Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  If Isha is right, then the Kiha told us the stories in the wrong order. Arrange them like this: birth of the universe, birth of their sun, coming into being of their world.

  But these old stories have as many meanings as there are stars in the sky. To assign one single interpretation to them is to miss the point. Take the second story. It could be as much a retelling of a certain philosophical idea from the ancient Indic texts called the Upanishads as a disguised theory of cosmological origin. In my other life I was learned in Sanskrit.

  But it is also important what we make of these stories. What meaning we find in them, as wanderers by the seashore find first one shell, then another, and form them into a chain of their own making.

  Here is the start of a story I have made by braiding together the Kiha tales.

  In the beginning, Isha made the world. Wishing to know herself, she broke herself up into parts. One of them is me, Somadeva, poet and wanderer. We circle each other forever, one maker, one made . . .

  Sometimes I wonder if I have made her up as much as she has concocted me. If we are fictions of each other, given substance only through our mutual narratives.

  Perhaps the Kiha are right: stories make the world.

  I wake and find myself on that high stone balcony. The queen is watching me. A small fire in an earthen pail burns between us, an angeethi. Over it, hanging from an iron support, is a black pot containing the brew.

  “Did it take you too far, my poet?” she asks, worried. “You told me of far worlds and impossible things. You spoke some words I couldn’t understand. An entertaining tale. But I only want a glimpse of what is to come in the next few days, not eons. I want to know . . .”

  I am confused. When I first opened my eyes I thought I saw Isha. I thought I was on the ship, telling Isha a story about Suryavati. She likes me to recite the old tales, as she lies back in her bunk, running her fingers slowly over her brow. I wish I could caress that brow myself.

  So how is it that I find myself here, breathing in pine-scented Himalayan air? How is it my mouth has a complex aftertaste that I cannot quite identify, which has something to do with the herbal brew steaming in the pot? My tongue is slightly numb, an effect of the poison in the mix.

  Or is it that in telling my story to Isha I have immersed myself so deeply in the tale that it has become reality to me?

  The queen’s eyes are dark, and filled with tears.

  “Dare I ask you to try again, my poet? Will you risk your life and sanity one more time, and tell me what you see? Just a step beyond this moment, a few days hence. Who will win this war . . .”

  What I cannot tell her is that I’ve seen what she wants to know. I know what history has recorded of the battle. The prince, her son, took his father’s throne and drove him to his death. And the queen . . .

  It is past bearing.

  What I am trying to do is to tell her a story in which I am a character. If I can have a say in the way things turn out, perhaps I can save her. The king and his son are beyond my reach. But Suryavati? She is susceptible to story. If she recognizes, in the fictional Somadeva’s love for Isha, the real Somadeva’s unspoken, agonized love, perhaps she’ll step back from the brink of history.

  My fear is that if events unfurl as history records, I will lose my Suryavati. Will I then be with Isha, wandering the stars in search of stories? Or will I die here on this earth, under the shadow of the palace walls, with the night sky nothing but a dream? Who will survive, the real Somadeva or the fictional one? And which is which?

  All I can do is stall Suryavati with my impossible tales—and hope.

  “I don’t know how far the brew will take me,” I tell her. “But for you, my queen, I will drink again.”

  I take a sip.

  I am back on the ship. Isha is asleep, her hair in tangles over her face. Her face in sleep is slack, except for that habitual little frown between her brows. The frown makes her look more like a child, not less. I wonder if her memories come to her in her dreams.

  So I begin another story, although I remain a little confused. Who is listening: Isha or Suryavati?

  I will tell a story about Inish. It is a place on a far world and one of the most interesting we have visited.

  I hesitate to call Inish a city, because it is not really one. It is a collection of buildings and people, animals and plants, and is referred to by the natives as though it has an independent consciousness. But also it has no clear boundary because the mini-settlements at what might have been its edge keep wandering off and returning, apparently randomly.

  Identities are also peculiar among the inhabitants of Inish. A person has a name, let us say Mana, but when Mana is with her friend Ayo, they together form an entity named Tukrit. If you meet them together and ask them for their names, they will say “Tukrit,” not “Ayo and Mana.” Isha once asked them whether Ayo and Mana were parts of Tukrit, and they both laughed. “Tukrit is not bits of this or that,” Mana said. “Then who just spoke, Mana or Tukrit?” Isha asked. “Tukrit, of course,” they said, giggling in an indulgent manner.

  “I am Isha,” Isha told them. “But who am I when I’m with you?”

  “We are teso,” they said, looking at each other. Isha knew what that meant. “Teso” is, in their language, a word that stands for anything that is unformed, not quite there, a possibility, a potential.

  It is hard for outsiders to understand whether the Inish folk have family units or not. Several people may live in one dwelling, but since their dwellings are connected by little corridors and tunnels, it is hard to say where one ends and another begins. The people in one dwelling may be four older females, one young woman, three young men, and five children. Ask them their names and depending on which of them are present at that time, they will say a different collective name. If there are only Baijo, Akar, and Inha around, they’ll say, “We are Garho.” If Sami, Kinjo, and Vif are also there, then they are collectively an entity known as “Parak.” And so on and so forth.

  How they keep from getting confused is quite beyond Isha and me.

  “Tell me, Isha,” I said once. “You and I . . . what are we when we are together?”

  She looked at me sadly.

  “Isha and Somadeva,” she said. But there was a faint query in her tone.

  “What do you think, Somadeva?” she said.

  “Teso,” I said.

  Here is a story from Inish.

  There was Ikla. Then, no Ikla but Bako walking away from what was now Samish. While walking, Bako found herself being part of a becoming, but she could not see who or what she was becoming with. Ah, she thought, it is a goro being; one that does not show itself except through a sigh in the mind. She felt the teso build up slowly, felt herself turn into a liquid, sky, rain. Then there was no teso, no goro, no Bako, but a fullness, a ripening, and thus was Chihuli come into happening.

  And this Chihuli went shouting down the summer lanes, flinging bits of mud and rock around, saying, There is a storm coming! A storm! And Chihuli went up the hill and sank down before the sacred stones and died there. So there was nothing left but Bako, who looked up with enormous eyes at the sky, and felt inside her the emptiness left by the departure of the goro being.

  Bako, now, why had the goro being chosen her for a happening? Maybe because she had always felt teso with storms, and since storms were rare here and people had to be warned, there was a space inside her for the kind of goro being that lived for storms and their warning. So that is how the right kind of emptiness had brought Chihuli into being.

  Pods kept forming around Bako but she resisted being pulled in. It was because of the coming storm, because she could sense the teso with it. Nobody else could. With others it was other beings, wild things and bright eyes in the darkness, sometimes even the slowtrees, but only with Bako was there the emptiness inside shaped like a storm. And so she felt the teso, the way she had with the goro being.

  The air crackled with electricity; dark clouds filled the sky, like a ceiling
about to come down. Everywhere you looked, it was gray: gray water, gray beings, looking up with wondering, frightened eyes. Only for Bako, as the teso built, was the excitement, the anticipation. Many had felt that before when they found their special pod, their mate-beings. The feeling of ripening, of coming into a fullness. The wild sweetness of it. Now Bako felt something like that many times over.

  Samish came sweeping up the hill where she was standing, trying to swoop her back with them, so they could be Ikla again, and the teso with the storm would become nothing more. But she resisted, and Samish had to go away. This was a thing stronger than the love-bonds they had known.

  Came the storm. A magnificent storm it was, rain and thunder, and the legs of lightning dancing around Bako. Rivers swollen, running wild over land, into homes, sweeping everything away. Hills began to move, and the beings ran from their homes. Only Bako stood in the rain, on the highest hill, and the storm danced for her.

  The teso became something. We call it T’fan. T’fan played with the world, spread over half the planet, wrapped her wet arms around trees and hills. The storm went on until the beings thought there would be no more sun, no more dry land. Then one day it ceased.

  Samish gathered itself up, and went tiredly up the hill to find Bako, or to mourn the death of Ikla.

  Bako was not there. What was there was standing just as they had left Bako, arms outstretched to the sky. She looked at them with faraway eyes, and they saw then that although the sky was clearing, the storm was still in her. Tiny sparks of lightning flashed from her fingertips. Her hair was singed.

  They saw then that the storm had filled her empty spaces so completely that there would never be Ikla again. They did not even feel teso. They walked away from her and prepared for mourning.

  T’fan stands there still, her eyes filled with storms, her fingers playing with lightning. Her hair has singed away almost completely. She needs no food or water, and seems, in the way of storms, to be quite content. When storms come to her people they cluster around her and she comes to life, dancing in their midst as though relatives have come again from far away. Then T’fan goes away and is replaced by something larger and more complex than we can name.

  “What does that story mean, I wonder,” Isha said.

  “Sometimes stories are just stories,” I told her.

  “You’ve never told me what happened to Suryavati, after you took the next sip, told her the next tale,” she told me, turning away from the consequences of my remark. The fact that you can’t wrest meaning from everything like fruit from trees—that meaning is a matter not only of story but of what the listener brings to the tale—all that is not something she can face at the moment. She is so impatient, my Isha.

  I steeled myself.

  “The queen was distraught with grief when her son took the kingdom and destroyed his father,” I said. “She threw herself on his funeral pyre. I could not save her.”

  But in this moment I am also conscious of the queen herself, her eyes dark with grief and yearning. Her hand, with its long fingers—a healed cut on the right index finger, the henna patterns fading—her hand reaches up to wipe a tear. And yet in her gaze leaps a certain vitality, an interest. Her mind ranges far across the universe, carried by my tales. In that small fire in her eyes is all my hope.

  Perhaps all I’ve found is a moment of time that keeps repeating, in which, despite the predations of history, I am caught, with Isha and Suryavati, in a loop of time distanced from the main current. Here my stories never end; I never reach the moment Suryavati awaits, and Isha never finds out who she is. Gunadhya remains a whisper in my mind, his relation to me as yet a secret. Here we range across the skies, Isha and I, Vidyadharas of another age, and Suryavati’s gaze follows us. Who is the teller of the tale, and who the listener? We are caught in a web, a wheel of our own making. And if you, the listener from another time and space, upon whose cheek this story falls like spray thrown up by the ocean—you, the eavesdropper hearing a conversation borne by the wind, if you would walk into this story, take it away with you into your world, with its sorrows and small revelations, what would become of you? Would you also enter this circle? Would you tell me your story? Would we sit together, Suryavati, Isha, and I, with you, and feel teso within us—and weave meaning from the strands of the tale?

  I am Somadeva. I am a poet, a teller of tales.

  Are you Sannata3159?

  Jhingur was deep in his favorite dreamvid when Langra came scuttling up to him, appearing like a twisted ghost against the great grassland, behind the bison and the thunder in the sky. The ghost gained corporeality; the sweep of land and sky, the smell of dust and sweat, the sweetness of roast meat faded to nothing, and there was Jhingur, wiping saliva and memory on his dirty sleeve, taking off the visor, squinting at Langra.

  “Dreaming again, boy? Not that I blame you,” Langra said with his sideways smile. He looked out of the hole that was the shop entrance. The shop’s metal suspension creaked and shuddered as a sleeker passed on the highway above them. “There’s nobody come today to buy dreams or mind-patches, now that the slaughterhouse is opening. All the riff-raff are out gawking! Go on, you go too! I’m going to be expecting something from Upside.”

  Jhingur knew that Langra was a guptman, that he dealt with secrets and mysteries, including strangers from Upside. You don’t ask a guptman questions. Besides, Jhingur had forgotten about the opening day. Grieving was like that. He got up slowly, staring at the view from the hole that was the entrance to the shop. The tall towers of Upside rose like specters over the mean streets, the rope-ladder web-ways of Patal. Rubble-ware huts and wall-holes and swing-shacks suspended from the cables between the great concrete feet of the towers—that was Patal, the greatest of the Undercities, refuge of the world. The canyons were so deep between the sides of the great towers, with the first-tier highways rising four to ten stories overhead, that sunlight couldn’t reach all the way down. The sun was a dream. He could see yellow patches of light on the face of a tower far above, and the sky was a sliver of blue between the towers. He looked and sighed, and felt the absence of the woman who had captured his heart like a weight in the chest. Had it really been only a few months ago that she has been there, up there?

  “You in love, boy?” Langra said, sneering in his good-natured way. Ordinarily Jhingur spilled everything to Langra, or to his mother and sister. He had never been able to keep a secret. But this was the first time he felt compelled to keep things to himself. He thought he must be growing up, after all, because wasn’t that what grown-ups did? Keep secrets, like Langra? But he said to Langra: “I forgot about the opening. My mother and sister will be going to work. They’re employed there, you know! At the slaughterhouse!”

  That gave him a good feeling, to think about his mother having a real job, earning money, bringing real meat home. He got up and grabbed the rope, ready to be let down to the smoky, sepia-coloured depths below.

  “Have fun, boy!” Langra shouted over the squeal of the pulley, leering crookedly at him. “You’ll be the best-fed fellow in Patal!”

  The slaughterhouse was something to gawk at. It rose from the dust and filth of Patal like a shining metal dream, a long, curved building like the thigh of a beautiful woman. There was a café with tall windows for the employees, and you couldn’t see inside, because the windows were opaque one-way and maybe even had illusioneering. There was a lot of jostling and sweating in the crowd in front of the building, and then a cheer went up when the new employees, in their uniforms, lined up to be let in by the guards at the gate. Jhingur’s mother saw him and left the line to hug him, because he had remembered to come. His sister gave him a wave of pure happiness, and to him it seemed that the two of them, so strangely confident in their shiny blue uniforms, had become almost like Upside people, not quite real. He was suddenly shy of them, but there was no time to get used to the new feelings. They were out of sight now, in the compound, and the great white metal gate was sliding shut. Jhingur turned and
elbowed his way through the crowd, past the long-braided rat-men standing at the edge. He ducked his head, avoiding the gaze of the Cameras that dived down from the heights above. Ordinarily he liked smiling for the Cameras, in the hope that he would see himself on some Net show like Reality Deep Down. But today he didn’t feel like it.

  The streets of Patal seemed strangely empty. In the daytime the light was diffuse and murky. Jhingur preferred the colour of night, with the little fires in the hutments, the aromatic smoke rising above the spires of smoke depots, the anemic streetlamps run by noisy generators. Where Jhingur lived was a peace zone between the territories of two self-styled demon kings, so there were fewer raids and killings here than in other places in Patal. Which is why, maybe, the slaughterhouse had opened here, in an old warehouse filled with hazardous chemware that the slaughterhouse people had to clean out. They had to chase out the rats and the rat-folk who ran, calling in their high voices through the alleyways of Patal with their long braids swinging out behind them and their children on their backs. The other residents of Patal didn’t mind this. The rat-people were not well-liked, although they supplied Patal with rat meat and strange, fungal concoctions to cure diseases. The rumor was that rat-folk ate everything, even rubbish and dead people. Right after someone died they’d show up and bargain for the corpse.

  Jhingur climbed up to his swing-shack to check on his grandmother, who was asleep, with her toothless mouth hanging open and drool on her chin, which he wiped carefully without waking her. She seemed to be getting more and more insubstantial every day: a bag of bones in sackcloth. He called to his mouse, who came out of a hole in the sacking and chattered at him and accepted some insta-meal crumbs. The mouse looked at him with beady eyes. “Did you find your love today?” Jhingur asked the mouse. “Did you write her a song?” This had been a joke between them ever since Jhingur read in an old viewbook that male mice compose vocalizations for their mates that might be compared to love songs. The mouse washed its face, twitched its nose at Jhingur, and disappeared into its hole. Jhingur sighed. Why, I’m sighing like Mama, he thought. I’m sighing like a grown-up. He wondered whether the woman who had so briefly shone in his life like a star had wrought this change in him.