Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  At the first opportunity I switched from the shuttle to a passenger ship that made numerous stops on various inhabited worlds, thinking I might go back to my last residence on the planet Manaus. But when it came time to disembark I couldn’t manage to do it. I am still on the ship, waiting until the impulse comes (if it ever will) to step out under the skies of a new world and begin another life. What has passed for my life, my personal Ramayana, comes back to me in tattered little pieces, pages torn from a book, burning, blowing in the wind. Like patterns drawn in the dust, half-familiar, a language once understood, then forgotten.

  Here are some things I have discovered about myself:

  I have no pleasure in life. I like nothing, definitely not absinthe or roses.

  I want to die. But a curious inertia keeps me from it. The things of the world seem heavy, and time slow.

  I still have nightmares about the burning woman. Sometimes I dream that Dhanu has a mantram that will bring me peace, and I am looking for her in the tunnels of a dying city, its walls collapsing around me, but she is nowhere to be found. I never dream of Hirasor except as a presence behind my consciousness like a second pair of eyes, a faint ghost, a memory. There are moments when I wonder what led a first-generation nakalchi to become a monster. The Ramayana says that even Ravan was once a good man, before he fell prey to hubris and lost his way. If legend is to be believed, there is a cave on some abandoned planet where copies of the first-generation nakalchis are hidden. Were I to come across it, would I find Hirasor’s duplicate in an ice-cold crypt, dreaming, innocent as a child?

  Lately I have begun to let myself remember that last climactic moment of my encounter with Hirasor. I shot my Ravan, I tell myself, trying to infuse into my mind a sense of victory despite the loss of the chance for true revenge—but I no longer know what any of those words mean: victory, revenge. Still, there is a solidity about that moment when I shot him, small though it is against the backdrop of all the years I’ve lived. That moment—it feels as tangible as a key held in the hand. What doors it might open I do not know, although I am certain that Sita does not wait behind any of them. Perhaps it is enough that it tells me there are doors.

  Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra

  I am Somadeva.

  I was once a man, a poet, a teller of tales, but I am long dead now. I lived in the eleventh century of the Common Era in northern India. Then we could only dream of that fabulous device, the udan-khatola, the ship that flies between worlds. Then, the sky-dwelling Vidyadharas were myth, occupying a reality different from our own. And the only wings I had with which to make my journeys were those of my imagination . . .

  Who or what am I now, in this age when flying between worlds is commonplace? Who brought me into being, here in this small, cramped space, with its smooth metallic surfaces, and the round window revealing an endless field of stars?

  It takes me a moment to recognize Isha. She is lying in her bunk, her hair spread over the pillow, looking at me.

  And then I remember the first time I woke up in this room, bewildered. Isha told me she had re-created me. She fell in love with me fifteen centuries after my death, after she read a book I wrote, an eighteen-volume compendium of folktales and legends, called the Kathasaritsagara: The Ocean of Streams of Story.

  “You do remember that?” she asked me anxiously upon my first awakening.

  “Of course I remember,” I said, as my memories returned to me in a great rush.

  The Kathasaritsagara was my life’s work. I wandered all over North India, following rumors of the Lost Manuscript, risking death to interview murderers and demons, cajoling stories out of old women and princes, merchants and nursing mothers. I took these stories and organized them into patterns of labyrinthine complexity. In my book there are stories within stories—the chief narrator tells a story and the characters in that story tell other stories and so on. Some of the narrators refer to the stories of previous narrators; thus each is not only a teller of tales but also a participant. The story frames themselves form a complex, multi-referential tapestry. And the story of how the Kathasaritsagara came to be is the first story of them all.

  I began this quest because of a mystery in my own life, but it became a labor of love, an attempt to save a life. That is why I wove the stories into a web, so I could hold safe the woman I loved. I could not have guessed that fifteen centuries after my death, another very different woman would read my words and fall in love with me.

  The first time I met Isha, she told me she had created me to be her companion on her journeys between the stars. She wants to be the Somadeva of this age, collecting stories from planet to planet in the galaxy we call Sky River. What a moment of revelation it was for me, when I first knew that there were other worlds, peopled and habited, rich with stories! Isha told me that she had my spirit trapped in a crystal jewel-box. The jewel-box has long feelers like the antennae of insects, so that I can see and hear and smell, and thereby taste the worlds we visit.

  “How did you pull my spirit from death? From history? Was I reborn in this magic box?”

  She shook her head.

  “It isn’t magic, Somadeva. Oh, I can’t explain! But tell me, I need to know. Why didn’t you write yourself into the Kathasaritsagara? Who, really, is this narrator of yours, Gunadhya? I know there is a mystery there . . .”

  She asks questions all the time. When she is alone with me, she is often animated like this. My heart reaches out to her, this lost child of a distant age.

  Gunadhya is a goblin-like creature who is the narrator of the Kathasaritsagara. According to the story I told, Gunadhya was a minion of Shiva himself who was reborn on Earth due to a curse. His mission was to tell the greater story of which the Kathasaritsagara is only a page: the Brhat-katha. But he was forbidden to speak or write in Sanskrit or any other language of humankind. Wandering through a forest one day, he came upon a company of the flesh-eating Pishach. He hid himself and listened to them, and learned their strange tongue. In time he wrote the great Brhat-katha in the Pishachi language in a book made of the bark of trees, in his own blood.

  They say that he was forced to burn the manuscript, and that only at the last moment did a student of his pull out one section from the fire. I tracked that surviving fragment for years, but found only a few scattered pages, and the incomplete memories of those who had seen the original, or been told the tales. From these few I reconstructed what I have called the Kathasaritsagara. In all this, I have drawn on ancient Indic tradition, in which the author is a compiler, an embellisher, an arranger of stories, some written, some told. He fragments his consciousness into the various fictional narrators in order to be a conduit for their tales.

  In most ancient works, the author goes a step further: he walks himself whole into the story, like an actor onto the stage.

  This is one way I have broken from tradition. I am not, myself, a participant in the stories of the Kathasaritsagara. And Isha wants to know why.

  Sometimes I sense my narrator, Gunadhya, as one would a ghost, a presence standing by my side. He is related to me in some way that is not clear to me. All these years he has been coming into my dreams, filling in gaps in my stories, or contradicting what I’ve already written down. He is a whisper in my ear; sometimes my tongue moves at his command. All the time he is keeping secrets from me, tormenting me with the silence between his words. Perhaps he is waiting until the time is right.

  “I don’t know,” I tell Isha. “I don’t know why I didn’t put myself in the story. I thought it would be enough, you know, to cast a story web, to trap my queen. To save her from death . . .”

  “Tell me about her,” Isha says. Isha knows all about Suryavati, but she wants to hear it from me. Over and over.

  I remember . . .

  A high balcony, open, not latticed. The mountain air, like wine. In the inner courtyard below us, apricots are drying in the sun in great orange piles. Beyond the courtyard walls I can hear men’s voices, the clash of steel as soldiers practi
ce their murderous art. The king is preparing to battle his own son, who lusts for the throne and cannot wait for death to take his father. But it is for the queen that I am here. She is standing by the great stone vase on the balcony, watering the holy tulsi plant. She wears a long skirt of a deep, rich red, and a green shawl over the delicately embroidered tunic. Her slender fingers shake; her gaze, when it lifts to me, is full of anguish. Her serving maids hover around her, unable to relieve her of her pain. At last she sits, drawing the edge of her fine silken veil about her face. A slight gesture of the hand. My cue to begin the story that will, for a moment, smooth that troubled brow.

  It is for her that I have woven the story web. Every day it gives her a reason to forget despair, to live a day longer. Every day she is trapped in it, enthralled by it a little more. There are days when the weight of her anxiety is too much, when she breaks the spell of story and requires me for another purpose. Then I must, for love of her, take part in an ancient and dangerous rite. But today, the day that I am remembering for Isha, Suryavati simply wants to hear a story.

  I think I made a mistake with Suryavati, fifteen centuries ago. If I’d written myself into the Kathasaritsagara, perhaps she would have realized how much I needed her to be alive. After all, Vyasa, who penned the immortal Mahabharata, was as much a participant in the tale as its chronicler. And the same is true of Valmiki, who wrote the Ramayana and was himself a character in it, an agent.

  So, for the first time, I will write myself into this story. Perhaps that is the secret to affecting events as they unfold. And after all, I, too, have need of meaning. Beside me, Gunadhya’s ghost nods silently in agreement.

  Isha sits in the ship’s chamber, her fingers running through her hair, her gaze troubled. She has always been restless. For all her confidences I can only guess what it is she is seeking through the compilation of the legends and myths of the inhabited worlds. As I wander through the story-labyrinths of my own making, I hope to find, at the end, my Isha, my Suryavati.

  Isha is, I know, particularly interested in stories of origin, of ancestry. I think it is because she has no knowledge of her natal family. When she was a young woman, she was the victim of a history raid. The raiders took from her all her memories. Her memories are scattered now in the performances of entertainers, the conversations of strangers, and the false memories of imitation men. The extinction of her identity was so clean that she would not recognize those memories as her own, were she to come across them. What a terrible and wondrous age this is, in which such things are possible!

  In her wanderings, Isha hasn’t yet been able to find out who her people were. All she has as a clue is an ancient, battered set of books: the eighteen volumes of the Kathasaritsagara. They are, to all appearances, her legacy, all that was left of her belongings after the raid. The pages are yellow and brittle, the text powdery, fading. She has spent much of her youth learning the lost art of reading, learning the lost scripts of now-dead languages. Inside the cover of the first volume is a faint inscription, a name: Vandana. There are notes in the same hand in the margins of the text. An ancestor, she thinks.

  This is why Isha is particularly interested in stories of origin. She thinks she’ll find out something about herself by listening to other people’s tales of where they came from.

  ——

  I discovered this on my very first journey with her. After she brought me into existence, we went to a world called Jesanli, where the few city-states were hostile toward us. None would receive us, until we met the Kiha, a nomadic desert tribe who had a tradition of hospitality. None of the inhabitants of this planet have much by way of arts or machinery, civilization or learning. But the Kiha have stories that are poetic and strange. Here is the first of them.

  Once upon a time our ancestors lived in a hot and crowded space, in near darkness. They were not like us. They were not men, nor women, but had a different form. The ancestors, having poor sight, lived in fear all the time, and when one intruded too close to another, they immediately sprang apart in terror. It was as though each moment of approach brought the possibility of a stranger, an enemy, entering their personal domain. Imagine a lot of people who cannot speak, forced to live in a small, cramped, dark cave, where every blundering collision is a nightmare—for that is what it was like for them. Their fear became part of them, becoming a physical presence like a burden carried on the back.

  But every once in a while two or more of them would be pushed close enough together to actually behold each other dimly through their nearly useless eyes. During these moments of recognition they were able to see themselves in the other person, and to reach out, and to draw together. In time they formed tight little family units. Then they had no more need to carry around their burdens of fear, which, when released, turned into light.

  Yes, yes. You heard that right. Although they continued to live in their furnace-like world and be cramped together, what emanated from them—despite everything—was light.

  Isha’s eyes lit up when she heard this story. She told the Kiha that the story had hidden meanings, that it contained the secret of how the stars burn. They listened politely to her explanation and thanked her for her story. She wanted to know where they had first heard the tale, but the question made no sense to them. Later she told me that for all their non-technological way of life, the Kiha must have once been sky-dwellers.

  They had told Isha the story to repay a debt, because she brought them gifts. So when she explained their story back to them, they had to tell her another story to even things out. They did this with reluctance, because a story is a gift not easily given to strangers.

  Here is the second story.

  In the beginning there was just one being, whose name was That Which Is Nameless. The Nameless One was vast, undifferentiated, and lay quiescent, waiting. In that place there was no darkness, for there was no light.

  Slowly the Nameless One wearied of its existence. It said into the nothingness: Who am I? But there was no answer because there was no other. It said unto itself: Being alone is a burden. I will carve myself up and make myself companions.

  So the Nameless One gathered itself and spread itself violently into all directions, thinning out as it did so. It was the greatest explosion ever known, and from its shards were born people and animals and stars.

  And so when light falls on water, or a man shoots an arrow at another man, or a mother picks up a child, That Which Was Once Nameless answers a very small part of the question: Who Am I?

  And yet the Once Nameless still reaches out, beyond the horizon of what we know and don’t know, breaking itself up into smaller and smaller bits like the froth from a wave that hits a rocky shore. What is it seeking? Where is it going? Nobody can tell.

  I could tell that Isha was excited by this story also; she wanted to tell the Kiha that the second story was really about the birth of the universe—but I restrained her. To the Kiha, what is real and what is not real is not a point of importance. To them there are just stories and stories, and the universe has a place for all of them.

  Later Isha asked me:

  “How is it possible that the Kiha have forgotten they once traversed the stars? Those two stories contain the essence of the sciences, the vigyan-shastras, in disguise. How can memory be so fragile?”

  She bit her lip, and I know she was thinking of her own lost past. In my life, too, there are gaps I cannot fill.

  The stories in the Kathasaritsagara are not like these tales of the Kiha. Queen Suryavati was of a serious mien, spending much time in contemplation of Lord Shiva. To lighten her burdens I collected tales of ordinary, erring mortals and divines: cheating wives, sky-dwelling, shape-shifting Vidyadharas, and the denizens, dangerous and benign, of the great forests. These were first told, so the story goes, by Shiva himself. They are nothing like the stories of the Kiha.

  Isha has so much to learn! Like Suryavati, she is a woman of reserve. She conceals her pain as much as she can from the world. Her interaction with
the Kiha is impersonal, almost aloof. Now, if it were left to me, I would go into their dwelling places, live with them, listen to gossip. Find out who is in love with whom, what joys and sorrows the seasons bring, whether there is enmity between clans. I have never been much interested in the cosmic dramas of gods and heroes.

  However, the third Kiha tale is quite unlike the first two. I don’t know what to make of it.

  Once, in the darkness, a man wandered onto a beach where he saw a fire. He came upon it and saw that the fire was another man, all made of light, who spun in a circle on the beach as though drunk. The first man, warmed by the glow of the fire-man, wanted to talk to him, but the fire-man didn’t take any notice of him. The fire-man kept spinning, round and round, and the first man kept yelling out questions, spinning round and round with the fire-man so he could see his face. And there were three small biting insects who dared not bite the fire-man but wanted to bite the cheeks of the other man, and they kept hovering around the other man, and he kept waving them off, but they would go behind him until he forgot about them, and then they’d circle around and bite him again.

  Then?

  Then nothing. They are all, all five of them, still on that dark beach, dancing still.

  Isha thinks this story is a more recent origin story. She speculates that the ancestral people of the Kiha come from a world which has three moons. A world that floated alone in space until it fell into the embrace of a star. There are worlds like that, I’ve heard, planets wandering without their shepherd stars. It is not unlikely that one of these was captured by a sun. This story was told to Isha by a child, who ran up to us in secret when we were leaving. She wanted to make us a gift of some sort, but that was all she had.