by Anthology
Clouds are borne on the wind
The river winds toward home
It was only the next day that I started to connect things in my mind. I think I know what the project is really about.
These people are not scientists, they are jadugars. Or maybe that’s what scientists are, magicians who try to pass themselves off as ordinary people.
See, the dead man’s idea is that time is like a river delta; lots of thin streams and fat streams, flowing from past to present, but fanning out. History and time control each other, so that if some future place is deeply affected by some past history, those two time streams will connect. When that happens it diverts time from the future place and shifts the flow in each channel so that the river as a whole might change its course.
They’re trying to change the future.
I am stunned. If this is true, why didn’t they tell me? Don’t I also want the world to survive? It’s my world too. This also means that I am more important to them than they ever let me know. I didn’t realize all this at once; it is just now beginning to connect in my mind.
I burn inside with anger. At the same time, I am undone with wonder.
I think the dead man is trying to save the world. I think the scope and the dead man are part of the same Machine.
I wonder how much of their schemes I have messed up by locking the Machine into a different time and place than their calculations required.
What shall I do?
For now I have done nothing.
I need to find out more. How terrible it is to be ignorant! One doesn’t even know where to start.
I looked at the history books Nondini had let me have—talking books— but they told me nothing about Rassundari. Then I remembered that one of the rooms on my floor housed a library from the days before the scientists had taken over the building.
I think Nondini sensed how restless I was feeling, and she must have talked to Kajori (I can’t think of her as Dr. Mitra now) so I have permission to spend some of my spare time in the library.
They might let me go to the night market tomorrow too, with an escort. I went and thanked Kajori. I said that I was homesick for my mother’s village home, Siridanga, and it made me feel crazy sometimes not to be able to walk around. At that she really looked at me, a surprised look, and smiled. I don’t think it was a nice smile, but I couldn’t be certain.
So, the library. It is a whole apartment full of books of the old kind. But the best thing about it is that there is a corner window from which I can see between two tall buildings. I can see the ocean! These windows don’t open but when I saw the ocean I wept. I was in such a state of sadness and joy all at once, I forgot what I was there for.
The books were divided according to subject, so I practiced reading the subject labels first. It took me two days and some help from Nondini (I had to disguise the intent of my search) before I learned how to use the computer to search for information. I was astonished to find out that my housewife had written a book! So all that painful learning on the sly had come to something! I felt proud of her. There was the book in the autobiography section: Amar Jiban, written by a woman called Rassundari more than two hundred and fifty years ago. I clutched the book to me and took it with me to read.
It is very hard reading a real book. I have to keep looking at my notes from my lessons with Rassundari. It helps that Nondini got me some alphabet books. She finds my interest in reading rather touching, I think.
But I am getting through Rassundari’s work. Her writing is simple and so moving. What I can’t understand is why she is so calm about the injustices in her life. Where is her anger? I would have gotten angry. I feel for her as I read.
I wish I could tell Rassundari that her efforts will not be in vain—that she will write her autobiography and publish it at the age of sixty, and that the future will honor her. But how can I tell her that, even if there was a way she could hear me? What can I tell her about this world? My wanderings through the building have made me realize that the world I’ve known is going away, as inevitably as the tide, with no hope of return.
Unless the dead man and I save it.
I have been talking to Rassundari. Of course she can’t hear me, but it comforts me to be able to talk to someone, really talk to them. Sometimes Rassundari looks up toward the point near the ceiling from which I am observing her. At those moments it seems to me that she senses my presence. Once she seemed about to say something, then shook her head and went back to the cooking.
I still haven’t told anybody about my deceit. I have found out that Wajid Ali Shah and Rassundari lived at around the same time, although he was in Kolkata and she in a village that is now in Bangladesh. From what the dead man tells me, it is time that is important, not space. At least that is what I can gather from his babblings, although spacetime fuzziness or resolution is also important. So maybe my deception hasn’t caused any harm. I hope not. I am an uneducated woman, and when I sit in that library I feel as though there is so much to know. If someone had told me that, encouraged me as a child, where might I have been today? And yet think about the dead man, with all his education. There he is, a hundred times more trapped than me, a thousand times lonelier. Yet he must be a good man, to give himself for the world.
He’s been asking me anxiously: Kajori, can you feel the shift in the timeflow? Have we locked into the pastpoint? I always tell him I feel it just a little, which reassures him that his sacrifice is not for nothing. I wish I could tell him: I am Gargi, not Kajori. Instead I tell him I love him, I miss him. Sometimes I really feel that I do.
I have been speaking to Rassundari for nearly a week.
One of the scientists, Brijesh, caught me talking into the scope. He came into the room to get some papers he’d left behind. I jumped guiltily.
“Gargi-di? What are you doing . . . ?” he says with eyebrows raised.
“I just like to talk to myself. Repeat things Wajid Ali Shah is saying.”
He looks interested. “A new poem?”
“Bah!” I say. “You people think he says nothing but poetry all the time? Right now he’s trying to woo his mistress.”
This embarrasses Brijesh, as I know it would. I smile at him and go back to the scope.
But yes, I was talking about Rassundari.
Now I know that she senses something. She always looks up at me, puzzled as to how a corner of the ceiling appears to call to her.
Does she hear me, or see some kind of image? I don’t know. I keep telling her not to be afraid, that I am from the future, and that she is famous for her writing. Whether she can tell what I am saying I don’t know. She does look around from time to time, afraid as though others might be there, so I think maybe she hears me, faintly, like an echo.
Does this mean that our rivulet of time is beginning to connect with her time stream?
I think my mind must be like an old-fashioned radio. It picks up things: the dead man’s ramblings, the sounds and sights of the past.
Now it seems to be picking up the voices from the books in this room. I was deaf once, but now I can hear them as I read, slowly and painfully. All those stories, all those wonders. If I’d only known!
I talk to the dead. I talk to the dead of my time, and the woman Rassundari of the past, who is dead now. My closest confidants are the dead.
The dead man—I wish I knew his name—tells me that we have made a loop in time. He is not sure how the great delta’s direction will change— whether it will be enough, or too little, or too much.
He has not quite understood the calculations that the Machine is doing. He is preoccupied. But when I call to him, he is tender, grateful. “Kajori,” he says, “I have no regrets. Just this one thing, please do it for me. What you promised. Let me die once the loop has fully stabilized.” In one dream I saw through his eyes. He was in a tank, wires coming out of his body, floating. In that scene there was no river of time, just the luminous water below him, and the glass casing around. What a terrible pr
ison! If he really does live like that, I think he can no longer survive outside the tank, which is why he wants to die.
It is so painful to think about this that I must distract us both. We talk about poetry, and later the next few lines of the poem come to me.
Clouds are borne on the wind
The river winds toward home
From my prison window
I see the way to my village
In its cage of bone my heart weeps
When I was the river, you were the shore
Why have you forsaken me?
I am getting confused. It is Kajori who is supposed to be in love with the dead man, not me.
So many things happened these last two days.
The night before last, the maajhis sang in the night market. I heard their voices ululating, the dotaras throbbing in time with the flute’s sadness. A man’s voice, and then a woman’s, weaving in and out. I imagined them on their boats, plying the waters all over the drowned city as they had once sailed the rivers of my drowned land. I was filled with a painful ecstasy that made me want to run, or fly.
I wanted to break the windows.
The next morning I spent some hours at the scope. I told Rassundari my whole story. I still can’t be sure she hears me, but her upturned, attentive face gives me hope. She senses something, for certain, because she put her hand to her ear as though straining to hear. Another new thing is that she is sometimes snappy. This has never happened before. She snapped at her nephew the other day, and later spoke sharply to her husband. After both those instances she felt so bad! She begged forgiveness about twelve times. Both her nephew and her husband seemed confused, but accepted her apology. I wonder if the distraction I am bringing into her life is having an effect on her mind. It occurs to me that perhaps, like the dead man, she can sense my thoughts, or at least feel the currents of my mind.
The loop in the time stream has stabilized. Unnikrishnan told me I need not be at the scope all the time, because the connection is always there, instead of timing out. The scientists were nervous and irritable; Kajori had shut herself up in her office. Were they waiting for the change? How will they tell that the change has come? Have we saved the world? Or did my duplicity ruin it?
I was in the library in the afternoon, a book on my lap, watching the gray waves far over the sea, when the dead man shouted in my mind. At this I peered out—the hall was empty. The scientists have been getting increasingly careless. The lift was unguarded.
So up I went to the floor above. The great wood-paneled door was open. Inside the long, dimly lit room stood Kajori, her face wet with tears, calling his name.
“Subir! Subir!”
She didn’t notice me.
He lay naked in the enormous tank like a child sleeping on its belly. He was neither young nor old; his long hair, afloat in the water like seaweed, was sprinkled with gray, his dangling arms thin as sticks. Wires came out of him at dozens of places, and there were large banks of machinery all around the tank. His skin gleamed as though encased in some kind of oil.
He didn’t know she was there, I think. His mind was seething with confusion. He wanted to die, and his death hadn’t happened on schedule. A terror was growing in him.
“You promised, Kajori!”
She just wept with her face against the tank. She didn’t turn off any switches. She didn’t hear him, but I felt his cry in every fiber of my being.
“He wants to die,” I said.
She turned, her face twisted with hatred.
“What are you doing here? Get out!”
“Go flee, Subir!” I said. I ran in and began pulling out plugs, turning off switches in the banks of machines around the tank. Kajori tried to stop me but I pushed her away. The lights in the tank dimmed. His arms flailed for a while, then grew still. Over Kajori’s scream I heard his mind going out like the tide goes out, wafting toward me a whisper: thank you, thank you, thank you.
I became aware of the others around me, and Kajori shouting and sobbing.
“She went mad! She killed him!”
“You know he had to die,” I said to her. I swallowed. “I could hear his thoughts. He . . . he loved you very much.”
She shouted something incomprehensible at me. Her sobbing subsided. Even though she hated me, I could tell that she was beginning to accept what had happened. I’d done her a favor, after all, done the thing she had feared to do. I stared at her sadly and she looked away.
“Take her back to her room,” she said. I drew myself up.
“I am leaving here,” I said, “to go home to Siridanga. To find my family.”
“You fool,” Kajori said. “Don’t you know, this place used to be Siridanga. You are standing on it.”
They took me to my room and locked me in.
After a long time of lying in my bed, watching the shadows grow as the light faded, I made myself get up. I washed my face. I felt so empty, so faint. I had lost my family and my friends, and the dead man, Subir. I hadn’t even been able to say goodbye to Rassundari.
And Siridanga, where was Siridanga? The city had taken it from me.
And eventually the sea would take it from the city. Where were my people? Where was home?
That night the maajhis sang. They sang of the water that had overflowed the rivers. They sang of the rivers that the city streets had become. They sang of the boats they had plied over river after river, time after time. They sang, at last, of the sea.
The fires from the night market lit up the windows of the opposite building. The reflections went from windowpane to windowpane, with the same deliberate care that Rassundari took with her writing.
I felt that at last she was reaching through time to me, to our dying world, writing her messages on the walls of our building in letters of fire. She was writing my song.
Nondini came and unlocked my door sometime before dawn. Her face was filled with something that had not been there before, a defiance. I pulled her into my room.
“I have to tell you something,” I said. I sat her down in a chair and told her the whole story of how I’d deceived them.
“Did I ruin everything?” I said at the end, fearful at her silence.
“I don’t know, Gargi-di,” she said at last. She sounded very young, and tired. “We don’t know what happens when a time-loop is formed artificially. It may bring in a world that is much worse than this one. Or not. There’s always a risk. We argued about it a lot and finally we thought it was worth doing. As a last ditch effort.”
“If you’d told me all this, I wouldn’t have done any of it,” I said, astounded. Who were they to act as Kalki? How could they have done something of this magnitude, not even knowing whether it would make for a better world?
“That’s why we didn’t tell you,” she said. “You don’t understand, we— scientists, governments, people like us around the world—tried everything to avert catastrophe. But it was too late. Nothing worked. And now we are past the point where any change can make a difference.”
“ ‘People like us,’ you say,” I said. “What about people like me? We don’t count, do we?”
She shook her head at that, but she had no answer.
It was time to go. I said goodbye, leaving her sitting in the darkness of my room, and ran down the stairs. All the way to the front steps, out of the building, out of my old life, the tired old time stream. The square was full of the night market people packing up—fish vendors, and entertainers, getting ready to return another day. I looked around at the tall buildings, the long shafts of paling sky between them, water at the edge of the island lapping ever higher. The long boats were tethered there, weatherbeaten and muchmended. The maajhis were leaving, but not to return. I talked to an old man by one of their boats. He said they were going to sea.
“There’s nothing left for us here,” he said. “Ever since last night the wind has been blowing us seaward, telling us to hasten, so we will follow it. Come with us if you wish.”
So in that gray
dawn, with the wind whipping at the tattered sails and the water making its music against the boats, we took off for the open sea. Looking back, I saw Rassundari writing with dawn’s pale fingers on the windows of the skyscrapers, the start of the letter kah, conjugated with r. Kra . . . But the boat and the wind took us away before I could finish reading the word. I thought the word reached all the way into the ocean with the paling moonlight still reflected in the surging water.
Naibar chhuto bi jaaye, I thought, and wept.
Now the wind writes on my forehead with invisible tendrils of air, a language I must practice to read. I have left my life and loves behind me, and wish only to be blown about as the sea desires, to have the freedom of the open air, and be witness to the remaking of the world.
WIKIHISTORY
Desmond Warzel
International Association of Time Travelers: Members’ Forum
Subforum: Europe—Twentieth Century—Second World War
Page 263
11/15/2104
At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!
At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.
At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
