  for apparently one samosa  a day with bajrang dal satsang, is sufficient to include or exclude citizens,  and so the protests by intellectuals who honor the Indian Constitution, continued.

 Now in November 2019, we have reached the ultimate culmination of the preceding months, which have brought us to such desperation, that the teachers union supports the student shut down. Many are alumni, who have known halcyon days, and   Professor Sapori, the previous VC, is remembered with affection because the students never protested during his term, as they do  continually now. Prof Sapori was always available to students and teachers, used a five rupee ball pen to sign classified papers and petitions.  Roland Barthes talks about hearing and listening, and Prof Sapori,  always heard, and listened to students. He once read a paper  to us on Scientific Collaborations, and engaged his audience with his statistical evidence that there could be 100 collaborators on a 30 page journal paper, as API points would go to each. Now the mediocrity of Prof Jagadesh Kumar can be seen in his ability to see Education as a money making project, and his illegal statute breaking ploys are recorded at every turn by the press and the academic community in JNU.

Each one of us can  individually chronicle the odd mess we have landed in. Why else would there be demonstrations every day in the streets, where 7000 students regardless of party affiliations turn up.  Each story is one of terrifying proportions. No tribunal can collate now the degree of violence that has been perpetuated on the community of scholars in JNU who have lived peacefully writing their books and research papers, supervising their students, and taking their classes. 48 teachers were chargesheeted for peacefully demonstrating, picked out purposely by fellow colleagues who being RSS members had been trained to do what the Master said. Anyone who remembers the photo of Narendra Modi in khaki culottes as a young man, will balk at the idea that Pol Pot and he could have any resemblances. Yet, the image of pellets hitting small children in Kashmir, so that honeymooners can visit Sri Nagar fills one with shock. Lies  now have become the common signs of the induction of the common people into this world where Ram Lalla rules, but children die continuously. The statistics of loss are hard to come to terms with. The JNU students are striving to make education the symbol of liberation, autonomy and choice. The Humanities have been vilified because the principle of free choice is seen to be an impossible goal. Money is the only symbol of success, and the Scientists believe that the poor have no rights because they could not even hope to climb the ladder to prosperity. Such casteist people say,  If you don’t have money, then don’t  come back next semester. If you don’t have money to pay your hostel mess bill, then don’t eat.

So the students  symbolically shut down the University, because they and  the teachers too, and the 4000 clerks will all soon be without tasks or jobs, if the present conduct of the Vice Chancellor is condoned. If they could shut down the Planning Commission, why not JNU? Is that what the people want? We will know soon.

Multiple Sclerosis* The Benefits of Yoga and Meditation

Yoga and Meditation

These two, yoga and meditation, are indivisible, since even those who are secular, enter into deep states of reflection, while engaging in yoga. The day begins well when one is able to contemplate, and do one’s exercises simultaneously. The energy that is released is substantial, the mind is calm, one lets go of all the negativism that might have accumulated because of the disturbing events all of us are constantly exposed to. Best of all, the predatory instincts we have, as human beings, constantly engaged in competition with others, is muted.

Yoga helps to build up immunity, as our nervous systems are affected very badly by the noise pollution, the contaminated processed food that we all eat, and the way in which we live our lives, generally without stoppers. We move, as metropolitan citizens from one excitement to another, often stopping to  merely draw breath, before we begin another excruciatingly exhausting assignment. The carbon trail we leave behind is as reminiscent of our own absorption of it, as we stand next to aeroplane exhausts while disembarking, as frequently as we get stranded next to a spewing truck or bus or SUV in traffic jams, which last up to ten minutes at a time. How do we get rid of this carbon which accumulates in our blood, always making us yawn through the day, as we work endlessly. A good diet helps, and the free radicals are washed out by our drinking quantities of  water and eating well washed salads and fresh fruit.

Yoga makes us, through its initial emphases on breathing exercises, spill out the air which is locked in our lungs, and by concentrating on the breathing, as we pull air in and push it out, it clears our brain. The concentration that is evident, as we do pranayama is probably the first step to meditation, since our mind and body becomes integrated in this preliminary exercise.

The integration of body and mind, which yoga brings to us is it’s greatest benefit. As we proceed with the exercises that our guru teaches us, we find them appropriate to our age and physical condition. The guru selects exercises that are necessary for our well being. Even in a group setting, where there are people of different ages, it is the guru’s wisdom that allows us to participate in some, and not in others. If our age and physical circumstance does not permit us to do some exercises, we should not feel incompetent. I had an uncle  in Kerala, who did head stands at the age of 90, and he always did his yoga and meditation before leaving for a twelve hour day at his shop, where he had been a spice merchant since his early youth. So age, by itself is not a determinant, but for those of us, who suffer from multiple sclerosis, the paralysis maybe so subtle, that even the simplest of exercises, such as lifting one’s spine while lying on the floor, may take some time.

Multiple sclerosis is a neurological illness, which is neither genetic nor infectious. However, living in polluted cities, eating food which has been loaded with pesticides does affect one’s chances of developing it. The similarities with rheumatoid arthritis, and with diabetes is compelling. Many of the symptoms of MS, which is the slow or rapid loss of faculties, and the deadness of nerves in the brain and spine may result in blindness, loss of hearing and ofcourse, paralysis. MS patients live with the dread of these, waking up in the morning, finding an eye inflamed, or ears blocked, or a body part stiff, without apparent cause. Yoga and meditation calm the body, and the mind. Shava Asana, like Pranayama, are excellent for returning the body to its accustomed  tranquil space. For the galloping form of MS, where loss of limbs is immediate, meditation is calming, since the body accepts the context in which it has been placed. Most MS patients, whether it is the slow or rapid form of degradation, know that time is of the greatest essence, that what they have may well be taken away from them by the end of the day. They suffer exhaustion, which is almost continuous, and ofcourse, fear, despair, anxiety. Care givers find their lack of attention to every day tasks, or their hypersensitivity to these, annoying in turn. They also suffer from the need to be attended to immediately. Meditation helps in controlling this need to be understood and attended to, as often, caregivers are busy with other tasks.

Yoga builds up those muscles which are in danger of atrophy due to the lack of blood  circulation in such patients. Even flexing hands and feet, while in bed, or at the computer, can go a long way in releasing the blood, where it has jammed or coagulated. Many times, MS patients wake up, in the middle of the night, with some limb gone completely dead on them. Ayurvedic treatment is a great boon, and sometimes, the patient emerges completely free of pain for a couple of months. The food that helps MS patients most are fruit and salads,  cooking in sesame oil. Ofcourse staying clear of butter, meat, chocolates, cakes, pickles and oily food does help in slowing the onset of illness. Since heat is the catalyst, those foods which are heating, trigger off MS episodes, or aggravate existing conditions. The heat rash and the inflamed eye is the first symptom. If the patient reads the sign that the body is overheated, and attends to it, then the chances are that she or he will work to cooling the metabolism down. Some are allergic to dairy products, some to meat. Each patient has to find out which is the catalyst to the exacerbation of their condition. Yoga, Ayurveda, Meditation and Diet are the most important in tailoring the palliative measures useful to controlling the disease, as it’s tumultuous appearance disturbs everyone equally, without being very visible. MS patients, before paralysis sets in, look like everyone else, but deep within they are trying very hard to lead normal lives, and they experience the world much more dramatically than others. Homeopathy has great remedial doses for each symptom, as it appears differentially for every patient. It is tailor made to the person according to the situation in which he or she finds himself or herself to be in, at any given time. The odd thing about MS is that every week, the patient finds a new body part is acting up, and standardized allopathic medicines like cortisone, or interferon, are not equally available to all patients, and come with their own side effects, and are not custom made to the individual and unique nature of each afflicted person. Yoga, essentially, is a preventive system of therapy, which handles the pitta in the person’s metabolism with it’s ability to understand that our relationship to the cosmos is constantly being divined by our attitude to it.

The Metro (Novella 2019 Susan Visvanathan copyright)

The Metro

The crowds spilling out are successful people with jobs, the men wearing ironed clothes, the women in synthetics. The young people are rushing to some exam or the other, they feel that if they pass this exam, then the world will open out in its myriad hues. They don’t look up because they don’t imagine that the scenery will change, for outside the sky is always red, and the winds hot. The moon turned black many decades ago, and the sunlight dimmed just yesterday. Today, they are in the underworld, and the sky seems far away, the neon lights are also dim. There is no tomorrow, the sirens wail. There has been another incident, another life lost. The stations are dense, the tunnels will take them out into radial roads, and all life is lived underground.

The storm begins to rise, the dust particles falling into the eyes, the clean ironed lines of trousers, the shine of nylon disappearing as the fine dust flies about. I live in a small house in one of the outer streets, where a single cactus still survives. Birds have died, and the caterpillars have become so outsize, that all remaining foliage becomes shredded even before they sprout. It was the year that we had acid rain. It fell on all of us, creating a specific pattern on our skins as it fell. We knew that if we opened our eyes, we would be blinded, and we knew that our tongues would be serrated, as if we had consumed hot pepper corns fried in oil. The world seemed no longer home, so we covered our faces and limped home, applying balm on our skins wherever they had been burnt. In the mines the old lords still extracted every ounce of metal, and the slaves lived on saliva and the wandering microbes that still inhabited the earth. We knew that our days were numbered, but no one counted them anywhere. Children were born scarred in the womb, and mothers died as they gave birth to disfigured beings. Dragon seeds of war had been planted everywhere, and the perfect ones, born without blemish, ran in and out of the ghoulish metro trains, which dispelled the crowds with a clang of doors.

In my own house, of course, the moon still visited, quite dreary, an image of someone who had once lived, and was now extinct. I knew its coming was a sign of my own madness, my nostalgia, my foreknowledge of things which had once existed and now had died. Why did I look out for the moon? Why, for no reason. All humans remembered the moon, because their mother’s bodies had catapulted to its call, along with the cries of the gulls as the sea waves receded. None of us had seen the silver sea for decades, it had gone under a billion volts of dead rivers, its own saltiness now defined only with the brackishness of radioactive river water.

I got out, off the metro at just the right moment, where the tunnels had become like a capillary of veins. I jumped into the crowd, and was wafted by them leaving my fears, I allowed myself to be sifted by the armed guards into the right avenues. I didn’t need to show my card anymore, because the wiring on my wrist activated the routes I had to take, and the scanners immediately swung into action, creating the right kind of leverage. I no longer felt that I was a prisoner of the system. I had even begun to enjoy the rush of electricity that charged into my veins. It was the right amount. A little more, and I could be electrocuted. I knew that, the interrogators knew it. Should I be marked by some casual officer, who did not share my physiognomy, racism it was called in the old days, there was every chance that I would be catapulted into the beyond.

I thought of the beyond almost every day, the still heart, the flat line of brain on machines, where picture book nurses would then call the family doctor, who would sign on the dotted line, saying that I could be sent into auto mode. That meant flying off without a body, and hoping that the bright light would encompass one into the petals of new flowers. Those bright lights were indeed hard to face, one went off into the first gloom and then the next.

Goodbye, world, family, humans, machines, red dust, black and empty moon. Where could one go without a body? It was too hard a question to ask. I would leave it for another day. The small yellow flowers in the red sky were actually stars. I looked at them everyday. When my twisted mind looked at the red sky, I actually saw blue. I lived in the past, it was not permitted. I had to be moving forward like everyone else.

Sometimes in the crevices of the tracks small plants grew, not dependent on the light of the sun, but able to grow, synthesise, sprout leaves without buds in the harsh electric lights which sprung up every few metres. They attracted no insects, not even the large caterpillars which were the most commonly known relic of the past. We were shattered by every jolt of the passing trains in our tiny flats, which like the plants that grew anonymously were in the trusteeship of the electric lights, which took on a strobe like quality whenever there were electricity fluctuations. Quite often, I found myself living in swathes of time, which were unknown to my neighbours for most of them were decades younger than me. Old age is that ephemeral thing, allowed to persist like a common disease if the state permitted it. The real truth was that none of us were able to live in the tempo of the present. We rocked back into the colourful days of our own youth, and that was seen to be an immensely destructive emotion. The vigilantes knew by the glazed look of the old, that they were not keeping time with the galaxies of the present, and that we were again captives of clear blue skies and opaque water in rushing streams. They would jostle us whenever we reached that state, because surely, surely, with our head in the air, we would miss our stations and reach avenues of time and space beyond our comprehension. Everything faltered in us, every time we made a mistake, our watches become disoriented, our tags failed us. If we went into a time zone too distant from our own, we could become electrocuted by our own emotions. It is not that we had nannies, it is just that people followed us all the time, wishing us to return to our rightful places.

Move on, Move on!

I am not sure, am I at the right station? Please can you look at my identity card?

Move on!

Sir, is there an enquiry booth?

Somewhere in the babble of similar disjointed speech and aching limbs, a hand would suddenly reach over the milling heads, and someone I knew, would point me to the returning train, and yes, I had got off at the wrong stop and would be lost for ever if I did not move fast.

The lights always blinded, the dark was always corrosive, the air was hot, since the air conditioners were pitched not to cool and calm us down but to actually relive the heat outside, so that we could acclimatise to the environment. Everything was done to make us accept our world. We were not expected to control nature, we were not expected to make our lives comfortable or even livable. We were here to prove that we could inhabit that dusty planet with the veneer of water, a thin fragile coating on which one day we would be inhabitants returned to our original home.

My house was always dark, with the vague roseate glow which came from the streetlight as it strew the cobbled streets with pretty scraps of yellow light. I looked out, and dreamed of the slice of moon that was our due, but no longer shone on us. As night came on, the dusty air would part, and the motes would circle like planets in ether in the streaming electric light. Strangers passed by my window, wearing their gas masks or their visors. Curiosity had died a tired death many decades previously, and we no longer cared what the other thought. My companion was a young woman who had been deputised by the state. She had her own thoughts, and did not intervene unless there was a crisis. She called me Mom, and lived as if she was an independent tenant. Her silence pleased me, for nothing was expected of me. I was grateful for her kindness, a technician of time, who tied my tags just so, wired me up for travel, took off my boots when I came in from the cold. Her name was Anjali but I called her Angel. She did not mind, her smile was effervescent. She was just thrilled with life, with the cold comfort of our cerebral days on planet earth. I found her yearningly looking toward the sky just as I did, but all we got was cement hanging over our heads. She did not feel lost, stranded, hopeless as I did. She had no longings other than to leave the metro station - housing that we were all forced into, by the eye-ball signatures we entered as we left the transport stand. But where could she go, the officials had placed her with me, saying that our charts showed that she would be a compatible care giver. She smiled brightly at me and asked if she knew the man who had shown some interest in marrying her, and would I have place for both of them?

“Show me his picture, and I will tell you immediately. My memory is good, I can tell with one glance, if I know your suitor or not. “

He was a small man, rather sweet looking, with a saturnine gaze. “Of course, I knew him,” I said, smiling. We had been colleagues at an art gallery. He looked after the guests, and I kept accounts for the owners of the place. We also ran a café together, which we managed with our other duties. He is a nice man, I said.

“So can he live with us?

“If you have no objection to sharing a room, certainly, he can live here.”

“We would have no objections, at all, Ma’am!”

 I looked at her with amusement. The delight was so huge, it wrapped itself around her like a warm glow. “And what will you live on?” was my unspoken thought. The girl was like ebony, her skin so dark, it gleamed in the shadowed light of the ever luminescent tube lights that lit the narrow circular pathways of our hooded city. She was tall, thin, and completely at ease. I enjoyed her company, though I often felt that she was looking at me carefully, a little too carefully. When I asked her the reason for her protracted stare, she would laugh and deny it completely. I knew that she lied easily, because there were times, that her eyes became catatonic, glazed, empty of expression. That was the way, she blocked off her thoughts and became impenetrable. I was keen to meet her boyfriend, but she said, she would bring him home closer to the day of their union. Was she thinking of my place as her home? I was startled by that. But of course home is where we live, where we keep our things, where our footsteps lead us.

When she was around, this companion, social worker, nurse, official…. I could no longer remember her true status, the atmosphere was always bright, even chatty, one might call it. It was never forced, except of course when she disappeared into her lonely tunnel of thoughts. I would sometimes shake her gently when it happened, and she would reappear from her trance, looking as if her view was fragmented. There was nothing cruel about her, ever, she was absent for a moment or two, that was all.

“I will put up bright curtains, and buy some flowers. Let me tidy your book case today!”

“Not a bad idea at all. What would you like to eat? We have some roots, sweet potatoes I think they called them in the old days. And of course mushrooms.”

“I like potatoes. Is there any fruit?”

“Yes, we have some dates and figs, which I bought when the sun still shone on the planet. They have kept well. It’s hard to imagine that once they are over, we will have forgotten what fruit was.”

“I am sure they will be able to have orchards on electric light in another couple of decades, then we will be able to eat again. These are only the transition years.”

We stared at each other for a moment, then I went back to putting photographs in chronological order. There were thousands of them, all collected in shoe boxes.  The state had given me the extraordinary privilege of working with these when I was most in need of money, and had written many letters to the powers that be, asking for work.

Each of them was of postcard size, and had been taken by different people.
The idea was to provide a certain classification by country, where the colour coding would provide an idea of the time of day when it was taken. It was of archival interest only, since the general public would not have access to them, but after filling many forms, and waiting in many queues it would be possible for an occasional researcher to find an answer for something he or she was looking for. Suppose for instance, they wanted to know how many times the colour red was found in the old world, and in what objects, or why the colour yellow was associated with cheerfulness, and summer sunshine, whether in flowers, clothes, or shoes, the photographs would provide the answer. The question had to be specific, the answer general.

Once I had come across a couple, the man was gentle looking, and the woman equally so, both lived in the tropics, and they kept reappearing in photograph after photograph. Who was their vigilante? It was very clear that they were being followed. It seemed as if the one who wished to impress their image on carbon was someone who was near and dear. It was not clear whom he desired more, the photos had a clarity and an intimacy about them. I was interrupted in my thoughts by my young companion who asked me if I would like to go out for a while.

I had no desire to see the artificial moon that the authorities hung out with its painted smile. It shocked me that people actually thought that it made up for destruction by bombing which took away everything that made us human. Why would they want us to go out at all? The girl however looked happy.

“You go,  I am busy today.”

“But it is compulsory for us to be seen enjoying the evening.”

“Oh, that’s for young people like you. We don’t have those pressures.”

“Come, Auntie! It’s something which we need to do together. I only get paid every month if I tow you out, willingly or unwillingly. I can get the wheel chair if you like, we only need to pay a small amount by token.”

“The wheel chair!”

“Yes, it is comfortable. If only you would try it out. I think we should today.”

There was something menacing about her. I thought it’s so hard for young people to keep their jobs, and something which looks like charity, or state endorsed social work, is actually a “job”. I smiled at her, and she was suddenly comforted, and it was as if she was the dependent. The care giver had become the dependent. Elation coursed through me. I was the reason she got food to eat, had a home to live in, had the possibility to marry. My immense powerfulness was as if it was the reason that the earth still careened around a non-existent sun. She began to escort me outside, and I knew that her sense of assurance came from being registered once more in the official log book of duties daily carried out by young adults pursuing a career in Life Insurance.

Every time Stella (I often thought of myself in the third person, allowing for a certain detachment in telling my story) went out with Anjali, she was startled by the beauty of their world. Though they lived in fear, yet, in the underground caverns of the earth, there was still a memory of galactic time, the sonorous nature of the dark, punctuated by the eerie whistle of the metro trains, as they shunted hour after hour, without break. They were with out drivers, decades ago the administrators had taken away the soulless concentration of driving the underground trains, and replaced humans with automation, which worked well. No one thought much about it, even when Stella was young, she remembered that a woman had pointed it out to her, and she had shrugged, merely shrugged. Man or Machine, it was emotions that made us human, she had thought, and those without machines, they belong to the world of the damned and the becalmed. They, the humans, would be pounded out, left to die, no one would have anything in common with them. It was in essence, the oligarchy of the meek and the composite, those who spoke one language, and lived one dream which was bleakly posed. “How to make the Habitable Uninhabitable, and the Uninhabitable Habitable”. The Greeks had a word for it, Midas, but here we just lived as we did, by the monosyllable of time, where nothing existed but our need for thought.

We walked silently back, or rather Anjali did, her heels clicking with a simple staccato beat rather like a heart. I was contented imagining the stars, the planets, the whirr of moths by the old street lights. We never allowed the State to interfere with our thoughts, and though they had digital archives of our feelings, emotions and dreams, they never quite admitted that they could manipulate us with those. We were wired up to the hilt, internally and externally, but other than the name tags, which allowed us to move in and out of determined zones, we were not really visible as automatons. Of course, it’s clear, we had emotions, we were not automats, robots as they called them in the old days. Tactility was one of the last instincts to go, and we watched each other for the flutter of eyelashes, the tensing of muscles or the clenching of fists.

When we reached back to the square where I lived, the metro lines curving to accommodate the street lights and the odd bench, I found I was out of breath. It was fear. I thought of the young man who would be making his home with us, an artist by temperament, and very good looking too. I remembered from our companionate working days that he was rather loud in his laugh, a forced laugh. It made everyone understand that he felt it would be a wall against his introverted self to project what he was not. Laughter is like a veil, it hides our torment, our sense of worthlessness, it can come bellowing out of us, or snicker quietly behind the hand. I dreaded that part of his personality. For the rest, I had no problem that he would be sleeping with my aid, and together, the house would burst with a certain sunny quality that both had. We had no sun, but we remembered sunshine, and still warmed to the digital reconstructions which so often came our way.

Somewhere, there was a silvery light which echoed the moon, returned to us when we least expected it. It was there, when we woke up at night, thirsty, hot, baffled, a bit like a lizard’s tail that slaps the ground as it lies severed. The moonlight was eerie, full of stops and starts, and then one realised, it was the light from the metro windows. The trains were silent, no long drawn out whistling, no sense of going anywhere, for after all, they only went round and round the desolate tracks. There were no buildings, no monuments, no histories. Information was carried in us, when we died, and were electrocuted to ashes, our memories en bloc were fed into another human. There was nothing frightening about it, because we ourselves knew that childbirth had become another fiction, another way of thinking about something that would never regenerate biologically. Decades had passed since in vitro had become the only way to give birth. It was not test tubes, it was cloning that won the day. I had insisted that I be buried, so trees would grow on me, and everyone looked away shiftily, knowing that the warp lay in my recurring memory codes that placed me in an old weft of time.

I often referred to myself in the third person, Stella, as if that would cover up for my lapses, as if I need not be responsible for them. “That Stella!” I would croon to myself, as I went to sleep, remembering every event that happened. It was so important to do that, with words, and with images. The memory was replenished by the retelling. My laugh often rang out into the night, and sometimes, I talked. Anjali, with her youth and the huge work load that she carried every day, did not puzzle about this, because she normally had her earphones on. Even when she tended to me, as she did now, edging the chair carefully over the curb, she was singing softly to herself. Sometimes the earplugs fell out, and in the static I could hear the music of the 70s, the 1970s, as they called it so long ago! How pleasurable, Bob Marley,  Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles, Jethro Tull, Cat Stevens, Englebert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, Bruce Springsteen, I could go on and on……She would plug them back, and the moment was gone, we were back in 2022.

 Look at it this way, they had told us, when they shifted us down into the metros, that we were the survivors, and we would live in the stations and basements and yes, even inside the underground trains. They told us that while the new subterranean city was being built, the plan was to lift the earth or what remained of it, on to a giant cable and we would be flung further away from the black hole of the sun, and the diminished, no, the eclipse of the moon. It didn’t happen that way. We all lived underground, and that became our home. Occasionally, we would hear that Gaia had appeared, and flung some stable station half way across the world into the sea. Sizzling and steaming that section of earth ran into the sea, the people with it.

I was never very worried, since for more than a decade, the question of the world to come had been settled through our continuity, by cloning, and the mesmerising space of our memories, congealed in wiring that matched our nerves, pulsated with them, mimicked them. What was there to fear? Fear was for those who had an imagination, who could think about the future, who had hopes, aspirations, lived in a bubble of time. I presumed that our generation, old, yet full of the memories of a century or more, were bedecked with our sense of laughter, pride, vulnerability. We were indeed human, not yet cloned, still present with our being as God given, rather than Science given. We were the first generation survivors of the world which was raped, harvested, devastated, reborn, reinvested. We knew the past, not as refurbished by tech, but by our bodies’ experience of it.

We were inside the cavern of the buildings that housed my two room flat. There was no kitchen, all food appeared through the machine that was placed in each room, with an incinerator by its side. It would be appropriate for the age and status of each person who thumbed their identity into the technology. It would be translated to chefs who believed that it was their destiny to turn the home fires of their clients into edible matter, a computer program which could be reproduced in the working routines of the next day.

The fire would burn an electric orange, the dishes would be placed, the food would be piped into the plates, hot, bubbling, nutritious, even colourful. Industrial piping was successful, rust free, and if clients were not pleased with the dreadful regularity of the menu, they had no one to complain to. Anjali pushed my wheel chair with a little venom over the ridge and it was her ribs which were jolted, mine had been replaced with a viscous plastic, many decades ago. Unlike the artificial or cadaver replacements, the plastic which was generated from flat broad computers to be found in every house were ever so convenient. Along with limbs, one could print them out according to need. I never even had to strain, I knew the zones by their colour, not by their number, and so had become efficient at replacing those of my body parts which had taken too much strain. The blood swirling was still my own. The bioplastic anatomical recreations were as eternal as the soul.

Chapter 2

The waterlilies spun out in incandescent pink. In the middle of the water, was a tree, grown by the gift of winds and winged seeds. Somewhere, bees buzzed, tiny, brown, ephemeral. The honey from Neem trees was mildly tinged with bitterness, too subtle for the ordinary palate, which preferred the adulteration by cane sugar, the honey clotting at the dregs. People came from all over the state to buy sarees, gold,  and to eat in restaurants. No one knew the price of things, they just paid whatever was asked.

When it got too hot in that seaside town they pushed off to the hills, faster than the traffic could carry them, taking lesser known routes, past exquisite churches all dressed up like white icing cakes. There was only the semblance of normalcy, for hunger ruled the land. The world was diminished by war, and more so by fear, for even where there was no disaster, people feared for their lives. Every morning was spent reading newspapers where obituaries ruled the moment. The stories of past lives were more interesting than the stories of every day rapes and death. Obituaries told the story of people who lived normal lives, where there was no terrible occurrence of violence. These were people one probably knew, who lived in the next village, or a nearby town. Marriages and deaths had a statistical regularity to them, for people lived in anticipation of one, and fear of the other. Young people found one another through the investigations of their elders. Beauty was not a criterion, it was whether one could cook or take care of old people that decided the day for the  shy bride. It was the old world, caught between the eyelids.

Stella turned around in the wheel chair. It was another red hued day, with lightening flashes coming through the cardboard sky. The cracks which had formed were simply frightening, the thunder seemed ever louder. She knew that she would be here when the sky rent open, and they were vaulted into an open realm of stars, sun and nowhere to go. She shut her eyes and returned to the safe world of the past, which was indecipherable to those who had not lived in that familiar world. The past, so irredeemable, so ever present, so filled with latent desires before aluminium took over the world, and iron was constantly distilled for newer varieties of steel. No plants could grow in such an environment, and the desert approached ever closer, as did the captive hills, pushed by the energy of it’s galactic past to crush the present in its  imminent lava flows and gravitational pull to the surface. The sky always red and dusty, was shut out by the blue painted canvas, which mimicked the skies in digital reconstructions of how the sky should be, with its fleeting clouds which when counted, could tell that time was passing, for the wind blew them here and there. The artist knew how to manoevre the clouds, create shapes, filter light. It was like being eternally in a planetarium, where the cloth sky absorbed the infinite beauty of the night, and when the lights came on, why, we were back in the auditorium of our very own earth.

The waters spilled around the outskirts of our city. They had become dank and very dreary. Every year, men and women in masks went out, and cleared the sewage with machines that droned for atleast a week. The water was distilled in larger tanks, and piped out. We never knew if there would be enough retrieved to last us for a year. But magically, the machines pumped out that clear fluid so essential for us even though we were now in the last phase of survival before leaving planet earth. How many of us would leave, no one knew.

Stella thought of the time when she had first come to the city, full of hope. The earth had crashed around them, and each of them believed that death was better than living in the ruins of what was once their great city. Yet, day by day, they found that the will to live was greater than their sorrow. They had picked themselves up from the rubble, and moved toward what the politicians said were their new homes, prefabricated aluminium sheds which had been put up overnight. Here, there was no sound other than that of people weeping, reciting litanies of their lost loves, and then the sudden sterotorus sound of someone breathing heavily in their sodden sleep.

Where was Anjali? The girl had become lazy, and was never to be found. The wheel chair had a back, hard and resolute, which jabbed her spine. So, she sat a little away from it, leaning forward. The loneliness of being old was not the problem, that she had managed several decades ago. The music that played in her ears constantly from the little box in her pocket was the best invention of the previous century. Time was ephemeral,  it fleeted past. But the seconds pounded in her ears, as she thought about space travel, which the morning circulars had stated to be the next step in their sojourn on planet earth. They would have to leave soon. The question was who would be chosen, and who left out?

Stella asked this question of Anjali very often, who would desultorily turn her head away, not getting involved in the very real fear that Stella always communicated. How did it matter to her, whether the old woman went to Mars or not? Such a stupid question! She noticed as she looked out of the sparkling glass windows that the Administrators had simulated rain again. Clearly the sparkling bejeweled window glass was a gift from the lewd microbe - replete troughs running outside the metro.  The used condoms, the disgusting trophies of late night copulation and the indestructible plastic that was thrown by young mothers who had not found a way to potty train their children had been digested by the incinerators.  The water returned to them, clean, flawless, with a lucidity that was no longer grey and worn out, but fresh, smelling of lavender. Everything was ofcourse chemically produced, but the effect was the same as if it was natural. As for drinking water, they had stopped accessing it from taps, or asking for it. It came to them piped every day, just as the food did.

Stella thought again of the days in Paris, when she had lost her memory, and was frightened that the State would notice. She had become frail, wind wafted, perfumed, bejeweled, not knowing where she was going, or how she would return. The days had been listless, watching the skies turn their incredible colours, as if congealed in the palette of the sky. She would lower the blinds, sleep till late in the morning, and then start again to wander the streets that her feet knew so well, she did not need memory, names, landscape, maps. Three years later, in another continent, with the tarpaulin sheds painted over the crumbling surface they knew to be ruined buildings of another century, long gone, she realized that life was only breath, breathing.

It was as if memory was a shard, sharp and double ended. At one level, she responded to the impulse to remember, and in remembering, live again in an opulence of a world which once she had known so well. The earth was tender and brought to her more gifts than she could have wanted. It gave her fruit and flowers, and the gentle gaze of animals, almost doe like in their captivity. Here, too, had been their protected canvas of the familiar, no one stepping out of their bourgeoisie tableaus. When the earth had rent apart, first by war, and then by convulsions unbeknown to them, they had realized that they were human, subject to geological change, galactic time. The newspapers reported the finding of new universe of stars and planets.  With that, hearts calmed down, they returned to the chores so familiar to them, waiting for the seasons to change, and the fruits and flowers that beckoned them from the gaily blazoning shops with their lights and perfumes. They were happy to have more days at hand, and then when the darkness fell on them, their own sense of belonging was quite gone. Everything that was theirs, fell to another. In a commonality of loss, the powers –that- be became profoundly tyrannical, creating an artifice of light, sound, life. And things began to move again, simply at first, but with a growing complexity as the years went by. Fear was hidden, and civility reigned again.

Stella had chosen to leave Paris when the first tarpaulins came up above the great cities, and the sky had become punctured by air craft which had to leave from outside the known radius of the world, as people understood it. They had to choose their destination, tunnel to airports, which  looked like filigree jewellery, and appeared outside the metropolis. And then in a matter of days, they would have assimilated in another part of the globe, a little frightened, but somehow sure that they had done the right thing, yes, moved towards their own survival.

If she had chosen New Delhi as the site of transitioning to  outer space it was because she had been familiar with it in her youth. The intellectual world of writers always served to protect the narcissus, and she had thought she would walk through familiar streets in the new world, where the sign boards had changed, and the old became abused by neglect. She had no fear in the beginning, since her memories of her work world were somehow quite intact. And people had taken to her immediately, providing her with facilities and home, papers and Internet. She had served them well once, and the records of her brilliance were sufficient for the new municipalities, charged with electronic devices, not to repel her, or exclude her. Or so she thought,  but then her foreignness was so palpable, her accent so pronounced, that she fell out of the web of belonging again, retreating into silence. The young girl she had adopted was the only one she now could turn to, but over the years, the sense of familiarity had reduced them to non presence, each busy with their thoughts, living life by the day.

How completely hopeful the girl had been when she had come to the house, and offered her services, in exchange for learning new languages, and the scientific aura which surrounded the old woman who expressed her innate ability to keep up with the alarming technological changes that most people found difficult to handle. Yet, unfortunately, the problem of memory had surfaced as the greatest deficit, and both Stella and Anjali started to feel they were sliding into a place of great danger. Stella managed to keep composed, putting her blue eyeshadow every morning on her heavy lids with a trembling hand. She felt that if she could communicate that dressing up was important, then the girl would make greater effort to dispense with the casualness of her own attire. Anjali was often dressed in crumpled pyjamas and her blouses though clean, were never distinguishable. She had none of the sophistication of the women Stella had been associated with, the pallor of her face showed that she had never had food which was nutritious. She was born in the days of piped food, and if she survived at all, it would be due to her will power and that of her boyfriend, who stayed listlessly with them, always poring over his work without looking up, or  gazing out at the cardboard sky. He had over the years, grown a little dense, his short frame picking up the carbohydrates in the food with ease, as he never stirred from his chair. However, the couple were happy, smiling at each other peacefully over their many chores. The government was now keen that people should inhabit the houses they stayed in as if indeed they were in outer space. The simulation of the circumstances of floating in a vacuum were being increasingly made available. For Stella, who was from an older generation, the act of looking out of the window was still replete with images she was comfortable with, familiar with. For Anjali and and her partner, Ishtar, the inner spaces of their minds, without the vinyl of reproduced images was quite enough.

Stella could hear the drone of their conversations, sometimes there was muted laughing. They were always aware of her presence, and sometimes they would appear, looking innocent and yet guarded. Had she called, did she need something? Then, when she shook her head, a veiled look of relief crossed their faces, and they disappeared again, into that world of which she knew nothing.

The warmth of their personas was sufficient for her, they were alive, they were human, they lived in the adjacent room, making the house accessible to her wheel chair by their quick inventions, all plastic, but unimaginably brilliant. It had been a long time since she actually got out of it, her limbs had atrophied, but in a second, they were able to roll her out painlessly on to her bed every evening, and slide her into the chair in the morning. She had stopped thanking them, for they shrugged their shoulders placatingly, placing an affectionate hand on her shoulder when she did.

The world was not spinning anymore, gravity was congealed in the last echo of the wall that separated them from the universe. It was not clear when they had lost their axis, but just as they never enquired, so too, they never doubted. The radio told them that they were lost people, and that the will to survive must be their own. They listened, placating one another, as the days shredded into countless anonymity, each moment going unrecorded except for the cries of the cicadas, which had survived the catastrophe. It was not cockroaches that had survived, for they got eaten up during the last days of the war, when all else had been cooked.

Stella shuddered. She called out again for Angel and her companion. They seemed to be rising, she could hear the house come awake, with it’s several sounds. There was the beep of the alarm clock, the radio playing music, the buzzing of their conversation. She could hear the water being filled carefully, half a bucket each, of lavender fragrant distilled water. Yes, she knew the sound so well, that she was comforted. She heard these every day. They would come soon, she knew that. She waited. The old world, the memories drew her back.

Chapter 3

Everyday, Ishtar and Angela worked hard to see that Stella was comfortable and happy. ‘Happy’ was too strong a word, for they themselves, while they delighted in each other’s company, did not dare to use the word for themselves. Their basic needs were met by the job they did, as they accepted the conditions of their occupation, as domestic workers. Stella never let them feel their life of servitude to be anything other than that of graciousness, hospitality and kindness. However, much as they persisted in trying to free her from a sense of her indebtedness, she always thanked them profusely for everything they did for her.

“May I have some soup, please?” she would ask querulously.

“In a minute, Madame!”  Ishtar would say. Yet, he had no way of telling her that soup no longer came in the form of vegetables boiled or desiccated, that was in the last century, much before he was born. Since her short term memory was bad, he hoped that by the time he came back from the kitchen, she would have forgotten. He had just spoon fed her some of the thick stolid stuff which came out of the community food tap. It had been some gruel made of  a variety of cereals, quite edible. He and Anjali had eaten some themselves, before serving their ward.

Stella waited for a while, then she lost interest in the idea of soup, which she remembered from her days in Paris, then a young woman, witness to the years of the second world war. She shrugged off the pain of those grey days, when the Jews had been marched off to concentration camps, and they as young students had been embarrassed and lost. Sometimes, she had been afraid that she would be charged with assisting them, or hiding them. Anything could be a reason to be executed. Collaboration was much worse, and the stigma that came from liaisons with the German soldiers or clerks would not be tolerated by kith and kin. Some people took on that burden on themselves, primarily because they felt that the Vichy government was doing what it could to keep destruction at bay. Compromise did not come easily to them, but camaflouge did. Sometimes, they went for a walk with members of the Resistance, unknown to their families, and then in the shadows of the early Paris evening, with the sky coloured grey and pink, they would hurry home, hoping that no one had given their identities away.

Her lover had told her that what they did as individuals was no business of the state, and that they had a right to their thoughts. They went about with a silence that was so deafening, that sometimes it gutted their ears. They longed for music, and the sounds of laughter. The continuous  subdued whispering that went for conversation in various alcoves was none of their business. They had to survive, they had to live in the halo of each other’s love. As artists, they could not possibly submit to the daily violence which they witnessed. Fear was the greatest enemy. He had told her that it would separate them, confound them. Holding her hand, he whispered to her that he loved her, that he would always be there, for his life was the only thing that he held as precious, and that was his gift to her.    

Stella yawned. The things that man would say to her! He had big hands, and a bigger heart, and he always gave everything he had to people who had less. Sometimes she thought she should chastise him, since he was always without money, and let her pick up all the costs.

“Rudo! I cannot bake more loafs for you to take to friends. You did not pay for the last batch you took.”

“Stella, they are hungry. They are children who gather to play every evening in the garden outside my house. They love what you send them every evening.”

“We have no food ourselves, how can we feed others?”

“They are not  ‘others’, they are our own children. The Nazis have given them a week to leave for the countryside.”

“We should also leave.”

“We have our home here. We have to continue as best as we can. Those children, they need food.”

“I am not baking today.”

She heard the sound of the door closing softly.

Ishtar came back with a pillow for her, but seeing her asleep, he put it down, near her chair without waking her. He rarely felt tenderness for her, as her strong will was something that he resented. He thought she ate up his day, and though he was grateful to her, and earned a good living, his thoughts were always on how to escape his fate. It often occurred to him, young though he was, that there was no fate, as in the old days. There was only the cavern of time, where they lived, ekeing out their everyday dreams. They thought of themselves as humans, but there was very little that differentiated them from automatons. Every morning they woke, viewed the alabaster or grey sky, depending on the mood of the powers that be, and then proceeded to the day’s duties, which was the care of the relic humans who had lived beyond a century or more. He was amused by Stella,  how perfect her mask like face had become. They felt that the time she put into her pancake makeup, her blue iridiscent eyelids, the deep red hue of her lips, the curl of her eyelashes, all seemed, somehow, quite foreign. There was the smell of age, too strong to hide, and yet, she used perfumes, asked to  bathe regularly, though her bones were so brittle, they could break. Was she French  or Dutch? They had lost the boundaries of countries so long ago, that no one used linguistic or territorial boundaries anymore. To be human was attribute enough,  in order to be classified as a relic.

Ishtar thought there was something carnal and cerebral about the way she understood the world, something in her expression, in the way she looked, and even the way her eyes darted, were very contemporary, nothing ancient there. He thought she had been French, before the great migrations took place. Her arms were still muscular, and he presumed that the paralysis had allowed her to develop her upper torso. He felt spasms of grief when he thought how Anjali tried so hard to be good, caring, virtuous. It did not come easily to her, she had to practise very hard every day to carry out her duties with finesse.    

 Gone were the days when the young did not bother to be attentive to old people. He had no idea where his own parents were,  probably they were being looked after by some other young people, like himself and Anjali. He had no real memory of them either. Ishtar looked at himself in the large mirror with dull brown wood frames, that the State provided to every house, uniformly. Yes, he imagined that he had eyes like his father, lips like his mother, a nose like a grandparent who was living in some other country. He was broad shouldered too, and his brown hair was always combed.

Stella grumbled if he appeared untidy and disheveled while serving her. He could see from the twist of her mouth that she was hurt and angry. He bowed a little on days like that, and disappeared into his room to change his shirt, and wash his face.  Angela, as the old woman often called her,  who was due later in the day to continue the round - the - clock routine of looking after Stella, would lie in bed, laughing a little. He would evade her glance. It was only too, too dangerous to get caught in Angela’s coquette ways. The last thing he had expected when he had answered the ‘job opportunities’ advertisement was to run into his previous employer, and simultaneously his childhood friend, who had also been a student accomplice in the days they got an education by sharing their knowledge. It was a rote exam,  when they were seventeen, and Angela’s careful note taking in class had helped him clear the exams. He had no idea that for the rest of his life, he would be paying back  for that favour.

Not that it was uncomfortable or uneasy. It was a job. It allowed them both to do what they liked best to do, which was watch films on their computer. They could spend the whole day doing that, as food appeared on time, without their instigation. The state had well trained jobbers who cooked and served, apparently. Well, then, obsessions were exercised only through the acceptance of other compulsory duties, such as the one they shared. Stella rarely called them, she seemed to believe that being old and handicapped was a very small tax to pay for the exciting life she had had. They refused to believe that she had been born in 1925.

“She could not possibly be that old!”

“She could be, why not?”

“There are pictures of women in China and Europe who lived that long in the old world. They ate some unusual diet, mainly raw things and red wine. Maybe Stella is one of the last surviving embodiments of natural diet and Shaw’s Metheusalah! Fabian Socialism had it’s takers as you know!”

“No, No nothing like that. It’s just that she seems so frail, and we have never really seen her close, as her odd makeup hides her from our view.”

“Well, then, we will wait, when next we bathe her, so that without permission we can scrub her face, and see her creases.”

“That would be cruel, Anjali. Everyone has their secrets. Inspite of being disabled, she is still able to use her face as a canvas. It’s not for us to ask what she hides. As an actress she holds her own, for we really don’t know what her feelings are, except by those voluntary grimaces or smiles which give us clues.”

“No one should be that vain!”

“She is not vain. It is her habit. That’s how women in Europe dressed their faces. They felt they were naked without foundation and eyeshadow.”

They got tired of the subject of discussing face paint. It seemed odd to them, when their faces were yet unlined, that anyone would want to apply grease and paint, if they were not posing for photographs or working in the theatre. Their own faces, young, smooth and unlined, did not depend on any artifice. They were hardworking people,  still very much in love with one another. They often smiled at each other, while going about their various duties. Leaving Stella unattended was a crime, and  being under surveillance continually, they had permitted no moment to be tracked by their employers as “irresponsible”. Old age had it’s virtue. They were told this over and over again, and since it was something they had grown up with, they took it to be gospel truth. There was no God, there was only Time. Time was the great begetter, and Time was also the great Destroyer.

When he had first met Stella, Ishtar was surprised by her beauty and her flamboyance. She was friendly, cheerful, a little boyish, but that added to her genuine charm.  There was nothing affected about her, never any lies or cunning. She took the world head on, and gave her job everything she had. In the beginning, Stella’s spare bones, her angular good looks, her austerely painted, mask like face was very attractive. She had been quite mobile too, never needing the wheel chair or the commode brought to her. In fact, she made journeys by herself to the outer limits of the Metro quite often. But the State insisted Anjali come into work once a week, and as the years passed, she became the regular care giver. In the beginning, it was just a way to make money to pay for her tuition, but after a year, it became a full time job in itself. She did not mind. Once Ishtar had shifted in with her, she found the business of getting an education cumbersome. It seemed enough that they had so much to do, their earlier skills had become defunct. They were no longer needed to cook delicious food, or wait on people, or know how to write essays about a world which no longer existed. Their needs were few, and they had no friends. It was true for most people. The rigour of the day’s work was sufficient to close them in, close them into a hub of work related activities, and to end all ambition. The artificial air made them drowsy, but they had not known any other, and they managed their affairs neatly. Stella was  always busy with her own thoughts, and they had no idea what sort of people filled her dreams. It was enough for her that they were around, visibly employed in her betterment. There was no furniture to dust, no food to cook, and yet, the music played in their rooms, and the soft buzz of conversation was sufficient to calm her. Their presence was like a balm, and by the flutter of her eyelashes she would communicate that she was happy by their nearness. She knew that they kept busy the whole day living in an alternate world in which she had no access. They did not fear the new world into which they were being obdurately pushed, day by day.

In the beginning, the State closed down the rivers and waterways. It next closed down the borders. Then it stopped receiving people from mangled harbours and overcrowded airports. With the closure of its railways, the State became a whirr of electronic lines, and people disappeared from the streets. The metros became the only known mode of travel, burrowing deep into the earth and the sea. The borders were constantly watched, and papers neither false nor genuine could any longer be had. That was when digital manipulation became the norm, and where every one could be docketed and brought back to starting point. There was no reason then, to leave home. Travel was neither necessity nor luxury, since all efforts were on, to leave planet Earth. Ofcourse, no one expected it for six hundred or seven hundred years, but  ‘mental readiness’, that, indeed, was carefully nurtured, woven into the values of the domestication of the mind, so that all  came to believe that was the only path.

Being watched continually by Ishtar and Angela was curious. What did they want, what did they hope for? Should she speak, when not spoken to? They seemed busy and happy in the adjoining room, divided from her only by a bead curtain. They were sometimes raucous in their conversations to another, sounding like birds calling from different trees, or like geckos on different walls. They seemed like strangers to her on the days they had quarrelled since they went about with blank faces showing no emotion. They turned her about gently, watched out for bed sores, cranked her stiff limbs into various positions, and sometimes, when bathing her, they would suddenly look into her eyes, to gauge her mood. She had no way of telling them that she found pleasure in their attentions, and that she was sorry they had had a disagreement. She did not know what they had quarrelled about. Their raised voices had woken her up in the morning, and she had not yet asked them the reason for their rancour.

“It’s your turn to wash her bottom today, Ishtar!”

“You do it, I did it twice yesterday.”

“What’s that got to do with it? We don’t count by number of stools, we count by the hour!”

“Okay, I will do it.”

Ishtar was cross. He was half way through watching his favourite digital programme, mass wound into the computer, non stop watching for the favoured few who had pleased the state by their dexterity in manual tasks given to them. Ishtar was addicted to his hobby. It seemed to him that the space race, between countries which no longer existed, was the most exciting formatted game. All these people lived here and there, and since reproduction was no longer possible except by in vitrio, no one looked unique, or could be mapped by their place of origin or their race. In the old days people were curious, and talked about dynasties, and mix and matching genes, and looked down upon some, and flattered others. Now, with three generations of in vitrio birth, the composition genetically was so complex, that siblinghood was ill defined, and as for marriage, that too was State decreed. Angela and he had never bothered. They lived together, quite comfortable in their daily routines, and as lovers they remained totally loyal to each other. He did get a little anxious when the five days of menstruation came by, because she was hot and demanding, and he too busy with his chores to comfort her, or cosset her. The room was too small, the lack of ventilation made him irritable. He tried to get out of his part of the deal at work, but she was strict as a school mistress. He found her immensely annoying, why could she not give in a little, and breathe easy.  But no, it was always a careful calculation of hours put at work, and energy spent. When they faced each other as antagonists, Stella got disturbed. She would smile placatingly at them, and start singing something sweet and lovely in an ancient cracked voice. She would touch them with her fingers, broodingly, staring at them with her sharp crone’s eyes. And they would calm down, and handle her more tenderly, and peace was restored.

What they enjoyed best about her was her peacefulness. It was clear that she had a mind of her own, which the State could not disrupt or own. ‘All thought is free’, they had heard her say to herself. Sometimes, she would smile, on other occasions weep quietly to herself. On those occasions, they did not disturb her reverie. Being immobile most of the day, lifted, washed, changed and fed in the afternoons, which were otherwise long and eventful, they felt that she had a right to her emotions. Once she told them about her lover Rudo. That story was older than them by about sixty years, so they enjoyed listening to it.

A bearded man, a lover, as strange to them as the food that she described or the seasons, or the calling of birds in the garden.  However, telling that story always calmed the lady, and then she would sleep deeply, like a child. So they let her tell it, whenever she did, though in the end, they too came to know it by heart. How odd  was the heart’s desire. How meaningless it’s repetition! If they interrupted her while she told it, she would stop speaking to them, and her monosyllables and hardened heart would give them no encouragement in the difficult work they did. Angela had been trained to talk continuously, and to make soothing noises. On such days, her dexterity with language was quite confounded by the centenarian’s silence. She would be quelled by a glance, she would find in the paralytic’s body, a corpse like coldness. It was almost physically repelling to handle her in those days. Her hands, with her customary warmth would somehow be cold to the touch, and her syllables rasping. It was as if she was saying to the young people, “You have no idea what goes on in my head, but you think you have authority over my body?”

She still called her Angel, or Angela and sometimes Anjali. But as the years passed, a certain boredom entered their relationship, a kind of torpor. There was nothing wrong with the old lady’s hearing, or her sight. She also had excellent lungs, which had been artificially replaced whenever needed, and  she breathed deeply, singing to herself on the odd occasion, or when she though her attendants needed some encouragement. Mostly, though, she was contented, and her display of an excellent long-term memory really confounded Ashtar and Angela. They had no idea if she was speaking the truth, or whether it was fiction. The corpus of memory was so huge, so varied, so full of discrepancies and flights of fancy that they realized that they were being subject to a type of biological archivalisation. They had no way of recording it, that was against the law, for the State wanted no remnants of relic civilisations to hamper the progress of the Scientific law to keep evolving till final departure to the seven habitable planets. Memories drew one back, made one hesitant. The dictatorship of the new, the emergent, meant that each generation had to accept it’s fate, it’s destiny, and not look back into the world which had become naturally extinct.

Stella remembered that the crumbling of the known world happened with endless rain. It was frightening at first, but then they got used to it. It was as if they had gone back a couple of aeons in geological time, and  while the earth got hotter, and the arctic melted, leading to floods and rise in sea level, people just imagined that it would all blow over. It did not. It just kept getting worse, and the migrations happened, firstly because belief in God, and competition between people whose idea of God did not match became the ground for wars. And once the destruction of the earth happened through rivalry and bombing it was as if the tectonic centre of the earth had become disturbed. The earthquakes followed one another, and whether it was on land or sea, not to speak of quiet volcanoes suddenly heaving molten lava, people had to run. They ran without any grammar, picking what they could from their loved objects, sometimes losing family members as they did so. There was no justice, no discord….just the need to run and hide where the floods could not get them. Food got rotten, animals died, children were lost and sometimes found, mostly adopted by strangers. It really did not matter what the cause was, it was only a matter of reasoning by the Administrators that since they were not responsible, there was no need for hand outs or dole. They felt essentially that they should make sense of what there was, and turned naturally towards space for their answers. The clouds in the sky floated about nonchalantly promising nothing.

Stella remembered that when she was young, the wars were so many, that they were mainly hungry. Food was rationed, and peace talks brought some decades of normalcy. The air was clean, and people went to the countryside for holidays. Paris was hot, and people went about dressed in fine clothes, or in American ‘hand me downs’ from tourists. Those soldiers who had married French women trained as lawyers, school teachers and clerks to keep their marriage going. Many had migrated to America which had become the new mecca for artists and art dealers.

Stella laughed, remembering a lithograph in a shop window, the three kings crossing a desert, by Dali. Now, where could one find a print like that, for love or money? The two room apartment was empty of all ornaments, books, canvases, and even calendars were forbidden. She was glad in a way, because who would dust and clean them in this thin air, where canvas made their roof?

There was no place for sorrow in this world, made real by protestations and arguments by the state, that this was the present, this was their lot. How odd that for those who had been born in an earlier time, the mendicancy of their thoughts came from their longing to return to a past in which the actors had no recall. The past flourished in their minds, and with the help of photographs and videos they refurbished  their conversations, calling others to remember with them. But, that too, was artifice.

The loathing that the young felt was immense and palpable, for what they thought was a waste of time, a sense of squalor, emotional as well as corporeal, for the rumbling of decades long gone. They did not bother to hide their disgust of these pale faces, the over ornamented people, the languages and dialects with which they had nothing in common. They felt it was best to move on, for their own past was singularly eventless, composed merely by the specialized duties of which they had been put in charge and the longing for music and voices recomposed digitally, so that their needs were met, and anything extraneous would then redefine their own images. The familiar and the unfamiliar were somehow inextricably wound already in conversation and the practicalities of their jobs as caregivers. To engage in a superficial exercise of recomposing the past for their patient was quite beyond them.

One of the things Stella remembered of Paris were the locks on the bridges. It seemed to her immensely ugly, this show of affection, of “locking hearts” onto a bridge, which could possibly collapse with the weight of the symbols whose keys had been thrown away. She herself had lived with Rudo for many decades. He was a kind man, full of passion, erupting to the holocaust of emotion with a temper others found fearful….and yet capable of immense concern for the weak and the sorrowful. He never seemed to lack understanding for their cares and woes, and spent all the money he had on them, particularly the children. Stella wondered if it was because they had no children of their own. She was given to ideas, and set herself every day to compose the materials necessary to mail off to the journal for whom she worked. They demanded that she polish a certain set of pages by the day, and she found that easy to do, simple, non taxing but it left her with no time. Everyday, she looked at the sentences she had to work with, simplify, taking out the curlews of dialect and personal style, and then, when they achieved a certain staccato simplicity, her work was completed. It was necessary for the reader who wanted only information…taking out the soul of language, the lyricism of prose, that was what she was paid to do. She used the thesaurus often, and then compiled the sentences so that fisherpeople, shop keepers, sweepers and cleaners, cooks and au pair girls could read the news that made their world such a significant place. War was a commonplace word, everyone knew it…the real story was that there was nothing to eat during the time of rationing and what appeared most often on the table was a punishment, a turnip soup, with its harshness diluted by wartime powdered wheat flour, looking  a little like semen and smelling of the sulphur of defeat and loss. Stella refused it, pouring it down the sink, and getting more dehydrated as the days passed. Rudo was less disrespectful of the right to live, and would drink his, holding his nose. It was necessary for them to accept these handouts, because the idea that they were part of the Resistance often rose in the mind of their neighbours and ofcourse, once denounced, they could only board the train to the gas chambers.

Stella had a sharp nose, and the black hair of the people who came beyond the Gulf of  Arabia. It was possible that there was Indian blood in her, why else would she choose to come to India, when the boundaries dissolved with nuclear war? However, she had always dyed her hair auburn, and the edges of white which showed beyond the line of dye was truly the lot of all women regardless of the hair colour they were born with. Auburn was perfect, it matched most of her clothes, and since she was very thin with bones which jutted out, she dressed in colours which were earthy and splendid. They took away the sense of extreme austerity that always accompanied her. Baking bread was her way of telling the world in the time of greatest turmoil, that she had a skill, and that it was essence of vanilla that made it seem so rich, when egg powder and margarine made the bread heavier than it ought.

Rudo had met her at the metro station when she was twenty years old. Stella remembered that day, and through the time of the dream, the time of theatre, she pushed her mind back to when the metro provided for them the sense of being back in the underground, the world of Lethe, the world of illusions. The air blew like a draft, it was cold, and the seats in the waiting area were filigreed. She felt acutely happy, just waiting to move rapidly in the underground, reach her destination without fear of bombs. She had heard that London had been almost destroyed.

Rudo came in one morning, disheveled, with bruises on his face. He had been attacked with stones because the black shirts thought he was hiding people. He had got away by referring to his uncle, who was a doctor in the army. There was still respect for the professions. While he changed his shirt and applied ointment on his many bruises, he spoke about leaving Paris. However, since they did not have the money they stayed right through till the war was over. It was a relief when the Americans came, they felt delighted by the cold, the people in the streets, the waving of mutual flags, and Stella felt she could breathe again.

 She looked up, it was evening, she knew that, because the pipes in the kitchen were buzzing and vibrating, and the young people were running about shutting windows. Not that there was air or light, but it still gave them something to do, something which made them feel busy and involved. In Paris, the clouds floated on lurid coloured skies, and people sat on benches with their arms around each other, but that was another century.

Chapter 4

Somewhere outside the metro, where the sky burned a sulphur yellow, and the smog laid down its grotesque vocabulary of compounds and chemicals, all those who lived under the tarpaulin sky, knew that it was a ghost, the amputated limb of their memories. They did not seek to confound it with their present, which was a still world of dreams and fast trains, taking them here and there, to do what they had been deputized to do. No one thought anything of it. The sky could be purple or yellow or red depending on what specific combination of  lead or phosphorus or carbon it was.  Never seeing it, since they did not stray from their painted sky, their thoughts did not dwell on it. They had nothing to do with it. Soon, there would be generations of new borns who were not oxygen dependent. Each would learn how to survive in these new environments, where the souls of the old would transpire to be  artificially reborn through a variety of techtonic forms, which then would speak the polished speech of the dead and gone, through digital means. An occasional garbling of the specimens, thus resurrected, caused no anguish. They would just pull out the innards of that disk and search for another. The new bright babies, orphaned at the moment of gestation by the loss of womb, would know how to eat and breathe and push buttons at the very moment of birth. Their skin would have the transluscence of their type, race being a distillation of so many varieties of genomes, that skin colour and phenotype had no meaning to this crop of children. They loved as they willed, bearing no children,  and untaxed by the State.

Stella looked at her children, the two who had been sent to her by the State, and who had become so attached to her, against their will, that they had requested  self wiring which facilitated their interactions with her, even when they were sleeping. This meant that should her blood pressure go down, or her eyes open and she lie awake, alarms would ring in their heads. Stella had no objection, in fact, she found it amusing that they had consented to turn into automatons. They would appear disheveled at the crack of dawn, and ask her in hushed voices whether she needed anything. She then thought of Rudo, who was always hurrying away to something, to the depths of the fire, to the intensity of work and responsibilities, and to whom, the world was always an intractable forest of desires which had to be kept at bay. She herself had a much lighter relation to her routines and obligations. Stella felt that while there was rotation and revolution, something they took so much for granted in the previous century, she would be assured of all that needed to be done.  Time was an accordion, which folded and clammed shut, rather than a distillation of sand, percolating by the second. Whereas, earlier, the earth had in its jeweled radius of sea and gravity, locked them in, now, with the promise of imminent departure, the lockdown of memory had become less pervasive.

An array of events had led them in their war torn world, during the Second World War to be distanced from the real. She had gone through the motions of work required of her from day to day, whether it was proofing manuscripts, or baking bread, as if it were the most important of things. The real truth was that war had, over the consecutive years, crunched their heads under a giant praying mantis of technology. Time was of the essence, for either the chores were completed or they were not. She had for a time joined a monastery, when Rudo had disappeared into his shell, his universe of secret discord, which he did quite often. In the still vaults of an abandoned cloister, they had made jam, and painted icons for sale, and when the summer was over, she trudged back to Paris, hoping that her friends would recognize her, for she had fattened on fresh bread and locally grown fruit and cream from the local dairies which whipped the cream before drying the milk for distribution as war time rations in small local factories.

She was shocked, by their absence for they had left for England, and no one seemed to know when they would be back. The universities were emptied, and people looked through each other in pale recognition. There was only Rudo who promised to return, as he had left her a note under the pillow, which was how he  normally communicated with her.

The Resistance was a network of people who ignored one another, when in public, who asserted their identity only in the most secure of situations. The fear that each one felt, had numbed them, so that they had become experts at hiding their feelings, and at passing on information. Each had a code, and when asked for it, would dissemble unless they thought their interrogator or partner was indeed true. Rudo was gone days at a  time, and when he returned, he never told her where he had been. She often tried to seduce him with good food and wine, which she had hidden away from the eyes of people she had once been close to. The sources were dwindling, cheese, wine, dried grapes…things they had been used to were now never to be seen. How tragic that they still longed for the food they had been accustomed to, and would discuss it sometimes in whispers.

Stella let him unfold his stories at his own pace when he returned.  He was always loath to talk, as if the circles of time and the ripples of sound were coincident. He needed to see her, and so he returned. The truth was, both of them were content in each other’s company, not asking for more. The silences were confounding to those who were strangers but to them, there was a world of forgiveness and silence. Where had he gone, what had he done, whom had he met? She could imagine it, men and women who met in the woods at dawn, and dispersed before the potato and beetroot farmers arrived. He would not mention their names, since any knowledge  shared between them was dangerous for him and her. Their chances of being discovered were very high, and what she most feared was being packed into a truck like cows to the slaughter. She thought that nothing was worse than being packed tightly into a truck,  for they had become used to the stampede of hungry people being taken away, for work or death…what was the difference? Sometimes, she went to the station, and stood quietly behind the massive blocks of instrumentation that sometimes went in the trains along with hooded passengers who had been wrested from their families. The flowers were out, spring could not be distanced from history. She could smell the early fragrance, hear the buzz of the bees, sense the labour of delight. And then the rows of well dressed Jews would arrive, carrying their hand bags and their children, some with spouses, some without. In a moment, pretence was gone, and they were crammed into windowless trains which shunted them to labour camps. Stella would go home when the bayonets started to release untimely death on those who had in some way broken a queue, or despaired of losing a loved one in the series of staccato numbers. that were called out and had shouted, breaking the eerie silence.

Many decades later, in Afghanistan, she saw the women with their children being herded and shot, for no reason other than war had no vocabulary other than death and despair.

Stella turned sharply in her chair. Her spine had ossified, but some movement was still possible. The man was at the door, looking at her, with his eyes concerned and alert, ready to help. He had been reading a book, because it was still in his hand. Usually, he carried a white plaque, electronic, the letters running neatly across its pale blue sky of electronic colour. This time, though, it was a book. She longed to hold it in her hand. It had been a long while since she had felt the coarse, opaque paper, mottled by time.

She stared at Ishtar, without blinking. He went away. Nothing was said. It was time for the morning routines to begin. He would send Anjali, who was much gentler than he could be. However much he loved her, it never changed their dispositions, their mutual animosities, their recurring conflagrations. Anjali was in touch with the world more than he was, he always retreated into his book. It was as if in this world, where speech had atrophied as it did during war, Anjali held on to the politeness and decorum of both speech and the tenderness of touching. When he moved Stella about, it was primarily because she had to be shifted from one position to another. His mind would be on the next chore to be accomplished.

“Mom, it’s time to go for a walk.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Time to read to you.”

“No.”

“Time to play cards?”

“Time to sing?”

She was bathed and  fresh, gleaming, soft skinned, her toothless smile, communicating both joy and hope. Every morning they had to go through the same routines, never very strenuous, and once having found what she wanted to do, the day would swing past with its usual calm. As soon as she had said, “Time to Sing?” in her lilting old person’s voice, he knew that she was in accord with her world. For Stella the world only came into existence when her wishes were fulfilled. The rest remained a battleground of conflicting interests, and the more he moved away from the path of her will, the more venomous she would become. He was sometimes overawed by her sweetness, her will to power, and resented that he had to do what she wanted. Yet, his training had made him complacent, and at the end of the day, there was his companion and friend, Anjali, whose avarice for reading and writing was the only real crime against the State that she admitted to.

The surveillance wires started buzzing when the old woman fantasized too much about the past, the veins in her wrist becoming purple with the effort of remembering and reliving, or when Anjali laughed too much over the book she was reading. There was a clocking in of how many pages she turned on her electronic tablet, and once forty pages were completed, the system crashed, turning on  only the next day when a new ration was  imposed.

There were days when the book Anjali was reading the previous day would not turn up, and then her sense of forfeiture was so huge, that she would become extremely Ishtar dependent.

“Get off my back!”

“Why can’t I watch the movie with you?”

“You don’t have a license for digital watching, only for reading. Find your book.”

“Please, Ishtar, don’t be so harsh. You know that my book shuts when I finish 40 pages.”

“That seriously is not my problem, my dear!”

She would go and lie down in her bunk. The hours lay long before her, and she devised a way of writing, which was unusual to say the least. She would begin to plot stories on the tablet provided to caregivers for accounts of their day’s activities. Here, there was an abstraction of space quite unusual to their vocation. Apparently, one could type more than forty pages a day, and there was no accounting by the somnambulant state, which was not too interested in the lives of centenarians. Why should it? How were they contributing?                                                                                 

Stella was amused by the fact that Anjali typed in long reports in her room on the days that her reading tablet shut down. What could she be saying to the authorities? One day she pushed her wheel chair, in which she had been seated by the couple, who had then gone to submit their cards for further extension of employment, leaving her in the care of a robot that they had forgotten to wire to her, and was actually running around the room haphazardly and silently. Stella chose the moment to go and see what Anjali was writing in the reports to be filed daily, but not sent anywhere, and chanced upon a  cornucopia of stories. She read them rapidly, and was surprised by the velocity of the young woman’s passion. There was nothing scurrilous about the text, and yet, and yet, the sensuality was so marked that she withdrew from it.                                                                                                                           

Having no experience of gestation in a mother’s womb, the product of scientific precision, no memory or recall of childhood,  Anjali had typed a document of lust and love based on her relationship with Ishtar. Since copulation was denied to them, neither having erogenous zones, or reproductive capabilities, Anjali’s stories were about the shock and horror of finding herself in the old world, where people had feeling, and attended to each other with sentiments which were once called human. Stella recognized Rudo and herself in some of them, and empathy was discernible in these accounts, because Stella had told these stories with some verve, and the young girl did not have to imagine them. The concentric circles of narrative were quite imposing…there were some accounts she recognized, and yes, they had been put  as conversations in quotes by Anjali, and there were some which had been invented. There was no authorial recognition, of self and other. There was sometimes a glibness, and sometimes fiction took on the form of revenge. Why was there such an awe-ful description of daily tedium, of occasions when nothing happened, when not even the painted skies had been changed for a week, and there was the incessant sound of rain in their ears? To have perpetually constant skies, and continuous lighting in their artificial planetarium, which they called “Metro” was immensely tiring. They longed for the dark, for real sky, for cloudless nights. More than anything, they searched for blazoning lights, and the muting of it, at dusk. They had news of it from friends in other parts of the world, where the ozone layer had not been perforated and there was some semblance to the world they had once known. There was talk now of simulating planetary experience here and now. Since the earth had been reduced to rubble, then, humans would have to learn to live days consonant with planetary axis of where they were headed in six centuries. The experiments had to begin now. A day which was thirty years in length, and a night which followed being of equivalence. Stella shuddered and wheeled herself back, carefully staying out of the way of the robot which was making placatory whirry noises as if putting a patient to sleep, and imagining in its fertile chip ridden mind that it’s mechanical remonstrations and benedictions had a willing recipient.

In Afghanistan the Taliban years had been grotesque to say the least. The daily killings in the name of jehad had only one motive, which was the return to feudal relationships of land and war, where the demons of modernity were  contemporaneously well anchored in guns and digital knowledge. It did not cause a sense of contradiction or miss match, ideologically speaking. Stella as an aid worker had been content eating the dusty bread of local ghettoized clusters of women and children. She had taught them new ways of quilting which involved cutting pieces of fabric into hexagonals, attaching paper and cloth together, and stitching it, piece by piece, so that fearsome energetic reds were coupled with blues and greens. These large emblematic cloths were then sold to tourists for the price of bread. The women, ragged, dust laden, hungry, worked for eight to twelve hours a day, receiving exactly the sum required to keep their children from begging in the streets. Stella did not think too much about the negative aspects of work and wage. She was just happy to hear the women talk, telling each other such long litanies of suffering that her heart froze.

Those years had given her the sense of rapture of survival, not of the fittest, but of those who had been chosen by the state and aid agencies, social workers and philanthrophical bodies. She had spent long summers in the camps working with young children, teaching them to read and write, to sing songs and to work the queues for food and medicines. No one thought much of an elderly woman who had left her native land, and was ensconced in the bitter conditions of war torn mountains. When winter came, she flew back to Paris, and Rudo and she were symbiotic, knowing that their hardwork and their love for people united them, in silences, and their genuflections to the beauty of a fog shrouded winter, which made them return every night to their home and the bliss of being together. Rudo had been in Africa, an international aid worker like herself. He had grown bigger than she had remembered, and ageing was something they accepted with some glee. It took away their drive to touch and feel, to enter, to emblazon their love with the customary tactility Parisians took so much for granted.

Rudo’s sweetness was legendary, but her own sense of satire so marked, she knew that beneath the quality of tenderness so evident to the people he worked with was an awe of death, a fear of pain. She never denied him this vulnerability, her own caustic nature honed by time and loss to understand that a man had to have his privacy, his sense of gallantry, his love of the future. Sometimes she was embarrassed by his need for others, for the way he put himself out helping others, always available to them. He never rested, even at night, he taxed himself learning new languages and using his wits to solve puzzles and riddles which during the day were hard to fathom. If one was crossing Africa, in Italian colonized country, would the maps be decipherable to British bombers? He had no idea where his answers would lead him. It was another way of organizing memories, to ask questions and leave them unanswered till someone who knew gave an accurate description.

When they had migrated to Afghanistan in the communist years, they felt at home, and the orchards outside their homes were lush with oranges. It was as if the dream time of their middle age was compounded by the fragrance of the flowers and fruit that they were surrounded by. The skies were clear, and the  mountain air a blessing. When summer wove its way in, the apricots would ripen, and they were delicious on toast, heated in butter and crisp to the tongue. Then began the years of torment, when the rolling of tanks became their morning call, and all the birds died. They were there when the Taliban rose, and the streets were shredded with the blood of soldiers, foreigners, loyalists to the King. Yet, they stayed, beginning their serious sojourn in a country which looked to Islam as its fortress. They were still loved and feted, though the embassies were no longer accessible as many closed down. Women were no longer in the streets, and were huddling in their bombed homes with their children. They still managed a daily diet of goat’s meat and rice cooked with raisins, but they feared once again, the loss of their lives and that of their friends. It meant that their life of freedom and joy was enclosed in a parenthesis of days and now that they were elderly they were numbed by daily events. Aid agencies came by in hundreds, photographers, volunteers of various humanitarian communities and ofcourse sociologists and economists and planners. Rudo and Stella were always being interviewed by people, as they were familiar with the terrain. When Osama arrived in the 90s they were the first to know. They never met him, but from the reports that they got from passersby and their household retinue of servers who remained loyal to them regardless of governments, they knew that the war with America would be served to them everyday with their newspapers and green tea every morning. Rudo shrugged his shoulders. Nothing changed him really…war was a business, but so were aid agencies…jobs, heartbreak, omelets without eggs..nothing bothered him. He stuck his tongue into her gullet every morning on leaving, with his rucksack on his back…there was nothing perfunctory about his passion, it was a habit, and she was accepting of it.

Stella laughed, her hair would never grow back, now that the faithful and loyal attendants had decided that it would be easier to comb if it was cropped. She herself had become used to their constant attentions, while at first she had hated it. But her bad temper caused them amusement, and when her muscles started atrophying, she was sensible enough to know that her life was at risk. Ishtar was more honest with her, she found Anjali’s sweetness cloying, and besides when she really needed her, Anjali would be formal, while Ishtar was tender. Anjali was better trained, she carried her certificates rather like a shield, and what had once been a vocation, had now become a profession. Ishtar, whom she had known as a young man, was truly like a boss to a client. That’s how he would have treated the guests at this hotel where he had served for almost a decade before they closed down the cafes as incendiary places where young people could plan a revolution. Stella herself had managed one when she migrated to India from Kabul after the UN had sent its armies, and reconstruction under a democratically chosen President had begun. She was still wanted there, but after she left for Paris, she did not get a work visa for the country of her adoption, and was flown to India instead. Here the work on the metro had started much earlier as stakes on Mars had been placed very early. Without Rudo, and the happy memories which now returned only in surreptitous flashes, monitored by the State, she had fallen into a passivity quite foreign to her nature. Quite often, they got summons from Planet 7Xy, which was the code name for the space station which they were expected to travel to, the one which had a climate most like earth, a sun not too distant, and most wonderful, 366 days! They had been awed when they heard about it, and the whispers on the stellar network which connected all the planets was that it was inhabited with earthlings who had colonized space aeons ago.

Stella was charmed by the idea of going, and hoped that it would be soon. While she liked her life on planet earth, with it’s routines and automatized rigour, she did regret that the view was so limited. A tarpaulin sky was no fun at all…and worse, underneath her pancake make up, she knew that the skin was beginning to corrode. The pollution was so huge, that nothing could stop it. They breathed it, and it sat on their lungs like tar. Replacing it often, they had got used to their own rasping breath, as the malleable plastic was similar but not the same as the fine tapestry of veins and sponge they had been born with.

The early morning announcements of their imminent departure were always specific. Pretty women in white garments came on to their individual screens, and looking like the sybils of ancient Greece, gave them the specific and detailed measurements of their space ships. They were expected to board them in the whisper of a moment, as the wind that rustled in the bare bones of trees, and the lights that glimmered in the opaque sky mirroring the stars they were to travel to. Ishtar always said that growing old was not an option, they would become ancients in another world, where there was no gravity, no air, no dust. Stella laughed, and said she had grown old in just such circumstances, for Afghanistan denuded by the bombs of mutually conflagrating nations had reduced itself to dust and rubble. The greatest losses had been of the Buddhas, and each time they lost another ancient site, her husband and she had sworn detachment. They felt agony however, as the destruction of religious sites were accompanied by deaths. They wanted to return home, but there was no home. They crossed over to Pakistan, and lived for a while, embellished lives with the elite, who were much like oligarchies in any part of the world. Elegant women dressed in sequins and silk, their svarkovski glittering in their clothes and ornaments in a riddled light. Stella particularly liked their shoes, which were of malleable cloth and lightest of leather, studded with rhinestones, and the smallest of crystals. The night sky was clear, and while there were snow storms, they felt that each day was precious, that human life was amazingly cheap, and that India had an osmotic border calling them to the Arts and Literature. The real truth was there were congenialities only recovered through ambassadorial gifts on both sides, while most of the time, there were skirmishes and shootings, and conspiracies of espionage.

As civil servants of the doctors without borders, Stella and Rudo had a subtle relationship with Amnesty International, and were pleased to deal with both refugees and citizens, carrying their own national identity cards with equanimity. Rudo played cards every afternoon with Afghan musicians and bakers of bread, and she discussed the latest inventions in the global market, quick to learn on the computer, as that was, in the 1990s, the passport to everything. Rudo had none of her verve, he made do with post cards which he had made with the help of a small printing press near their home. He wrote with a small cramped hand, to all his friends in Paris, telling them of the daily anxieties of coping with a small income, with which the couple had to survive. Sometimes they received  useless gifts from friends back home, such as chocolates and butter biscuits, which they quickly distributed to the children.. neither of them liked sweets very much, and it was a relief to have a throng of eager young children putting out their hands for a share of expensive fare from the Rue de Boulangiers and Paris Marche.

When it got cold in Murray, they looked towards the mountains with a sense of shock. The fringes of earth could barely be seen, and there were no tourists. They would then plan to return as early as they could to Paris, but visas not being available, they were only too ready to travel to India. And yes, the fates smiled on them, they were most welcome. It would only be a signaling system from those two sibling countries that peace workers were available anywhere, that warring nations had time for the comfort of decorative marches, where the border was reiterated by the mimicking of the frolic and foreplay of war. “Oh yes”, Rudo would say, laughing loudly, “there should be no borders between countries.”

Chapter 5

In the summer, early summer, the bird cries were continuous, the mango trees abloom with ivory coloured flowers. Stella brushed her hair slowly, her white skin blanched by a 20^th  century sun, mottled in places. She knew that her memories were being siphoned by the State. Like a snake’s body that absorbed sound as rhythm, so, too, the coiled wires went from the head boards of her wheel chair and her bed into the painted yellow box which collected memories for a generation that had not lived as she had. Plants, insects, bird calls – all of them were now extinct.

Yet, the bright illumination which numbered their days, as the sun would have, in an earlier time, was doomed to die. Rivers had been tarmacked, mountains punctured, streams no more than thin trickles. Electricity too was now diminished. During the day, the smog covered the sky, and on the odd days, when the tarpaulin frayed they glimpsed the stars and sometimes a chipped moon, or imagined they did.

Stella yawned, and waited, counting frangipani outside her window in war torn Kabul, a tree with myriad clusters, white ringed by yellow and red, fringing into pink, pushing upwards. It was as aid workers that Rudo and she had made sense of their diplomatic assignments. When the bombs had begun to fall, they were the first to arrive, with the Doctors without borders.

So long as they were together, she had known only surcease, a gently wafting sense of equilibrium and order. There was never sorrow, or guilt. They found in each other the joy that comes from companionship, an overwhelming silence that would not be disrupted by the continuous drone of bomber planes and the sorrow of the inhabitants. Just as the Americans in Paris had been given the mundane pleasures of bitter coffee and walks by the Seine, in the same manner, Rudo and Stella had lived blameless lives carrying out their duties with ease. Writers, artist, beauracrats all passed through their door with a practiced ease. When in Kabul, the obvious place to be was with the couple who were entrusted with doing the paperwork for those who wished to leave the country.

Then it happened, what they had always feared. Rudo disappeared. After many days of waiting, reminiscent of that time, those long and terrifying  years in Paris, she heard that he had been found in New Delhi. His memory was gone, he stuttered, his large and burly body was covered in bruises and he did not want to return to Kabul.

Stella had arrived at the hospital in Delhi,where he was being treated. His eyes looked blankly at her, but when she said, “Rudo!” he smiled and said, “Fine! And you?”

She held his hands and wept, kissing him feverishly, but he shook her off and would not say a word.

“Rudo, what happened?”

“He got hit by a moving vehicles as he was descending from a hill at night,” the nurse said, bleakly

“What hill?”

“Do you know his name, Madame?”

“Rudo Sulan”

“What is his occupation?”

“Writer, publisher, Refugee Rehabilitation Consultant to the Afghan

Government.”

“A Social Worker?”

“An activist.”

“How long has he been gone from home?”

“Two weeks.”

“Two weeks! You did not inform the police?”

“We live in Kabul. People do disappear.”

“Well, he was found in the hills . The people who brought him were devotees of the Dalai Lama.” 

“Dalai Lama! Were the people he was working with Tibetan refugees?”

“The people who brought him said he was wandering in the hills. He seems in good health, and his disposition is peaceful.”

“I would like to take him home with me.”

“That won’t be possible, Madame. The police will not release him until we discover who he is, and how he came to Dharamshala.”

“My dear. We are old people. I have brought his passport. I insist that we meet the Director of the Nursing Home, and take my husband back with me.”

The nurse, her name was Elisa John, started to take Rudo’s pulse. She looked about 20 years old, but was probably 30, and  projected immense authority. She was from Kerala, efficient, pretty, tidy, religious. Her father was an engineer, her mother a home maker. She was full of confidence, and an  airy manner, with tiny diamonds in her ear. When Stella persisted, Lisa said, in perfect English while filling up the patient’s form in a cursive hand, “What did you not understand of what I told you?” Then she whisked herself out. With the number of patients they had to take care of, a bedside manner became improbable.

“If we had a daughter, Rudo, she would have been like her.”

He stared uncomprehendingly at her. There was something gentle about his eyes, a little sad. He had seen her before, but he could not say where. Curiosity got the better of him.

“And what is your name?” he said.

“Stella!”

“Like a star.” It was a statement, not a fact.

She had come to terms with this new reality. She knew everything about him, from the size of his underwear, to the existence of secret moles. And yet, he was a stranger to her. She noticed his beard, white, sharp, camaflouging the chin without being fuzzy and untidy.

“Shall we go home?”

He looked around. “Isn’t this home? I like it here. I’m home in my body”.

He spoke English, with the customary French accent. Stella shrugged her shoulders. All to the good, he had lost his memory, he didn’t recognize her, he was bearded and wounded. Yesterday had been spent travelling continuously. She was an old woman too, and her bones ached.

“Well, then, this is home!”

She put her bag on the table, her large coat on the chair and lay down in the attendant’s bed. There was nothing to be said. The hospital had forbidden flowers and there was nothing cheery about the room.

Outside the window, an early Spring announced itself. Stella could see birds, flowers, and patients being walked around slowly, and a clear fountain, the water she could see hurling onto river stones and being spiralled up again. She closed her eyes and fell into a deep sleep, and woke up to the sound of the dinner trolley. Lisa had sent food for her too, and after she helped Rudo eat, which he did not fend off, she gulped down the rice, boiled vegetables and custard. Night had fallen, and the corridors were silent. Rudo was staring into space. If he was in pain, they did not know it, for the nurse came and checked him, prodding him gently in the ribs. Stella watched anxiously.

“Nothing to worry about, Madame. He is old, concussed, but he will come through!”

Stella smiled back for the first time. Her idea of travelling back to Kabul seemed utterly inappropriate. They would wait for the discharge slip and meanwhile rent a house.

As the weeks progressed, and the police dropped by less and less, not looking for links to terrorism, Rudo seemed to get better, He looked at her, as she changed her clothes, and brushed her hair every morning, not bothering to draw the curtain around his bed. It was an avuncular gaze. Yes, he was older than her, he saw her as someone very familiar but could not remember a single thing about her.

“Rudo, don’t your rember how we would would go shopping every evening, taking a baby stroller with us?”

“Did we have a baby?”

“No, a baby stroller. Our neighbours gave us one.”

“If we didn’t have a baby, why the stroller?”

“For shopping. Bread. Cherries, Cheese.”

He smiled back attentively. He had started to read again. That was a stroke of luck. In the beginning he had some difficulty, but the physicians helped him out with glasses and books with large print. Then newspapers and a magnifying glass came from the Delhi branch of their office. That made all the difference. He held the newspaper high up at a distance. His eyes were clear and his expression non  committal. Stella watched as he read slowly, his lips moving. When the story continued on another page, he looked disappointed but did not pursue the matter. Then there were occasions when he said he did not recognize the alphabets, and they had to start again from scratch.

 In the depths of her heart, Stella was contented that they were together again. That he had forgotten her was obvious, but he enjoyed her company, smiled and nodded when she embarked on some long story about their shared past. He really had no interest in recovering it. She stopped testing his memory. “Rudo, don’t you remember?” had been a recurring chant, and he would evade her gaze, staring blankly into space, or at the empty blue sky outside their window. All her life, she had been careful, frugal, fastidious. If she had not married, she would certainly have been found as a spiritual tourist in some Asian countryside. Stella was able to communicate with the stars, animals and small children. Her work had increasingly involved young women who had survived bloodshed and war, displacement, migration, brand new identities in countries loath to take in refugees. Her calmness coupled with a vitriolic temper and much gesticulation when necessary, got her the results she wanted in refugee rehabilitation countries.

“How many countries have you visited?”

Ms John asked her, looking at their passports one morning as they casually lay side by side, on the attendant’s bedside table.

“Forty six in his case, twenty in mine.”

“On work?”

“Yes.”

“Never on holiday?”

“We always went home.”

“Home?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s home?”

“Paris. The flats near Paris 8”

“Is that a metro station? Or a zone?”

“It’s a University.”

“Ah, I see.”

 The Doctor came in, and their conversation stopped. He was a dark burly man, with a short mustache and glasses. His white trousers were tropical cotton, loose and baggy, as if he were from the 1950s. His white shirt was crisply starched, hand woven with translucent pearl buttons. He looked clear eyed and oddly benevolent. Everything about him communicated his sense of worth, from his polished black shoes to his expensive rimless glasses.

“How are you Monsieur Sulan?”

“Very well.”

“Ready to go home?”

Rudo smiled. The nurse yawned and left the room hastily knowing that the Doctor’s optimism did not match her opinion. It was she who measured the patient’s pulse, and called in the male nurses when he had to be sponged and cleaned. She knew that his mind was as empty as a clean slate. He observed everything carefully, he nodded at appropriate moments, and he understood he had to re-learn everything.

“Stop all medication.” The Doctor wrote neatly at the bottom of the page. Then he smiled sweetly, shook Rudo’s hand with a perfunctory nod at the woman who said he was his wife and left the room. Stella ran across and helped Rudo down from the bed, the three steps being just that little dangerous to negotiate for an old man. His breathing was more stertorous, and he had lost weight as well. Something about him was essentially calm, and his eyes were gentle as he saw her approaching him. She held his hands, knowing that he would be too heavy for  her to manage to help and the fear of falling for both was very present.

Stella smiled comfortingly at him, disengaged her hand, and went to the attendant’s table and rung the bell. Sister John appeared immediately and looked concerned. She admonished the old man, for having moved to a sitting position. She tied the knots of his patient’s overall, straightened his feet so that the edges of the arches touched one another.

“I will be back.”

“When?”  Stella asked nervously, afraid her husband would topple over.

“ Just now. Give him his lemon juice now. Don’t worry, he won’t fall.”

She ran out, and was back almost immediately with the two male nurses who were wearing white overalls and looked cheerful. They were solid men, and one of them had a ball point which leaked into his shirt. He looked at it, and said to Stella, “Looks bad, huh? I will just change my shirt after I attend to Mr Rudo.”

There was something comforting about the three of them bustling around Rudo as he gulped down his lemon juice. The nurse took away his glass and wiped his chin dexterously. She was a voracious mumbler, and Stella watched astonished as she heard her softly speaking.

“Oh my dear! Being old is not a curse. You are an ornament to society. You have people who love you. Your wife calls your name, even at night. She feels your presence even in her dreams.”

“Certainly not!” Stella said acerbically.

Rudo looked at her with some laughter in his eyes. He was used to people chattering away, even though he was by nature a silent man. Wherever he had gone, people had always assured him of their loyalty, their assistance, their particular obligation to serve him. He took it quietly, almost as his right, and they rested in the tranquility that he wore as a cloak. Stella had found his silences completely enervating and had never got used to them. Enough that she felt responsible for him, and asserted her authority over those who crowded her out.

He was passive in the hands of the two men, both of whom were professional weight lifters and handled his bulk easily as if he were a mere child. They had the thin faces, sharp nose and  narrow  eyes  - members of the same clan as Sister John, whom they addressed as Lisamma. Childhood friends growing up in the same village, children born to farmers who had migrated two thousand miles in search of work. It was intriguing that inspite of their proximity to disease, their skin was clear, almost translucent. The woman too had glossy black hair, which was combed carefully behind her ears.  Stella noted everything about her, her petiteness, her sense of propriety, they were essentially rural people. In the city they asserted this more flamboyantly, talking to one another with the ease that childhood friends have. Stella could hear them talking softly, behind partially closed doors, as they bathed the old man. They had light adolescent voices, and occasionally the men sang.

In a while the old man was wheeled out. His chin was smooth, he looked like an old Roman general, his eyes vacuous in marble, stone faced, assured. Stella thought to herself, this is my husband, the man with whom I have lived for decades, whose virtues were devoted to his work. Her sadness became the reason for the nurses to turn their faces away. They worked with helpless people, they talked to them, scolded them, treated them like they were infants, absorbed their suffering, but they really had no way of assuring the caregivers that all would be well. That was not their job. So they waved good bye, and were off to a new job, a new responsibility, yelling out to each other as they went down different corridors until summoned to some new team work responsibilities.

Chapter 6

The two adversaries looked at one another. In the years that had passed between the diagnoses of Rudo’s loss of memory by injury, and Stella’s acute rejection of his condition, both had aged. Rudo was extremely well looked after. His contributions toward the understanding of ghettoization and rehabilitation had been recognized. He was for the French government, a chevalier, a man of honour. However, Rudo was immersed in his dream world. To Stella, it seemed he had never really returned to her, though he was friendly, kind, compassionate, whenever she spoke to him. He had learned to read and write, and so kept fitfully occupied. However, every morning she had to reintroduce herself to him. He would smile, sometimes, bleakly and formally, then extend his hand, the palms cool, the wrist limp. It was  as much a rejection as the cold cheek he turned to her when occasionally she leaned over to kiss him. It was ultimately, not just amnesia, it was rejection of who she was: ever present, her hopeful face swimming in his line of vision, her voice receding into a tunnel of time, which he tried to recognize but could not.

Somewhere along the way, as the years passed in hospital, rather as if it were a low quality motel, Rudo got better. He still remained mute, and somewhat vacuous, but  with some difficulty, with careful coaching from the attendants, he had learned to do things for himself, to walk, to greet strangers. He read voraciously, and though he could not remember what he had read, later, he still got a lot of pleasure from following his finger on the page and mouthing the words. His voice when he was motivated to speak was full of odd burrs, half prounounced consonanants, a long and stuttering  slightly desperate shove of a vowel, with the tongue clamping shut on the palate, before the word was expelled. He sweated sometimes, the beads of body salt sticking on his forehead.

Stella never tried to stop him, or to cajole him. It was enough that he was back in her company. She was achingly aware of his lost persona – it reiterated itself through her conversation, most of which began with a sigh, a conversational reminisce of something they had eaten, or said or thought about. To each of these he would stammer, “No,” because he really was not interested.

When they left the Hospital annexe, where they had spent three years, the staff gave them a nice farewell dinner. Sr John had shredded coconut in cabbage which gave it a wonderful flavour. The men had fried chicken in large quantities which they all enjoyed, Rudo eating his portion delicately, his eyebrows folding in together in a frown, his eyes locked in concentration. They had only their clothes in two suitcases, owning no other possessions. The old man was able to get up carefully from his chair and walk to the taxi. Their achievements as a couple were extolled in the newspapers and the hospital had helped them rent an apartment close by. Nurse John came to settle them in. The furniture was austere and the cupboards were filled with fresh bed linen. It was understood that they would require a full time nurse. They couldn’t afford Ms John ofcourse, but with the help of the Embassy they found a young girl who took over the household, curly haired, tall, strapping. She was alarmingly young but she knew her job well, excruciatingly efficient. She excluded Stella completely,  from her conversations and actions, focusing her attention on Rudo. He enjoyed it immensely, occasionally winking at Stella when he saw her grave eyed and serious. The days went by very very slowly. Every morning, in their separate bedrooms, they woke up to the chatter of squirrels. A cuckoo called and called all summer, shrieking it’s solitude. And then, finally, weeks later there was an answering call. After that, Stella noticed the low, morse code like drubbing in the air, as the black birds answered each other.

“Can you get me some hot water for my shave, dear?”

Stella looked up from her book. Before she could answer the whisper, Bella the attendant was there. She was dark, swarthy, pretty. Her hair curled luxuriously down her back, and she spoke with vehemence.

“Breakfast first, old man!”

“I think he likes to be clean before he eats.”

“He doesn’t think. His brain is a straight line with a few dips and a few ascents. Don’t you worry, ma’am. I’ll handle it. He gets really dirty after he finishes his food. Off you go, Madame.”

“Porridge?” Rudo asked querulously, deeply hurt that he had been referred to as “old man” by Bella.

“Yes. Open up.”

His mouth opened obediently and the girl put in a spoon of milky oats. He liked her. She was sweet and gentle with him, all the while chatting cheerfully and swabbing his face with a damp cloth. She clucked around him like  a baby, and on occasion protectively hugged him with her muscular arms wrapped around his shoulders. Just as he was losing interest in his food, he found himself energetically motioning to her to continue feeding him. The oats was over, the boiled eggs neatly folded in with salt and pepper, and after that, the old man agreed to have fruit neatly sliced, in a bowl. It was all over in half an hour, and he was fast asleep in his chair.      

Stella got her own breakfast, cheese, toast, coffee and an orange and went back to work. Everything about the day seemed to roll forward, time empty of events. She had a fearful moment when she thought that only meal times ordered their days. Rudo woke up and looked around.

“Which day is it?”

“Wednesday.”

“Ah!” He went back to sleep. There was no striving, there was no doubt,  or affection,  or longing  - everything was calm in his world.

His male nurses from the hospital came on the dot of 9 a.m and shaved, bathed and dressed him. He was in his wheel chair, looking a little like Charles de Gaulle in his dressing gown. Stella laughed delightedly. It was difficult for her to believe that he was only a shell.

“Do you remember…”

“No!”

“Palestine. We were in Palestine and the Arab children were in our care. They would come to the Refugee settlement camp.”

“Afghanistan, I remember Afghanistan. That was our last posting, was it not?”

“Yes, yes, it was. Rudo, do you remember when the Archaeological society met us after the desert reclaimed the past, and there were no mnemonics.”

“What?”

“The Taliban had bombed historic monuments, and we were there when the rebuilding happened. “

“Yes, I encouraged them to read the myths and legends and to see the mountains as continuous.”

“We must go back, at the earliest, oh my darling, we have been away from home so long….”

“How? I remember things only in fragments, like a light coming on in a dark room. I cannot even find  my way from the bathroom to my bed.”

“You are just joking, Rudo! I’m always with you, I never leave you alone even for a moment, when Bella is here then I finish my chores. We only have to go back to the mountains, and life will take it’s own course.”

“You go, I am staying. Bella knows what I need.”

Rudo took off his hearing aid, shaped like an exquisite shell and very costly. He put it carefully on a side table in its felt box, snapping the lid shut. He had the expression which she most associated with him now, a melancholy, a fading out. He took out a magazine which reported the war. The Taliban was still active, though it had been seemingly eradicated. He smiled as he read. The world he knew so well, and the patter of continuous well informed journalese coalesced in his head. The only thing that mattered to him were his feelings for his work. Afghanistan had been so green, the water running freely,   time when the people felt that they were the keepers of the land.  Not owners. The monarchy was resolute, and even in exile they were not forgotten. But there was food, and families had one another. In the terrible decades that followed dictatorship by armies, first the Russian, and then the overlordship by Taliban time went slowly. They had hoped to be rescued. The aid givers returned slowly. For many there had only been the cosmos of war and thousands whom they tended day after day. They had, Rudo noticed, while being one among them, two sides to their personality. One, they were totally committed, crossing occupational borders and political ones with ease, chosen for their singular proficiency. Second, he couldn’t remember. He frowned a bit, started coughing. He lay back in his chair. Then suddenly, he shot upright. Yes, the second was that they were as a community, along with the journalists and photographers, extremely sociable, and enjoyed the company of their friends. It could be card play, simple games of scrabble, or it could be dancing. He remembered the carpets being rolled up, someone at the piano, or strumming a guitar, and then couples would come onto the floor. Stella was a great dancer. He shut one eye, it always helped his vision if he looked through his left eye. The doctor had warned him that it was an automatic response to developing a lazy eye, but Rudo thought to himself, that now he was so old it was a normal part of ageing. He remembered the fall quite clearly.

Rudo was walking home from the talk. It was a sonorous one about knowing the Self. He vaguely remembered right then that he had written a letter to Stella explaining his urgent departure. He had always meant to return. From early childhood he had fits of vanishing, no one knew where he went, he always had an excuse when he returned. Usually, no one was particularly interested. “Oh, you’re back.” That was the usual cry, whether friends or family. Stella never asked him any questions. As he was usually taciturn, asking him questions did not provide her with  any answers. Whatever excuse he gave her, she would accept, clutching him feverishly at night. The last time he had disappeared, his feet had carried him to the bus stop. He had reached Rawalpindi, sleeping fitfully. Another bus took him to Pathankot, and then two days later to McLeodganj. He was in the company of men and women, seasonal labour, who worked as porters in hill side towns.

Rudo woke up with a jolt. Bella was being rude to Stella, and the tension in the air was like electricity, or being caught in a lightening strike. He knew those so well, that the analogy was appropriate. One took cover till the storm moved on. He put his head out, a little like a turtle, and then retreated into his world of observation of people and events, without any emotional investment. The words were not clear, it seemed to come from another room. He wanted to put on his hearing aid, but was afraid of dropping it. He knew that whatever he said, would not carry above the women’s voices.

 “I said he was not to be moved after his bath. I told Paul and Alexander. I told them. They think because they are B.Sc. nurses they have a better idea about how to handle the old man. I will kill them when I see them. He is not supposed to lie in the sun. It’s not about being in the cool dark morbid interiors of a nursing home. His temperature has to be constant.”

He could see Stella open and shut her mouth rather like a goldfish whose companions have died, and it floats about, alone, and without any goal. She was shuffling out of the room, leaving him his possessive attendant. She got on much better with the night nurses who were muscular men, in charge of pushing the oxygen cylinders and the patient into the mosquito netted room, where he lay gently snoring all night. Sometimes they came into her room to chat, and they would make her some cinnamon tea, and play an innocuous game  of cards.

Stella was afraid of the dark, not of ghosts, or blasphemous spirits from the past. She just found it impossible to bungle around, without seeing. The moon light was a generous companion on some nights, and the street lights blazed in an aura of gold, and yet, there were occasions, when it rained, and the electricity burned down, and it was impossible to see even her nose. She always had a torch at hand, and with this she would flash on and off those perfect circles of light onto the sky. She thought that evening, that only if she had treated the girl better, if only she had not been such a snob, if only she had learned her name the first week itself, instead of beckoning her with her finger. How rude she had been. No one treated people as inferiors anymore. This woman had as elaborate a lineage as she herself did, going all the way back to the same zygotes floating in water. Stella shrugged, accepting that she was essentially mean by nature. She hated her own inefficiency, and there was not a day when she did not spill milk, or break something in the kitchen. Ceramics were not so expensive in this city, she just went out and quietly replaced whatever was broken when she could go out to the market for just half an hour. Rudo was always calm, polite…what was endearing about him was his essential ease and courtesy. He was a delightful companion to these young people who looked after him. He had started recovering his memory, slowly but surely, and the vignettes of information that he gave them was both useful and entertaining. No wonder then that the young girl had become possessive. She looked at Stella as if she did not exist, as if she were a passing shadow. Sometimes she was outright rude, and there was the aweful occasion one cold winter day, when Stella came back from the shops, and the girl, whatever her name, did not open the door.

      

Chapter 7

Stella looked slowly  around her. The world had changed somehow, and she had found it displeasing. The mountains had been their haven – the austerity of the landscape, the bright white light. It was surely a world which had been given to them, to nurture . The earth has not been tilled for a long time. War camps dotted the world, and they were never without work, simply because farmers who went out, often came back without a limb. It was hard, to have to be exposed to so much suffering, endlessly. Their own needs had been limited to each other’s company and that of their friends. Every day passed by in a combination of fear and compassion. They discovered skills they did not have earlier, and received acclaim for it. They were surprised when they met people who knew everything about them, including the fact they ate broken wheat porridge for dinner every night when alone at home. If they had guests, Stella cooked ofcourse. Sometimes they were shy, and unable to speak to their guests except in monosyllables. But, that too, did not deter the endless stream of people, of all ages, in whichever city they were, from visiting them.

The archaeologists ofcourse were the most interesting to them. In every war torn country that they were in, these roaming brood of scholars arrived. Well dressed, with the latest equipment, the Professors hobnobbing with students in easy amity. They carried their heavy equipment with ease, and for the finds that they made, an entire new machinery arrived with built in airconditioners. What was truly interesting was how like a colony of bees they were. They were not parts interdependent, they were a single unit, a whole.  Ofcourse, they knew about  Rudolf Steiner’s work with bee keeping and educating workers on the beneficence of honey. But the parallel between the archaeologists and the hive stunned them. They were wonderstruck by what the land released to them, and sorrowful about the layers of destruction. Each level displayed to them both human ingenuity. Here were the Persians, Scythians, Huns, Greeks, Romans…right up to the Taliban who had no respect for images.

Stella shrugged, everyone had their beliefs, and their job was the exercising of human rights. The people who visited them, and asked about their past and their hopes for their future, often became friends of long lasting status. It was Rudo, who always answered on their behalf, a little cursorily.

“We became inhabitants of a world that was fanned by enmity. So we became well known …maybe!...as peace makers. We have no objection. Maybe those reading your stories about us will feel that it’s important to serve others.”

The cold deserts of the mountains began to bloom, and slowly fruit trees and wild flowers began to dot the horizons. Medieval mosques and Buddhist sites, alarming in their sudden vacuity in a war zone, became the places of sanctuary, for the wounded and survivors alike. The enormity of war hit them, and they were already old. Their world had been dismembered by hate, but now it was so potent that the dragon teeth of destruction had been sowed indiscriminatey. They met young men and women, whose eyes carried a flicker of hope, but mainly, it was the dead, half gaze of defeat. It was as if even their lids were hard to lift. They did not stutter – rather they spoke in a forced clear fashion, and either with the help of translators or in a pidgin of mixed tongues, they made their case heard. Only a few out of the hundred they met every day, would ask, “How can I help you, sir?” The rest were too wounded and bereft.

Rudo sometimes looked at Stella, through the corner of his eye. He saw that the thick foundation cream she used, which set her face apart from the rest of her body was beginning to crack. Her hair had become completely white, and she now looked her age. He like that about her, the sense of vanquishment, of vainglory, of a sullen acceptance. They lived opposite a cemetery, and the sense of pervading doom was further exaggerated till they sighted an 11^th century wall, still intact, and the wild rabbits and the deer roamed quite fearlessly. Rudo never bothered to think about what he had lost. There was a certain equanimity, about possessing the present. He had perfected the art of living here and now, looking busy, if not content. The radius of space and time included only himself, but occasionally he looked out of it at Stella. She always smiled back at hm, as if he were a stranger. There was no guile in him, that he was aware. Rudo realized that his absences had confounded her, worn her out.

“Are we going to stay here forever?” he asked.

“Yes, darling. We have no home now. After Osama was captured in Pakistan, they cleared the entire area for hundreds of  miles.”

He was pleased by that answer. Here, there was food, there was water. The summer was harsh, it was true, but they were alive. The girl Bella was a find. She had the ability to make him feel that age was not an obstacle to love. He cherished her and flattered her, and made her believe that she was a genius. Stella and he fought over her occasionally as if she was the Indian boy whom  Titania and Oberon wrestled over. He treasured her. She brought him his food on time, answered door bells, was intelligent, and she had taught him to read again, as with every stroke, his brain would be a blank slate. She had finished college only recently, and as she came from the slums, the ability to read, write, go to college meant that she had a host family, wealthy patrons. They lived down the road from them, in a large house, a family of service providers who had worked for the family for a hundred years. As a third generation member in a family of about twenty people, ranging from ages eighty years to five months, her parents were glad that she had got a good job with the old foreign couple. She still went back to sleep in her house, squeezing a mat in one of the two rooms and a verandah allotted to her family. Her grandfather tended the cows, who ate cud peacefully in the lawns at the back of the house, her mother cooked, her father was the chauffer. They also had an extended family member who ironed clothes and dusted and cleaned the house. The rest of the members of the clan were kept busy with their own affairs, as they had a kitchen, and did not eat with the family for whom they worked.

Bella bought all the vegetables for Stella and Rudo early in the morning. She took them with her, though the bag was heavy, and her brother, a night watchman in the neighbouring house, always offered to accompany her.

“I don’t need your help.”

 

”You’ll break you back.”

“No NEED.”

“Fuck you!”

She found her brother threatening. He was a tall good looking man, and his hand often rested on her back in a heavy lifeless way. She found him immensely attractive and was repelled by his nearness to her. Incest was not unknown in the family, and once the police had come to separate two brothers who wanted to kill each other over their children’s amorousness. The oddest thing that Bella found between the foreigners was their distance from each other. They hardly spoke. Though they were husband and wife, the distance between them was alarming. It was as if they were strangers, occupying the same house. The woman used endearments, but she never really wanted to get involved with her husband’s needs. The man was equally ambiguous. She liked him, though, and having retaught him the alphabets, and sat with him while he relearned a language, he was immenslely grateful. Difficult to believe that once he had trained hundreds of people and negotiated between Heads of State. There was no knowing where fate would take one. She sighed and rang the bell.

Stella opened the door, her elegant silk gown a little askew.

“Will you make some tea?”

“Yes.”

“Papa doesn’t want sugar.”

“I know that.”

“Papa said to wake him up as soon as you come, with tea.”

“I’ll do that.”

The door closed behind Stella, and Bella heaved a sigh or relief. She would not need to interact with the old bat till lunch. She didn’t have anything against Stella. Hard that they had to give up everything that they had, constantly moving, at every level preoccupied by their mutual survival on whatever the State  gave them as income. As activists they received privileges – house, servants, cars, embassy invitations. But as refugees, they were living on their savings. Anyway, Bella thought how can they be employed at their age, with their handicaps.

Bella dressed everyday in white embroidered kurta with blue jeans, clean, pressed, fragrant with strong sandalwood attar. It gave Rudo the sense that she was in uniform. She pushed open the door, with ther shoulder, the tray heavy laden with teapot and cup, sugar, milk, in a white jug. He was already up, bright eyed, happy.

“I was waiting for you!”

“Yes, Madam told me.”

The rituals of the day had begun. He told her about how the Americans always thought the Afghans were gun toting drug lords. All history would look at the period between the 70s and the early 21^st century as a requiem to war. He closed his eyes in the middle of a sentence and fell fast asleep.

Stella came by at 11 a.m, looking for company. She said nothing to the old man, and fanned herself near the window on a long sofa, the landlord had provided them with. She looked at Rudo placatingly. He looked back, and then turned his face away.

“What did I do wrong, Rudo?”

“Nothing. It’s not your fault”

“You would run away again, if you could.”

“Yes, it’s a habit. But unfortunately there is nowhere to go.”

“See! For all the years I have served you, this is the answer!”

“Madam! Do not disturb him.”

“I am not disturbing him. He is disturbing me.”

Stella showed Bella the way her pulse was leaping about in her thin wrist. She was wiping the foundation off her face, as she was sweating, and the creases on her skin showed up fine and clear.

Rudo watched without stirring. Why could she not understand that when something was over, it cannot be changed? Ever since they had married, he hid his Achilles heel from her, but the disappearances were so chronic, that no one could cover up for him. And yet,  and yet…there were no pathologies, no alcohol, no womanizing, no odd behavior. When his friends asked him why he left home without  explanation, he said he had no foreknowledge.

He told Bella, “It’s no Dr Jekyll or Hyde business. A boredom of the kind you can never imagine strikes me, like the low sea tide that changes the shore. It floats over my body, the senses become still, and as a consequence, I find myself putting on my shoes, and walking till I cannot ever stop. I enjoy it in a way, the anonymity and the continual movement. I feel it’s beyond my control, so I don’t resist it.”

“Lucky you were found in time. You could have died, this time, from what Ma’am tells one,”

“Yes.”

He had lost interest in her and settled in his usual torpor. His eyelids batted, he forced them open. Bella laughed, “Sleep, Papa!” but he shook his head and took out a magazine, and began poring over it. He had never been a great reader, even in his youth. He found words difficult to fathom, and with a foreign language, it was even harder.

As the day progressed, the hot wind blew through the open window, but no one got up to shut it. It kept banging occasionally, and the old couple would jerk as if to  get it. The househelp had gone home for the day, as the family was expecting guests, and they needed  their cook Bellal, Bella’s mother, to serve them.

Finally, the heat got to them, and Rudo said, “Stella, shut the window!” She nodded, and got up from her chair where she had been absorbed in reading a novel. She leaned and shut it with a bang, and went back to her book. The print danced before her eyes. The exertion had been too much. She counted her  pulse. It was 52 beats a minute. That was fine. Then she looked at Rudo, who was motionless with his eyes closed. The barber had not visited them in a month, and his hair had grown quite long, and his beard was an unruly white bush. He looked as if he needed a bath. She called a local service that provided for old people like them, and in an  hour, the team arrived. No payment was needed, as it was a charity organization.

“You should have called them earlier.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll keep their number with me. It’s been a long wait, since the hospital thinks we are now well looked after and independent, and after the last altercation they don’t want to send their people. I really should have asked you. Reminded you.”

Stella yawned. It was as if they had been trapped in a space they could not negotiate out from. They were still polite to one another, but it was as if the last disappearance had completely enervated them. If he had not fallen off the precipice, he would still be in Dharamshalla, attending religious talks, and she would have been in Kabul, teaching quilting to the villagers in outlying districts. She felt as if he had taken her life away, and now bereft of emotion, they had to continue with these banalities. Rudo was looking at her quizzically,

“Why do you wear pancake make up, Stella?”

“Because it protects my skin.”

“But the chemical damages it further.”

“I feel better with it on in the tropics.”

“Himalayas were not the tropics.”

“All women of  my generation wore it. During the war years, we prepared face creams from thick  dairy cream and lemons. It was like contraband.”

He subsidized into his magazine. It was about rainwater harvesting, and then the pages ran into each other into  story on the degradation  of mountains and new age farming. He found it extremely interesting. The problem with head injuries was that it blotted out a lot of grey matter. And yet, a calm mind led one to believe that other cells could take on new roles, that relearning could help one recover.

He worked hard all morning, copying out alphabets. He had not yet started writing words yet, and cursive writing made his head ache so much that to even attempt to read was  now impossible. Rudo saw that Stella turned the pages loudly, and occasionally, she put her book down halfway, to start another. Though his reading skills had improved vastly, writing was a chore….magazines were simple to read, novels not. He thought she was profligate to buy  so many books and leave them lying around.

The girl came back in the evening, and found the dishes all washed, and left overs put neatly in the kitchen. Rudo was busy on the phone talking to an acquaintance who had offered to take them to a play. The auditorium had steps though and was not wheel chaired enabled. So it was really the polite conversation that people in Delhi enjoyed without mutual benefit.

“We can go to the Zoo, in winter.”

“Yes, I love to do that.”

Stella said,  “Just a visit to the park would be nice, if he could manage that.”

“He has already put down the phone.”

“Maybe he will call in November. It’s only June, we can ask him then.”

They looked at each other, and started to laugh. It had been a week since they had had a conversation. Stella noticed that Rudo had lost his perpetual twitch near his right eye. Four years after the fall, he was beginning to heal. She hoped that in time, he would be able to move out of his wheel chair, but he, seeing her anxious hopeful look, became stony faced and impassive.

At 4 pm Bella had rung the bell. She was furious that Stella had washed the dishes and put them away. It was almost as if her job was being taken away. She took out  all the washed dishes, wiped them and restacked them. That took  a  good half hour. Then she beat up omelettes for their dinner and force fed Rudo, who was passive and benign. Stella ate hers carefully, cutting it up briskly, grateful that it was cooked properly and didn’t ooze through the centre. She had hoped Bella would make some soup for them, but realized that she had been hired to look after Rudo, and that’s where her energies would be focused.

Bella was humming a song, sitting very very close to Rudo. She had combed his beard, after washing it in a basin, with shampoo. He had subjected to it meekly, as the barber had already trimmed it.

“You look nice.”

“It feels cool now!”

“You look so nice that I wish I could take you home with me.”

“From what I hear you are already out of space at home.”

“We can always make space for another old man like you!”

Rudo lost interest in the conversation, and looked out at the uniform blue sky. He could see deer coming out, and the birds had started cheeping before going to sleep. They were certainly noisy like children at play in a flatted complex, the Ashoka trees housing several hundred species of winged creatures.

He remembered in  a partial vignette that summer in Kabul before he had  abruptly gone on a a dream walk.

“We used to organize dance and music performances for the children,” he said abruptly.

“What?? What did you say?” Bella said aggressively, as she folded sheets that she had washed in the machine, in the morning.

“Nothing.”

“Alright. I heard you. I can’t imagine though, with bombs exploding like fire crackers in your ears.”

“The real reason was just that…so that the children could cope in the underground shelters. Stella used to stitch their costumes from old clothes. We got a lot from all over the world, specially from thrift stores.

“Ma’am, Sir has flashes of memory. And he is speaking very clearly.”

“That’s good. War hurts one’s soul and the children suffer. It was our job to comfort them.”

Bella had decided to spend the night and rolled out mats she kept in the cupboard. Though they were old, they were well maintained. Her pillow was a roll of sheets placed under the mats. The mosaic floor was clean and well swept. With the lights off, and the door between the two rooms closed, Stella could not make out was happening. There was some conversation, and then, a loud cry as the old man was straightened out on his bed. She never went to look. It was too tortuous, and usually Bella sweated a lot while doing it. It was when the door banged shut and automatically locked itself that they knew Bella had left for home. On days she stayed in, they  heard her making her bed, singing to herself, and then the soft burr of her snores.

Rudo was always happy when she decided to stay. It was as if his blood flowed easier. It was true that they had paid her well at the beginning of every month, but what she gave him was a deep sense of security.

If he sat up in the middle of the night, she would immediately be by his side. Then, anxiously, knowing that he needed a basin, she would fetch it. No job was too demeaning, she knew that his own poise came from his loss of memory. His brain was only just beginning to light up after a long fuse out.

Bella was fed up. All the hardwork that she had put into re-educating the old man was quite wasted. He had fallen off his bed, and the fresh contusion made him stutter and one eye seemed to have shut for good. She had asked them to employ a male attendant for the night, but they had said they  could not afford it. Rudo was upto his neck in pain killers and other medicines.

The doctor visited every day, saying cheerfully that the end was always a painful business. Life goes on, its we who fall out like stars, dying and becoming black holes, energy spirals, meteors that crashland and are then either buried or cremated. Sarva Dukha as the Buddha said. Poverty, Old Age, Diseases, Renunciation, Death – it’s all the same to me. “Our medical degrees never provide us with a bed side manner”, he said, with  a laugh.

“Where did you get yours?” Stella asked acerbically.

“I don’t have one. Now I am halting the fees for you, dear Lady!”

Stella blew her nose into the tissue paper. Everything had been going so well- they were free of the hospital for more than a year. Even Sr John and the other nurses had stopped visiting them, being busy in other tasks. Now with Rudo quite disabled they would have to think again, about what their options were. She phoned the hospital and the Director said that they had a hospice and Rudo could go there. The bills would be picked up by the Embassy, as he was  their most valued guest of the State, whose contributions in the Resistance could never be forgotten. It was all done so quickly that Stella was shocked. She asked Dr Mathias if he had known of the accident.

“You were all expecting it.”

“I am so sad.”

“Yes, Madame. We  understand. He must be in pain too.”

“It’s the loss of his faculties that we are most distressed by.”

“Send him to us immediately. We will make him comfortable.”

“Thank you.”

Rudo was looking blankly at her with one eye. His large body had bent over, and when the ambulance came, he was  weeping. H mumbled that his rib was poking his heart.

“Rudo, darling. There is no solution to this. We are going to be separated. Bella and I can’t come with you to the hospice.”

He inclined his head a little to her, and then gave her his hand limply. It was goodbye to a life time. Time had already gone by so slowly, and her voice seemed to come from far away.

“I shall dream a lot! Goodbye.”

Bella said she would serve Stella, and broke the news with a happy laugh, that Rudo had signed all his savings to her. As the ambulance drove away with Rudo surrounded by attendants, Stella looked at Bella,

“Signed away his savings? What will you do with them?”

“It will see me through medical school. I had cleared the exams this summer but I had no idea how I could use the opportunity. Papa gave me all his money when he heard. He made me promise that I would pay half the rent for these rooms.”

“No need, my dear. I am really so happy for you. I think you deserve it. Where will you go to train?”

“Right here. I don’t want to leave my home. And you?”

“I’ll go back to Paris. I have a flat in the Rue de Algiers. I do let out some rooms to tenants, but I never meet them. They lead such untidy lives, with their unpacked bags and their children, sleeping where they will and then leaving in haste. Not that I mind, it’s their life. Rudo left me so often, that this departure seems only like  a segment of a series.”

“I promised to meet him every weekend, and the Hospice has agreed. He’s not terminally ill, after all – just a series of deficits that’s normal at his age.”

“ I’ll pack his things. He will need all his clothes and books.”

“Give them to me, Ma’am. I’ll ask my brother to drive me to the hospice.”

Stella said, “Bella, you are so helpful. I can’t thank you enough. It looks like I’ll have to fly out at the end of the month. He’s said “Goodbye” to me. He never does that. It’s hard for me to bear. When people become old they become selfish. Their needs are few  but their desire to live is huge. And they manipulate others. A bit like little children. He would have thought that living longer in this house would have been accompanied by  great discomfort. So the death cleaning gives you a personal allowance and he will have the pleasure of your company once a week. So be it. These are the grand friendships of the Ancients. “

“Yes, Ma’am.” Bella was instantly placatory. She knew that fate had played a card she had never anticipated. What need to worry now?

“Goodbye, Madam. I will come early tomorrow and help you pack.”

Stella looked at her with undisguised dislike. She hated the girl , but her innate courtesy made her cover it up.  No distance would warp her feelings for Rudo who had always protected her from calamity, taught her skills, understood that she hated sharing, and left her to follow her path.

“Look, you are going to see Papa on the weekend. Give him my love.”

“If he remembers you, Madam, ofcourse I will.”

Stella stared at her in horror.

That’s true. Don’t bother coming in. I’m glad he could help you with your studies. He was always very generous with his money. He never kept any for himself. That’s why, dear, we had separate accounts. It is so necessary to protect one’s own interests. Ofcourse, you can keep the share that he asked as contribution to our house rent.”

“Thank you, Madam.”

“Goodbye, then. Don’t forget to drop me a line, now and then. I would be very interested in your career.”

The girl smiled and was out of the door in seconds. Later that afternoon, she phoned Rudo.

Rudo was rambling, “Stella, Stella, take me home. I don’t know anyone here. I know what you think. I gave all my money away. It’s true. I’ve left everything to the girl. It happened the week before my fall. She asked me several times. Stella, I’m sorry, please come and get me.”

“Rudo, I can’t.  I wish I  could. But you always turn your face away from me. And it’s nice the Embassy has taken over. What can I say, my dear. I have no jurisdiction. The girl says she will meet you tomorrow.”

“Yes, yes! I signed adoption papers and made her nominee to my account with withdrawal rights, and power of attorney. She is young, but I wanted her to have a good future. She knows a lot of things I don’t. Infact, she taught me to read and write, when I had become tabula rasa. Now, again, I can’t read and write, or tie my shoelaces, or button my shirt and trousers, but that’s another story. Stella, she pushed me over. That’s how I fell. I was sitting up on my bed and she toppled me.”

“Papa!”

“Why are you crying?”

“You just told me something I did not know. The night nurse has come. I can hear her.”

“God knows that I loved you Stella. I still do. But my fate wrenches you away from me. Bella says that you are returning to Paris.”

“Rudo! Bella has already spoken to you?”

“Yes, she is a very lovely child. She phones every fifteen minutes to find out how I am. I have a room to myself. Quite comfortable and meals come on trays. And it’s airconditioned. Well, my dear, good night,  and remember me when you are gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“To Paris. Good you didn’t sell your father’s flat.”

“Rudo, you remember?”

“Didn’t lovely Bella tell you my memory has started returning in fragments?”

“And after the fall this morning?’

“Yes,  yes, my brains in shards but some things I do recall. Our travels together and my last escapade.”

She could hear him laughing, but the nurses were pushing him away, as his eye bandages had to be changed.

She could stay on, she supposed, but it was all so chaotic. She could not for  a moment believe what she had been hearing. Rudo’s world oscillated between fantasy and dread. The two were not separate but they fed into one another. Each was the reflection of the other. There were times he seemed completely normal. For instance, when Bella would arrive at the Hospice, the next day he would be completely benevolent. It was as if all that he had said to Stella was nothing. She couldn’t even believe him. Which young attendant would push an old man off his bed.  Stella though he was gas lighting her, something that was an aspect of his advanced senility. Charming though he was, whenever she called, there was something menacing about him. He acted as if only the present mattered, and the past was of no consequence as he had no memory of it.

Stella decided to let Bella come and wind up the house. The material things they owned were so few, their departures so frequent, that they had perfected the art of economy. It was as if their virtues were captured in their adaptability. Two boxes – that was all they owned. Stella divided up their clothes and books, walking slowly carrying a few things at a time, making many short journey from cupboard to bed in each room. It was as if Rudo had even less than ever, as if his identity was singularly burnished by the few things at a time he had chosen to keep. There were his six white shirts with matching drill trousers. A  pair of turtle shell glasses. Vests and shorts. Six books of which the most dog eared was Cioran’s “The Trouble With Being Born.” Stella shut the box closed. It was she who was running away, though she was taking her time about it. She smiled  to herself that the finality of goodbye was never possible. He was bound to recover, the question of their fractured lives was always left open to fate. She closed the door between their rented furnished flat which later they had occupied for all of one year, and got into the car to go the Embassy to negotiate her return home.

The Councillor was a tall thin bearded man with glasses. He was a follower of the great Nicholas Roerich, and equally fascinated by mountains. His study, where he welcomed petitioners by appointment, was filled with large oil paintings on cardboard, and he had started work on some obscure aspect of studying the aspects of renunciation in trans Himalaya regions.

“Madame, you have done much for us, and I am pleased to meet you. It’s been a decade since we met.”

“Yes, the last visit was in…..” Stella tried to remember, gripping the sofa edge, so that the veins in her wrist stood out.

“In Istanbul, over the question of minority rights to Armenians,” he hastily said, seeing her discomfort.

“I came about  a ticket to return home. Rudolph has lost his memory. He was in a lot of pain these many years. I am grateful that you have supported his treatment.”

“Who can forget his closeness to Gaulle and how much he did for our country. What can I do for you?”

“ Out of the circumstances, I have to leave as early as possible.”

“When?”  he was instantly alert.

“I’d like to leave tomorrow. I have very little money, and no place to stay. Rudo has no reason to regret my departure.” She started laughing, and her white hair created a halo under the dim light above her. The aluminium stand was simple and unaffected and the large globe was porcelain. She looked at it thinking in the old days we would never have had this in our rooms.

“It is 2009,” she said abjectly.

“Yes, yes. What of it?”

“We are old people.”

“No madam. Not old, quite ancient.”

“Send us where you like, after this.”

“Of that, there is no question.” He started laughing, the tears flowing down his face.

“Think of it, Madam, the road to the grave is linear. After all, there is only the hospice in his case, and for you the Senior Citizen Home.”

She liked his simplicity, the odor of books, and a spice scented fragrance that he carried with him. It was not musty, rather it was like a heavy cloak. Books, they were everywhere, and a strong smell of margosa emanated from them.

“I have a small flat in the Rue de Algiers.”

“Ah.”

“And a pension. Rudo and I maintained separate bank accounts. He has gifted his savings to a young woman, who was his day nurse, to further his education. I had no objection.”

Julien Lebleu nodded his head. He understood perfectly. Home economics was his forte when he dealt with diplaced professionals. The husbands he had met, many of them very highly placed like Sulen, were gentle aristocrats having no care for themselves or their dependents, if at all they had any. They quickly gave away their money to someone who asked for it.  He could picture the young woman. She would be tall, hefty, a sports woman with a sense of humour and some specialized skill, such as with lifting, boxing, shooting, horse riding.

“What was the young lady’s skill?’

“Conversation. She could talk to him. She was also physically very strong.”

“After his fall, what were his deficiencies?”

“You have his reports.”

“Madame, I see ten persons every day, before lunch, with cases more complicated than yours.”

“Pardon. He has hurt an eye, but although it sealed shut, he was not disturbed.”

“And you are?”

“We have been married sixty years.”

“Then why leave?”

“It is painful for me. I cannot help him. The girl who he treats as a daughter says she will visit.”

The Councillor didn’t look at her directly again. That she was coherent  was a miracle. He wrote out some letters by hand, watched her sip her tea through the corner of his eye. She looked composed. In  few minutes his secretary appeared, and she had air tickets. Stella sighed with relief, took them and tried to thank the Councillor, but he was busy at his desk, and nonchalantly waved her on.

She was hurt by this officialese, these were after all people who had been intimates ten years ago, when they were risking their lives in some danger zone. He had accompanied them to Capudiccia and had held her hand gallantly, while Rudo strode ahead. She could suddenly smell the sea and the palimpsest of  time where 20^th century tourists merged with the aura of ancient Christianity. It was as if he too had become part of the mountains in the cavern of his study, beyond her reach.

She thought joyfully of Paris, the dense coldness of the vaults where medieval kings and queens lay in Saint Denis, the sepulchral grandeur which tourists paid to see, while Parisians themselves were not enamoured. She laughed to herself, it would be getting cold, there would be no one there whom she knew whom she could tell this terrible story to. It was after all a world which was no longer familiar, and even the streets though cobbled were part of the new, the extra terrestrial. She herself was frail, her bones sticking through her white skin mottled by age, and her hair coloured an auburn at the hair dressers. She did not recognize herself in the  mirror, and she had to say to herself, “I am Celestine” but her image did not smile back. She trailed her suitcase and her last fine linen coat to the airport. Her lipstick was a little askew from the stress of looking in the mirror in the taxi, but for the rest, she looked calm and collected. Her glasses were on a string of fine pearls, her  last investment in the city where she had lived for five years.

People helped her with everything,  and she felt gratified that she did not have to use the wheel chair, though she assented to sitting in the carrier van which took passengers and luggage to their  prescribed gate on request. There was a flurry, when she could not find her tickets, but then an attendant was summoned. He gently enquired where she had been while waiting for the announcement to board, and then after ten minutes, he appeared triumphantly flourishing her ticket with its luggage stickers. She had left it under the flower vase at a restarant while having coffee and a sandwich. No one said anything,  neither smiled nor was judgemental. She got back into the queue and having boarded, slept most of the way, suppressing the sense of squalor that the girl and Rudo had put her in. Old age had its tremendous skills,  and people became Lear like,  in their disposition. She knew how to handle her life, she couldn’t look after anyone else, though. When she moved to an even more extreme situation, as Rudo had done, she too, would become dependent on anyone at all. She would look for a comfort zone, closing herself in on those minimalist needs - air, food, water - beyond that appearances would belie her actual abilities. She looked down at her suit, it was a little creased. She shrugged, and asked her fellow passenger, a young man from Michigan who had a yoga teacher in Rishikesh, and was enroute to America, via Paris, whether he could call the air hostess.

“Yes, Madame. The button is here.” He pointed up to the round switch.

“I cannot reach it, my boy.”

She had met many like him during the long years of her service. They were sweet, confident, empty headed. She smiled at him, and he immediately, pressed the switch for the airhostess.

The girl who turned up was only twenty, and she was invested in a bright smile, her blue uniform tightly packing her lovely body into regulation size. With alertness and concern she escorted Stella to the small cupboard of a toilet, stood against the door jamb as the old woman was afraid to shut the door, and then after gently drawing her out of the cubicle, pulled the flush with a triumphant smile.

Chapter 8

Since the world was once round,  and gravity tied us to it, the seas sloshing peacefully and keeping to their edges, no one worried. Then the angle of the axis tilted, just that bit, mountains moved, deserts flew past their borders in storms, and bombs left a trail of devastation. Out of the soil emerged creatures never imagined and people started fleeing for they imagined the world was ending. The Greeks had a word for it, “dragon seed” and each monster slayed bequeathed another hundred. Since there was no mystery about war and death, the game of chance reduplicated itself and people trampled one another. There was after all, only the absence of the self, the one who challenged, stood apart, cried with the wounded. The machinery of war imposed itself equally on all people at all time. Things had reached a certain impasse, Stella realized. There was no reason to leave planet earth. The first speeding of the metro and the promises of reaching outer space had yielded a plethora of hope, or every day optimism, a sense of never ending dynamism. All those who had lost hope of leaving had been told it was only a matter of days, months, and even hours. Without any impatience, they had believed it would be so.

The grey skies, so eternal had represented an endless sense of doom. People swore it was endless rain, which was foretold, where the single celled protozoa would appear again, and new life emerge from them. It was not known what was the nature of devolution, but certainly evolution had its grammar. The painted tarpaulin was replaced by computer scenes, and these were infinitely easier to manage. It was as if the colours could beguile sufficiently, and the sense of subdued and flamboyant sky no longer seemed necessary.

There was however, fear, which accompanied the waiting. In the end, the stocks of fuel ran out, and those who were left behind, were resigned. They had to make sure of their everyday reality. It was given to them, now as immutable. Stella had cropped her hair so that now there was no longer any fear of dyeing it. It had once been so white and grand, and later a variety of blondes, and browns and auburns. That phase had allowed her to mingle easily with strangers and others. That she had Indian blood was not known to many, her white skin concealed under thick pancake make up had a thousand wrinkles, but only she had seen them, even the care givers were wary of scrubbing it with cold cream and cotton. It was as if hiding them had made her feel omnipotent and ageless. Her foreignness in Paris, after Rudo had been interred in a Sanatorium had been both like a bane and a boon. No one knew anything about her. A woman came in every day to cook and clean, and since Stella had very little French after decades of living in South East Asia and Africa, they hardly spoke to one another. It was as if hiding the ageing, atrophying, lifeless skin, she could pretend extinction and loss were not near. It was as if her identity had forged itself in new ways, and she had become a universe unto herself, having skills that had been useful, but now unintelligible. The very nature of the years before the sky stations had been constructed were in themselves immensely diverse. People knew that with the water resources running out, life would be in question, but while they thought it would take hundreds of years, it was actually a few years. In those years, the world compressed itself, the architecture formatted itself into a similarity based on convenience. Everything became, in a rush, optimally accessible to everything, and everyone equally. There were no distinctions, and people rushed to fit in, to belong.

This mass extinction of people’s occupation, varieties of flora and fauna, and in time of everything that made the world observable and uniquely experiential, led to the survival of those who could handle monotony.

The first step of learning to adapt to monotony was ofcourse to appear expressionless and emotionally indifferent. This required hard work. It came best to people who had travelled by airplane, and had become accustomed to sitting for long hours in waiting halls, designed to a perfect similarity. The aerodromes were the first symbols of shared universal conditions. People could sit for hours together without conversation or shared experiences, not talking or hearing one another. Even cell phones had closed them into a space of immobility. Piped music shut all thought out, and each individual was absorbed in the minutae of their experiences. Like being in a dentist’s clinic, they absorbed their own pain, their indifference to one another’s condition. It became the signature of their being.

Stella was sorry when buildings she had loved and known were hidden away behind large screens. It was believed that people who inhabited them, or had left behind the iconic signals of the past were a predominant influence stopping progress. Rather than employing war as the bases of a mutual destruction, the emphases on concealment was total. Since nothing was damaged or brought down, individuals learned to walk through the maze of streets which cordoned off their past from them. Their mobile phones signalled to them as they tried to maneuver the maze every day. Workers came to assemble them every morning, and dismantle them every night. There were scores of advertisers, who offered iconic goods cheaply to pedestrians: clothes, jewellery, electronic goods. However, however, since currency had died out, banks closed and the carbon had entered people’s lungs, their desires were spent, and people never left home if they could help it. In this seething cauldron of wrested desire, young people learned to love each other. They had hope and vanity, a sense of everyday quietitude, and no resistance to the state. They heard the news, they frowned or laughed as given by custom, and they made as if there certainly would be a tomorrow. Nothing perturbed them, extinction itself was a known idiom, it had happened before, it would happen again. The lemmings and the microcosm of hidden dna were compatible…for every creature that jumped off, there would be hidden away some similar evolutionary substitute. When had tails dropped off, when had memory spiraled into a vacuum?

Stella looked out of the window. The sky had turned an abundant pink, and the morning was just beginning. She knew that the sun would leap out of the sky, and then, in a while, as the grey clouds swam into view, it would hide, it would drizzle, grow cold, yet the Parisians would saunter past, mingling with the tourists who had taken over the town. There was nowhere she could go, except walk up and down the bridges, with the grey water rushing past, and the boats sailing languidly with their crystal glasses on well set tables. It meant nothing to her, the world was real only in her imagination. All else had failed, and they would begin the day again, in a dream time, where everything was recorded, heart beat, and eyelid flickering in somnambulant dreaming.

Chapter 9

When the space ship, the Metro, took off, the inhabitants did not know. There was no roar, no fire, no sparks, just the sudden realization that they were now in the void. They woke up when the alarms rang on their bedside clocks, when the shower sputtered without water in the bathroom, and when their food pipes did not produce the customary custard. The entire city, so long landlocked on earth, was now a roving planet, carrying its paperless inhabitants into outer space.

Stella looked out of the window, and saw the night sky.  She thought, “Its Perpetual Night, so we are on the move. About time too. Light years away, from earth, no possibility of return.” She sighed, and rang the bell for her attendants, but they seemed to be in coma. Well, then, she would wait for them to land. She started to imagine, what it would be like.

There was once a kingdom, she thought. There were castles on the hills, fortresses barricaded by many walls, each concentric and guarded. The walls led people to different caves and entry points to the castles. Once they had passed each circle of impediments, they were led closer to their goal. Their bodies were the only indicators of time, of everything else they had no inkling, no wisdom. So there they were, on the planet Mars. Its surface corroded by billions of years, pock marked by fallen meteors. Water lay just below the surface, and once they landed, they would be led to their own underground lake. For many decades now, people without country, without homes had been arriving from planet Earth. They brought with them their seeds and inventions. Each one thought  of home, and propelled their nostalgia in known ways. They had been waiting to land, waiting to arrive.

The populated portions had started blinking their lights to the rest of the universe. Unwilling to call themselves Martians, they referred to themselves by their Metro names, and led simple lives. Food was plenty, they had cartons of capsules, as agriculture was not a possibility for a millennia atleast. And that too, would be possible only if the future generations willed it. And the sun, constant, appeared only in the way in which it could, as a memory. Without light, there could be no re generation. There was talk of migrating to the six planets, which were closer in time scale to earth, having a sun and a 24 hour circle of night and day. Alas, the maps did not permit them to voyage forward. Six hundred years in preparation, and a thousand in transit. After that, maybe.

Stella yawned. There were no risks involved. Once the earth dismembered, what else was there? They had dispensed with their Gods long ago, and a few priests remained on earth to safeguard the shrines. They needed little but their own sense of valour to concentrate their energies, or to remember the names of the Gods and Goddesses. Artifacts of ivory and stone had long ago disintegrated when they had re entered The Empire of Stone, a backward track in time, which all recognized. It went parallel to their entry into The Empire of Space.  The first years of the latter were marked with surprise, delight, and the warmth of technological light. Then, in a couple of decades, it deteriorated into disappointment. Everything was composed in formulae, everything disappeared when the electricity fluctuated. So they lived and lost, lived and turned the page to more monotonous year. Stella was unaffected, because memory had become sufficient to tell the tallest tales to those who had sought to confine her imagination to the present. She believed that, Schezerade like, her existence depended on this act of constant retelling. For a while, there was interest, as she described events, activities and institutions which were quite extraordinary, atleast to the listeners. But then, she could not find a listener, for they were all bent on going to the Moon. Earth was now incomprehensible to them, as magma sprouted at every turn. Hot winds blew, the earth erupted noisily. The green ring of trees around each home became so much a pile of brown inflammable wood, its rustling leaves promising a sparking without invitation. Floods, then fires, a cooling down and an ultimate entropy. No one had imagined such heat, such immense fear. Hailstones hit their homes, and then in the damp, after such an event, they would hope, but the dark brought new terrors as insects landed dazed by the circumstances in their window of time, which the sudden cooling had brought. The movements of animals brought them immediate knowledge of what was to come, and they would flee their homes, because they knew that when the deer, snake, rabbit and dog jumped to some unheard tune, that the earthquake was imminent, and they would have to take note.

They usually left without possessions, as these, like memories were heavy to carry. Once they crossed the desert, there were the oceans, and after that forests. They held on to one another, burning the carcasses of the dead without shame or honour. They beheld battles, they mourned the loss of kin. Friends remained together and no shame was thought necessary for the immediate copulations that resulted in children. The old were unable to keep in tune, unless they were carried by someone, and everyone was too tired and emaciated to do that. Life, as they knew it, was no longer possible, so they died terrible deaths with no one to comfort them, or to shut their eyes. The Metro had become the last Empire, before the Final Entry into the Space Age, and those who had come in when the gates locked, counted themselves lucky. Here, they had quickly been divided into the old and the young, and separated accordingly. Stella had thought herself lucky to have entered while there was still hope of survival.

Looking out into the endless night, she thought achingly of the sunlight that had been recreated by the permanent sun, a technological innovation involving endless bursts of hydrogen, but that too had become extinct in the matchbox called Time. So they vanished from earth, and were left in the vacuum the old world had called space. There were light years to be crossed, and they were prepared to do that. At the end, there would be the planet of Mars with its iridescence, and its many flags. “Dig deeper!’ the slave drivers would roar, as they pierced the crust looking for the turquoise water that their computers had discovered so many aeons ago. It was a time of stillness, the journeying, the preparation, the longing.

“Up the high mountain, with the wind blowing. The desert loomed closer, the empty earth, rid of its many plants became a kind of crumbling dust. Too many people wanted to reach the top of the mountain, so the soldiers had been harsh, and sent back the old and the encumbered. Children were not allowed, for instance, nor the sick. What was there, at the top? Why, a castle. What was there in the Castle? A Queen. What did she do there? No one knew.

It was  dark in the rooms, and the young woman lived alone. The cruelty of the men was known only too well among her serving maids, so they hid her away. And yet, she herself longed to meet her husband and her brothers, for she knew that they rode up every day to meet her, before setting off for  pillaging and war. She had no idea why they wanted to kill and usurp, but they said that that was what they did. They had need of priests too, so they brought them along whenever they came to glimpse her as she walked in her gardens. They saw her, she was alive, that was sufficient for them, and away they rode off ridding one more farmer of his land, one more gardener of his fields, one more shepherd of his flock . Their pettiness surprised her, she felt the sorrow of the people among who they were strangers, but there was nothing she could offer them, and no one came to see her in any case. She could hear them screaming when they were robbed, and their women captured. Looking from her windows, the field lay completely fallow, and the chopped heads were united to bodies arbitrarily, and the limbs were all piled together and burnt for the convenience of the marauding soldiers. The smell of roasting bodies wafted up, but she returned to her embroidery, thinking that the world of women was perforce separated from those of the warriors. She was sad for those lost souls, and had prayers said in their honour. The evening brought the stars, and forgetfulness. The dreams she had were of the families who had lost sons. She wept as she knelt and prayed asking for forgiveness, but those prayers wafted up with the incense, and did not find the gods she sought, for they had been left behind in their own country.

She understood then that her brother’s gods wanted war, lusted for blood, that they were conquering heroes who knew only this one creed. They came as giants into hot luxurious countries, and then slaying the people, made their beds on the earth soaked with blood. She had no way of stopping them. They were the dragon seed, where one fell, a thousand took their place and grew to manhood thirsting for blood. After them came the farmers, running over the mountains, for their fields had been stolen by others, and each brought with him his plough and married the wives soldiers had slain, and then they grew the maize and millets that were to feed them on the land manured by the blood of dead warriors.

Each Spring, they dug up the earth, and smiling skulls turned up, which they threw to the dogs, or buried in another field. War had turned their brains, they knew neither friend nor foe. They recited the sacred scriptures before hunting, before digging the fields, before setting out to war. There was nothing to be mourned. The terrible heat, the drought, the shudder of an occasional rain…this they knew. The women were as foul mouthed as the men, their children torn from the womb, they were like blood hounds who know their victim. When the fields were harvested, the sheaves bound, the wheat would throw up a tooth or two, which would be thrown away like river pebbles occasionally found in the grass. Was there ever a season without flames, was there a cycle of growth without death. The time of looking forward was now gone, they only looked backwards to what they did not have, to the the time of hunger and death. Now, the granaries were full, and the people were busy hunting others down. Loot in the name of war was perfectly legitimate. Robbing, conquering, shooting, killing…all these were commonplaces. There was a war cry, and then a collective lunge, and stabbing if not being stabbed was seen to be perfectly normal.

Below the earth, was now a steaming puddle which could absorb the magma in a hiss and tremble. The soil was thin and dry, pebbles seeming to magnify, become brittle and then crumble into dust. People no longer tried to walk on the land, as their feet would burn, the soles becoming worn out by the incessant heat. War brought ashes, and ashes brought famine. For the moment, the granaries containing the plenitude of other kingdoms, and petty chieftains offerings satisfied them, but as they had no time to plough, sow or harvest they knew that they could indeed starve in the winter. So they set the women to be farmers, while they roamed the naked land for more people, more goods to steal. The women sang songs, took lovers, bore children, and forgot the men who had first enslaved them. New villages arose, and were taxed by ruling kings. They too, became in time, a new class of soldiers, setting foot in new lands. And remembered that they were only substitutes to those who had left  the community to achieve greatness and immortality.

And the great warrior arose among them, looking to the hill tops to build his    castle. He built one for himself, replete with courts and gaming houses, abodes for courtesans, and stables for horses and stys for pigs. And here he did not permit his wife to enter. For her, on an adjoining hill, he built a filigree palace, exquisite to behold, and quite different from his own. Here, there were rooms which emptied out from the rock into the sky. Flower gardens were laid, and music halls and dancing rooms. Alone, she would live, his prisoner, subject to his whims, never allowed to leave. He was her brother, and given in marriage, for their mothers were sisters, to her so that she would know that her only duty was to bear children. There were slaves ofcourse, to guard her. The Abyssinians had come specifically for this task, and they had nothing to do, except to see that any lover who climbed up the ramparts would be killed immediately. So the days were empty, and the men gone to war, and there was nothing to do except read and write poetry. Here, then were the sorrowful laments of women who had known nothing but death, who had no future, who went unnamed in history, because their only task was to wait for the men to return.

Looking from the window, for miles and miles, it looked as if the people accepted their subjugation. There they were, going to their prayers. Vishnu perpetuated his guiles upon innocent milk maids, who languished when he departed with his conch. Every single woman thought she had him for her own, but he appeared somewhere else, with a fresh conquest. Nothing the Queen did brought him to her. She alone had to wait for her King to return. And he did, once a year, with bugle and lanterns, accompanied by a hundred soldiers, who waited for him outside, with the fires lit, and the stars all turned up to see their royal couple. It was boring for the soldiers who had seen the king at work with his courtesans every evening, and who had enjoyed the voyeurism of the lowly. Here there was no work, but the placid sounds of snoring, and the hushed turning over, and the placid creaking  of a handmaiden’s fan, by  the bedside of a queen, growing older every year. What was her purpose? she thought, again and again. The children born to them were by other women, she had never labored, and her bed remained clean sheeted and full of the subdued verse that the Gods liked to hear from their chatelaines. It was this she was used to, there was nothing new that she could offer. From the depths of her heart she loved her brother, he alone who could by the genealogists notation be her mate. He had been her childhood playmate, the one who understood her every gesture, her expressions, her covert glances. It was understood that one day she would be her queen, and he would be her consort. But then, no one knew what the future would bring, how matriarchy would fall, and kingship prevail.

One of the first things he did, after their marriage was to cut her off from her friends, from her brothers, from her mother. Her father had died in venomous battles with kin folk. They were known to be blood thirsty, they had no conscience, they had no will…death ran in their veins, and only by spurting the blood of brothers could they ascend their thrones. It was as if loss of life was a paltry thing for the jewels, playthings and huge tracts of land that they got in return. This instinct to murder was accompanied by the love of the finest things, and they coveted what they did not have. It was a simple expedient to give up family, domestic harmony, the ordinary, the everyday routine pleasures for what they saw as their right. The mildewing pleasures of mother’s milk and contented coitus was beyond them. The passivity of the glades of romance, of the swarthiness of workers and oil pressers they left to their women to harness. They had no rights in their children, who clung to their mothers. As soldiers, they found pleasure where they would. This sense of belonging to the sword and the blood run fields was what they took to be the real world. Armies marching, shepherds fleeing, the billowing of flags, the hollow call of the trumpet, and the soft pulp of strange vaginas, a new body ransacked every night…this then was their world. The anonymity of captive women, killed after a night’s pleasure or yoked to the bullock cart with the other loot of war was not unusual. It was indeed as if people whose villages were burnt were immensely wounded by what had happened to them, but the wars between chieftains was known to them by history and by song. Sometimes, when life returned to normal, and they crept back to their homes, they found that everything they loved was gone.   

Ofcourse, they knew that would be so, but the treachery that had surrounded them shocked them once more. Where were their vessels, their tents, their bales of wool, their sheafs of corn? What would they now trade for salt and gold? Yet, they settled down, and began to till, plant and sow. When the first ears of millet stuck its feathery brushes up, and the women too were willing to be pleasured by their lovers, the tax collectors would arrive, pulling up their kingly chariots, carting their sacks and seals with the authority of deputies.

Selvi would usher the tax collector in the Queen’s room. The maid knew that they could not hope to teach him manners, but surely he knew he had to enter bowing and prostrating himself?

The very day he had seen her he had known that the king had chosen well. She was large and fair, her very being carried a certain authority. She was not bedecked with jewels, nor dressed in fine linens. A simple cloth was draped around her body, tightened under her  left arm with a single knot. They said that her family was from the mountains, and that as clan members of the king, the intimacies between them had soured with the years, and the number of wars fought and won. It was not unusual, wives were meant to stay home, and bring up their children. In this case there were none.

“The King sends his salutations.”

“He was here just last month, before the harvest.”

“Yes, that’s why I am here, so that the Queen may be divested of her excess.”

“I have no need of anything, as I follow the path of my master.”

“And who may that be, Lady?”

“The Lord of the Seven Hills.”

“So be it, meanwhile, I will meet your head accountant.”

He bowed, and left, never turning his back to her, his black eyes gleaming. She was not frightened, though his manner both apologetic and arrogant made her feel that he would not find fault with her arrangements. He was a chattel to the king, after all, just like herself. The Bailiff had power only for such time as he had money and tribute to bring to the king. The moment that stopped, his reputation was tarnished, and not being a soldier, his sedentary occupation was always at risk. The soldier could ride off, he could attach himself to another chieftain. The Bailiff knew that the fear he felt for the King was not about the loss of his life, but it was about the seizing of his properties, of being beggared. He had a worldly manner, his height was proportionate to his task, for he had to frighten people into giving up their secrets. The Queen did not even know his name, she was contented to see him leave her apartments, knowing that he would not visit till the next harvest. She went back to her embroidery, to her parrots and dice games. Every moment was accounted for, her solitude was noisy with the accompaniments of slaves, who in turn whispered her day’s activities to the soldiers who accompanied them everywhere, and took back what she had said and done to the King.

Ofcourse the King had a new consort, and it was a matter of pride to this court that he kept her imprisoned in her quarters,  feeding her the finest foods, and draped in garments embellished with gold. The diamonds and sapphires she wore were so heavy, that he really  could have furnished a new army for wars across the furtherest borders. The Queen thought about it, and then shrugged her shoulders. Here, high up in the fort, Hampi was of no consequence. Here, the air was clear, the eagles flew high up, and she had the finest of cottons to wear. The Empire came with a price, and cheated of everything, she had learned to engage herself hour after hour, with new teachers. There was the drawing master, the fencing instructor, the masseuse, the embroidery teachers, the language teachers, the theologians. There was no possibility that she could escape the hill, except to throw herself down. When the summer grew hotter, and the plains burnt down from threshed paddy and maize and millets to a dull patina of browns, she hid in the inner rooms, counting the days till the seasons turned and they could come out to the terraces again.

The Castle was built only to conceal her. As chieftains of wandering armies they could not possibly take their families with them. And every day was spent apart, each with distinct duties. No wandering monk was permitted by the soldiers, and how the queen had found the poems of the elite squadron of foot soldiers was beyond any one’s understanding. Three thousand years of verse, and the sound of untranslateable phrases in their ears every morning came from her quarters.  The sorrow of her people, those whom she had adopted, by the simple act of looking from the ramparts of her fort, was implicit in these verses. The wind had rounded the rocks, the trees and bushes were sparse. From where she stood, she could see the King’s castle, more comfortable than her own, with courtesan’s chambers, and a hunting lodge for itinerant chieftains who came to present tribute. She could see the Artisan and Oil Pressers’  Barracks, from which she got word every day,for the bee keeper sent her messages wrapped to the delicate foot of pigeons. They were of utmost simplicity and evaded the eyes of the soldiers, flying straight to the window of the queen’s apartment, and she sent it back with a note of her own, before the sun was up. The notes even if  found, could not possibly hurt or alarm any one. It was the easiest way to learn a new language, the simplest way of staying alive.

The Queen looked up startled. It looked as if it was going to rain. The hot winds, the blue skies, had given way to clouds that were as black as the rocks, and a cool

breeze wafted in through the windows. There were no windows to shut, brown screens of dried hay protected them from the rain, they would just move into the inner quarters and let the storm do its worst. Down,  two miles below, the horses were neighing, and the threshed paddy was falling over in bundles like soldiers cut down in war. It seemed unnecessary to tell the serving maids what to do, for they were all running around, with set expressions and doing what was required. They did not even glance her way, she was the one set aside for a paramour. The King was so well loved, that there was no regret in the mind of the people that he had set aside his ascetic wife, who had not given birth to sons. Their faces were impassive. Her beauty was dead wood to them, and her orders ignored. Finding her unconcerned, they went about their duties wanting only to keep their jobs and feeding their bodies. Her austerity was an embarrassment. They found her suitably occupied through the day, and thought that it sufficient that they did not have to worry about her sanity. As for her love for white pigeons which flew in from the oil pressers fort, they were curious but not preoccupied by doubt or suspicion.

For every note she received, she sent a single word back. There was no mercenary motive, lust was not their idiom. Basavana had been their mutual lord, and every single moment was a tryst with him. If they did have a way of meeting, we do not know about it. The soul was ever constant, and the circularity of the snake biting its own tail was the symbol of immortality. First, the verse, then the syllable. The cost of living was not worth the breath that went into each, separately or together, they could hear one another, they could bear the gravity of their situation.

The soil was dark, thick, crumbly, rich. The plants which grew in the ravines parted with their juices willingly, and the artists drew their gods intertwined with the bodies of the men and women who lived in their thatched huts. The golden leaves that cured jaundice, when rubbed on the body, made it of a golden hue, and wealth poured into the homes and hearts of those who  knew the secret mantras. The very secrets of the earth were told to the chosen ones, who kept their remedies to themselves, and the Queen, rendered a vagrant by the order of her Supreme Commander, Lord of all three Forts, kept her counsel, and learned from everyone equally.

Leaving the fort was not easy, so she waited for the dark night of the new moon, and as it became a disc in the sky in a few days, her time was very limited. Selvi was her only friend, the one she trusted with her keys, and she would sleep in her bed and pretend that she was the Queen, while the guards let out the one whom they thought was Chaya the servant maid. Chaya slept undisturbed in her quarters, willing to wake up only when the sun was high up in the sky. The guards thought she, Chaya, was going to keep a tryst with her lover, and did not enquire closely. The slave was the duplicate, she was the one who had freedom, her work designated to keep her close to all, without giving up her identity.

In the forest, her feet bare, the thinnest of anklets decorating her feet, the Queen was pleased to smell the fruits of summer, the hot fragrance of mangoes, and to compensate, the cool scent of jasmine. She breathed the air, and saw the stars cluttering the dark sky with their distant light. She felt as if her life was captured in the intensity of time, caught in starlight and meteor journeys. If the King were to cross her path, he would not recognize her. That was why she chose the few days when he did not go hunting, when he dazzled his court, and his courtesans with poetry.

The road, what there was of it, was rugged, and the stones cut into her feet. The wind was cool, and the embers of the sky, flying across the train of stars, drizzled the black night. She waited for the hoot of the owl, and sure enough, there it was. Crickets and cicadas were so loud that she could hardly hear herself think. Shades of the night passed her by, whispers, sounds, the wind, the trellis of creepers rustling, dry leaves under her feet. She heard them all, under the flapping wings of bats, telling herself that freedom was for the bold. She knew that hunters were about, and if they saw her, they would shoot their arrows, for women out at night were thought to be ghosts, yakshis, demons of the dark.

The bee keeper had met her just once, and he had kept her secret. He was a large burly man, with the sharp nose of the peasants, who had escaped being rounded up for soldiering. He had large black eyes, and he was almost mute. When he had seen her, sweat had broken out on his brow, and his fire torch had wavered in his hands, and he would have dropped it, but she said, “Tell no one, I am your queen.” He had thrown himself on the ground, and then when she told him “you have to help me get to the town”, he had laughed, held her hand with respect and adoration, and then together they had walked till morning, when she could see the town before her, with its bustling shops, its metal smiths, and its cowherds. Their return was more fleet footed, up the steep hill, and they had not stopped for food or water, because her return would have to wait till dusk, when the guards assembled near the iron studded gate. She entered quietly through the jungle, merging with other waiting women, and no one noticed her absence or her return. It seemed to the beekeeper that the hours he had spent in her company were a dream. They had not spoken, and the silence was worthy of the seers who kept their own counsel.

The Queen bathed in rose water, and sandalwood incense filled her rooms. The King made sure she had every comfort, and she lived as if there were no tomorrow. The day was sufficient to her, she did not enquire where the food came from, and who brought it to her. Selvie did all the talking and sometimes she thought that the world depended on the images of speech, of the concern that the poor had for the rich, who were not remotely human. To be human was to care for each other, to look out for signals, to know right from wrong. Selvie always wanted to know, “Do you not care what he does to you? Do you not feel that you have a right to know what your future is?”

“When the men are at war, and have courtesans to comfort them, then what need they have for spiritual seekers?”

“You must ask for the right to adopt a child. Our Lord still visits you, though his visits are fewer and fewer.”

“What we have is the comfort of our habits.”

“Ask him to take you with him, when next he comes.”

“Water finds its own level, and people must make do with what fate has chosen them.”

“Your fate is what you make, not what descends on you like bird shit.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I see a white pigeon at your window.”

“Shut the door, and bring my food in the afternoon. Rice with thin curd. I want only what the artisans eat.”

“I will inform the King.”

“So be it. Remember, you are my only companion.”

“Alright, I wont tell him then. But if a stranger appears at your window, then remember, we will know what it is you do.”

The maid left, clanging the plates she had brought, the food, ravenously eaten, the millet doshai and the black peas with shredded coconut, and small pieces of raw mango having been eaten so rapidly, that the maid had been shocked. It had been long since the Queen had an appetite. They were not allowed to call her by name.

The door shut softly behind her, and the Queen went to the pigeon. The paper was thin, hand made, with flecks of some flower on it. The man was able to tell her simply that he loved her. His neck would go, as would hers, should the king find out. “It’s of no consequence to me what you feel” she had written back. “I do not understand”, it was  just one word, in the artisan’s tongue. The pigeon fluttered back. It was not so far to the Oil Presser’s Hill, and he would have his answer soon, with no possibility of replying till the moon waned.

Chapter 10

It was morning. The jeweled sky had disappeared into the bright light of day. A scythe of moon showed, and the fragrance of jasmines filled the room. The night had gone by in a blur of dreams. The very stability of the Queen’s existence depended on a good night’s sleep. It was being said that her husband would never return, that he was enamored by his new wife, and she never left his side, even accompanied him to the battle fields. It made her own head heavy, though she imagined her competitor’s armour, so she did not even think about it. It was summer, the days stretched hot.

The beekeeper had not sent her the pigeons for many weeks. Their letters to one another head ceased. Selvi said he had been seen wandering in the forest, and no one knew why the Queen asked about him so often. He had brought herbs too, for the royal baths, and was much sought after by the women in the Queen’s fort. She was not competing with her slaves, and had him come in alone when he could be found. An abandoned Queen was of no interest to anyone. She could do as she pleased.

The fort gave her pleasure. Enclosed from all sides, the climb up was never monotonous. The cool breezes blew, the butterflies swept past her myriad coloured, the wild flowers bloomed in the hottest months. All she wished for was the days to pass, each one unique, studded with events. The court poets who resided with her were quick to write verse about her, though she aged in the brazen sun, and wrinkles creased her smooth skin, the mouth turning downwards a little in disappointment and solitude. She still remained their Queen, though most days, they never bothered to visit her, or on seeing her in the gardens early summer mornings, walked quickly in the other direction. No new incumbents entered, they were tightly wrapped together, remembering the past at Hampi.

They had heard that a Roman  and a Moroccan were coming to visit soon, and the preparations had begun. They did not know how he would speak with them, but apparently he knew their language, and had interpreters. She was happy to meet someone new. Conquest was one thing, rule another. To oversee these rich land, one had to have power. Even to greet the pepper merchants money was needed. However large the territory, or small the kingdom, it had to have one who knew the King intimately.

The birds were singing loudly outside the window. She rose, and went to the window. No pigeon awaited her. To have a friend seemed the most blessed thing. The beekeeper had been her sole companion for many months. He knew poetry, and like other artisans living with him, they thought in verse. His understanding of the Gods was complex, and he lived by his wits. Now that he had gone on his mandatory journeys, crossing the borders of alien kingdoms, she was left alone. He had warned her ofcourse, for when the moon was full circle his journeying into the forests would begin. No one knew where he went, except that he returned to the oil pressers hill with huge combs of honey, each with the queen imprisoned within.

Outside, it was calm, the farmers were busy with their rice fields, and the earth was thick and moist. It seemed only yesterday they had arrived from Hampi, crossing the parched earth with their caravans and hunting dogs, the women carrying their scythes, shields  and swords with equal worth. Hampi, where the palaces and temples were always bedecked. The land was arid, but they got everything they needed from the enclosed gardens and ponds. The Vijaynagar empire only grew every year by conquest, and the women stayed in their interior places. Of the common people, they knew nothing. How did they survive, these slaves and farmers? Their palates knew only millet, and wild berries. The King, however had rights of tribute, and received their best produce – rice, coconuts, bannanas, yams, tendrils with the accompanying gourds, packed in large shallow baskets to excess.

She stretched, she looked at her feet, henna and toe rings just as they ought to be. So he would not return to her? Well, she had heard Basava had embraced the Lord with a sigh. She too hoped to die, having no memory of it. People thought her life dreary, but she was filled with the blessed light, the incandescence of stars. Nothing displeased her, nothing incurred her wrath. She was always delighted by the smallest thing. The hot wind blew in her face. They were from Bellari, the heat of Gingee was nothing. She had hoped to return to Hampi, but after some years, she knew she had been forgotten. The King had used her palace as a hunting lodge, rising only to use his bow to shoot deer, rabbits, and with  a sling shot bring down the occasional egret, which would fly skywards, its white wings furling outwards before it fell like a stone. The summer would become heady when he arrived, but after a few days he would get weary of playing chess and swimming in the courtyard, and the early morning hunting brought him back empty handed, and he would be gone before the sun had reached it zenith. The silence that enclosed the castle, the simple fort in the hill was so total, that she could hear her own heart beat.

The Queen was still standing here, near the window, where the disc of a daylight moon was paling and fast disappearing. The maid came in, along with the entourage of cooks. Odd that one woman should have so many people to serve her. But yes, they always anticipated the King’s return, always presumed he would be present for lunch..

“And what will you eat today?”

“Horse shit.”

“Madam, the King has sent a messenger today asking that you be fed well today. He has won a major battle.”        

“I will eat nothing.”

“He asks that you be fed well.”

“So be it.”

She withdrew herself into the inner chambers. Her bath water was ready, and she bathed, and was scented and clothed in the finest embroidered cottons. The  reign of Deccan Kings from the North had left behind a language, and the softest of robes. The soil embaraced the good things that conquerors left behind, and forgot them entirely when they left the place.

The King believed that his presence brought bounty to his people. By his absence, he willed the land to rot, his people to die. War was pestilence.

“Let him go!”

“Where, Madam?”

“To his death!”

“That is a curse, the soldiers will take messages to the King.”

“Ah yes, I whispered it.”

“I did not hear it, Lady.”

“I must become a new woman. Let me learn new arts. Send the poets.”

“They are at work on a new poem of love and death. The losses incurred by the king’s love for war, and yours for the black skinned beekeeper.”

“Everyone knows?”

“How can anything be hidden?”

“You know that he is the boon?”

“And you will die unattended in the sun, your fort a necklace of skulls, and we too.”

“He is human and his smile is all I seek.”

“There are no words?”’

“Yes, poetry.”

“He treats you like a man would treat his courtesan.”

“He treats me like his Queen.”

‘That title no one can take away from you, dear Lady!”

The women having finished their work of soaping, scraping, scrubbing, paring, washing, drying, went away to their quarters. She looked at her ornaments They were too heavy, too precious. The arched open window brought in the sky. A sole eagle flew high up, swooping down, its target seen . The day had begun, nothing was sought from her except the recovery of  memory.. the beekeeper had given her the black string with the amulet that he wore. He was a follower of Kali, though he immersed himself with sandal wood paste, and the fragrance of dried herbs, he thought of the young wild haired goddess, who pounded her father, and He, benevolent and detached, allowed her her prey. “I am her prey!” the beekeeper would shout, intoxicated with honey. She knew that her lover thrashed the ground, and cried for her. He            could not distinguish between Goddess and Queen. The metalsmiths who mended the shoes of the cavalry and kept him company on drunken nights, told the soldiers that the beekeeper was the most loyal of them all.

The temples to Vishnu were precious to her, and she brought flowers for the incarnations each bedecked by previous kings chariots,  sea shells, tortoises and wild boars. At the bottom of the hill, were the sacred drawings, aeons older than her, hidden by bushes. The stories were told with a linear simplicity. She lost herself in meditation only Basava appearing to her, and the songs to Shiva her only verse. The legend of the Shephard King remained in her memory. With him, she had learned much, each syllable of his advice remained in her mind. He had no fears, he had been prisoner to the Deccan king, he had seen their coins, earned their wrath, travelled to Delhi, understood their language. Slave kings, having the ambition of their fathers, who were slaves once, and Lords forever.

The dusty wind blew into the fort. With it were leaves, and faded petals of flowers. A light drizzle, barely reaching the earth, before it vanished, fell. The date palms were swaying, and the people far below, were tethering the buffalos and the goats. The people did not think much of the fort. It was a necessary evil, if not the Cheras, then the Pandas, or the Cholas, and now these Rayas, afraid of no one. The marauding kings from the North had arrived too, and taken prisoner one of the young princes who had disguised himself. He had gone as prisoner, and learned their language, and imitated them, when he was free. He was a shepherd king, one of them, Vijayanagara was embellished by his presence. He had no need of armour, he rode with is soldiers, and wore his jewels in layers so that they protected him. The Queen looked out of the window. There was a caravan approaching . She could see the dust clouds, and knew there would be a mile of them. The wind blew them here, they knew the routes from the maps drawn for them. Each time they visited, they had new things of her. There were songbirds in golden cages, and myrrh. Ofcourse, olive oil, and handpainted fans. She was delighted by their visits. It meant there was someone she could talk to, and if she waited at the window, she would know if the prince accompanying these treasures was someone she knew. Hampi was the most crowded of cities, and everyone knew that this outpost that she governed had a thousand coveting eyes.

These rules of warriors and petty kings, that they must always know that at the end of the day, there was one richer and more powerful than them, to whom they must bow, was something that she understood perfectly. Here, in the Queen’s Fort, they lived by the day, waiting for news of a lost war. Meanwhile, they enjoyed the privileges of their kind, and found friends among one another. From the Artisan’s Fort,  they got all their news, for the horse shoe fitters were replaced by others, when wounded, and as new men left for the battle ground, the wounded would recover from the scourge of battle, and slowly start reporting to the men around them. They were ofcourse many, who knew the
Songs of the battle lines of earlier times, and they quite easily turned to verse, the new events, setting them to tunes which they composed as if the lyrics were their heart beat, the sound of drums at sunset. The queen knew she only had to ask for the bee keeper, and he would entrance her with his music, his rough body lying over hers. She believed that the secret of their ardour was safe, till such time as the King returned. No one would dare to whisper to him while he fought but once he returned to the Fort, someone would surely tell him.

She was now 22 years old, a discarded Queen, keeping the Fort for reasons of convenience. There was no reason for her to fear for her safety. Yet, the bee keeper always told her that their time was limited, and that love was not a thread that connected them, it could not be. He had a wife, she loved him, he returned to her. Is that a problem? He laughed, showing her his teeth, sharp and stained, his hands rough, and his feet gnarled by many years of climbing the rocks, which hung over all of them, with the steep incline, the occasional bush, the heat, which burnt their bodies without leaving marks. The wind blew, and the smooth rocks, round and mellowed by the work of the rain and wind, were like stepping stones of time, and the King had only to call his soldiers to get the artisans together to build the fort, and the extensions of parks and steps, and lakes and houses. The very presence of the King, she remembered, made men drop their armour and do what he asked. They carried the Queen and her women in palanquins, and settled them into the Fort when it was ready. She delighted in its odd stylishness, its perfection, knowing it was her prison.

Every day was the same, the dust beat them, and the sun burnt them. They stayed close to the trees, and waited for the cavalry to return. The horses were fleet footed even on the most rugged terrain, and the Queen’s hearing was so good, that she could hear them neighing even before they arrived. She felt that her life was counted by the pulse beat of the soldiers, if they won, there would be gifts and feasts, the concubines would arrive dressed in plumes and silver on their breasts and ankles. If there  was defeat, there would be death and funeral pyres. The Queen knew that the Rayas brought with them the legends of the long dead slave kings, that they themselves were cherished soldiers of the Golconda kings, who had become Rayas perforce, wearing fine linens and keeping horses.

Their sojourn in Delhi had been spent mainly in the company of sages and pirs, the holy men of Islam. Although they knew everything about battle, and were masters of strategy, yet they knew that one day they would return home. They were sure of their manoevres, and waited for the day when their Lords would trust them so totally, that they would be given their freedom to roam. And that’s how they became familiar faces in the market places, their fairness, and their aquiline noses the spitting image of their father, the great Raya himself. The logos of battle was to win, or to die, and by the time the brothers were fifteen years old, they knew that their lives were written by the stars and the eye of time.

The  heirs of the Slave Kings had contrived to be ever present, they hired look alikes to merge with the people, disguised as the King, and always in command, these men brought to their city the reputation of ceaseless domination. The Rayas too, became hardy at their work, mingling with the shepherds, learning their language, sharing their food, and then joining with their commanders to learn new skills in battle. When they returned to Gingee, they had to hide for many months, before they could display their skills. And finally being King was to subdue the local people, and spin tales about Hampi, which they yearned for. The river stretched in their minds, for glittering miles, and it was for Hampi that they swore victory over death.

The Queen had no wish to live. She thought that her duties had been given to her by the Queen Mother, who had died when she was still a child. Even if she had no memories of those conversations, the maids who waited on her, had memorized them, and daily told her what needed to be done. She was content to live in the palace, high up on the hill, and watch the slow circling eagles. The romance with the bee keeper was kept a secret, and no one so much as winked at her, for keeping her secret. She was alone more than ever, and the meditation and sighs of pleasure over food and jewels now remained her only pursuit. The caged birds had been allowed to fly away. And as the days passed, there was news that the King and his bride would visit her, on their way to the next battlefield. She was horrified by the news. What would she say to them? She had betrayed the King, and had no remorse. Her monthly period had stopped. Her breasts were swelling. The bee keeper had no news from the Queen, as she sent back his birds, or wrenched their necks.

It was Spring before the King returned. His wife was small and pretty, and kept to herself, not wanting to enter into dialogue or dissension between the First Wife, the Concubines and the other rivals. She was young, her hair fell soft and straight, quite unusual, so it was presumed that she was an Artisan’s daughter. The King enjoyed her company, playing with her like she was a small forest animal. That he was so many years older did not cause anyone but the First Wife discomfiture.  When they met, the two ladies by passed each other, without sharing a glance. It was as if the other did not exist. The King noticed that the Queen was larger than when he had met her last. However, having no interest in her at all, he only asked for his food to be brought to him. There was some commotion, because it had been a hard summer, and only the mango harvest had been of any worth. To feed an army on maize was not considered seemly so they had killed all the goats and deer in the vicinity, and the soldiers were satisfied with their meal, accepting the millet bread with alacrity.

The Queen looked at her husband, the killer of his brothers. They had been influenced by the Slave kings, and had brought the terror of siblinghood and rivalry. Alas! She who had loved them both, and had been forced to choose, and now the one she truly loved was dead. She had to live with the secret. She knew they had taken the path of no return, that his ghost would not visit her, she had betrayed him. They had returned, no longer slaves, but free men, dressed in fine linens and jewels. Then they waged war against Mohammad Bin Tuglak, seeking to wrest back kingdoms, but found only the lesser, a descendant. They had won, battle after battle. The one at Kamlapur which she had heard about was the bloodiest. They lived to tell the tale, that itself was a surprise. But after winning back Anegunde, did they stop? Their father had been mighty, and they owed their people victory. Yet, blood lust did not leave them, and they wished to put back the clock. The sorrow of grieving men and families meant nothing to them. To soldier, to wage war, to win battles, they  had no sense of loss. If they lost a battle, they hid in the woods, then they would amass armies and bring them together again. They had known every detail of Mohammad’s madness, how he loved to feast warriors, and bring them to his table, giving them expensive gifts, honouring them, flattering them, then when they had left, sending them a death warrant. They had learnt, as his prisoners, the arts of emulation, subtle manipulation, shrugging off evil deeds with a slight grimace. The art  of war was camaflouge, it was to deaden the live spirit, love, honour, gentleness, fidelity…all that which they had learned as children. Here, now, were new men, who saw the bullion of war as the only gain. What need did they have for fealty and justice.

Hampi had been built from their successes. The return to the Gods of their childhood. That had been the supreme sacrifice to belong to Nandi, and not worship. To have grown up in the ardour of Shiva in the arms of Pamba, and to repudiate her in the court of their enemies, where the brothers had climbed from being slaves to soldiers to Lords in the space of a few years. To give up one’s love for one’s own Gods and then camaflouge splendidly and appear like luminaries of Allah, whose shining light they did deduce, for they were shepherds first, willing subjects of which ever king subdued them.

Hampi had been their jewel. The huge ramparts of fortresses, the sanctuary from war, where they returned with the loot and slaves, where foreigners came, and business was heady. Here, they would build to the Gods, and leave the strategies to their generals. It was where the temples would bring as much money as they burnt in clarified butter, and the ashes smear on the brow of the weary and the desolate. Not that the shepherd kings had much to weep over. After they had fled the courts of Delhi, they had disguised themselves as wealthy merchants, wearing fine linen and brocaded shoes. They had travelled over thousand of miles with their camels, giving new names in every city. They never had to prove themselves, people recognized their mules, and called them Gaddhas. The mules were driven by servants who brought metals, jewellery, silks, and as the camels had to be left behind when the monsoons arrived with their customary lashing ferocity, the Rayas too, rode mules, wearing now the disguise of turban,  sheathed swords and long cotton coats, with tight fitting pants.

The brothers stopped at every village and small town, when they had escaped the Quzbat kingdom, a woman had risen, the aged mother of Tughlaq, and they were quick to flee. They knew that once their escape was known, they could never return to the arched domes of the stone palaces, for they would be hanged like robbers. Ofcourse, they were enemies to each other, for competition between brothers is the reason for fratricide. For the moment, having a common aim, they could suppress their rivalry. Where ever they went they had new roles to play, sometimes presenting themselves as comediennes, some times uncle and nephew, other times, master and slave, two lovers, and even husband and wife. The older Raya demanded fealty, the younger one gave it. Submission was not hard, it only required good manners and a sense of humour.

Closer home, they would be recognized, however beautiful their costumes. So they turned back to the simple clothes of hunters and goat herds. Their manners became more rough, they were more fraternal, back slapping and easy in their conduct. No one recognized them. They knew they were home, when they saw the mountain slopes, harsh and sudden, arising from the slopes of ever  verdant forests, when the land became terraced, and open to the hot winds. The flat plains of their native land burned in the sun, they saw the rigid lines of Vijay Nagar with its fluted plain architecture, the splendor of the temples, the luminescence of the water, which had collected in the monsoon. As they rode their horses, the sweat gleaming on man and animal equally, they knew that no one could tell them apart. 

Their similarity had been their virtue, though they were divided by many years, the older rougher and more martial, the younger slimmer fairer, and muscular and, yet, if they switched roles, people believed them. It was not their features, it was their bearing, their voice, the sense of power that they  had. Many times while wandering in the forests, they would meet bands of robbers, but were never hurt or wounded. They would take on the identity of those whom they were guests. They would present themselves exactly as if they were one of them. It did not matter whether they were princes, or monks or dacoits, the brothers were skilled at the languages of each principality. They spoke Telugu with Kakatiyas, and Tamil with others, and Kannada with their own Badagas. They acted as if they were men of the world, and having been for long years with the Moroccan, Ibn Batuta, they did not see it misfit to abandon friends and families after years of being with them.

Sometimes they thought of the woman, their kinsman had betrothed to the younger. Who knew what she did in the years they were away. It was not their fate to live as householders do. When they died, they always remembered the years of war, not the years of harvest. Blood flowed not in their veins,  but in the fields that they had destroyed, like the crushing of a beetroot harvest. They felt agony for lost souls, and built temples to the Gods, to the Great Annihilator, lingams promising ever more wealth to the priests. The priests were nonchalant, for they had their daily duties to perform, the lotus to be bought to the temple before the sun rose, the preparation of sacred foods, the coconuts to be smashed with every prayer. The sea was distant, but every monsoon, the Tungabhadra swelled, and spilled into Anegunde and Hampi. The very nature of their destiny  was deprivation of the soul, and squalor of the body. Yes, they wore fine clothes, and displayed their jewels, but both the brothers knew that they, as companions were also rivals. When Mohammad Bin Tuglaq had reduced them to paupers, and when they hid in the forests with their families, they had known hunger and death. They had hidden in the dread dark, the twilight of green for months. They had escaped to Hampi, and seen their temples and towers torched. Divested of everything they  had, they knew that the treasures they had underground, the diamond mines, would be waiting for them. What could they say on finding their world famous marketplace divested of every coin, every merchant, every animal. Mohammad never forgave his enemies, and after destroying them he would give ceremonial coins, and elephants to one or two survivors. Yet, the two brothers had survived the visit to Delhi, had come back better equestriennes, were able to duel and sing marvelous poetry. They had not known hunger, only imprisonment, and that too, behind filigree walls. When Delhi was emptied, the Queen mother had given them their freedom, and they walked home.

The brothers had a sense of humour, they knew that the Violator was God, so they carved his image. How  could they differentiate the Annihilator from their named and venerated God. They carried memories of him, so sharp nosed, so aquiline, so fair.  His face was beautiful, and his heart knew no mercy. He believed that friends were foes, and his foes were  friends,  keeping them all at a distance, frightening them daily with his gift and threats. The Rayas knew that he had been impressed with them, and that they had escaped with their lives. The mules had replaced horses, and their fine robes by hemp and local cloth. No one could tell them apart, and they dined with all, presenting themselves as holy men. Their artifices had  become legion, and all they thought was to return to their Queen. She ofcourse had died decades before, but how were they to know? They had no newsbearers while travelling from Delhi to Daulatabad. They were unknown, and then, when they returned home, they found that she, their childhood friend had died in childbirth. Or so they told anyone who asked them.

“Nothing is  known of the child, we were by her side. It was a girl, a small dark thing, with no features which we recognized. It could have been the bee keeper’s child, for he was the only companion that she had. We think that they were lovers, but so many years have passed since you returned, we did not imagine that you would come back.” Selvi told them without remorse, though she knew that death was a paltry thing, compared to dishonor.

The brothers did not speak of the Queen again, and she was forgotten. It was as if their memory of her was so simple, so clear, without a line of truth. Was she their sister? How had they found her to be so innocent, when she was not theirs to own or know. It was as if among their 3000 concubines they had attached themselves to her. They had not found happiness with her it was true, but that recognition, they still preserved,  that she was married to one, but loved the other. This they knew to be true. So many years had passed, they were old men now, but their instinct to rule was still intact. They had left her in the solitude of her own fort, and the older had given up his rights to her, in favour of his younger brother, thinking that she would live longer with the younger. But, that was a fantasy, the younger had  an obsession with war, not love, and the many brothers they had, sometimes substituted for one another. They looked similar, and women loved them all equally. The truth was their memory was failing. She was one among hundreds whom they had known ephemerally. How simple were their lives, they knew no guilt. They sometimes said that they had been captured by Mohammad Tughlaq, sometimes they said yes, captured, but delegated with military powers. Fifty thousand men had died, Mohammad had retreated. They rebuilt Hampi, they venerated  Shiva and Pampa, they used their wealth to empower the idea of Vijayanagara, they were the brothers who were loyal to their father. What was a son or a bride, what was a mother, or a concubine? They were like fragile threads in a spider’s web,  and to escape them, they had to keep control of their territories. The Queen had only been a pawn, like so many others, they heard she died at 20, of an illness. The little girl who was born was returned to the Oil Pressers’ hill. It was always noted, if not recorded, colour and web of blood, and the practices of tutelage. She would grow up curly haired, strong, dark, intensely worshipful of her father who took her to the bee hives hanging high up on the side of the rocks. Her love for him was as delicate and respectful, as the love her father had bestowed upon her mother when she was living on the ancient hill, all by herself.”

The story was over, Stella stopped recording, for there was no one to read it, and she was alone, as the stars continued to shine, and the black hole was their galactic neighbor.

The End