The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Back in my bare little room I would lie on my sagging bed and listen to the voices from the shop below, the lulling rhythm of the sewing machines, and play at making meta-minds. “Arun,” I would tell myself, “in two years you’ve come a long way.” But my laziness, held at bay by the unaccustomed intellectual stimulation, reasserted itself eventually. Instead of pursuing a full degree I opted for a mere diploma, which greatly disappointed Janani as well as some of my teachers.

  But the change in my life, in this short, intense period, had opened me up to the possibilities of the world. I read voraciously in Hindi and English, learning about foreign countries and customs, and the wars and plagues of history. From lurid Hindi science fiction to paperback English romances, there was nothing that was not grist for my mill. I came to realize that sensing other minds through the written word was almost as interesting a skill as my unique, innate ability to sense them directly. Writing—whether English or Hindi or computer code—was the key that opened the doors to other minds, other lands. Like a monk on leave from the monastery, I was agape with wonder. For the first time I realized that there were many ways to be a foreigner; losing one’s memory, being poor, being illiterate, were just some of them.

  Meanwhile I continued to get letters and packages from Janani. She was now a seamstress in Rishikesh. She wrote that she was gradually retrieving and returning my things, such as they were, from before the fire. The things made no sense. There were some photographs that she had apparently taken herself: a great, dazzling wall of flame, an enormous log in the foreground, glowing with the heat. Pieces of abstract ceramic sculpture, remains of etchings. Had I been an artist? There was nothing remotely artistic about me now. I looked at my hands, my body, clean and healed by Janani’s ministrations. I did not even have any scars. I looked at the other photos she had sent of teenage boys looking into the camera. One of them was me. The others looked vaguely familiar. Had they been my friends in that unknown life?

  But I was too busy with my new life to pay much attention to my erstwhile possessions. Not long after receiving my diploma, I got a job checking software for defects and moved to the great, crowded metropolis of New Delhi. Janani was ecstatic. “A great step up in the world, Arun!” she wrote, exulting. And in many ways it was so. Flush with success—the job was easy for me and not too demanding—and with a new sense of my place in the world, I settled down in my new life. It was during this time that I began to explore my extraordinary mental abilities in a more methodical manner.

  One of my early discoveries was that there were minds that were completely closed to me, different from the kind of mental resistance I’d felt with Janani. There were people who would be standing with the crowd outside the cricket stadium, apparently as excited about the impending match as anybody else, but they did not register on my radar. I was greatly troubled by such minds—blanks, I called them. I feared and distrusted them. It seemed that my skill had its limitations. But the solitons were different. I sensed them, all right, but I could not draw them in. Their minds moved through my jumbled meta-mind the way a man walks through a large, empty field on his way home. Quickly, cleanly, with his attention elsewhere. Taking nothing, leaving nothing behind.

  The first one I experienced was at a rally at the Red Fort in Delhi. The prime minister was up on the ramparts in a bullet-proof box, speechifying about the latest war. Seventeen thousand people with nothing better to do—college students, farmers with harvests lost in the drought, clerks on their way to important errands, unemployable sons of rich men and other wastrels, street people and pickpockets—had been rounded up by the party men. As the prime minister’s rhetoric became more passionate, I sensed the minds, at first relaxed and disjointed like a bunch of loose rubber bands, becoming like angry bees buzzing in concert. Not very interesting—too simple, but also dangerous. I put my hands over my ears, but I could not shut them out; it was as though I were being blinded and deafened at the same time. Stumbling away through the crowd, I was pushed and cursed as I pressed on. And the realization hit: the meta-mind had formed of its own accord. I had not done it. That is why I couldn’t make it stop. What such a self-generating meta-beast could do, who knew? The crowd surged around me, thrusting and clawing at me. I imagined the monster going out into the streets, maiming and killing, crying for blood. As my own mind dissolved into chaos, something strange and wonderful happened. I sensed a deep and momentary stilling in my mind, as though I had crossed a great, noisy battlefield into a waterfall of peace. Just for one glorious moment. Then the bees hummed in my head again, and it was all I could do to stagger about like a drunk at the fringes of the crowd, looking for that person. Useless, of course. Who walked so cleanly through the mad tangle that was the meta-beast, like a monk striding serenely through the sinful glitter of the world?

  I learned later that there are only a few people like Sankaran, and that for very brief periods of time all people are like that. But some sustain that state of mind for most of their waking life. A cobbler mending shoes in front of a cinema hall in Bombay. A mathematician walking, seeing not the world but equations and things. A mother, single-minded about her ailing son. A lover in a dusty old garden, oblivious to roses. Yes, later I understood this state of mind.

  Life in the big city was never boring. There was scope for my abilities, and they led me into unexpected adventures. One time, while strolling through the fort city of Old Delhi, I came upon a young girl standing in a doorway. She was a waif, barely in her teens, incongruously dressed in a bright red salwaar kameez that was too big for her. The narrow street was full of people and noise, bicycle bells and the calls of fruit sellers, and the light had the dazzling clarity of high summer. Seeing her in the dark archway of an old building with the sunlight washing her thin face, I felt the anguish of her mind like a blow between the eyes. I sensed a hopelessness so absolute that instinctively I moved toward her. She drew back from me, and a man appeared out of the shabby darkness of what I then realized was a brothel.

  That was how I met Dulari. My rescue of her involved most of my meager savings (her price) and a local women’s group. She was eventually given a job at a clothing shop that employed dozens of emaciated young women to sew name-brand clothes for overseas markets. I went to see her occasionally, but most of the time guilt made me stay away. Although her life was better than before, it was still no life for a fourteen-year-old girl. But I was now a member of the middle class. I had to pretend to a certain decorum. Besides, I lived in a tiny room sublet to me by a large and boisterous Punjabi family. Dulari had no place in my life.

  But I could not hide from myself the fact that I could have loved her. She was a child, and it was not appropriate, but I saw past her painfully thin, broken body into her mind. She was like the proverbial lotus that grows in murky water; its roots are soiled, but it climbs upward, bifurcating into petals that open to the sky. Under the scars, a part of her was untouched by the privations and humiliations of her life; there was intelligence, hope, and layers of wonderful complexity and potential that perhaps would never find expression.

  My colleague Manek was another matter entirely. He was well educated, had prospects, and was earning a reasonable salary. His mind—I could never look upon a person as simply a corporeal entity—was clean and simple, like an orderly room, and his thoughts and emotions were often quite transparent. One day, I sensed that he was depressed and asked him about it. In his simple, direct way, he told me that he was in love with a young woman he could not marry. There were caste and class issues, and his beloved’s family was keeping guard round the clock so the couple could no longer meet. To make matters worse, his parents were now looking for a suitable girl for him. Naturally I became Manek’s confidant.

  That summer my landlord and his family decided to go home to their village in Punjab for the holidays. They padlocked all the doors in the apartment except for my room, the kitchen, and the bathroom and left me to a peace and privacy I had never before enjoyed.

  So Ma
nek came to see me at home. One day he was near tears and I put my arms around him to comfort him. After that we became lovers after a fashion. He was not gay, he said, but he wanted me to pretend to be a woman, to be held, caressed, and comforted. In his mind the illusion was so complete that as I lay with him, I could almost feel the swell of my breasts. Meanwhile I touched his mind with my own, furtively, tentatively. I think our occasional mental contact helped him relax, although he could not directly sense the tendrils of my mind. With his face buried against my bare shoulder he would whisper the names of all the women he had loved from afar, ending with Anjana, his beloved.

  Later there was Sheela, a quiet mouse of a woman, the older unmarried daughter of a couple who lived in the flat above. Her sisters were married off; she was the plain one, apparently, so there was not much hope that she would find someone. In her lovemaking, as in her mind, she was bold, imaginative, and tender, but everything she said was by touch or glance. During our few assignations she never spoke a word. Once I broke our pact of silence by uttering the word “love.” She sat up on the bed, stared at me, her wide eyes filling with angry tears. “Don’t you dare say that word ever again,” she said fiercely. She leaped upon me and began to pull off my shirt. The dark places in her mind deepened, trembled; caves opened like mouths; rivers of emotion roared in the gorges, the hidden places of her soul. She was fascinating, but she did not want me. Ultimately, fate in the form of a divorced man looking for a wife took her away to some far city and another life.

  Sometimes I worried about how different I was from other young men. I looked and dressed like a man, but I did not understand social conventions about what it meant to be a man or a woman. I could go out with other young men to seedy bars and drink beer, but I did not know that the women there were for flirting with, or that I should outshout the other men in a bid to impress. I would sit down with a woman and ask her about her work, or about the embroidery on her blouse. Women colleagues found that when I was the only male present they could talk as easily about “women” things as if they were by themselves; once I took part in a discussion about their periods, even though my role was only that of interested questioner. “God, Arun, you’re too much,” they would say, suddenly remembering I was a man. I watched cooking shows with as much curiosity as cricket and wrestling. My ability to sense minds enabled me to see human beings as entities beyond man-woman categories. I decided, after some months of informal study, that rather than two sexes there were at least thirty-four. Perhaps “sex” or “gender” isn’t right—perhaps a geographical term would be more appropriate—thirty-four climactic zones of the human mind!

  But my peculiarities occasionally made me wonder about my future. My colleagues were falling in love, getting engaged, getting married. To me, each job was like a temporary resting place before the next thing, as was each relationship. Would my restlessness be my undoing? Janani dismissed my fears. “You are young,” she wrote in a letter. “Learn about the world, Arun. Embrace it. Love as many people as you can, but don’t let anyone keep you like a bird in a cage.”

  By the time I met Sankaran I had learned a lot. Never to go to political rallies, for one thing. Or religious processions, although temples, churches, gurudwaras, and mosques were all right in small doses. I had also learned that contrary to what you might expect, families do not generally make good meta-minds. There is too much pushing and shoving about. They coalesce and come apart. Maybe they maintain a dynamic rather than a static equilibrium, because they are, after all, with each other day in and day out. Perhaps a meta-mind, indefinitely sustained, eventually goes mad.

  I also did some experimenting with animals. There was a herd of cows that foraged in the street outside my apartment complex. They stood in the midst of traffic like humped, white islands, peacefully chewing cuds, or waited with bovine patience for people to dump their kitchen refuse at the corner garbage dump. I sensed their minds but did not understand the nature of their thoughts. One night, returning from work, I saw a magnificent bull standing in the middle of the road, on the median. Traffic swept by him on either side. In the luminous dust under the street lamps, he was like a great white ghost. Across the road the cows lay regarding him with indifference. I sensed his mind as clearly as if it had been visible. He was calling to the cows with all he had, a long, soundless low of desire. The cows’ response was, in effect, Not today, pal, we have cud to chew. It was then that I realized that animals could not only sense each other’s minds but also communicate mentally.

  I continued my experiments with human minds, learning all kinds of interesting trivia. For instance, odd numbers, especially primes, make more stable meta-beasts; even numbers are less steady, especially if there are only two people involved. Couples are really dangerous, because there is nothing to balance the connection between the minds, no push to counter the pull, if you know what I mean. Which is why, long before I met Sankaran, I had decided never to fall in love.

  I met him in America. Janani encouraged me to go there after she heard from a fellow sensitive that Rahul Moghe had been seen in Chandigarh, only a few hours’ drive from Delhi. I felt the old, nameless fear again. I had not thought about Rahul Moghe in years. At that time my company was exporting a team of software people to the United States. Urged by a fury of letters from Janani, I joined the exodus to the land of milk and honey.

  In America’s small towns, with their abnormally clean streets so strangely empty of people and animals, in the surreal, neon-bright canyons of vast skyscrapered cities, I found that I could further explore my ability to make meta-minds. Despite the much-touted individualism of Americans, I often encountered large groups of people with similar belief systems and mental processes. In the beginning it was vastly entertaining; I walked down Wall Street, peered in at the Stock Exchange. All those people, thinking themselves competitors and rivals, muttering into cell phones and shouting like deranged children—what a seamless, stable meta-mind they made! Then there was suburban America, yuppie-ville, with the over-large houses and multiple cars and boats, where it was just too easy. Teenagers expressing their individuality in their name-brand clothing and angst-ridden looks were easy, too, but there was a dark undercurrent in that meta-mind that disturbed me, hinting of dams upstream about to burst. I amused myself making meta-minds out of warring groups of political opponents and fundamentalist religious types with opposing loyalties. My own community of Indians, with few exceptions, lived in a time warp, adopting conventions and practices that no longer existed in India. Their constant obsession with their status as high-earning professionals was boring. Far more interesting were splinter groups living on the edge of mainstream culture; I made friends with Wiccans, Mexican immigrants, and an Ethiopian gay couple that ran a restaurant in San Francisco. I lived in California at first, working as little as I could get by with, indulging my special ability to the hilt. Despite all this I felt a deep and increasing loneliness at the back of my mind, a longing not just for my old haunts in India, for old friends and people I had known, but for something beyond that. Already I was making a shape, a place, for Sankaran inside me.

  Then something happened that drove me from California. One bright Saturday morning I was swimming about in the shallows near a beach when I felt an undertow. I began to struggle against it; then I realized that it was in my mind. A powerful tug, reeling me in as though I were an exhausted fish. I recognized the summons that would not be denied. Rahul Moghe had found me at last.

  I emerged from the water and found myself compelled to walk between sunbathers and colorful beach umbrellas toward a car parked on the road above the beach. I tried to stop, or to ask for help, but I was as helpless as a mannequin. As I came near the road one part of my mind noted that the car was a white sedan with tinted windows. A man in sunglasses sat in the driver’s seat. He leaned forward to open the passenger side door. I remember that a gold ring flashed on his hand.

  There was a sudden squeal of brakes, a shuddering crash. A bus, pulling into i
ts stop just behind the car, hadn’t slowed down enough. It rear-ended the parked car, buckling the back and making it rock forward. The pull of Rahul Moghe’s mind ceased abruptly.

  I took the chance; I ran to where my beach bag lay, picked it up, crossed the road out of sight of the accident, and sprinted furiously through the parking lot on the other side of the road. My bare feet burned on the concrete, but in a minute or two I was in my car, driving off to safety. A police car came in from the other direction, siren wailing.

  About twenty minutes later I felt Rahul Moghe’s mind reach for me again, but his touch was faint, searching, tentative; a few minutes later I couldn’t feel him at all.

  Through sheer luck I had gotten away again.

  I changed jobs, fled the West Coast, and kept to old, sprawling eastern metropolises like New York and Boston. Nearly a year passed. There was no sign of Rahul Moghe. Janani’s letters also did not mention him except to warn me to be vigilant. She hoped I had seen the last of him.

  I knew, however, that he would be back, that he would find me. I sensed this in a way that I did not understand. I would dream of him sometimes, of the long arms of his mind reaching for me, drawing me to him, to the abyss of his soul. He terrified me. But there was a part of me that wanted to know him, perhaps the only other person with my ability.

  Then one afternoon, in a café in Boston, where I was attempting to drink what Americans fondly believe to be chai, I met Sankaran.

  I was amusing myself constructing a meta-beast from the very uppity literary crowd in one corner and a dysfunctional family of four at the next table when someone coasted through the whole mess of mental cobwebbing like it wasn’t there. Instinctively I looked toward him. He was unmistakably Indian, delicately built, with a thatch of unkempt black hair and an apologetic and neglected mustache. His hands were slender and brown. He sat down with a book and a coffee cup and was soon lost in whatever he was reading.