Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  And then upon its heels came a thought that he dismissed immediately: perhaps this was the way his talent would return. His once prodigious talent, honed in La Paz, blossoming in Spain and Italy, driven mysteriously from him one night in Madrid some seven years ago, after which he had been unable to write another word. He could write letters, instructions, but not poetry. He had tried deceit; he’d written a shopping list and edged it toward poetry, without success. He lived off his already famous work for a while, and then he had taken to the road, journeying as far as Siberia, South Africa, and now India, hoping his power over words would return. Nothing had happened so far. The only poetic thoughts in his head were those of other poets, most notably Bolivia’s Jaime Saenz, posthumous mentor, Poet-in-Residence of his mind. Even his meeting with Lalita, when he’d had a thought as close to poetry as he’d come in years, had not yielded anything.

  He had met her in the Thar desert a year and a half ago. He had thought that a landscape matching the privation of his soul and his bank account would work some kind of magic on him, but it hadn’t been that kind of magic. He had been captivated by the stark and unpretentious beauty of the scrublands and the sand dunes, the small villages with the sparse, thorny trees, and the people and animals who made their home in this inhospitable place. So different from the arid beauty of the altiplano where he’d grown up—yet the vastness of the sky felt like home.

  He was sitting outside a tea stall at a village one afternoon, awaiting his first sandstorm. Most of the people who frequented the tea stall had already left to prepare their belongings and families for the storm. The owner of the stall had packed up too, but Felipe Encina Amaru, child of the Andes, wanted to stay and see the storm approach so he sat outside on a wooden chair after everyone had fled, sipping tea in a thick glass with bubbles, watching the western sky darken. The sandstorm, approaching, was an enormous brown, roaring wave, dwarfing all that lay before it. There was a stillness in the air, and grit, and he felt the great, pregnant pause.

  She came out of the storm. So it seemed to him. In fact her rented jeep had broken down before she had reached the village and she had been walking for a while. But when he raised his eyes from the glass she was striding toward him, in a long orange shirt over gray pants, her blue scarf blowing behind her in the sudden, swift wind. Her hands fumbled at her neck, adjusting her scarf, but to the poet she was manipulating the reins of the storm, which towered behind her, a beast of impossible proportions. She walked to the tea stall, looked in, seemed disappointed that it was empty. She looked directly at him for the first time.

  “Got a car?” Her voice was urgent but unhurried. He felt himself drowning and had to gather himself to nod wordlessly toward the blue Zen.

  “I wish to know what wind carries you,” Felipe declaimed silently in the words of Saenz as he started the car. A wild hope filled him as they rattled toward Jaipur.

  She was an ornithologist studying an endangered bird, the Great Indian Bustard. She described it with her voice and hands. A large bird, friendly, inquisitive eyes, swift runner through the desert scrublands. “Think of it like a little ostrich. Or a large goose. ” She laughed easily, but her eyes were sad. She told him she fell in love with the bird at a fair in New Delhi when she was a child. He imagined her face pressed to the glass, the bird coming up to her unafraid, curious. “I actually felt a kind of recognition,” she told him, looking at him directly, as though to see whether he understood. She had questions for him about Bolivia’s new law granting rights to Mother Earth. “You guys got it right,” she said. She wanted to know more about it. He told her he hadn’t been back in a long time, and all he knew was that it was hard to implement the law. “Greed,” he said.

  He found himself talking to her without effort. He had spent his childhood tagging along with his mother, hawking herbs in the Mercado de las Brujas. The streets and alleyways, the women with their charms and amulets and dried animal parts, the light of the sky between the narrow, upwinding lanes—had been his world until his uncle took him in. His uncle worked as a janitor in an office building in the modern part of the city. In the two-room tenement that was his home, there were all kinds of strays—a cousin from a remote village, a runaway child, a street dog or two. Always, there would be someone in need, knocking at the door of his uncle’s heart. The uncle would frown and wonder how he would house the next abandoned soul. “Hell, what’s another one?” he’d say at last, resignation mingled with relief, nodding to the boy or animal, finding a place in the already crowded rooms for the newcomer. Some weekends Felipe would spend with his mother, south of the city, gathering herbs. From here he could see the city of La Paz reaching up the mountainsides, higher every year; if he turned around, there was the white peak of the Illimani, a wave flung up into the sky. His poet’s heart had been forged here, in the thin air of the altiplano, in the market’s narrow alleyways, among his uncle’s rescued flotsam, under the clear blue sky of winter, in the spring rain.

  “I can see why you are a poet,” she said, smiling, mesmerized by his descriptions.

  “No longer,” he sighed.

  He told her how his talent with words had vanished on a night in Madrid, seven years ago. Hunched over a drink, listening to an unusually strong sirocco howling outside, he had not known until the morning that the poetry had been taken from him.

  “Did you try going home?” she asked him. “Sometimes that works.”

  He said, quietly, remembering: “Two years later, for my mother’s funeral.”

  “And your poetry didn’t come back to you then?”

  “No.” He had nursed a secret hope that it might, but there was nothing. Only grief, and guilt that he hadn’t been back in time, as he gazed upon his mother’s emaciated body, her hands like claws, as though she had been in the middle of a transmutation that had been arrested by death. He went to the old market and consulted a healer, but there was nothing anyone could do. He remembered arguing with Pedro in Madrid later on, Pedro the friend, later the suicide. Pedro’s memory said to him: “Why do you think the world has magic, then, that things are not just of themselves, but of something ineffable? Why do you persist in believing this childish rubbish?” He shrugged defensively at Pedro’s ghost.

  So they drove to Jaipur with the storm following on their heels like a wild beast, and they talked, and she told him stories. The Great Indian Bustard was once seriously considered for the national bird of India, but was defeated by the peacock. “Because those fools were afraid it would get misspelled,” she said. “Can you imagine, the Great Indian Bastard? What kind of name is Bustard, anyway? I like the Indian names better. Kharchal is one of them. Or Hoom . . . because of the male bird’s cry—I’ve heard it a few times, too few times. There’s nothing like it.”

  She fell silent for a while. When she spoke her voice was thick with tears. “There are fewer than two hundred left in the wild,” she said. “They are this close to extinction. They used to live around people, near villages without harm, but modern agriculture is their enemy. And modern mega-projects signed on by multinationals. No habitat, no bird. And nobody cares.”

  She looked out of the window. Her passionate rage moved him. He sensed a delicate thread of sympathy between them—a kinship beyond the obvious. He wanted to tell her she mattered to him. He wanted to tell her that she could have walked out of one of Jaime Saenz’s poems. The dead poet whispered lines into his mind, as was his wont, but they were not Felipe’s lines.

  “I had my first poetic thought in years when I saw you,” he said at last. He told her about his fancy that she was the harbinger of the storm. Her laughter rang out, startling him.

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard!” She said, more seriously, with a long sigh as though of despair, “I’m just a human being, Felipe . . . I hate the human race for what we’ve done to the world, but human is all I am.”

  “Nobody is just a human being,” he said slowly, keeping his eyes on the road. “We have something else in
us, yes, a kind of magic, a connection to the world that can transform us. I am hoping it will transform me.”

  His words sounded unconvincing even to him. But she looked at him without mockery, with a half smile. Jaipur was approaching with distressing rapidity. He wanted to hear her speak. He asked her if there were any more stories, legends, myths about the Bustard . . . the kharchal.

  “Not many,” she said. “But people who live close to them have fancies about them. They are very compelling creatures. One old man took care of a small flock of them outside his village. He would guard the eggs they laid, and in return he said they would warn him if a storm was coming. He took to believing that they could call storms. There is one major legend about them, though. Have you heard of the queen of Chattanpur? There’s a hotel they’ve built over her fort. I sometimes stop at the restaurant there on my way to Delhi.”

  That was the first time he heard about the hotel. It was not called Chattanpur any more: it was the Hotel Vikram Royal.

  There was a woman who lived outside a village in Rajasthan many hundreds of years before now. Nobody knew where she had come from, but she was a healer and a tantric practitioner with great powers. People were afraid of her but those in need would come to her and she would cure them for a small price of cloth or food. She was young and beautiful but nobody dared to touch her.

  Then the king of the region happened to pass by, and he was taken by her beauty and her quality of self-possession, and he desired her for one of his queens. She, too, was struck by his noble mien and his kindness to her, and agreed to marry him, on one condition.

  “I am not an ordinary woman,” she said. “As a magician I have duties to the great forces from whom I derive my powers. There are times when I will have to go away from you for several days. If you let me do this without question, I will always come back to you.”

  The king did not like this but he was much in love, so he agreed, and took her away to his fort on the great hill. His other wives were jealous and took to gossiping about the new queen, and spreading rumors about her. For several nights she stayed with the king, but after that she told him she must leave for some days. She went into her room and closed the door, but he stepped out on a balcony and watched her covertly with the help of a mirror. She threw off her clothes and muttered some words, and a mist surrounded her, and then a bird—a kharchal—flew out of the mist and out of the window. He could hear, far away across the desert, a long, melodious call of such yearning that he, too, was moved by it. The bird flew toward the call and was lost from sight. Then the mist in the room dispersed and there was nothing there but her pile of clothing.

  Some days later the bird flew back, again under cover of darkness, and returned to the form of a woman. As the king got to know his new wife, he began to wonder whether she was more bird than woman, but he kept his thoughts to himself, not wanting to tell her that he had spied on her. His other wives were not pleased with the king’s continued devotion and spread rumors that the new queen went off secretly to meet a lover. The king began to half believe these lies even though he knew the truth. He became jealous of her time away. After all, what was to stop her from turning into a woman again, somewhere far across the desert, and lying with another man? One day he challenged her with the accusation of infidelity. If she wanted to prove her loyalty to him, she would have to stop these excursions.

  “I think the time has come for me to leave you,” said the queen, sorrowing. “If you will put bars around me, I cannot stay.”

  And she ran to her room, but the king was at her heels, so that when she turned into a kharchal and flew out, he managed to pull a long feather from a wing. When he did that, the bird shimmered in mid-air and turned back into a woman. The queen fell to her death from that balcony and the king was left holding the feather in his hand.

  After that terrible day, ill luck befell the fort city. There was a plague, followed by a storm, and then a fire. It is believed to this day that the queen cursed the place as she fell. It was abandoned not long after, and fell into ruin. For a long time after that the local villagers heard the kharchal call for days upon end, as though in mourning, and they say the cries had such longing in them as to make the hardest-hearted men weep like children. Now the kharchal don’t cry so often, or if they do, it is likely for themselves, for their own coming extinction. But who’s to hear their cry?

  Lalita slipped out of his car with a wave and good-bye somewhere on Mira Marg in Jaipur, as casually as though she hadn’t completely changed his life, burned away all he had been before. “When . . . uh, where will I see you next?” he yelled after her over the cacophony of traffic, terrified he would lose all contact with her. She turned back, her blue scarf loose about her neck, her hair long and loose about her shoulders. “I’ll come with the next sandstorm,” she told him, mocking him, and then she was gone.

  Later he Googled her name, send emails without much hope (“I don’t do much email, and Facebook, don’t even think about it!”), and went to ornithological meetings when he could, asking about her. She always seemed a step ahead of him—he had just missed her, she had just left. To make ends meet he wrote a book about modern Bolivian poetry and the enduring influence of Saenz. The book was reasonably well received; as soon as he could, Felipe took his earnings and himself to the hotel she had talked about. Here he felt an unreasonable hope, not just because she had told him she sometimes stopped at the restaurant on the way to Delhi, but because reminders of her were everywhere, through the latticework on the balcony windows that showed the kharchal amidst leaves and flowers, and the statuettes of the birds in the queen’s room. It was all very romantic and very expensive, and time and money were running out. In desperation he talked to Avinash. The errand boy Raju had recommended him. Avinash had seemed so sure he could bring Lalita here, the poet had come to believe him, despite his distrust of the man. And now there was this impossible storm. But she had said, hadn’t she, that she would come with the next storm?

  She’s a modern young woman, and an ornithologist, his mind told him. And as he was thinking this, leaning on a balcony pillar, staring out into the sand-smudged night, he was startled considerably by footsteps.

  “Sar! Sar!” It was the errand boy Raju, a handkerchief around his face. “Sar, Avinash boss calls you, sar!”

  Raju’s explanation in broken English didn’t make sense as Felipe followed him through dark corridors, but this much was clear: some others apart from him had been spared. Felipe found himself being led to an unfamiliar part of the hotel.

  “What’s this? Where are you taking me?”

  “Employee wing, sir! King’s royal storeroom in old days. New manager’s room is being re-done. Boss is there.”

  The manager’s room was small and square. Work had been going on in it apparently for widening—a layer of the thick stone wall had been taken down on one side, and a pile of broken stone pieces lay in the middle of the floor, with tools arranged neatly in one corner. Avinash was standing in the middle of the room. He held a small flashlight in his hand.

  There was someone else there, outside the pool of light cast by the flashlight. The person moved suddenly into the light. Felipe’s heart turned over.

  “Lalita!”

  He saw her smile in the inadequate light. She looked both strange and familiar.

  “Hi, Felipe. Long time.”

  Raju had found her in the restaurant, the only person there who could speak, and move. She had been going from figure to figure, trying to see if there was anything she could do.

  “Didn’t expect to meet like this!” she said. And then in Hindi: “Avinash, what is all this about? Why won’t you tell me?”

  He was standing in the middle of the room, listening to the queen.

  “Don’t disturb him, he’s thinking!” Raju said.

  Felipe watched them. The young man with the flashlight, head cocked to one side, as though straining to hear something. The woman who had intrigued him so, standing some distance away
, alert, practical, and yet, to him, extraordinary. The boy looking at Avinash—faith in his gaze. The pile of stones, the widened part of the room casting unearthly shadows.

  Then he saw that even in the poor light and the dust haze, there was an opening—a gap where a stone should have been in the wall. He moved toward it just as Avinash did. He was startled by the smell of alcohol.

  “The manager was a drunkard,” Avinash said. His voice, sudden and loud in the darkness, startled them. “He kept his stock of booze here, in a secret compartment. Must have been a loose stone in the original wall that opened into this little chamber. He smashed one of the bottles in his hurry when he was packing up. Didn’t think to look farther in.”

  “There’s something farther in?” Lalita said. They were all crowding around Avinash now. He trained his flashlight into the small chamber, put his arm in.

  “There’s something . . . At the back.”

  He drew it out. It was an ornate box, about a foot long and no more than two inches in depth. The silver had tarnished long ago, but the mother-of-pearl inlay work still glowed. It depicted a kharchal, each feather carved delicately as though with a hair strand, standing in a garden.

  “This must have belonged to the queen,” Lalita said reverently.

  Avinash opened the box.

  In it, on a bed of white silk, lay a single large feather.

  “This was the king’s storeroom,” Avinash said. He spoke in a monotone, as though repeating someone else’s words. “The king took the feather from the queen as she was in flight, and he kept it in this secret chamber.”

  He paused, frowned.

  “Give it to her? You’re sure?”

  “Whom are you talking to?” Lalita said. Raju looked at Avinash with wide, scared eyes.