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[The Virgin
Trip (continued): Part Two]
At the
reception in his hotel, he was told there was a woman looking for him. She
wouldn't give her name, they said. What was she like, he wanted to know. They
said she was middle-aged or probably older, tough-looking, sari-ed, dusky complexion and rather secretive about her intentions:
wouldn't leave a message. He took his precautions and was on the look-out. As
he turned the corridor-stairs leading to his apartment, he felt a hand tug at
his suit sleeve. He swivelled round, disengaging himself by the effort.
-
Siddata looked
in the direction of the voice. There she was, flattened against the corridor
wall, the woman assistant at the brokers'.
- Sorry, I didn't recognise you. You could
have left a message at the reception, and I would have contacted you. What's
the matter, Lady.
-
- Okay, Lady, if that's what you want,
come with me to my apartment.
She was all flustered and nervous at the
same time. She looked about her frantically, pulled her flowing sari up a bit
with one hand on the knot on her belly while she covered her head with the free
flowing end of the sari. As our man used his laser-key to enter, she fretted
and said:
- Don't think,
Siddata ushered
her in with much concern for her reputation. She went straight into his bedroom
and sat on the bed.
- Is very good here, I see.
- Not bad - he said and added as an
after-thought - by any standards.
She shook her head many times in assent.
- Drink? - He offered her a glass.
- No, no, no. Saar
don't know, I Brahmin. Don't drink anywhere.
- Oh! So, if you don't mind, I will - he
said and filled a glass from a decanter, the clear bubbly water sounded even more fresh than the water itself which was tepid. Our man
took a gulp and winced and put the glass down smack on the dressing-table. -
What can I do for you?
She looked calmer and more decisive. She
brought the loose end of her sari down from her head and covered her bulging,
exposed mid-rift. Siddata followed her actions and
rested his eyes on her belly. She straightened up and tucked her handbag in her
lap in what seemed a defensive measure. Siddata got
the message and looked away.
- Is sure very difficult vat I come here. Vat I vant is very simple.
Vat I tell you, very difficult.
- Take your time, but please be brief,
I've got work to do.
- This girl you vant,
same girl. Only one girl,
- I know that. I've just been told by Sundaresan.
- Ah! Sundaresan. So he told you.
Ah! I not know. How he told you?
- Yes, something like
that.
-
- What's her caste then?
- She jas middle
middle caste. Maybe, jas
maybe, long long time before she have Kshastriya in blood, bat no big big
caste. Jas middle middle only.
- You mean she has no Brahmin blood in
her.
- No, no, noooh,
no! That no. Maybe jas bit bit
drop Brahmin. Bat that mixed caste. Jas no class, no good good.
-
According to you then, she must be wholly Brahmin to be good.
- Vat that? No understand,
- That doesn't matter. - He took a pill
from his trouser pocket and swallowed it. He did not appear to know what to do
with her. - What can I do for you? Is there something in particular that
brought you here?
- Oh, yes. I vant
show you,
- Thank you very much for showing it to
me.
- Ah, then,
- I'm afraid, Lady, I didn't say any such
thing. I was just looking because you asked me to.
- No worry,
- I'm afraid you got the whole thing
wrong. I'm not looking for another one.
-
- Lady, you're putting me in a difficult
situation.
- No difficult,
- Is your boss your brother?
- Cousin brothaar,
- Anyway, you see, Lady, I've already made
up my mind.
- Very very
good,
- Lady, please.
Please understand that I've come here on a mission. I have my plans.
- Oh, that alrai'.
Jas make make plan. Marry here,
marry there, no matter to girl. She very very
quiyet, very very cook.
Cook puttu morning, cook thosai
evening, cook vadai one clock sharp sharp.
- Please, Lady, I'm very tired. I need to
get some sleep.
- Oh, no worry. Sleep good good. I call girl. She come run run. Jas two minute only. She good
good massage leg an' back. Good sleep after.
- Lady, could you please give me a break.
- Saar vant
brek. Vat brek? Puttu thosai iddly.
Vat brek, Saar? I call call girl. She make
plenty plenty appam in two minute.
- No, Lady, I don't want any breakfast, I
want to take a snooze.
- T.K. I tell secrat
now. You know girl big big caste. I tell secrat. She eat anything
- Why should he get mad if she eats anything.
- Because she my sister,
- Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
- Acca! Then
Siddata seemed
genuinely touched by the performance and calmed himself down. He held his
silence as she sobbed. Whether she was faking or not he could
not tell, and he was filled with remorse for her. He wished something
could be said to relieve the situation, but there was nothing he could say. He
feared that any moment she would break down, and he would have need of help
from the hotel authorities. Just then his interphone buzzed. It was Sundaresan. The woman stopped sobbing and dried her tears
with her sari ends.
- It's Sundaresan.
I need to speak to him in private - he told her while holding the voice-button
down.
The thought of her cousin brother finding
her there got her up in a hurry.
- Just a minute, Sundaresan,
I'll be with you in a minute. - She headed for the door. He accompanied her a
little way behind. She stood by the door. He flashed his laser gear and the
door slid open. She peeped furtively about herself and scurried down the
corridor. That was the last he was to see of her, though on several occasions
at the reception a younger version of her but plumpier
and more distressful looking woman in a sari tried to waylay him, almost
knocking into him. He had no idea who she was, but it suddenly occurred to him
when he was about to leave that she might have been the "sister"
whose pic he was shown. She was much darker in
complexion than on the image-print. Sundaresan merely
called to say he was always welcome to his place for a meal. Siddata politely declined by saying that he had gone on the
compressed pill diet. And that was that.
***
Siddata was a
long time thinking things over. His new amorous state obstructed him from
thinking clearly. These strange feelings came in bouts and had him nailed to
his bed. Add to that the air-conditioning system in which he was constantly
locked and bathed in the hotel, he was almost beside himself in his thinking.
Something seemed to come unhinged in his computer-fed psychological makeup, and
there was no way by which he could use his computer to analyse himself
properly. The programmes and soft-wares they manufactured in his time did not
allow for the residues from an older age when psychoanalytic theories applied
amply to all forms of human actions. He
was quite definitely a product of the New Frontal Age. His people looked ahead.
Nothing in the past mattered if it cluttered up one's own memory backyard.
Self-erasures of unnecessary incidents and events in one's life were a norm.
The mind was kept open for newer and bigger things, newer and fresher insights,
and one lived one's life without the unnecessary hang-ups, phobias and
aggressions that people in pre-mid-twenty-first centuries were in the habit of
going through or be subject to role-playing magic-realist wishes. What our man
was going through seemed to him, at last, as a sort of throwback he could do
without. Until he came to that conclusion -- at the end of three excruciating
bed-ridden days and nights -- he was quite completely in the throes of a
soul-sick lover that he had become, or at least someone who was grovelling in
the arms of infatuation, either of which sentiment was considered in his time
as wasteful luxury in his ringdom. The literary
critics of his time wrote reams to relegate the novels and poems of earlier
centuries which thrived on such sentiments as the wailings of a genetic
sickness that have needlessly held back the human race from progressing. But
they were unable however to find a replacement for such writings that have
rooted themselves in the soul or genes. Many in earlier decades complained that
library copies had often been stolen by youngsters and secretly passed on
amongst their age-olds in dormitories
of schools and training centres. Our man himself was wondering if he was not a
victim of some such reading he undertook late in the nights, under cover. Whatever
the origin of his troubles, he rose the fourth day from bed with a voracious
appetite. He took three pills instead of one for breakfast and added a cup of
pre-sweetened and milked coffee he ordered up to his room. He was feeling fine
as he strode down the acacia and raintree lined
boulevard that morning in the direction of the
When
he arrived at the marriage-brokers', they were all extremely pleased to see
him, though a bit surprised that he had returned to see them. He slapped his
code-card down on the manager's shining curved teak-table and said:
- Not one cent above ten million. That's
as far as I'm willing to go. You can click the contract in right this moment,
if you please.
The Manager and his assistant looked
stunned. The assistant was looking quite put out by her performance at the
hotel. She tried to avoid looking at him, but the astronomic sum he was willing
to throw away on a virgin shocked her and caused her to rivet her eyes on him,
as if by fixing him with her eyes, she might succeed in winning him over to her
proposal the other day.
- Sarr..er...er...
They looked at each other. Siddata cast a condescending look at the woman at his side.
She averted his eyes. Her bosom heaved and the flab of flesh in her exposed
midriff flapped.
Siddata spent
another day and night locked up in his suite at the hotel. He was thinking hard
and he communicated frequently with Foucault and others back in his place.
Once, a message flashed on his suit-case screen: No sweat! If you want the girl, we'll send the gear down with the
courier.
Siddata didn't react one way or the other. In the meantime, the bouts of
infatuation for the girl increased, and he felt totally immobilised. He
couldn't understand how he could be subject to such feelings. He even wondered
aloud: If this's
how people in pre-twenty-first centuries felt, I wonder how they managed to get
anything done at all! This's just crippling, even
annoying!
The next morning he called Sundaresan and arranged to meet him near where the girl
worked. She was a scientist at the Astro-Space-Time
Institute, of which her husband-to-be was the administrative director.
Technically, they both came under the jurisdiction of the Outer-Space Exploration Programme of the Inter-Stellar Administrative
Zone-1 Unit, a facility that could make seeing or speaking to them a matter
of manoeuvring from connections back home for Siddata.
But he wasn't quite tempted to pull strings yet. What if she openly showed
disdain, he wondered. His only choice was to play for time with Foucault and
see how things might themselves unfold. For the moment, he could think of no
better solution than seeing Sundaresan with whom he
felt the passage of strong currents a matter of expected course.
Sundaresan appeared
on time at the steps leading to the Astro-Space-Time
Institute. Siddata stayed clear of the roads. He was
nearly knocked down by the throng of Vélektriks that suddenly seem to emerge from no-where,
especially since hooting was banned. An ironic smile sat on Sundaresan's
lips ever since he saw the famed Blood-runner
standing respectfully on the steps. "Blood-runners": mutants who
facilitated the passage of humans, animals, birds and insects from one zone to
another when they themselves were forbidden entry or departure for reasons of
census control or other health constraints -- were the most popular
audio-visual figures of the epoch. All forms of video games invariably featured
them as the most freakish of heroes. Although, officially, he was on a statistical
fact-finding mission, that is, he scanned whole areas and streets for
bacteriological and virological evidence, it was
plain to the people he came into contact with him that there was a good chance
he was one of these mutants, too.
- I know you are on a diet, but you could
eat or pretend to eat something or other. You could have whipped-mango cream, a
local delicacy, if you like.
- That's O.K.,
I've already taken a de-dietising pill this morning.
I can eat, provided the food's not as hot as at the hotel.
- Go on a curd meal. That'll cool your
juices down.
The self-service canteen was automated.
They had merely to press some buttons on the electronic menu-board and stick
their code-cards in. The food came packaged and laid out on brass trays and
containers. There were various tiers to the canteen. Sundaresan
led Siddata to the centre tier, from where those who
wanted to dine on upper tiers would have to fan out on escalators.
- What shall I call you? Siddata is obviously your code name.
- Call me Joe, if you like. That's by what
I'm known to the boys back home.
They both dined in silence. Their
vegetarian dishes were the traditional ones: brinjal
dry fry, a slightly sloppy sambar, rather sticky ladies' fingers and frilly thosai and
powdery iddly.
At first their telepathic connections proved difficult to establish, Siddata obviously not wanting an easy entry into his brain.
Not until he had taken all the precautions by only permitting Sundaresan to maintain small-talk with him that they
communicated in silence.
- She'll be here in a minute or so.
- Who? Oh, yes.
- She comes around this time, unless...
there she is. You're in luck, she's not with her beau.
- Siddata nearly choked. He lost his appetite right
at that moment. - We're used to these feelings. We have kept them alive with
our love-sick cinematic songs of the twentieth century.
She was dressed in a white overall and
moved gracefully past Siddata. He looked up at her
back. She stopped at an escalator entrance and turned her head. Her
long-flowing velvety jet black hair was woven and gathered onto her crown. Her
eyes flashed in the direction of Siddata. He said to
himself: She's looking at me! He
thought she smiled. Then, just as suddenly, she looked angrily in his
direction. Siddata didn't mind. She had no mascara on
and Siddata managed to get a closer look of the
sloping and curving eye contours. There was something doe-like about her, he
thought.
- I agree with you, said Sundaresan, in silence.
- Isn't she just "divine", as
they say in the days of yore! - Sundaresan smiled, a conniving smile.
- I don't blame you. She has captivated a
whole people, millions and millions... - He suddenly stopped smiling. He had
noted Siddata's resolve earlier on, but never
imagined the extent to which he would or could go. - Don't, my friend, think such things. They are dangerous thoughts.
Siddata went
through in quiet another bout of infatuation or love, he couldn't say. His
spirit, if that was what one could call the residue of feelings that were left
in him after early "genetic cleansing", felt buffeted, tossed and
tormented within the confines of his limited inner vision of himself. Sundaresan quickly saw the confusion he was going through,
himself not having undergone any genetic cleansing.
- I know what,
we'll go and see the Yawing Man. That's what we call him. He as you
know is the famous mathematician and astro-physicist.
- Where is he now? Some ten or twenty
years ago, everybody had his name on his lips.
- He's still around. Only he's retired
from all official activity. He was my maths prof back
in his heyday. Then, one day, he took off to the Central North-Eastern Ringdom after
having come across a rare journal published by an obscure researcher in the old
Euro, some time, I think, in the last decade of the twentieth century. He found
an old tattered almost illegible copy in a junk yard used by
- You mean the original poïetic
documents?
- Of course. Yes, The Anthropo…er…er..something… Poïetics...yes, yes, that’s it I think: Anthropopoietic Documents.
- Well, those issues printed and published
in the face of insuperable odds -- you know, they had the author-editor nailed
for good -- are, for your information, well-known documents in our ringdoms.
- Then you must know about the Yijing’s place in
it all?
- Of course I do.
- Good. Then, come along quickly. We'll
give him a surprise. But, the trouble is, he'll already know about our coming
once we decide to see him.
-
How's that?
- You know, the
old Sittar
stuff. This thing about enjoying supernatural powers: levitation, leaving and
entering the body at will, power to diagnose by simple sight, power to heal
with gold and other minerals, metempsychosis, telekinesis and all that.
- But I thought the Sittars had gone out of existence
by the nineteenth century.
- In a way, you're right. But my prof got wind of some wayout
yogic practice which leads to awakening the kundalini up through the six cakras, with the difference that here in this
climate continence was not prescribed as a condition. Perhaps that was the key
to the secret. So, he tried it out under the Chinese version of the doctrine
when he was over there to give lectures and talk pure maths. There continence
was indispensable and he managed it. Since then he has renounced everything. Wouldn't even take credit for solving and giving the proofs of the Pointcaré Conjecture and a few other
mind-twisters. Lives simply. Gave away all his
books and notes and files and what-have-you. Thrives on practically nothing, is
always in good humour and enjoys perfect health. And he says he owes it all
originally to a close reading of the poïetic
documents. One thing I'd like to know, whatever became of the editor? They say
he was a writer of sorts.
- I can fill you in on him quite easily.
Just some years ago, a researcher at the Central
Revision Board got interested in his writings and dug into the abandoned
Library of Congress collections and came up with a whole series of works --
apparently printed by the author himself -- which made us all wonder why he
never made it in his lifetime and why he was conveniently ditched in limbo. I
read about it in a disc-book brought out only about six months ago. The title
was something like Secret Cases Secreted
or something like that.
- I was told the old secret services were
after him.
- That's right, but it went deeper than
that and no one knows exactly why they were after him. Apparently they wouldn't
let go, not until he was battered down for good and was too lame to lift a
finger in his own defence. There were all sorts of hints, of course. They said
it was all organized by the old colonial bastions. But then no one was able to
put the pieces together. One clue pointed to the extreme religious factions.
Yet another asserted that it was the Jews or the Freemasons. They were all
powerful in those days. But he, himself,
claimed loudly that his major maître-penseurs were Jews, and that he had nothing personal
against them. The trouble was the very same people branded him an anti-semite.
- Is that true?
- You mean him being anti-semitic? Not by a long shot, though he must have got
somewhat jittery about them after half a century of relentless semitic pressure. His only crime
he defended himself when attacked by some lousy leechy
characters, and that did it.
- I don’t get it? Why? Why should he be
branded anti-semitic when the Semites themselves were
giving him hell?
- That’s the point, they couldn’t stand
the idea that anyone who was then lower than a worm could even want to defend
himself… instead of …instead of joining them, I suppose.
- That sort of reasoning beats me. There’s
a catch some where. Why did they keep him down? Really.
- Don't ask me. Seems like an odd case. Even an impossible case to crack after all these years.
Maybe if you read some of
Professor Leibovitz’s writings and
interviews, you might get a clue, you know the savant who was criticising his
own people for not granting independence to the Palestinians. In any case, the
researched piece I read indicated that it was something very personal; small
fry who had it against him using hot-shots in high places to crack down on him,
who in turn when they failed used the secret services
to shit on him.
- What a fate! But why didn’t the Euros
help him out?
- You think they were going to lift a finger at that time to help a er…er…even
a falsely-branded anti-semite? And so soon after the Hitlerian debacle?
***
The Yawing
Man, as Sundaresan had said, lived simply in a
sort of a vast unfurnished hall of a studio in the upper floor of a bungalow
near the beach, one of the apartment bungalows in a former twentieth century
playground-cum-fun-fair for the poor and the unsophisticated, called Golden Coast Reserve. Everything in it
was (not intentionally, of course) made to caricature the genuine article:
coloured pot-bellied statues of Brahmins
looking dwarfish and grotesque in their shaven heads, wide bulging eyes, horny
teeth and pigtails, asparas in ponds looking like
bathing-beauty sirens in fish tails, mock sculptural reliefs
in weird contortions of tiresome repetitive designs, bull-drawn carts housing
luridly painted -- green, white, red, ochre and black -- coaches for
sight-seeing; in short, all the workings of a bottom-of-the-barrel Indo-Tamil
version of an imitation of Disneyland, without the salutary intent to amuse the
young in mind. Here they took themselves seriously, both the providers and the
payers who daily streamed into the sandy, sticky eerie wastes by the tens of
thousands. It was the poor-man's concocted world of culture. You can imagine, most would have spent their annual savings just to come
for a visit from far and wide. After a day in its confines, you too would
become a part of the comic strip. All that was left of the reserve was the
ochre-coloured bungalows with their mock porticos, pillars, cornices and wide
stairways which served no apparent purpose. In the gardens, clay and cement
cows slouched chewing the cud under garlanded horns and mascara-filled eyebrows
while coconut-grove monkeys, their eyes larger than their fists, lay forever
caught in a swinging posture, one about to drop from a parapet, another about
to scale a trunk and yet another using a palm frond as a trampoline.
A brownish concave-chested
man of fifty, his shoulder clavicles sticking forwards and inwards, his knee
bones thicker than his thighs, looking like an overgrown boy of fourteen with
rickets, except for the head, a long broad face on a perfectly convex shell of
a skull from which sprouted thick straggly hair. His chin and cheeks were
starkly spotted with days' old growth, his long broad aquiline nose splitting
equidistantly widely-spaced large liquid honey-coloured eyes and fan-like inturned ears. A playful, childish smile always, it seemed,
lingered on his lips and needed only the merest excuse to light up his entire face,
drawn back by taught muscles in a bunch to a point in the nuke. He was waiting
for them at the Golden Beach suburban railway station in khaki Bermuda shorts,
a straw-bare Mexican sombrero and leather sandals. The rest of his body was
bare. His unstained teeth flashed fully-opened lips, amused as much with
himself and his own antics as with the strange pair that came to call on him
without giving him notice.
- I thought, Sir, you'd be here to receive
us - said Sundaresan rather apologetically.
The
professor turned hermit looked at them both for only an instant and never cast
a look at them after that, preferring to sense their presences rather than the
correct vision of their shapes and sizes.
- The tide's low. Let's walk down and
along the beach for a while - he said, taking his sandals off and clasping them
in his left palm. The callers did likewise. From then on they said nothing to
one another. They cast helpless looks in the direction of the ocean where it
fused with the sky. The wind ruffled their clothes and hair. It felt warm, but
the sand was hot where the water had evaporated. Sticky spray swept the air.
The taste in the mouth soon turned sour. They walked closer and closer to the
water, avoiding the shells, corral, bottles and pebbles left by the receding
tide. - Let's go to my place and have some tea.
When they were seated on straw mats, the
studio-room didn't look that deserted. The windows were all widely opened at
different angles. The thick brown curtains were drawn partly to keep the
blinding light out. In a corner lay stacked a roll of matting that was
obviously his sleeping material: rug-like matting that might have been a poor
man's carpet, some sheets and a wooden block with the centre dented, a Zen
monk's pillow, of course. At the other end, in a corridor a gas stove and some
kitchen appliances, spare crockery and cutlery stacked in a small low wooden
cupboard, the top of which served as a cutting board. Sandals and shoes were
neatly arranged outside the door. Sundaresan and Siddata were taken by surprise watching a squirrel scurry
along the walls and curtains.
- It probably came in through the opened
bathroom window and is desperately looking for a way out. Unfortunately I have
nothing so wonderful here to offer as it can find outside.
The professor drew the curtains back and
waited a second for the squirrel to rush past him in a bound. He drew the
curtains close and joined the visitors with his tea things: some Chinese black
tea, three red-clay bowls, matching kettle and a panful
of boiling water. He served the tea while stretching out on his knees; then he
sat down with his legs crossed, feet upturned on thighs. While they drank in
silence, a gentle slightly ironic smile developed on his lips and cheeks.
During the few minutes which elapsed before he addressed Siddata
aloud, he conversed with Sundaresan on his sojourn at
I.M.I.T. and his future projects, all in quiet, his voice a ponderous low
timbre. He then looked at Siddata.
- Since your mind is made up and there's
nothing anybody can say to convince you of the merits or demerits of your
decision, it might perhaps be wise to undertake a trip into Trans-Time Single-Choice Alternative Trance.
I know you've heard of it.
- But I certainly don't have the means to
enter into that state.
- How do you know whether you are able to
or not until you have tried. Since your sufferance is beyond your own genetic
makeup's equilibrium, you might just have to try it, unless you propose to
impose your will and your technology on thousands of simple folk, and you well
know the result.
- Could you guide me, Professor?
- I might, but you have to enter the state
in your own apartment with no one around. You have nevertheless to accept the fact
that once you come out of it, you have to accept the consequences of your
actions. You may not then revert to your
time and wish that things might stand as they are at the present moment.
- Would the situation be the same for
everybody else, or...
- Not quite. Only your situation and the
situation of the person you project to abduct would have changed. Everybody
else will be none the wiser. If you will, this is one way of avoiding having to
inflict more pain than necessary in the circumstances. If you carried out your
decision to abduct her by force, you can well imagine how many others are going
to perish.
- How long is it likely to take?
- In that state,
space-time as you live it now, collapses. You will enter a
dimension-zone of the imagination which will permit you to execute your wishes
though the time taken in our world would depend on how long you relish your
deeds.
- You mean, it
could take a day or even less.
- Yes, it could take even a few minutes,
but not generally more than a day since your daily bodily needs would impose
themselves on your state of meditation.
- I see. I may then have to cleanse my
body first and prepare for the worst.
- Exactly, but make sure you provide for a
small area around you free of obstacles, just in case, and of course for easy
mopping up later when you come out of the trip.
They looked at each other just for a
second. Sundaresan rose. So did Siddata.
They bowed gently and left without much ceremony. All the way back Siddata had a determined look about him. When they parted
at the Pallava Tower Station, Sundaresan
looked sympathetically at Siddata and said:
- If you need me to...
- Thanks a lot. I think I should take this
trip all alone. I have to find myself by entering into my own future all by
myself.
- It’s risky business,
you know that, don’t you? – They looked at each other as though for the last
time. - Call me when you come out of it.
Promise?
Siddata gave him
a resolute look, nodded and parted. Sundaresan watched him go, not without a sense of fear
overtaking him.
***
For three days and three nights Siddata fasted. He did not know why. He was a bit astonished
that he did things for the first time in his life without premeditation. Things
just happened the way it should, it seemed to him. He cleared a space in the
centre of his lounge, stretched the carpet tight and circumscribed the space
with the downy settee and cushy armchairs with the low bed of a double mattress
rise closing the space. The first day and night he went through a sort of
stocktaking of the reasons for his arrival and actions and resolved to go
through with his decision: he wanted the girl for himself and he felt there was
no sacrifice he was not capable of making to achieve his purpose. He spent much
time in the empty space just sitting and lying around on the thick hand-woven
carpet, and without his knowledge entering into states of meditation in fits
and starts during the second day. The third day he was calmer and seemed to be
able to enter at will into what seemed hours-long meditational
states in which he reviewed at will some of his past actions. When he woke the
fourth morning, he had no doubt the moment had arrived to attempt the living of
future events whatever the outcome. He simply had to. Somewhere down the past
something had gone wrong with the genetic manipulation in his makeup. He was a
man of his century being called back to an earlier century, the difference, it
seemed, he had traversed from the zone of his departure to the zone of his
arrival. He made sure he was not to be disturbed. He left a message for Sundaresan that he was about to take the trip that day. He
contacted his client and his agent back home just to say he was taking time out
to think things over and should they wish to contact him, they could leave a
coded message in his computer which they could activate by using the right
commands. At all costs he was not to be contacted directly. They didn't quite
understand his wishes, but they said they understood.
That morning he drew the curtains tight,
locked his door and windows with his laser command, switched on the ventilator,
stripped to a bare minimum, drank a lot of water, sat down in the middle of the
empty space and just waited. Around
Then, the images he saw telescoped one
into the other.
He saw the girl - her name was Rukumani - for one instant in her white overalls and the
next in gaily-clad sari, then it seemed she was frozen stiff in sub-Celsius
vapour.
Then he had her slung over his shoulder.
She was thoroughly wrapped in a silky cocoon, and he cried out:
- Don't you dare approach.
If the cocoon is punctured, she'll die within a few seconds.
Next thing he knew, he was running with
her towards the beach. It was somewhere between Marina Beach and the Golden
Beach. Whole hordes of dark-skinned people - men, women, old women and men, and
even children gave him chase.
Then, he was adrift with Rukumani, still in the cocoon, on a fishing junk he
commandeered. The fishermen were unaware of who she was, and when the winds
dropped, they tried to overpower Siddata. The latter
just pulverised them all, except for a lad and a girl who served the fishermen
food. He kept looking constantly for the hour. He had to get Rukumani out of the cocoon before the four critical hours
were out. Otherwise she would just dehydrate. The process of de-cocooning her
was delicate. He had never done it himself; he had only seen it on the screen.
What made things worse was the constant buzzing of reconnaissance planes and
helicopters. Oddly enough, there were no boats about. The junk merely drifted
aimlessly in a sort of hazy ethereal doldrums. He knew that if he didn't
release her from the cocoon with all care, she risked having her skin damaged
for good. So, he carried her to the hulk of the junk. He managed to convince
the lad and lass to bring him some oil, but it was fish oil, boiled down from
fish fat. It stank like the rest of the hulk. On deck, since the winds had
dropped, the sun was scorching. He had only half an hour left. He started to
de-cocoon her. First he rubbed the outer surface of the cocoon with the oil.
The more his fingers ran over her contours the more he was in her thrall. He
could see her through the gossamer-like coating and felt the act of saving her
life -- a life he had endangered, himself, by wanting her all for himself -- an
act of utter profanation in local eyes. He knew that her people, any one of
them, would not hesitate to slaughter him for what he had done. Yet he
proceeded with utmost care and delicacy. The lad he posted on deck. The lass, a
long khaddar cloth promiscuously wrapping her loins and shoulders, stood by him
in her bare feet, amazed at what she was witnessing. Her tiny black hands had
fingers partially knotted and eaten away, either by disease or fish-bite. She
had never seen any one as richly clad at such close quarters, nor any one as beautiful.
Little by little, Rukumani
came to, and when she did, she embraced her body with her arms, out of what
seemed a sense of shame: her clothes had partially come off with the silky
cocoon wrappng. Siddata
insisted that he rub some oil on her exposed skin. She refused violently and
ordered him out of her presence. Siddata asked her to
let the lass help her. She took one look at the girl’s dustcaked
gnarled hands and felt repulsion rise in her.
On deck, Siddata's
vision seemed to slacken and dim. The next thing he knew was that it was
pitch-dark. He was standing over the shivering form of the precious girl. It
was equally dark and cold in the hulk. A hurricane lamp flickered dangling on a
cicatrised wooden beam. The next thing he knew she was in his arms. He
smothered her with his lips, hands, arms and thighs. The junk was rolling then,
and he lost all control of himself. The bouts of infatuation he had gone
through earlier on had all gathered tempo by then to overpower him and make him
want her with a force he never thought he was capable of. She lay squirming and whimpering in his arms. The proud
eyelashes that lashed him earlier on by sharp contemptuously perfunctory
glances now lay trailing, docile and spent, an albatross whose sprawling wings
had given out on her over the long-stilled ocean.
Then the noises came back. The sounds and
images collided and reverberated in his head. Again he careered in a
kaleidoscopic swirling rhythm. Sounds and voices and music and images of all
sorts fused one into another, and they thumped in his head. Again he wasn't
sure any more if he was there as an entity. He melted into what he heard and
saw... He had a strange conniving feeling he plunged with ease into swirling macro-poietic
time-space while micro-poietic time on earth stood still.
When he woke, he saw the mess he lay in.
He saw to what extent he had battered about the furniture. Some parts of his
body ached and smarted. His knees, toes, elbows and skull and shoulders were
bruised. His throat felt scorched. There was a constant ringing sound in his
ears which receded for a while and then re-emerged with greater force, almost
unbearably piercing in sharpness of timbre. He couldn't think. He just noted
his condition mentally and saw that he was lying in a splash of urine and
faeces. He dragged himself to the bathroom, turned the shower tap on and just
lay there with is mouth open. He had no idea how long he was under the shower.
When he emerged feeling slightly better, he set about clearing the mess. He
folded the soiled carpet, tied it up into a bundle and left it in the bathroom.
He mopped up the rest of the stains with some towels and flung himself on the
bed.
***
It was a full day when he came to. His
head was still heavy. He washed, shaved, took some pills, dressed and set out.
His legs only barely touched the ground. He checked his receiver-emitter equipment
and found a couple of coded messages which he ignored. He gave some
instructions to the floor-attendant to dispose of the carpet, placing a crisp
bill in his hands which caused the employee’s sombre tired eyes to light up. At
the reception, he was told that a certain Dr. Sundaresan
had called on many occasions, but owing to the instructions he left at the
reception desk, they didn't put the calls through.
When he got to the front gate, he found
the sidewalks jammed with people of all sorts. It seemed the entire nation was
out in the streets. People were talking in hushed, urgent tones, their faces
distraught. Under a tree several brown, black and pale-skinned women in saris
knocked their heads together in a circle, tore at their hair and beat their
breasts, wailing. Siddata was so touched by the
performance he didn't take stock of the situation he was witnessing. On the
road the traffic had slowed down. Vélektriks did not
honk their horns. Many people on the pavements seemed to have sore eyes, their
faces screwed up in the morning glare. Yet, they all waited patiently for
something to happen. He managed to squeeze past some tough-looking taxi-men in
khaki uniforms who stood at the entrance sad-faced.
Under their seeming politeness to “other-ringers”, there lurked a repressed
hint of murder in their lowering eyes and sturdy jutting chins. He wanted to
ask somebody why they were all there, but most looked daggers at him. He edged
his way through the throng in the direction of the
The
white girl was reading a newspaper which she had in her hands kept wide apart.
In the front page, he saw a full-page picture of Rukumani
and the banner title read: END OF A GLORIOUS DYNASTY. TAMILAKAM MOURNS! The
date on the front-page banner read:
© T.Wignesan,
[from the collection of short stories: mere deaths and the
mostly dead.