Tarun K. Saint with Anil Menon
A Foreword
Each episode of the series will include a well-known writer in an exchange of ideas about the field, and a sample of the writer’s work. This session features Anil Menon, SF/speculative fiction writer besides being a trained computer scientist. Followed by his short fiction, INTO THE NIGHT
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Tarun K. Saint: Welcome to this session of South Asian SF Dialogues, Anil. Let me begin by asking you about your overall sense of where SFF/speculative fiction stands today in this region. Your own earlier investigation led to the writing of the essay ‘Hunting a Snark: on the Trail of Regional SF’ (2010). How has the situation changed with respect to writing in the languages, if at all, especially with respect to the question of translation? Has recent SF in the subcontinent eluded the trap of didacticism and the pedagogic imperative with respect to science with the emergence of serious or literary SF?
Anil Menon: Indian spec-fic in English is certainly thriving. There are a lot more writers who identify themselves as working in spec-fic than there were a decade ago. Also, oddly enough, thanks to the elimination of traditional distribution channels—courtesy, Amazon and Flipkart—readers have greater access to books, not less. Earlier, they were at the mercy of incompetent distributors and equally incompetent booksellers. It’s like a version of Braess’s paradox, where removing a connecting road can actually help reduce traffic congestion. This is a great time to work in Indian spec-fic.
However, I also feel the situation in regional science fiction & fantasy (SF&F) remains dismal. There’s always been a lack of sophistication both in conception as well as execution, and that remains unchanged. On the other hand, spec-fic isn’t just science fiction and fantasy. One outstanding exception is Urdu short fiction. I’ve read a lot of wonderful Urdu short stories from the 50s through 80s. These stories could be categorized as magic realist, metafictional, nouveau realist, absurdist and so on. It would be a great pity if Urdu authors didn’t continue to build on this impressive tradition.
Regarding the pedagogic imperative in Indian science-fiction: The kind of science-fiction that tries to improve the nation’s “scientific temper” is mercifully on the wane. However,perhaps science-fiction can’t help but be didactic, just as fantasy can’t help but be ideological. Science-fiction is idea-centric, and that requires providing info-dumps to explain what’s going on. Once you begin to expound, it gets addictive. It’s hard to get off the podium. It doesn’t help that science-fiction readers are highly tolerant of this kind of exposition. Second, a lot of science-fiction tends to be written by technology enthusiasts. So the stories aren’t problem-oriented or situation-oriented, but rather, solution-oriented. This gives it a didactic feel. Finally, where there’s a demand, supply often follows. Magazine outlets and anthologies routinely issue submission calls for stories that offer hope, build awareness of global warming, rethink gender relations, etc. Naturally, you get a lot of ideological and didactic fiction.
TKS: Let us take a step back to the time when you began writing and publishing SF stories in international magazines. Were there any particular influences on your early work? Were the writers of the Anglo-American tradition a more significant influence, or was it the East European and Soviet writers (Stanislaw Lem, the Strugatsky brothers)? Or even the magical realists?
AM: I didn’t grow up reading SF&F. I didn’t even know there was such a genre. My father had been a great reader and even after he lost the habit in his 40s, he kept buying books. He was especially fond of collected works. Lovely big, fat books just filled with oodles and oodles of text. He couldn’t really afford them on his central government salary, but he didn’t care. His favorites—Morris West, Alberto Moravia, John Steinbeck, Irving Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Hailey, Somerset Maugham, Chaim Potok– became my favorites. If I’m a writer today, it’s because he put those books in my hands.
I’d come across a few SF stories in college and they felt different but I didn’t think too much of it. I was (and am) an indiscriminate reader. I’d gotten used to being surprised on a regular basis by different kinds of writing. The week I landed in the US however, through a curious set of circumstances, I inherited all the SF&F books of Nadeem Ahmad, a friend’s friend who’d committed suicide. That was the real start of my reading in SF&F. I read all of Arthur Clarke, Bruce Sterling and Ursula Le Guin, the Foundation trilogy (or is it the Pentateuch?), the Dune series, Walter Miller, Philip Dick, an unhealthy number of Dozois Best-of anthologies…. pretty much the entire nerd booklist. If I write SF today, it’s probably because someone committed suicide.
I remember being inspired by the great stylists: Joyce, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Russell Hoban, Jorge Luis Borges. And Raja Rao. I am not a fan of his, but his Kanthapura was an eye-opener. Truth is, I don’t think I ever wanted to write like any other author. I wanted to do my own thing, and I instinctively knew rehashing someone else’s style or thematic concerns would be a mistake. I try to write stories only I can write.
TKS: What were the specific challenges faced at that time by writers from the subcontinent (even if you were based abroad at the time)? Was there a resistance/indifference in publishing circles to new writing from ‘exotic’ spaces?
AM: Regarding resistance: not at all. I found the SF&F community in the US very supportive. Social media has poisoned waters in recent times, but it was different when I started. It’s true I had to make my SF&F short stories relatable for Americans, but I didn’t find that unreasonable. It’s how markets are supposed to work. Had I been publishing in an Igbo market, I would’ve adjusted my writing accordingly. But though such adjustments aren’t unreasonable, they can be creatively limiting. I resolved that when it came to novels, I’d publish in the Indian market, so that I could write mostly with Indian audiences in mind. I’m very glad I made that decision. Unlike an American writer, I’m free to write whatever I want.
As for indifference: It’s not the West’s responsibility to nurture Indian writers. I don’t see India taking a great interest in developing, say, Nigerian fiction. Similarly, why should Indian literature, whether it’s in English or Pali, be the West’s problem? The problem isn’t really external. The fault, as Cassius said, is in ourselves. Specifically, I think the problem is that Indian writers aren’t independent enough. We follow, rather than lead. If the West is discussing, say, transgender rights or climate fiction, then we’ll also discuss transgender rights and climate fiction. We hide this dependency under the pretense we’re participating in some kind of global conversation, even though “the” West doesn’t give a damn about what we think or what’s going on here. We can broaden the narrative situation, but the issues and conceptual frameworks are borrowed from elsewhere. So we contribute variety, but not novelty. Of course, these are over-simple generalizations.
TKS: You decided to publish your first YA SF novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet with Zubaan in 2009. What led to this decision?
AM: I was in Delhi, working on an article on Indian SF&F. Zubaan had published some fine works by Payal Dhar and Priya Sarukkai Chhabria, so I thought I’d start there. Someone pointed me in the direction of Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, who was working for Zubaan at the time. It was supposed to be a short meeting, but we ended up yakking for hours. Jaya asked if I was working on something, and it so happened I’d just finished The Beast. The rest was just a matter of spitting and shaking hands. Urvashi Butalia (I love the woman) gave me the beady eye, but she trusted Jaya’s (and later, Anita Roy’s) judgment. So that’s how I ended up slipping through the purdah barrier at Zubaan. I was their first male novelist. This ballsy fact still gives me an indecent amount of pleasure. A small step for a man, a giant step for mankind.
TKS:The anthology Breaking the Bow:Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (co-edited with Vandana Singh, 2011), also brought out by Zubaan,was path-breaking in many respects and introduced many new voices in the realm of speculative fiction, including Pervin Saket, Deepak Unnikrishnan,and Indrapramit Das. What were the difficulties faced while assembling this collection? How do you assess its relevance in today’s context?
AM: It was a remarkable anthology, but I feel we could have pushed our authors to achieve more. Someone needed to be Steve Jobs on that project, and I wasn’t. I would be one now, but ‘now’ is always too late.
The main difficulty was that Indians have stared at this epic for so long, perhaps they don’t really see it anymore. We received a lot of tiresome socially-conscious submissions, all determined to finally give some justice to Surpanakha or this or that unjustly treated minority character. That wasn’t the mandate of the anthology. The point had been to use the epic’s events as a jumping off point, do something new. One example would be Arthur C. Clarke’s use of the Cyclops incident from the Odyssey in Childhood’s End. Most readers don’t even notice the connection. Unfortunately, our call for submissions may not have made our expectations clear. So it goes.
As for the anthology’s relevance, I think it stands as a marker of the kind of projects that were possible before the Hindutva took over. The book would probably be impossible now. It was barely possible even then.
TKS: You were part of the first speculative fiction workshop organized at IIT Kanpur in 2009. Indeed, in recent times you have made the transition to speculative fiction in your writing. Was this a decisive break with SF? Or do you still experiment with form, regardless of categories? Your novel Half of What I Say (2017) is described at your blog as a political romance. To what extent do contemporary movements and protests have a bearing on your recent work (as in the case of the depiction of Lokshakti in this novel)?
AM: Writers often say they go where the story takes them, but actually it’s easy to end up writing the same kind of story over and over. Sometimes a writer is boxed in by reader expectations or financial success. Other times it’s because of one’s professional network, or one’s publishing history, or not wanting to get out of the comfort zone, or simply the anxiety of losing what little one has achieved. I didn’t want to be that kind of writer. That’s one reason for moving out of science-fiction. After a while, any genre gets predictable. I wanted to try new things. Some people are vulnerable to depression. I’m vulnerable to boredom.
Fortunately, it’s worked out so far. My first novel was a YA/science fiction novel, the second was a political romance set in an alternate India, and the third novel (forthcoming) is a metafictional work. Pervin Saket and I are collaborating on a gloriously melodramatic web series. Finally, I’ve been plugging away at a mass-market nonfiction book. The best part of all this shifting around is one makes new networks of friends. Otherwise, you tend to run into the same dozen or so people over and over again.
TKS: Let us know a bit about work in progress, including your forthcoming short story collection.
AM: The nonfiction book is about how the country’s obsession with the past is sapping our creative energy and why we need to (and how we can) orient ourselves differently. I intend it to be an entertaining scold. As you can surely tell by now, I like lecturing.
I have the novelist’s old horror of talking about works-in-progress. So I’ll sidestep what the new novel is about.
But I can talk about my forthcoming The Inconceivable Idea Of The Sun & Other Stories (Hachette), since at this stage, I am quite superfluous to the project. It is a collection of about seventeen speculative stories, and concerned with a “simple” question: does anything have an unchanging essence or not? Neo-pragmatists like the philosopher Richard Rorty don’t think there is. I think he’s right. Our tendency to identify an essence in things—identity, race, caste, nationality, gender identity, sexual preference—is a habit that’s very hard to overcome. Each story examines a different kind of essence we take for granted. Naturally, the collection of stories as a whole waffles on what it means to be a collection of stories.
TKS: It is important to ask if there is a possibility of SF in a society which is hardly ‘modern’ or technologically developed. Can a society whose scientists are still deeply superstitious really imagine a future (for good or evil) which is rational and concerned with questions about what it means to be human in a society without sanctions from God? Or what it means to have an Indian Self if and when the country does become rationally advanced and scientific. Can one write SF in a society which is not secular? If so, of what kind, given that there can be no speculation about the presence or absence of God? Can there be SF and spirituality?
AM: The great dual of Science isn’t Religion. It’s Story. As Weber pointed out more than half a century ago, stories replace causes with affects. The sentence “The Queen died and the King died of a heart attack” becomes “The Queen died and the King died of grief.” When you go in the opposite direction, that is, replace affects with causes, you get a sentence that feels science-y.
In other words, we can naturalize religion by removing its story-like elements. That’s what Spinoza did with the Christian and Jewish God. As many observers have noted. Spinoza’s God is more or less the Vedantic God. And if Einstein can square Spinoza’s God with his own understanding of the cosmos, then I don’t see why Hindu scientists can’t find a way to square their religious understanding with science.
Interestingly, science fiction is a narrative form that has to balance two forces in tension: science and story; it is a tensegrity structure. A secular society is no more a pre-requisite for the production of science-fiction any more than a divorce-free society is a pre-requisite for the production of romance fiction. All that is needed are authors who are interested in what science and technology is doing to us.
TKS: What might be an Indian attitude toward a scientific future? Can it be imagined as being different from SF Futures in the US or Russia? It is interesting that a deeply Christian man like Tarkovsky does make SF films and twists and turns Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, who are far removed from religiosity, for his own purposes.
AM: I think the most striking feature of the subcontinent is its long love-affair with pluralism. It’s hard to overstate just how weird pluralism is. Almost every other corner of the world has committed, in theory and practice, to some form of monism. We have our monist frameworks too—Advaita Vedanta is one example—but in practice, Indian monism is as full of contradictions as a married Bishop.
Is it possible to unite this pluralist attitude with a scientific worldview? Certainly. William James’ philosophy of radical empiricism is precisely such a worldview. James was more Hindu than any Hindu I know. The heart of the pragmatist approach is to enable a pluralist universe.
I’m almost certain the “Indian” attitude to the future will be to pluralize the future, just as this attitude once pluralized gods, time, cosmos, and death. We’re not a people of one anything.
TKS: If most western SF is dystopian, is Indian/South Asian SF markedly different?
AM: I see dystopian fiction as a subgenre of millenarianism; the West seems particularly fond of millenarian movements. The poet Cavafy elegantly captured this wistful longing for apocalypse in his poem Waiting for the Barbarians. Well, in our case, we don’t have to wait for When Things Go To Hell. For us, to paraphrase Samit Basu, dystopia is just Tuesday. There is nothing speculative or future-ish about our dystopias.
In any case, I don’t think we should valorize difference purely for the sake of carving out an identity free of foreign contamination. In India, that road leads to the Hindutva. Manga didn’t emerge out a desire for difference. Neither did Carnatic music. We should just make the music we like to hear. It is okay if that happens to be dystopian fiction. It’s okay if it isn’t.
The process of colonization is all about becoming ashamed of what one loves. The trick therefore, to decolonization, to claiming one’s difference the healthy way, is to love unashamedly.
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INTO THE NIGHT: Anil Menon
The island of Meridian was still thirty minutes away, but Kallikulam Ramaswamy Iyer had already done enough neck stretches, shoulder shrugs, hand wiggles and toe scrunches to limber his joints for this lifetime and the next.
He was tired. He was eighty-two years old and had relaxed his ancient Brahmin joints through many a stressful hour, but the last few days had been some of the worst: first, a thirteen-hour flight from Mumbai to Sydney with a three-day layover at Singapore, then a four-hour flight in a boomerang- shaped aeroplane from Sydney to Fiji’s Nadi airport followed by a two-hour ride in a catamaran ferry to Meridian. Far away.
Ramaswamy shook his head. Why had Ganga decided to settle so far away? She had always been peculiar, his daughter, this bright-eyed girl they had raised from mustard seed through plaits and school bag to first-class first and first menses, this wild daughter of theirs that squeezed their hearts so, squeezed it till he’d sworn not to love her anymore, but of course it was all talk, as the missus would verify, for wasn’t he here in the belly of a fish, going to a land of cannibals for the sake of their bright-eyed girl who only thirty-seven years ago had begun a mustard seed as modest as an ant’s fart.
“Think in English,” advised his wife. “Tamil will only make it harder for you to adjust.”
Oh, listen to the Queen of England. Who was the matriculate here, madam? And who was the Sixth Standard, twice-fail?
A wave of laughter surged through the boat. It was beginning to irritate him, these periodic laughs. What were they laughing at? And why was it funny? A passenger in the adjacent seat, a sleek cheetah of an Indian girl who’d been gesturing with her silver thimbles throughout the last half- hour, lifted her head, blinked rapidly and smiled. She looked tired too. What was she doing here, alone, so far away from home and husband?
He continued to brood. Ganga could have stayed. There were plenty of jobs for Hindus in India. Even a job in Europe would have been acceptable. But the South Pacific! Meridian was so new it wasn’t even listed in his Rand McNally 1995 World Almanac. Who could’ve foreseen when he left Kallikulam in 1962, barely nineteen years old and with ninety rupees in his pocket, when he’d left his parents, dressed in their starched best, left them behind and forever at the Thrichedur railway station, who could’ve foreseen this final migration, three score and three years later, to a land without elephants, to a land without ancestors, who could have foreseen?
“Stop beating that drum, sir,” said Paru. “Fall on your knees and thank your Krishna-bhagavan that you have such a sterling daughter. You’re in her care now. Just adjust a little. So chin up and get ready for the next innings.”
You? What had happened to the ‘we’? His wife Paru had been younger by ten years. By all logic she should have been on this boat, not him. But of course, the ‘we’ of sixty years plus had ended at the Sion Electric Crematorium in Mumbai.
He flexed his neck. No. That had just been the disposal of the end. The end had come with a shopping list. Paru had sent him to buy groceries and when he returned, it was to a world without— No, it was no use dwelling on that day. Today was the first day of the rest of his life.
He sat, resigned, as another rash of laughter broke out. The girl was also laughing. She must’ve sensed his inspection, because she turned her head in his direction. Her eyes were milked over, like the white, dead corals he’d seen near Fiji. Pity struggled with revulsion in his mind. O God, what was the matter with the girl’s eyelids? Why was she rolling them up? Almost like a lizard. Poor girl. Ramaswamy quickly turned his head. So there were handicapped people in the West as well.
People may say what they want, thought Ramaswamy, but fate was blind. Why else would this beautiful girl be blind, why else would he have had to leave India, and why else would the last conversation with his wife have been about potatoes, brinjals and coconuts, and would he, for God’s sake, please, please check the tomatoes before buying them, because the last batch had been overripe and practically rotten. It could’ve been about anything, and it had been.
He didn’t mind that his wife had died. She had become tired, worn out. Nothing had interested her anymore, not even their fights, and her insults had stopped being insults and begun to feel like the instructions of someone departing for an immensely long journey. She had become tired, Paru had, his wife of sixty years and seven lives, tired of waiting for Ganga to settle down, to stop hopping about, to amass the money to bring you home, Amma. I love you, please, please hang in there, okay? Why, had his house been any less of a home? Had he not taken care of his wife? Paru wanted to let go, and he had gotten tired of holding on for the both of them. He didn’t mind. But Paro hadn’t left empty handed. She had taken his memories with her. That he did mind.
It meant that he now had to recollect things, and could no longer rely on a shout (“Paru!”) and an answer. For instance, what was the name of the school he’d attended in the 1940s? Had they first talked in the Esso canteen, or had it been that monsoon day when he’d offered her his umbrella? What was the name of his last American boss at Esso, the year before it became Hindustan Petroleum? He clearly remembered the fellow. Especially his laugh. The fellow would laugh, a great big honk of pure evil, revealing a panoply of white, red, yellow, lead glint and a couple of canines sharpened by decades of insatiable meat-eating. But what was his name?
“Who cares?” said Paro. “Things have changed. Just adjust a little and all will be well.”
Adjust, adjust. He didn’t want to adjust. He wouldn’t adjust. He didn’t need adjusting. He wasn’t an ill-fitting pair of trousers or a TV with bad reception. Let others adjust. Like Lord Rama, he would act according to his dharma, and if that was inconvenient for the world, then by all means, please just adjust, my dear adjusting world. Nonsense!
Ganga could have stayed back in Bombay and looked after her aged and ailing parents. If she had, her mother would be alive now, no doubt. No doubt about that at all. Her mother’s death was on her head. Money, money, chasing money. Never staying in one place for long, always hopping around like a rabbit on ganja, how could anyone live like that, Krishna-bhagavan alone knew how long she would stay in this new place Meridian, he wouldn’t be surprised if he got the orders to pack and move before he’d even unpacked and landed, no, not surprised one bit. She should’ve done her dharma and looked after her old parents. But who cared about dharma these days?
There was an announcement being made, but the accent was impossible to understand. It was clear though they had almost reached. Through the large windows, he could see bits and pieces of the skyline. Passengers were busy getting their things together; a few were busy blinking at each other. Maybe that’s how they said goodbye in this part of the world. The blinking reminded him of ants on a sugar trail. The catamaran docked with a bump and jerk.
“We’ve reached,” said his co-passenger. “You can unbuckle now.”
“I know,” said Ramaswamy, smiling and blinking. “That’s what I want, that’s what you want, but that’s not what the buckle wants.”
“Here, let me help. It’s been a long journey, huh?”
And before he could say anything, she leaned over and began to struggle with the belt. Her hair glistened as if they were coated with glass. He couldn’t help touching a strand, and she glanced at him. “Careful. The alloy coat is not quite stable yet.”
“Are you married?” he asked.
She frowned and didn’t answer. “There!” She detached the belt. “Come, Appa. I’ll call Aaliyah and tell her we’ve reached.”
Appa? Yes, of course! This was Ganga, his daughter. How could he not have recognized her? The hair was a factor, yes. But still. What was happening to him? He was so astonished by the lapse in memory, he forgot to be terrified.
“Yes, yes,” he said, furious with Paru. It was all her fault. Fresh resentment began to ooze from the wound of his recent loss.
#
He had been here before, a stranger in a strange land. In 1962, he’d stepped out on Platform No. 3 at the Victoria Terminus in Bombay, with the smell of soot in his nostrils, a roll of bedding and an aluminium trunk full of good advice. He had survived the first strange day and the second and the third, until a season passed, and he had become part of the very strangeness he’d seen on the first day. On his way to work, he’d sometimes see himself stepping out of a train, on this platform, on that platform, from this village, from that village, going everywhere and going nowhere at all.
So why did this transition feel so different, as if he were doing it for the very first time? Perhaps strangeness simply could not be adjusted to if the strangeness lay, not in the miracles of the place, but in its small-small things.
The miracles were manageable because they all had a familiar feel. Buildings that supposedly chatted to each other about energy, politics and life. Or, for example, the ‘bubbles.’ They were cars with skins that could change colours and even flex as they picked up speed. His daughter had tried to explain how it all worked. Who knew how it worked? He could tell she had no idea either. But they were just inventions. They were just new.
For example, the hearsee. It was just a binoculars and headset rolled into one. With the hearsee, you could see what other people were seeing, hear what other people were hearing, assuming they had hearsees too. It used a “nictitating membrane” and of course it had wireless. Wireless was a must. Sanjaya must have had something like a hearsee. He had been able to narrate what was happening on the battlefield to King Dhritarashtra as it was happening. So nothing new about the hearsee.
No, the strangeness lay in other things, once familiar things. It lay in Ganga. She had so many friends. He’d always hated that word: friend. It excused everything and expected nothing.
One friend – Aaliyah – seemed to be a permanent guest. Aaliyah was a Muslim name. Another “friend” was practically an animal; she lay curled on the sofa, her skinny, thimbled hands working ceaselessly – thinking about the mathematics of relatives in general, Ganga claimed – getting up only to feed, and that too eating things directly from the fridge, all the while standing on one leg like a flamingo and eyeing him cautiously, as if she half- expected an ambush. They were many others, all women, with made-up names, Tomi, Rex, Lace, Sharon, and once, just once, a slender gent with a sharp Aryan nose, high forehead, and a lady’s name. Ramaswamy had asked him why.
“Because I am a lady,” he’d replied.
Dinner was a nightmare: meat and wine all around him, overcooked rice, undercooked vegetables (they crunched!), rubbery yogurt, and cold metal spoons. The first time he ate with his hand – thoroughly mixing the rice and buttermilk by hand, relishing every wet squelch, and licking the fingers at the end – it’d been impossible to ignore the long watchful silences, rapid blinks, the Flamingo’s high laugh, and most hurtful of all, Ganga’s startled expression. As if she didn’t know. As if she too hadn’t eaten the Tamil Brahmin way, his way, the correct way, once. As if she had forgotten.
He had a room at the end of the hall on the first floor, tucked away from the rest of the house. The girls mostly lived upstairs, rarely coming down, and if they did talk to him, it was only to ask him idiotic questions about festivals, the caste system and Hinduism. He had to watch his answers. Otherwise:
“That’s rubbish,” Ganga would begin, knitting her brows. “If you look at the facts”
The facts were these: Brahminism was bad. The West was good. Everything he said was superstition. Everything she said was science. Those were the facts. S’all right. He had his beliefs, she had hers. She called her beliefs ‘facts,’ and that was all right too. If science was all-powerful, then why she did grovel before the Evolution God? Evolution this, Evolution that. The girl knew a lot, but she understood nothing. As people said, just being able to talk about a trunk didn’t make you an elephant.
But most of all, it was the caged existence that was intolerable. So many circuits of the house, so many cautious in-the-doorway peeks into bedrooms, so many against-the-light inspections of their mail, so many cups of microwave chai, so many naps and then to painfully go up, down, around and about the house circumnavigating the hours, the day, the month. Occasionally the house would pass on messages in Ganga’s voice or Aaliyah’s voice, and he’d feel like a house pet, expected to mewl and bark at the sound of his master’s voice. He never responded when they called, shuffling around silently, refusing to be happy for their sake, and fully aware that irrespective of whether he responded or not, every room in the house was visible to their lizard eyes. How had he, Rama, ended up a prisoner in Lanka?
The silence of his Mumbai apartment had always been bordered with far-away horns, shouts of neighbourhood children, Paru’s telephone gossip and the imminent possibility of tea. This silence had weight but it was empty. Sometimes he cried.
#
Ramaswamy lay in bed, facing the wall, the coverlet pulled all the way to his neck, and quietly burbling in a mix of English and Tamil:
“Appa?”
He froze.
“Who are you talking to? Are you alright? Are your legs hurting?”
When he turned, he saw Ganga in her nightdress, her face lit from below by the room’s night light.
“I’m okay. Just thinking, that’s all. About the good old days.”
She sat down beside him and put a hand on his chest. “Not able to sleep?”
“How much sleep can I do?” He hesitated, and then spoke in a rush. “Ganga, I want to go back to Mumbai. I can’t live here in this freezing cold and twenty-four hours of rain. Everything is backwards and upside down. From the nose via the back of head to the ear, as people say. A simple man like myself only needs his two servings of rice-curds and a glass of water. That I can get for myself. Why I should be a burden to you? I am going back.”
“We can’t have this conversation over and over again. Haven’t you been watching the news from India? And there’s no one there to take care of you. In a few years, your health problems are only going to get worse. If anything happens—”
“Krishna-bhagavan will take care of me as he has all these years.”
“Don’t be childish! Amma took care of you all these years, not your bloody bhagavan. So at least give credit where it’s due.”
He was pleased to see her voice rise and her accent veer into its natural roly-poly South-Indian roundness. Ha! Not such a suit-and-boot madam after all. He remembered roly-poly; he’d walked this little girl back from kindergarten every day, pig-tails and upturned face, hopeful smile and Appa, Appa, please can I have some kulfi, Appa.
Where had it all gone wrong with Ganga? Was it when he had shifted her from the Tamil-medium school to the English one in Higher Secondary? Or was it the day he had found her smoking with the sweeper’s boy, a Shudran, whose polluting hand lay curled inside her open blouse? Or was it after she got involved in college politics, morcha’ing and hunger-fasting and speechifying on behalf of every useless ruffian and cause, getting angrier and angrier, totally impossible to talk to, ever Paru had given up, until in Ganga’s final angry tearful embrace at the airport, he had sensed she was saying goodbye to herself.
“I should’ve disciplined her more,” thought Ramaswamy, “but as people say, a donkey never has a tiger for a father.”
“Can we go to a doctor?” he asked.
“Now?”
She nictitated and geometric patterns flashed across her eyelids; the room seemed filled with a new awareness. He sensed there were others in the room, watching, listening, perhaps even commenting on him.
“Appa? Are you in pain? I can call an ambulance—”
“No, no. I just want an estimate of how much time I have left.”
“No one can tell you that!”
“Not even science?”
She smiled and touched his face. “Not even science.”
What was the use of it then? He lay back on the bed and turned to face the wall.
“Appa? Look at me.” She shook him. “Look at me.” And when he did, she continued in the same calm voice. “I know it’s all very strange and new to you. And Amma is not here to make it easier. We won’t stay in Meridian for ever. But wherever we go next, life will remain change, and we have to adapt. Otherwise, we might as well be stones. Evolution—”
“What is this evolution-evolution you keep brandishing like a stick?”
“It’s a theory that says we don’t need a story to explain how we all got here. It was first clearly explained by Darwin—”
“Speak in Tamil, Ganga. Speak in Tamil.”
He listened to her fantastic tale about fish that had grown lungs and learned to walk on earth, a Xerox machine called DNA in every atom and what not. As she talked, her alloy-treated hair furled outwards, a controlled motion that had nothing to do with the wind or any natural shake of the head. Somebody was playing with her hair. He closed his eyes.
When she said ‘cells,’ he imagined tiny telephones, but when she said ‘chromosome,’ ‘molecule,’ ‘recombination,’ and ‘species,’ nothing came to mind at all. It couldn’t be true. None of it could be true. If it was true, then he would never see Paru again. This one life, this would be the only life. It couldn’t be true. He marvelled that she could swallow so incredible a story but refuse to accept the simplest, most obvious explanation understandable by the stupidest child: God did it. But he didn’t want her to stop talking.
“Ganga, this Evolution God, is it Christian or some other religion only? And if it is Christian, then who is Jesus?”
She was silent for a few long seconds, and when she spoke, it was quiet enough to be almost a sigh. “Aaliyah is right, Appa. This isn’t just homesickness. You’ve fallen out of time. We have to reconnect you to the world. The first step is to set you up with a visor. It’s not as good as having Amma or a hearsee, but it’s better than nothing. You will begin to see.”
#
He was here, on the battered bench of a battered park, banished for the day, because the house was being energy-audited, and they didn’t want him blurting something to the auditor.
It was good to be out, even though the sky was a sickly bluish-grey and the wind was one tooth too sharp. The park was bordered by book shops, clothing stores, cafes and open-air restaurants. He’d picked a spot on a deserted side of the park, because the smell of burning meat reminded him of the ghats of Varanasi.
Ramaswamy carefully removed the visor and the thimbles from their case. The visor’s elegant comma-shaped neurosensors were a bit ticklish, but not unpleasant against his wrinkled skin. As he stared at the “viewspace,” it began to shear, as if it was being stretched from opposite corners. The eye had to keep moving, otherwise the visor would lose focus. His somewhat stiff fingers found it hard to work the thimbles, used to manipulate the visor’s controls, and after a while he began to get confused with the coloured flags, training wheels and little rotating astrology-type signs. The viewspace filled with tiny windows and he blinked helplessly as he tried to regain the original viewspace.
“Don’t worry,” said Paru. “This spectacles is no match for a Senior Clark from Esso.”
Abruptly, a gut-wrenching image of water, wood, blue and sky filled his viewspace. Some weathered lettering: “Marine Research Institute.” Black coiling black beautiful tentacles black with beautiful grey donut-shaped – no, disgusting – suckers. He recoiled in his seat, mewling as he flailed in empty space for something tangible.
His viewspace shimmered, recoalesced. Back to the park and its threadbare carpet of green. He regained his breath and with it a surge of triumph. He had just used somebody else’s visor, or more likely, hearsee. So this is what “melding” was all about. What was all the fuss about? It was just like watching a movie. He hadn’t been the least bit terrified then, but recalling the tentacles, he felt his crotch tighten.
It took a while to retrace his steps, but he managed to get the screen full of windows again, and as they scrolled past, he blinked. And blinked. And blinked. In most cases, he got wobbly images of edges, shadows and corners of rooms. But even when he got a nice view, such as the one from the tourist staring up at the statues on Easter Island, or merely a bad one, like that shameless young girl lying on the bed, what did it matter? Most people seemed to be sitting on equally battered benches staring out over equally battered parks. Ganga had claimed he would feel, not just see, what they saw and felt, but then why did he not feel any different? What did he and they have in common after all, other than a mutual acknowledgement of being lost? He was everywhere and nowhere.
“It is not our time,” said Paru, sounding subdued. “Give it a chance.”
His visor filled with fifty scattered circles. Ganga had explained that in “idle mode” the visor would show the GPS coordinates of people in a half-a-mile radius. A window popped up, reminding him to “fill in his profile.”
“Do what it says,” said Paru. “Put up a sign saying you want to chit-chat.”
“Keep quiet! You should be sitting here suffering, and I should be in your Madras-coffee loving head. Irresponsible, selfish cow.”
He tried to describe himself but didn’t get very far. The “wizard” asked for his Myers-Briggs type; whether he was an introvert, extrovert, kibbitzer or grokker; whether he was an empath, sympath, fabpath or skimpath; and whether he was looking to buy chillax underwear. What kinky things turned Ramaswamy on?
“Elephants,” confessed Ramaswamy. Temples. Obedient children. Early morning showers. Hinduism. Brahmin culture. Decent women. But then he got diverted with the memories of all the delicious foods he would never eat again.
The bench was still slightly wet, most probably from the early morning rains. The world looked like a watercolour painting, which he liked, but he didn’t like that it was a painting with no people. Where were all the people in this country? The colony’s park in Mumbai had always been chock full of people: retirees, teenage lovers, food vendors, toy vendors, mating dogs, laughing clubs, children running about everywhere. The sky looked dark, swollen, the face of a child about to cry. Perhaps global raining was around the corner.
The visor queried his current mood. He selected the most depressed face he could from the samples in front of him.
“I took it all for granted,” he thought. His head had begun to ache.
A teenager sat down at the far end of the bench. He had an open, cheerful face framed by a halo of curly black hair. He nodded in Ramaswamy’s direction.
“Waz,” said the kid. Then he stretched out his legs and made himself comfortable.
The visor claimed the kid’s name was Krish and then went on to bug Ramaswamy with a variety of options. Irritated, he took off the visor.
“Excuse me, is your name Krish?”
“Like da tag sez, heya?” The boy seemed a little puzzled, and his eyelids nictitated. His expression brightened. “Ya-i-c. Welcome to Oz, uncle.”
“I’m Ramaswamy. I’m from Bombay. Native place, Tamil Nadu. Are you also from same?”
Krish shrugged. “Maybe. Me’s from Wooshnu’s navel, maybe. We same if youz likes da same.”
The boy’s accent was not Indian. Ramaswamy could barely parse what he was saying. “Are you having school holiday today?”
Krish grinned and shook his head. “Waz school? Youz the headmaster? What be da teaching today, Master Bates?”
Ramaswamy laughed. Kids were scoundrels no matter where they were. “Bad boy. You need to be more disciplined.”
“Nuff sport.” Krish scooted over. “Youz wanting da elephant, heya?”
The boy’s eyes were so merry and his smile so infectious, Ramaswamy also found himself smiling. “Heya. Heya. What’s this ‘heya’?”
“Gimme da izor, dear.” The kid reached for the visor, but something about his expression made Ramaswamy snatch it away and put it in his shirt pocket.
Krish shrugged and unbuttoned his pants. “Assayway youz want.” He grabbed Ramaswamy’s hand and shoved it into his pants. “Go on. Sample all youz want. 100 per cent desi juice on da tap, uncle-dear.”
Later, Ramaswamy would puzzle over the fact that the boy’s penis had been hard and erect. And the fact that he felt a surge of emotion whose name he hadn’t needed for more than two decades. An emotion that was in equal parts small-eyed, calculating and aroused. But it was only one of the many puzzles.
A police car swooped out of nowhere, a blaze of whirling blue lights and piercing siren. The next ten minutes were a terrifying blur. Two officers jumped out of the car; one ran after Krish, and the other fumbled for his handcuff.
His boss from Esso! How was it possible? The same beefy expression, the same greyish-white whiskers, the same sozzled eyes. Mr. Gregory! Just remembering the name after all these years was mildly orgasmic.
“Mr. Gregory, Sir!” Ramaswamy shot to his feet and was ready for dictation.
“Move again asshole, and you’ll make my day.” The cop pointed an object that resembled a TV remote at Ramaswamy.
But Ramaswamy had already realized his mistake. Of course this policeman wasn’t Mr. Gregory. His boss had already been middle-aged when he, Ramaswamy, had joined as a young assistant clerk.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were my boss from Esso. I came here to take some fresh breeze only.”
Ramaswamy tried to explain how his hand had ended up in the boy’s pants. The boy clearly needed a doctor, he had a rash of some kind. Perhaps he’d thought an Indian would help. But he was only a retired clerk from Esso, his daughter’s dependent, practically a beggar himself. Esso’s health insurance had barely covered Paru’s treatment; there was nothing he could do for random lost-eyed Indian boys. If the officer would be kind enough to call his daughter, Ganga could confirm every detail. When Ramaswamy reached for the visor in his pocket, the officer tasered him.
#
In time, the pain faded, as did all direct memory of the incident. In time, a woman in blue came over to report on the investigation. The cop who’d tasered him was an American, like most of the cops on Meridian. Americans understood immigrants as a rule, but of course there was always the rule’s exception. She talked about the dangers of viewspace porn. He felt she had been ordered to explain but was trying to apologise. He understood little and was grateful when Aaliyah stepped in to keep it that way. On the whole, Ganga was much more affected by the whole business.
“This is all my fault, Appa.”
“Yes.” Ramaswamy nodded sagely. “You never listen.”
But he didn’t feel any satisfaction he had been vindicated. Only a vast sadness. His poor daughter, that poor sweeper’s boy, this poor broken world. He was so tired of it all. Why had he tried to change? Adjust, adjust. Adjust enough and even Lord Rama would become Lord Ravana. Nonsense.
When the cold grey rains came, as they often did in this age of carbon, he liked to sit by a corner window of the house and watch the banana tree in the yard make short work of the water. The rain, as thin as cow’s milk, rolled off the tree’s bright green plates, as ineffective as a mother’s Tamil on a child’s unrepentant back. Sometimes the Flamingo would creep up and crouch by him, her eyes blind in thought, her bony fingers ceaselessly working on the general problem of relatives.
“What is the solution?” he once asked the Flamingo, in Tamil, “if the ones I love hate what I love?”
The Flamingo said nothing. Perhaps she hadn’t heard. It was moot in any case, for the problem was intractable. Change was inevitable; it hadn’t been, but now it was. Call it evolution, fate, choice or chance. If that was the only way the world would turn, so be it.
But acceptance wouldn’t come. The darkness crowded him from all corners, the light of his understanding curving upwards along its walls and returning in an ever-tighter loop. Soon, he would be beyond the reach of all stories.
“Amma,” Ramaswamy would shout, forgetting himself in his despair. His mother: a chequered six-yard sari, a raspy voice, wrinkled hands, jasmine-scented hair and the comfort of her sari’s corners. “Amma!”
Sometimes his daughter would turn up with a glass of Horlicks. In her nightdress and short-hair, she resembled one of those Goan ladies in India, brown as a coconut but all white inside. She would pretend to listen to his burbling, her eyes blinking absent-mindedly, her hair furling like snakes as they flexed and re-flexed into one of her many styles. She had many styles, but she looked a widow in all of them. She would tell him fantastic tales from science and biology, offering facts when he longed for truth. He would pick a fight, say outrageous things, insult her friends and all that she held dear, and sometimes Ganga would lose her temper.
“Speak in Tamil kondai,” he urged. “Speak in Tamil.”
Then Ramaswamy would relax. Ah, the old familiar words. So familiar, so sweetly old and familiar. He let the ferocious alphabet fall, splish-splosh, all around and galosh, the rain of words, in one ear, out the other, the gentle splash of words, how he missed her, Paru, his bride of red earth and pouring rain, his comfort, his eyes, how he missed her, his love, his all, as he walked, faster, ever faster, into the night.
********
Notes --Tarun K. Saint acknowledges the help of Dr. Alok Bhalla in framing the questions. --Into the Night first published in Interzone Magazine. Special issue on Mundane SF. Ed. Geoff Ryman. Issue 216. June 2008. All rights reserved. Contact: iam@anilmenon.com Anil Menon’s most recent work Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015) was shortlisted for the 2016 Hindu Literary Award. His debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet was shortlisted for the 2009 Crossword Prize and the Carl Baxter Society’s Parallax Award. Along with Vandana Singh, he co-edited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books, 2012), an international anthology of short fiction inspired by the Ramayana. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines including Interzone, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Jaggery Lit Review, and Strange Horizons. His stories have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including Hebrew, Igbo, and Romanian. A collection of his speculative short fiction, The Inconceivable Idea Of The Sun: Stories (Hachette, 2021), will be published later this year.
Tarun K. Saint is the author of Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction (2010, 2nd. ed. 2020). He edited Bruised Memories: Communal Violence and the Writer (2002) and co-edited (with Ravikant) Translating Partition (2001). He also co-edited Looking Back: India’s Partition, 70 Years On in 2017 with Rakhshanda Jalil and Debjani Sengupta. Recently, he edited The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (2019). The bilingual (Indian-Italian) SF anthology Avatar: Indian Science Fiction, co-eds. Francesco Verso and Saint, appeared in January 2020. The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction volume 2 will appear this year.
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