by Lavie Tidhar
Then Raitek’s broad face broke into a smile again. He produced a laminated card from the inner pocket of his jacket. It was a dull grey ultrathin plastic job, featuring his name, an old redundancy QR-code and, most important, the acronym of the company: AIM.
“There is one now,” he said.
A Bridge of Words
Dinesh Rao
Once in a while, you’d suddenly see someone, out of the corner of your eye, with the tattooed dots on the forehead and the side, but of course, you’d blink and before you got a better look, the person would disappear into the crowd. It is a hopeless task, thought Riya, as she trudged along the main thoroughfare in the market, unable to keep her eyes from constantly scanning the crowd and yet weary of the necessity to be constantly alert. It didn’t help that she drew attention to herself; no matter how much she tried to blend in, something gave her away. It wasn’t her face—she could pass for a local any day—nor her clothes, but maybe her stance? The way she walked? Some subtle trait advertised her strangeness to the people around her. Bahsa, the research assistant, was amused by their failure, but even his cheerful explanations of their situation were beginning to grate on her.
“I hate field work,” she announced. “Let’s just scan through the police database. I can write a script in ten minutes…”
“If we can get hold of it… personally, I don’t think they will just give it to us, here, take the camera files, have fun,” replied Bahsa.
“But Dr Gudi promised…”
“I know, I know, but in my experience”—Bahsa looked around conspiratorially—“Dr Gudi is a nice man, but sometimes he says things you want to hear. We all do, it’s a national failing. Scholars have long lamented this problem. There is no way the police will let us have access to anything.”
Riya sighed, and longed once again for the cool of the old library. “Maybe that’s how they can tell that there’s something off about me—maybe they can sense the sweat rolling off me,” she thought.
Bahsa said, “Look let’s give this half an hour more. If we don’t find anyone by then, let’s go back and have a drink.” Riya muttered okay, and cheered up grudgingly.
They wandered through the market, dodging shoppers and sellers and pickpockets and beggars, through the byways of the marketplace, constantly scanning people’s faces for the telltale dots on the head. Riya’s feet were aching and the need for sustained alertness tired her. They stopped to buy some weirdly shaped fruits—even Bahsa had never seen them before. He asked the old lady selling it what they were called, and she said its name in that sing-song accent that Riya remembered so well from her childhood. Bahsa handed one to Riya, and they peeled the flakes off the Khumba fruit and munched into it. Riya pretended not to listen as the woman interrogated Bahsa about her. She could understand most of it but it was the accents that troubled her. She heard the familiar patter that Bahsa used every time it came up—
“Yes, she’s from here, but lives abroad. In Krashigar. She was born here, in ThuLadvipa, but her father is a Krashigari. Her mother went there when she was a small child. Yes she speaks ThuLu, yes yes she knows, she’s from one of the Old families actually, her mother is a Sumuka-Vaarta.”
At this last bit of information, the old lady turned to face her. She stared at her intently, and Riya finally acknowledged her with a quick nod.
“What is she doing here?” she asked.
Bahsa, completely oblivious to the change in her tone, continued with his spiel. “We’re working on a university project, it’s part of a huge nationwide project about the Spaceship (he used the Krashi word) that came looking for our ancestors.” Bahsa didn’t mind telling everyone he was on this project; he was really proud of it. But Riya found it hard to deal with the inevitable questions. How could they let a foreigner come and work on the project? Yes of course, I understand that her mother is a Vaarta but it’s not like she lived here, and she doesn’t even speak ThuLu properly. On a normal day, Riya would have smiled politely and used one of her twenty-five different ways to Get Out Of This Conversation, but this time she just turned and walked away. Bahsa yelled, “Hey! Wait up,” but in a tiny gesture of rebellion, Riya pretended not to hear him and ducked through a stall selling scarves into another section of the market.
She stopped in front of a stall selling spices and prepackaged food, the kind that they would never allow her to put in her luggage on a plane. A small kid came running to the stall holder and asked for Bamsa powder, but the guy minding the stall said, “No, I won’t sell it to you, go get your parents.” Riya moved on to the next stall selling cheap resin reproductions of the Spaceship, side by side with lovingly hand-crafted wooden ones. Riya picked up a model. This one was really good. It used differently tinted inlaid woods to show the various parts of the ship. She asked how much it was, and was pleasantly startled to realize it was affordable. “Ah, why not,” she thought, “Everyone else here has a Spaceship idol somewhere or the other. After all, they came looking for the ThuLu people—they came looking for us!”
Riya walked among the stalls till she ended up at one of the entrances and then she called Bahsa on the ’phon. “I’m here,” she said, watching the people watch her. “Let’s go back to the campus. Today has been a complete waste.” Bahsa caught up to her quickly, already a bit guilty that he had let her go off on her own. On the way back to the university, she asked him, “What is Bamsa?”
“Bamsa? In what context?”
“Some kid came to this shop asking for Bamsa powder, but the shop keeper wouldn’t sell it to him, asking him for his parents. I assumed it was something like alcohol, you know, like you need to be of a certain age before you can buy it.”
“Oh Bamsa powder, no, no, it’s not age restricted. They sell it in spice shops mostly, it’s a powder to dye your hair.”
“Then why would the guy refuse to sell it to the kid?”
“Maybe he was orthodox. Some of these shopkeepers are orthodox and won’t sell Bamsa to kids, because they also use Bamsa paste in religious ceremonies. They take Bamsa wood and scrape it against a metal plate and this produces a paste. The paste is then used in the ceremonies; you’d dip a special stamp-seal in the paste and then place it on your forehead. The patterns on the stamp seals are unique to lineages. They are usually passed on from mother to daughter. You must have done this yourself; it’s very common among the Vaartas?”
“No,” said Riya. “Or rather, I don’t remember any such thing. My mother gave up many things when she left for Krashigar. We hardly celebrated any festivals; she was always too busy in her work. She did try to teach me and my sister many things, but it’s never the same when you live away from the island. I know ThuLu better than my sister, and that’s only because I learnt it at university rather than at home. Everyday I discover little things like these, things that every islander knows. It’s an impossible task.”
Bahsa said, “When I was a child, my father made me go to a priest to learn the prayers, you know, the morning prayers, and he was old-school. I am not Vaarta but there are many similarities in our traditions. Anyway, I used to fight it every day, I didn’t want to wake before dawn and do the whole transfer of night to day pledge, nor the guardian prayer or anything, I just wanted to sleep in. But eventually I’d wake up long enough to mimic the movements of the family priest.”
Riya looked at him steadily, barely hearing his words, already lost in a swirl of images and memory. She remembered the prayer box that was the first thing that her mother installed in every house they’d been. And no matter how discreetly she placed them, some guest at every party would always comment on them, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were religious, how interesting.” And then her mother would make a halting oblique speech of her background and what each object meant, and then politely change the topic. When one lived in the land of the people who ran roughshod over the old ways, every such innocuous comment made her wince. Riya could still see the little altar clearly; it was the first physical sign of connection to her
history and so assumed a large significance. The little flute-like tube, the incense holder, the filigreed pyramid, a chunk of wood and the ornate metal plate, and of course the stamp-seals. A chunk of wood with a telltale smell; she remembered it now. She had seen it before.
They reached the university campus after sunset, and as was her habit, she looked west to see the artificial red glint of the patiently waiting Spaceship, no doubt still broadcasting the same key phrase over and over again hoping for a response. Like someone in a darkened room saying hello, hello… hello. At first the new star was a source of terror, a red eye in the sky, but now it comforted her. Riya waved goodbye to Bahsa and headed to her house. It had been a long day and her bed was especially inviting; sleep would ease all disappointment.
* * *
The next day, at the group meeting, Dr Gudi was incredulous. “How can you come here and tell me that you couldn’t find a single Thuri person? What, has there been some nationwide shortage of study subjects? Riya, I can understand if you missed them, but Bahsa, seriously, you should know better. From here it looks like you’re slacking on the job. Well, there’s nothing to it, go back on the next market day and keep trying till we get someone to talk to.”
Riya was disheartened. This project was turning into drudgery. She hooked up her ’phon to the screen and searched the net for a sympathetic ear, but the usual timezone asynchrony denied her this. Instead she got hooked into watching yet another documentary about the Spaceship. This time a team of researchers from Krashigar announced that they’d cracked the message from the ship, and that it was some sort of a countdown, but this theory was dismissed because the message never changed. Then there was news that a gorgeous version of the message was published, in a sort of codex, that one could buy. On a whim, Riya ordered the codex. In paper form, even. Her project was only tangentially related to the ship—Dr Gudi was exploiting the fact that there suddenly was a vast amount of money available if anyone wanted to do anything with the ship and its message. All they knew that the ship had come down before, very very long ago. There were stories in the scriptures. There was no doubt that this was the second visit. The Vaartas had compiled extensive records about the first visit. But the sources were secondhand. All the myths and the scriptures were in ThuLu, and the original language, DevfaLa, was lost when Krashigar invaded. Dr Gudi’s research was on the origin of language—he focused on tattoos and other body patterning—and he had, with great professional skill, linked the themes of body patterns and the Spaceship’s signal in a breathtaking daredevil act of grant writing, and thus financed the department for a few more years. The wolves of disaster were at bay, for now.
A message blinked on her ’phon. Her mother.
She began, “Riya, I have a mission for you. You know I had to leave ThuLadvipa in a hurry, but I had time to store many family heirlooms before they were lost. I left them in the care of very long time family friend in Purja—in fact, we were almost married to each other when I reached the right age. Now that you are there and will possibly be there for a while, it’s fitting that these things are in the family’s possession once again. I want you go to Purja and get them. I want to come myself to show you our ancestral home, or what is left of it, but work is keeping me tied up here and I don’t know when I can get away. But I will feel a lot better when I know that these things are in your hands, it will be a weight off my back.”
Riya was annoyed and intrigued. She called Bahsa, and then hung up immediately when she realized how late it was. What could those items be? Probably old photographs and clothes. Her mother always exaggerated things. Her ’phon pinged; it was a message from her mother again, telling her that there was a festival the next day, but Riya already knew that. She had seen people buying the leaves of the Sugarpa plant, and preparing for the Sun festival by stringing banners and paper flowers and all manner of activities. Festivals here were quite different than the ones she was used to at home in Krashigar. There the ceremonies were muted; her mother quickly performed some offering in the house, almost furtively, before heading out to work. But here, the whole city celebrated. Riya felt the excitement in the air at the prospect of a day spent engaged in the old ways and dressing in the old style. A thousand years of the effects of Krashigar’s brutal insistence on the removal of the old ways had almost vanished with the resurgence.
Bahsa had invited Riya home for the Sun festival. Bahsa’s wife GavaNi was a wonderful cook and relished the festivals, and Riya never missed a chance to eat there. Every bite was like a little sensory explosion. Her father, though, often complained that the smell of the cooking gave him allergy attacks, or that he couldn’t concentrate. It was always a mystery how he managed to survive ten years in the island. And later, chomping down on the delicacies, she listened to GavaNi telling/singing the story of the Sun festival to her twin girls, hearing the story both as an adult and as a child. As night fell, talk turned inevitably to the project. Riya was worried what she would do if she did not find enough Thuri subjects. Bahsa reassured her. They spoke of the ship and its possible message, unconsciously glancing at the west to see if it was still there. Bahsa said, “I can’t believe, if this is the second visit, why didn’t they devise a better way to contact us? Surely they must have known that things were going to change here?”
Riya replied, “Maybe they didn’t know that. Maybe their society is super stable over millennia.”
“That could be it. And another thing: why us? Why not Krashigar? How did they choose us? Ah, so many questions.”
“I hope that this is resolved in my lifetime. I would hate to revisit this conversation sixty years later and still have no answers.”
“I’m sure those Krashigar scientists will come up with something soon enough. They’re sending another rocket.”
“Are they?”
“I think so, let me check.” Bahsa peered into his ’phon. The steady hum of city traffic filtered their way up to the apartment. “No, the mission is not a Krashigar mission, it’s from Partia. Hmm, I didn’t know they were interested. It must be an election year there.”
“What’s the plan this time?”
“Oh, just the usual: try to get close to the ship and try to get them to say something other than the damn key code.”
“You know, I think there’s nobody on the ship. It must be a robot/artificially controlled ship. Prepared to wait till the end of time for a correct response.”
“Yep.”
There seemed to be nothing more to say.
* * *
A few weeks later, the codex was delivered to her house. Riya had almost forgotten about the order, and it felt like she was getting a surprise present from a secret admirer. She opened the box, and realized instantly that the book was so gorgeous it just didn’t belong on her cheap bookshelf. She spent the rest of the evening on the balcony, watching the sunset with its incongruous star, flipping through the book and nursing a glass of hot wine. A series of unbelievably clear photographs of the ship, a section recounting the first approach, the Vaarta connection. She was familiar with most of this, and she brushed past the now iconic photos that filled the net and the papers every day. A few personal stories of people involved in the various planetary level projects. But the bulk of the book was devoted to the complex message and the possible interpretations.
She told Dr Gudi about the book during one of their sessions, and got a quizzical look in return, as if he was surprised she was wasting her time with books that were clearly meant for the general public. His mood had definitely taken a turn for the worse in the last few weeks. The high of getting the big grant had finally worn off and he was deep in battle with the university bureaucracy to get started on the project. To add to his woes, an ongoing expensive computer simulation study had ended with no clear results, leaving him with a gigantic bill and not even enough data for a small paper in a low-impact journal. Bahsa and Riya had managed to find a few Thuris willing to be interviewed, but the numbers were nowhere near enough, and the lack
of results was causing a tension in the group.
“Have you put out ads?” Dr Gudi asked, for the tenth time.
“Yes, but only three Thuri people responded, and only one of those was tattooed as a child. The other two were modern. Fans, so to speak.”
“I hate these modern types. It’s so much ethnic pollution. Okay, we’ll see what happens. You might have to travel to the small Thuri settlement at Purja, after all. I was trying to avoid that possibility because they are really hostile to strangers. But there may be no other option.”
“Purja!” exclaimed Riya.
“Why are you surprised?”
“Hmm, my mother just asked me to go to Purja as well! She wanted to me to revisit our ancestral home, and meet some old family friends.”
“Okay, that’s settled then. That’s fantastic. If you know someone from Purja, it’ll make all the difference. I’ve had three projects die because I didn’t have the right introductions. See if Bahsa can go with you. I don’t want you to travel there alone. Purja has always been a bit radical against Krashigar, ever since pre-independence times, and I don’t want you to get into trouble.”
“But I am not Krashigari…”
“Yes, yes, I know that, and you know that, and I’m just being cautious, you see?”
Riya bit back a retort, and had to be content with merely glaring at Dr Gudi when he turned his back.
* * *
Purja was a surprise. Riya expected a small backwater village, but she didn’t expect the calm that comes with being surrounded by backwaters and Sugarpa farms. The fields were shiny green, and the deep silence of the fields was broken only by insects buzzing and birds chirping. Time slowed, her breathing slowed, and Riya felt the endless chatter in her mind slow down as well. It felt like she was returning home. Bahsa walked behind her, as they headed towards the village centre. There was a small stone engraving there, proclaiming that this was the origin of the freedom movement, a small act of disobedience from an unlikely hero that somehow caught the imagination of a hitherto hopeless people. The village itself looked as if not even a single house had so much as changed a single tile on the roof in all this time.
