“Well, mate,” she said. “Ain’t you going to kiss me?”
The fire is all but done. No, don’t bother with another log. Let it die. There’s nothing there but ashes anyway.
You look at your mother and you see someone I do not—a woman who is old and wrinkled, who has put on some weight, perhaps, who could never have been an adventurer, a rogue, a scamp. Oh, I see her exterior well enough, too. But I also see deeper.
I love her in a way you can’t possibly understand, nor ever will understand unless someday many years hence you have the good fortune to come to feel the same way yourself. I love her as an old and comfortable shoe loves its mate. I could never find her equal.
And so ends my tale. I can vouch for none of it. Since the fever, I have not been sure which memories are true and which are fantasy. Perhaps only half of what I have said actually happened. Perhaps none of it did. At any rate, I have told you it all.
Save for one thing.
Not many years later, and for the best of reasons, I sent for the midwife. My darling Caroline was in labor. First she threw up, and then the water broke. Then the Quaker midwife came and chased me from the room. I sat in the parlor with my hands clasped between my knees and waited.
Surely hours passed while I stewed and worried. But all I recall is that somehow I found myself standing at the foot of my wife’s child-bed. Caroline lay pale with exhaustion. She smiled wanly as the midwife held up my son for me to see.
I looked down upon that tiny creature’s face and burst into tears. The tears coursed down my face like rain, and I felt such an intensity of emotion as I can scarce describe to you now. It was raining outside, they tell me now, but that is not how I recall it. To me the world was flooded with sunshine, brighter than any I had ever seen before.
The midwife said something; I paid her no mind. I gazed upon my son.
In that moment I felt closer to my father than ever I had before. I felt that finally I understood him and knew what words he would have said to me if he could. I looked down on you with such absolute and undeviating love as we in our more hopeful moments pray that God feels toward us, and silently I spoke to you.
Someday, my son, I thought, you will be a man. You will grow up and by so doing turn me old, and then I will die and be forgotten. But that’s all right. I don’t mind. It’s a small price to pay for your existence.
Then the midwife put you into my arms, and all debts and grudges I ever held were canceled forever.
There’s so much more I wish I could tell you. But it’s late, and I lack the words. Anyway, your trunk is packed and waiting by the door. In the morning you’ll be gone. You’re a man yourself, and about to set off on adventures of your own. Adventures I cannot imagine, and which afterward you will no more be able to explain to others than I could explain mine to you. Live them well. I know you will.
And now it’s time I was abed. Time, and then some, that I slept.
Of Love and Other Monsters
VANDANA SINGH
In the lyrical, complex, and compassionate story that follows, we learn that it’s possible to weave minds together the way that you weave thread. The question is, given that peculiar kind of thread to work with, what do you make from it? A gorgeous multicolored tapestry? Or something considerably bleaker, black and white, dyed red around the edges with blood?
New writer Vandana Singh was born and raised in India and currently resides with her family in the United States, where she teaches physics and writes. Her stories have appeared in several volumes of Polyphony, as well as in Strange Horizons, InterNova, Foundation 100, Rabid Transit, Interfictions, Mythic, Trampoline, and So Long Been Dreaming. She’s published a children’s book in India, Younguncle Comes to Town. The chapbook version of Of Love and Other Monsters has just appeared, as has her first collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories.
When I think about him I remember a wave I watched near a beach once, a big, beautiful, smooth wave, perfectly rounded, like molten glass. It came into a narrow channel from the open sea, muscular and purposeful, hardly breaking into surf. I thought it would climb all the way up the end of the channel, wash over me, and carry on, unbroken, till it crossed the entire Deccan peninsula. But it met the sand, rolled over it, little traceries of white disturbing its smooth, translucent aspect. Touched my toes, broke up into little tongues of froth, and dissipated. So I like to think of him—Sankaran, I mean—like a wave that came out of the ocean for a while to fulfill some purpose (whatever that was). Then he was lost to me.
Physicists have a name for that kind of wave. It is very unusual, and it is called a soliton, or solitary wave.
When, as a young man, I met Sankaran for the first time, I thought he was the one I had been searching for all my conscious life. But as the poet Faiz says, there are more sorrows in the world than love. As soon as I had settled into a certain youthful complacency, the world and its attendant sorrows got in the way.
The study of minds, soliton-like or otherwise, is my particular passion. Mindsensing, mind-weaving—these extraordinary abilities set me apart from other people. I like to go into a gaggle of housewives bargaining over turnips or a crowd at a cricket match. I drift about, trying to determine what kind of entity the crowd has the potential to become. I take the embryological possibility of the meta-mind, make a joining here, a parting there; I wave my baton like the conductor of an orchestra and sense a structure, a form, coalesce in the interactions of these knots of persons. The meta-mind I construct has a vague unity of purpose, a jumble of contradictory notions, and even a primitive self-awareness.
Which is why I am so disturbed by solitons. They walk into a meta-mind as though nothing were there, and they walk out, unaffected. They give nothing, nor do they take away.
Such was Sankaran-with-stars-in-his-eyes, Sankaran the astronomer. This is not his story, however—his is just one thread in the tapestry, one voice in the telling. This is my story, and it begins when I was (so I am told) seventeen years old.
The first thing I remember is fire. The next thing: a pair of big, strong hands stroking and kneading me. A woman’s voice, saying, “Come now, be so, be still … .” I was lying on a bed of warm ash, with sharp bits digging into my back.
I have no recollection of my life before the conflagration took my memory and identity. What I am now began with fire, with a woman called Janani, on a summer night in the remote outskirts of a small town in eastern India. Some time later, when I came to my senses, the stars were out, and the air smelled of roasted coriander seeds and cow dung, as it does most nights over there. I was lying on a cot in the little yard behind Janani’s shack. Everything, including my lean, dark body, was unfamiliar to me.
My rescuer, Janani—a widow who ran a toddy shop—took me in and helped me face my predicament. The first thing she did after I recovered was to give me a name: Arun, which (like everything in those early days) sounded strange to me. “It means ‘red,’” she told me. “You were born of fire.” In those days I could sense the ghost of my past self very faintly: I saw symbols, words, numbers, shapes, as though scratched in damp clay. “Who am I? What happened to me in the fire?” I asked her. My voice sounded rasping and unfamiliar. The Hindi syllables felt strange on my tongue, but the words were there in my mind, waiting for me.
“I cannot tell you,” she said. “There was a fire in an abandoned building, and I rescued you. You are not a local. That’s all there is to know.”
Without an identity I had nowhere to go, no family. Nobody in the area recognized me. So Janani gave me a home. I slept in the front of her hut, which was the toddy shop. Oh, the strangeness of those days!
It was like learning to live again. She had to show me how to take a twig from the neem tree behind the hut and use it like a toothbrush. I learned how to use a toilet, how to chop onions, how to talk to customers. Janani made a living not just from selling toddy but also by dispensing herbs for ailments from stomachaches to unrequited love, and I had t
o learn the lore enough to know which bottle to bring out when she asked for it. I had to learn to recognize my own face in the mirror—I would stand before the little mirror on the wall and pull faces until she yelled at me, “Arun, you fool! Did I pull you out of the fire so you could admire your beauty all day?” And she would set me to work washing glasses or chopping herbs. The ghost of my past self stayed in the shadows of my mind, and I found myself thinking less and less of what my old life might have been. At that time all was new, strange, and endlessly fascinating—not least of which was my ability to sense minds.
I was idle by nature and by the nature of my ability, which was distracting to say the least. Janani insisted on educating me; from her I learned my letters and arithmetic, which seemed to come very easily to me. She also got a retired clerk who frequented the tea shack nearby to teach me a little about history, geography, and the rudiments of the English language. I would have liked nothing better than to loiter all day in the marketplace, but Janani’s sharp tongue kept me at my chores and lessons, at least until her back was turned. She was stocky and strong; she moved with the cadence of a large, slow river, sweeping up everything in her path. Her customers, work-worn laborers and ne’er-do-wells, feared her and confided their woes to her. Only once did I see her take a man into the dark room behind the shop where she slept. After several hours he came out, staggering, smiled vaguely at me, handed me a ten-rupee note, and left. He never came back.
My favorite place, where I learned and practiced what I considered to be my art, was the market; here the vendors squatted on the ground before their baskets full of gourds, peppers, eggplants, and onions, shouting, “Rob me! Loot me! Only three rupees a kilo!” I grew to appreciate the sweaty housewives with their glinting eyes, their bright saris hitched up in readiness for battle as they began insulting the produce. Pride, honor, and desire amidst the tottering, shining piles of luscious fruits and vegetables—how could I resist? I sensed the convoluted topography of each mind, its hills, valleys, areas of light and darkness, the whole animal mass trembling and shifting with emotional fluxes. After some practice I was able to draw the minds into a kind of net, to weave the separate threads of jangling thought processes into—not a tapestry, I was never that skilled, but a jumble of knitting wool, such as a kitten might do. There was little awareness among the separate minds that they were, at this point in space and time, tentatively the members of a rather confused metamind—how many cells in your body, but for a specialized few, are aware of themselves as part of a higher consciousness?
I once tried to draw Janani into a meta-mind with a couple of her customers, but she came into the back of her shop and cuffed me. “Don’t you try that on me, you good-for-nothing! Is this how you repay me?” I had already guessed (from the fact that nobody had tried it on me and that my subjects seemed to be so unaware of what I was doing) that this ability of mine was unique, but I didn’t know that Janani knew I had it. Later she explained that she did not possess my ability—indeed, she had come across only one other person who did—but she was a sensitive. She could tell when someone, especially a crude beginner like me, was trying tricks.
“Who’s this other person?” I asked, intrigued.
“You don’t need to know anything about him,” she told me. “Just somebody I met once. He wasn’t a nice man.”
She wouldn’t tell me more. But I realized then that the world was more complex than I’d thought; at least one other person had my peculiar talent, most didn’t, and some could sense my mind reaching out to theirs.
I spent all my spare time wandering about the narrow green lanes of my neighborhood under the gulmohar trees, scuffing up soft, silken dust with my bare toes. In the muddy by-lanes I gambled at marbles with other boys and gawked with them over the calendar of dewy-eyed film stars hanging in the neighborhood tea shack. I learned about sex and desire by watching the pariah dogs in the streets and the way the older boys looked at the unreachable, uniformed schoolgirls passing by with pigtails swinging. My own longings were nebulous. I could look at the tea seller’s daughter—a sloe-eyed vixen with a sharp tongue and a ready vocabulary of swear words—and tell that underneath it all was a mind as fragile as a spider’s web, tense with fear and need. I felt drawn to her, but then there was also the barber, a thin, clean-shaven young fellow, shy and subdued to all appearances. He distracted me every time I passed the place where he had set up shop: a mirror hung on a wall by the street with a chair in front of it, where he sat his customers down and ministered to their heads or beards. His mind was luscious, imaginative, erotic; I could not read his thoughts, but I could sense the nature of them: desire flowed with the rise and fall of his fingers, the shy caress of his hands on the cheek of a customer. Both my mind and body responded to the needs of such men and women around me; sometimes I would get aroused simply walking down the street, feeling the brush of their minds like feathers on my skin. Due to the crowded, public nature of our lives and the narrowness of convention, there was little hope of physical consummation—only the occasional groping in dark alleyways among us boys—but I could reach out with my mind and make a bridge, a connection as tangible to me as a touch. Most did not have the ability to sense this, but once the tea seller’s daughter looked up at me, startled, her eyes as clear and honest as a small child’s, as though she, too, had felt the electricity between our minds. Then her habitual aloofness slipped over her face like a mask, and the moment was gone.
There was a game I liked to play: I would lie on the broad branch of a large neem tree that grew near the tea shop, close my eyes, and try to guess who was passing below me from their mind-signature. If the person was a stranger, the mind-signature told me nothing of their identity, not even if they were male or female—but a well-known person was like the familiar topography of the street you grew up on.
Despite my persistent questions, Janani refused to tell me about the other person she knew who had my ability. “I hope you never meet him,” she would say with a shudder.
Then one night he found me.
I had just finished sweeping out the shop when I sensed something odd, as though a tendril had insinuated itself into my mind; at the same time I became aware that there was someone outside the door, just standing and waiting in the darkness. Janani must have felt it too, because she looked at me in sudden apprehension. I felt the tug of a mind far more sophisticated than my own, pulling me into the labyrinths of its own consciousness like a fisherman drawing in his line. I got up and began walking toward the front of the shop as if in a dream. Janani, who was obviously less affected than I, grabbed me and pushed me out the back door, into the quiet darkness of her vegetable garden. “Arun, you fool, get out of here!” she whispered fiercely against my cheek. I willed myself to put one foot before another. I climbed across the bamboo fence. Every step I took made me stronger and more able to resist.
When I returned, Janani was sitting on the shop floor, rocking to and fro. Her hair was unkempt, her sari crumpled, and she kept saying, “Rama, oh, Rama,” in a soft monotone. A great wave of anger and fear swept over me.
“Who was that? What did he do?”
“That was Rahul Moghe. The only other person I know who has your talent. He is dangerous, and he wants you, God knows for what terrible purpose. You must avoid him. You will know him not by his appearance, which can be deceptive, but by the way he drags at your mind without warning.
“He has threatened me. Now this place is no longer safe for either of us. I must think what to do … .”
That was the first and only time Janani took me to her bed, to the comfort of her dark, Himalayan breasts that smelled of cloves and cinnamon. She was like an earthquake and a tidal wave rolled into one. Afterward, I heard her mutter to herself, “Surely it doesn’t matter with him; he’s different … .” In the morning she flung me summarily out of her bed and began to pack.
“This is a sign that we must part ways. I have taught you what I can. You will go out into the world and make s
omething of yourself, and keep away from Moghe. I have some money I have been saving for you. Meanwhile I will sell this place and go live with a friend in Rishikesh. Keep in touch with me, because I want to know how you are faring. I have some of your things in a safe place. I will send them to you when I can.”
“What things?”
“Things from before the fire. Don’t worry about it now. You must go to the next town and get a job. I know a place …”
Which is how I found myself living in a tiny room over a tailor’s shop in the neighboring town. It was a tranquil time for me. I helped the tailor with deliveries, and after a while he made me a pair of pants and a shirt so I could look like a respectable young man instead of a drifter with holes in his clothes. Eventually (prompted by a barrage of letters from Janani) I got a job as a clerk at a computer training institute. Here my quick brain and my lessons with Janani and the old clerk paid off; over the next year I improved my English and began to help the system administrator with computer maintenance work. The work was enjoyable and came to me easily.
“Arun, foolish one,” Janani wrote. “You are no longer a street waif with few prospects. Here is your chance to make something of yourself. I’m sending money for classes. Learn computers and get a proper job; every idiot is doing it.” So I registered for a couple of classes and found that I had a knack for programming. Numbers, symbols, instructions, logic—it was as though I had once known this, or something like this, in my old life. Encouraged by the students, who looked upon me as a project of their own, I began to study full-time. Although I had no formal education and was unused to discipline, I made progress with their help. In the hot, dusty little classrooms with the squeaky ceiling fans and traffic sounds from the open windows, I was able to shut out other minds and concentrate. Slowly I began to write, decipher, and debug computer code. In a few months other students were asking me for help. My life changed.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 57
