Time Travel: Recent Trips

by Paula Guran

  Nondini nudged me, asking "Gargi-di, is that the right place and time?" Without thinking, I said yes.

  That is how it begins: the story of my deception. That simple "yes" began the unraveling of everything.

  The institute is a great glass monstrosity that towers above the ground somewhere in New Parktown, which I am told is many miles south of Kolkata. Only the part we're on is not flooded. All around my building are other such buildings, so that when I look out of the window I see only reflections—of my building and the others and my own face, a small, dark oval. At first it drove me crazy, being trapped not only by the building but also by these tricks of light.

  And my captors were trapped too, but they seemed unmindful of the fact. They had grown accustomed. I resolved in my first week that I would not become accustomed. No, I didn't regret leaving behind my mean little life, with all its difficulties and constraints, but I was under no illusions. I had exchanged one prison for another.

  In any life, I think, there are apparently unimportant moments that turn out to matter the most. For me as a girl it was those glimpses of my mother's village, poor as it was. I don't remember the bad things. I remember the sky, the view of paddy fields from my grandfather's hut on a hillock, and the tame pigeon who cooed and postured on a wooden post in the muddy little courtyard. I think it was here I must have drawn my first real breath. There was an older cousin I don't recall very well, except as a voice, a guide through this exhilarating new world, where I realized that food grew on trees, that birds and animals had their own tongues, their languages, their stories. The world exploded into wonders during those brief visits. But always they were just small breaks in my life as one more poor child in the great city. Or so I thought. What I now think is that those moments gave me a taste for something I've never had—a kind of freedom, a soaring.

  I want to be able to share this with the dead man who haunts my dreams. I want him, whoever he is, wherever he is, to have what I had so briefly. The great open spaces, the chance to run through the fields and listen to the birds tell their stories. He might wake up from being dead then, might think of other things besides deltas.

  He sits in my consciousness so lightly, I wonder if he even exists, whether he is an imagining rather than a haunting. But I recognize the feeling of a haunting like that, even though it has been years since I experienced the last one.

  The most important haunting of my life was when I was, maybe, fourteen. We didn't know our birthdays, so I can't be sure. But I remember that an old man crept into my mind, a tired old man. Like Wajid Ali Shah more than a hundred years ago, this man was a poet. But there the similarity ended because he had been ground down by poverty; his respectability was all he had left. When I saw him in my mind he was sitting under an awning. There was a lot of noise nearby, the kind of hullabaloo that a vegetable market generates. I sensed immediately that he was miserable, and this was confirmed later when I met him. All my hauntings have been of people who are hurt, or grieving, or otherwise in distress.

  He wasn't a mullah, Rahman Khan, but the street kids all called him Maula, so I did too. I think he accepted it with deprecation. He was a kind man. He would sit under a tree at the edge of the road with an old typewriter, waiting for people to come to him for typing letters and important documents and so on. He only had a few customers. Most of the time he would stare into the distance with rheumy eyes, seeing not the noisy market but some other vista, and he would recite poetry. I found time from my little jobs in the fruit market to sit by him and sometimes I would bring him a stolen pear or mango. He was the one who taught me to appreciate language, the meanings of words. He told me about poets he loved, Wajid Ali Shah and Khayyam and Rumi, and our own Rabindranath and Nazrul, and the poets of the humbler folk, the baul and the maajhis. Once I asked him to teach me how to read and write. He had me practice letters in Hindi and Bengali on discarded sheets of typing paper, but the need to fill our stomachs prevented me from giving time to the task, and I soon forgot what I'd learned. In any case at that age I didn't realize its importance—it was no more than a passing fancy. But he did improve my Hindi, which I had picked up from my father, and taught me some Urdu, and a handful of songs, including "Babul Mora."

  Babul Mora, he would sing in his thin, cracked voice. Naihar chuuto hi jaaye.

  It is a woman's song, a woman leaving her childhood home with her newlywed husband, looking back from the cart for the last time. Father mine, my home slips away from me. Although my father died before I was grown, the song still brings tears to my eyes.

  The old man gave me my fancy way of speaking. People laugh at me sometimes when I use nice words, nicely, when a few plain ones would do. What good is fancy speech to a woman who grew up poor and illiterate? But I don't care. When I talk in that way I feel as though I am touching the essence of the world. I got that from Maula. All my life I have tried to give away what I received but my one child died soon after birth and nobody else wanted what I had. Poetry. A vision of freedom. Rice fields, birds, the distant blue line of the sea. Siridanga.

  Later, after my father died, I started to work in people's houses with my mother. Clean and cook, and go to another house, clean and cook. Some of the people were nice but others yelled at us and were suspicious of us. I remember one fat lady who smelled strongly of flowers and sweat, who got angry because I touched the curtains.

  The curtains were blue and white and had lace on them, and I had never seen anything as delicate and beautiful. I reached my hand out and touched them and she yelled at me. I was just a child, and whatever she said, my hands weren't dirty. I tried to defend myself but my mother herself shut me up. She didn't want to lose her job. I remember being so angry I thought I would catch fire from inside. I think all those houses must be under water now. There will be fish nibbling at the fine lace drawing room curtains. Slime on the walls, the carpets rotted. All our cleaning for nothing!

  I have to find the dead man. I have to get out of here somehow.

  The scientist called Nondini sees me as a real person, I think, not just as someone with a special ability who is otherwise nothing special. She has sympathy for me partly because there is a relative of hers who might still be in a refugee camp, and she has been going from one to the other to try to find her. The camps are mostly full of slum-dwellers because when the river overflowed and the sea came over the land, it drowned everything except for the skyscrapers. All the people who lived in slums or low buildings, who didn't have relatives with intact homes, had to go to the camps. I was in the big one, Sahapur, where they actually tried to help people find jobs, and tested them for all kinds of practical skills, because we were—most of us— laborers, domestic help, that sort of thing. And they gave us medical tests also. That's how I got my job, my large clean room with a big-screen TV, and all the food I want—after they found out I had the kind of brain the Machine can use.

  But I can't go back to the camp to see my friends. Many of them had left before me anyway, farmed out to corporations where they could be useful with medical tests and get free medicines also. Ashima had cancer and she got to go to one of those places, but there is no way I can find out what happened to her. I imagine her somewhere like this place, with everything free and all the mishti-doi she can eat. I hope she's all right. Kabir had a limp from birth but he's only eighteen, so maybe they can fix it. When she has time, Nondini lets me talk about them. Otherwise I feel as though nothing from that time was real, that I never had a mother and father, or a husband who left me after our son died. As if my friends never existed. It drives me crazy sometimes to return to my room after working in the same building, and to find nothing but the same programs on the TV. At first I was so excited about all the luxury but now I get bored and fretful to the point where I am scared of my impulses. Especially when the night market comes and sets up on the streets below, every week. I can't see the market from my high window, but I can see the lights dancing on the windows of the building on the other side of the square.
I can smell fish frying and hear people talking, yelling out prices, and I hear singing. It is the singing that makes my blood wild. The first time they had a group of maajhis come, I nearly broke the window glass, I so wanted to jump out. They know how to sing to the soul.

  Maajhi, O Maajhi

  My beloved waits

  On the other shore . . .

  I think the scientists are out at the market all night, because when they come in the next day, on Monday, their eyes are red, and they are bad-tempered, and there is something far away about them, as though they've been in another world. It could just be the rice beer, of course.

  My captors won't let me out for some months, until they are sure I've "settled down." I can't even go to another floor of this building.

  There have been cases of people from the refugee camps escaping from their jobs, trying to go back to their old lives, their old friends, as though those things existed any more. So there are rules that you have to be on probation before you are granted citizenship of the city, which then allows you to go freely everywhere. Of course "everywhere" is mostly under water, for what it's worth. Meanwhile Nondini lets me have this recorder that I'm speaking into, so I won't get too lonely. So I can hear my own voice played back. What a strange one she is!

  Nondini is small and slight, with eyes that slant up just a little at the corners. She has worked hard all her life to study history. I never knew there was so much history in the world until my job began! She keeps giving me videos about the past—not just Wajid Ali Shah but also further back, to the time when the British were here, and before that when Kolkata was just a little village on the Hugli river. It is nearly impossible to believe that there was a time when the alleyways and marketplaces and shantytowns and skyscrapers didn't exist—there were forests and fields, and the slow windings of the river, and wild animals. I wish I could see that. But they— the scientists—aren't interested in that period.

  What they do want to know is whether there were poems or songs of Wajid Ali Shah that were unrecorded. They want me to catch him at a moment when he would recite something new that had been forgotten over the centuries. What I don't understand is, Why all this fuss about old poetry? I like poetry more than most people, but it isn't what you'd do in the middle of a great flood. When I challenge the scientists some of them look embarrassed, like Brijesh; and Unnikrishnan shakes his head. Their leader, Dr. Mitra, she just looks impatient, and Nondini says "poetry can save the world." I may be uneducated but I am not stupid. They're hiding something from me.

  The housewife—the woman for whom I have abandoned Wajid Ali Shah— interests me. Her name is Rassundari—I know, because someone in her household called her name. Most of the time they call her Rasu or Sundari, or daughter-in-law, or sister-in-law, etcetera, but this time some visitor called out her full name, carefully and formally. I wish I could talk to her. It would be nice to talk to someone who is like me. How stupid that sounds! This woman clearly comes from a rich rural family—a big joint family it is, all under the same roof. She is nothing like me. But I feel she could talk to me as an ordinary woman, which is what I am.

  I wish I could see the outside of her house. They are rich landowners, so it must be beautiful outside. I wonder if it is like my mother's village. Odd that although I have hardly spent any time in Siridanga, I long for it now as though I had been born there.

  The first time after I found Rassundari, Nondini asked me if I'd discovered anything new about Wajid Ali Shah. I felt a bit sorry for her because I was deceiving her, so I said, out of my head, without thinking:

  "I think he's writing a new song."

  The scope doesn't give you a clear enough view to read writing in a book, even if I could read. But Wajid Ali Shah loves gatherings of poets and musicians, where he sings or recites his own works. So Nondini asked me:

  "Did he say anything out loud?"

  Again without thinking I said, maybe because I was tired, and lonely, and missing my friends:

  "Yes, but only one line: 'If there was someone for such as me . . . ' " I had spoken out of the isolation I had been feeling, and out of irritation, because I wanted to get back to my housewife. I would have taken my lie back at once if I could. Nondini's eyes lit up.

  "That is new! I must record that!" And in the next room there was a flurry of activity.

  So began my secret career as a poet.

  Rassundari works really hard. One day I watched her nearly all day, and she was in the kitchen almost the whole time. Cooking, cleaning, supervising a boy who comes to clean the dishes. The people of the house seem to eat all the time. She always waits for them to finish before she eats, but that day she didn't get a chance at all. A guest came at the last minute after everyone had eaten lunch, so she cooked for him, and after that one of the small children was fussing so she took him on her lap and tried to eat her rice, which was on a plate on the floor in front of her, but she had taken just one mouthful when he urinated all over her and her food. The look on her face! There was such anguish, but after a moment she began to laugh. She comforted the child and took him away to clean up, and came back and cleaned the kitchen, and by that time it was evening and time to cook the evening meal. I felt so bad for her! I have known hunger sometimes as a girl, and I could not have imagined that a person who was the daughter-in-law of such a big house could go hungry too. She never seems to get angry about it—I don't understand that, because I can be quick to anger myself. But maybe it is because everyone in the house is nice to her. I can only see the kitchen of course, but whenever people come in to eat or just to talk with her, they treat her well—even her mother-in-law speaks kindly to her.

  Her older son is a charming little boy, who comes and sits near her when he is practicing his lessons. He is learning the alphabet.

  She makes him repeat everything to her several times. Seeing him revives the dull pain in my heart that never goes away. I wonder what my child would have looked like, had he survived. He only lived two days. But those are old sorrows.

  I want to know why Rassundari looks, sometimes, like she has a guilty secret.

  The dead man has started talking to me in my dreams. He thinks I am someone called Kajori, who must have been a lover. He cries for me, thinking I'm her. He weeps with agony, calls to me to come to his arms, sleep in his bed. I have to say that while I am not the kind of woman who would jump into the arms of just any man, let alone one who is dead, his longing awakes the loneliness in me. I remember what it was like to love a man, even though my husband turned out to be a cowardly bastard. In between his sobs the dead man mutters things that perhaps only this Kajori understands.

  Floating over the silver webbing of the delta, he babbles about space and time.

  "Time!" he tells me. "Look, look at that rivulet. Look at this one."

  It seems to me that he thinks the delta is made by a river of time, not water. He says time has thickness—and it doesn't flow in one straight line— it meanders. It splits up into little branches, some of which join up again. He calls this fine structure. I have never thought about this before, but the idea makes sense. The dead man shows me history, the sweep of it, the rise and fall of kings and dynasties, how the branches intersect and move on, and how some of the rivulets dry up and die. He tells me how the weight of events and possibilities determines how the rivulets of time flow.

  "I must save the world," he says at the end, just before he starts to cry.

  I know Rassundari's secret now.

  She was sitting in the kitchen alone, after everyone had eaten. She squatted among the pots and pans, scouring them, looking around her warily like a thief in her own house. She dipped a wet finger into the ash pile and wrote on the thali the letter her son had been practicing in the afternoon, kah. She wrote it big, which is how I could see it. She said it aloud, that's how I know what letter it was.

  She erased it, wrote it again. The triangular shape of the first loop, the down-curve of the next stroke, like a bird bending to drink. Y
es, and the line of the roof from which the character was suspended, like wet socks on a clothesline. She shivered with pleasure. Then someone called her name, and she hastily scrubbed the letter away.

  How strange this is! There she is, in an age when a woman, a respectable upper-caste woman, isn't supposed to be able to read, so she has to learn on the sly, like a criminal. Here I am, in an age when women can be scientists like Nondini, yet I can't read. What I learned from the Maula, I forgot. I can recognize familiar shop signs and so on from their shapes, not the sounds the shapes are supposed to represent, and anyway machines tell you everything. Nondini tells me that now very few people need to read because of mobiles, and because information can be shown and spoken by machines.

  After watching Rassundari write for the first time, that desire woke in me, to learn how to read. My captors would not have denied me materials if I'd asked them, but I thought it would be much more interesting to learn from a woman dead for maybe hundreds of years. This is possible because the Machine now stays stuck in the set time and place for hours instead of minutes. Earlier it would keep disconnecting after five or ten minutes and you would have to wait until it came back. Its new steadiness makes the scientists very happy.

  So now when I am at the scope, my captors leave me to myself. As Rassundari writes, I copy the letters on a sheet of paper and whisper the sounds under my breath.

  The scientists annoy me after each session with their questions, and sometimes when I feel wicked I tell them that Wajid Ali Shah is going through a dry spell. Other times I make up lines that he supposedly spoke to his gathering of fellow poets. I tell them these are bits and fragments and pieces of longer works.

  If there was someone for such as me

  Would that cause great inconvenience for you, O universe?

  Would the stars go out and fall from the sky?