Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  “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 prison! 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 grey 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 grey, 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 free, Subir!” said I. 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 good-bye 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 someth
ing 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 good-bye, 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, weather-beaten and much-mended. 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 grey 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.

  Naihar chhuto hi 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.

  A Handful of Rice

  At last Vishnumitra saw the king. The city was alive with beasts, mechanical and organic; there were elephants in the procession, stately and benign, draped with silk and brocade, bearing jeweled howdahs on their backs; then the the metal men, marching in formation, sun glinting off their armor; the king’s black horse, riderless and unsaddled, hooves ringing, leading the king’s glory, the tallest howdah on the tallest elephant. Crowds leaned out of balconies, lined the roads, throwing rose petals into the parade. Horseless carriages of the latest fashion, just out from the king’s own factories, led the procession, but it would not do for the king to sit in one of those. There were few things, said the traitor to Vishnumitra, as royal as elephants.

  To Vishnumitra the elephants looked out of place. He was an outsider from a village in the far reaches of the kingdom, and the bright, ringing clamor of the streets, the heavy scent of roses and sweat, were all too much for him. His opinion was of no account, so he said nothing. But he thought with some nostalgia about the home he had left behind these many, weary months, although the picture that came into his mind was one from his boyhood. Kind-eyed elephants bathing on the shore of the Ganga with the village boys, the water a grey sheet under a cloudy sky. Ahead were the steps of the ghat going down to the water and on the steps his mother and sisters, saris billowing red and orange. It was early morning; it was going to rain. On the rise along the shore the shisham trees spoke sibilantly in the breeze, their leaves a tender green. He saw his mother bend down and release the little earthen diya in the water, in its garland-boat of woven leaves and marigolds. Her hands cupped the small flame to make certain it did not go out in the wind, but the currents pulled the diya away from her, and she straightened and looked at the little boat—fire on water—sail off mid-stream. Fire on water, a prayer released into the world.

  He shook his head to clear it of old memories and immediately the noise and pomp of the procession assaulted his senses again. Annoyed with himself for dwelling so much on the past lately, he tried to turn his attention to the task at hand: to get a good look at that elusive, all-powerful monarch, the great man who ruled Hindustan, the man who, it was said, would live for ever. Harbinger of Peace and Prosperity, they called him, this mysterious man who would not let anybody draw his portrait or take his picture. He was not quite mortal, it was said. He had held off Sher Shah’s kingdom in the North-West, the Portuguese colony in the East, and the British territories to the South, and only magic of some kind could have accomplished that, said the sycophants and admirers of the king.

  Vishnumitra did not believe in magic; instead he believed in rigorous observation and systematic study. The glimpse was the first step; after that he didn’t know whether he was going to do it, or how he was going to do it. He was not an assassin, he had told the traitor. The traitor nodded as though to imply that all the assassins said that anyway, and Vishnumitra had felt soiled by the man’s polite disbelief. Somehow these days of waiting and plotting in the great nation’s capital had been the hardest period since he had left home two years ago. Perhaps it was no wonder that he was tired; that his resolve was shaken by that deep, inexpressible desire to go home. Looking at the King’s portrait on the coinage of the country, the abstract, fluid lines suggesting a face beautiful in repose, he had thought about his mother making kheer in the kitchen. A portrait of the king, made illegally and paid for in blood, showed the lean, aristocratic face, the eyes large, clear, cold. “This is not very accurate, but maybe it is good enough?” the traitor had said. Vishnumitra had a sudden clear vision of the schoolroom in his village, the foot-thick mud walls, the golden thatch overhead, the view of the distant river. It took him some time to frown and say that he really needed to be able to recognize the king clearly before he could be certain he had killed the right man. It was known that the king had proxies who sometimes spoke for him on lesser public occasions. At least once, such a proxy had been killed. No, Vishnumitra needed to see the king face-to-face.

  “How can I be certain,” he asked the traitor, “that the man in the procession is indeed the king?”

  “For the anniversary of his coronation? Only the real king rides the royal elephant, my friend.”

  The broad way was divided in the middle by a long water channel that had been sprinkled with rose petals. Along each side of the road was a five-foot-high divan, a raised platform bristling with tall, plumed soldiers. The noise was tremendous, with shouts and the baying of horns.

  And Vishnumitra saw the king.

  The room he was in was level with the howdah in which the king rode. The building was too far from the street for clear viewing with the naked eye; they had already been searched for weapons by guards. So Vishnumitra put the telescope in position and squinted through it, waiting for the attendant inside the howdah to do his job.

  The attendant, in the pay of the traitor, did his job. He had an embroidered palm-leaf punkha in his hand and while fanning the king he let it catch in one of the king’s long braids. The king wore his ceremonial turban above his coiffure; the crown shifted, the black braids parted. The king turned instinctively toward the punkha,
his hand already up to adjust the braid, his mouth an O of surprise and irritation, and in that moment Vishnumitra saw him.

  The procession continued. Vishnumitra lowered the telescope, stood staring out through the latticed window, his mind a maelstrom.

  No wonder he had been thinking so much about his youth.

  The king—surely there could be no mistaking it—the king was no other than Upamanyu, the young man he had befriended in his boyhood, the wanderer who had made a home with them for four unforgettable years, closer than a brother. But no, it could not be. In the interim Vishnumitra had aged; despite his practice of the forbidden sciences, he had a few gray hairs. He looked younger than his fifty-seven years, but the king looked twenty-five.

  Upamanyu . . . the face burned into his mind, thirty-eight years ago, never forgotten. Remembered always, with yearning.

  If the king was, indeed, Upamanyu, that could only mean one thing.

  “Well?” said the traitor. “Can you . . . will you do it?”

  Vishnumitra took a deep breath. He controlled the needless dissipation of his body’s prana with an effort, a skill learned over years, and felt his mind and body getting back to equilibrium. He now understood that his wanderings in search of the hidden sciences and their practitioners, his investigations into the murder of the girl Shankara, whose name he still could not say without pain—were all intended to bring him to this place at this point. He was the only man in the four kingdoms who knew who the king was.

  “This is where our association ends,” Vishnumitra said to the traitor. “You have been paid. If I do it, I will do it alone.”

  That night, Vishnumitra went walking through the long, lamp-lit streets of Dilli.

  The city rose over the banks of the Yamuna like a poet’s dream. Here was the delicate arch of a doorway, the doors carved with scenes from a fairy tale; there was a temple spire, beside the dark crown of a mango tree. The dome of a mosque, silver in the twilight, and above it the fort itself, red sandstone, turrets, and tessellations. Closer at hand: a man selling roasted shakarkand under a tree by the roadside: the smell of coal and sweetness and spices, the flare of the fire. Voices from within a walled garden where somebody was watering rosebushes. He could smell wet earth and the inescapable fragrance of roses. The horseless carriages still startled him as they went by, leaving behind a wet smell, coal and steam, and the image of a face or faces at a window. Here and there were patrols of the king, guards in red and brown, with green turbans, riding horses. And the ornate carriages filled with nobility, pulled by the great, white, humped oxen that stood six feet high at the shoulder. One time he saw a patrol accompanying those curious artifacts, the metal men (borrowed for the parade), back to the factories where they worked. The metal men walked stiffly; with each step the joints clanged faintly, metal on metal, and there was a sigh of steam. Vishnumitra could not get used to their swiveling heads, their eyeless gaze.