“Thank you," said Mrs Mukhopadhyaya, in their language; that was a word she had been careful to learn. And then, because the nearest person to her was waiting patiently, as though expecting her to say something else, she added, “You drink water. Can you drink tea?"
“No," they said, ponderous. “Tea has no meaning for us."
Mrs Mukhopadhyaya smiled; she suspected they meant taste. “Is there something else I could bring for you?" she asked, and they made a gesture that seemed to indicate a negative.
“No," they said, and quickly. “Water is fine and suitable."
“I know," Mrs Mukhopadhyaya said, “but you have been kind, and I wanted to be kind in return."
The person made a gesture that might indicate resignation, or approval, and drifted quietly away. On the open space of grass, children were making large banners out of old sheets: Ur says YES, Ur hamara hai. In the language of the other people, affirmation could not be conveyed concisely enough for an old bedsheet, so one of the children was busy with a stylised depiction, an economy of black brushstrokes somehow conveying the impression of one of those great glass bodies, making a gesture that again might indicate resignation, or approval. Mrs Mukhopadhyaya thought that if perhaps someday she attended a class with Leila, she would understand it a little better.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter either way to you," said one of the women who had helped with the tea. Her name was Shanti; Mrs Mukhopadhyaya had known her vaguely on Earth. “I know the minister sahib will be glad to get home. Although your garden here is beautiful," she added, as though those two statements had some connection Mrs Mukhopadhyaya did not quite understand.
“I suppose," Mrs Mukhopadhyaya said. The words had made her uncomfortable.
“The kids love the banners," Shanti continued, seemingly oblivious to Mrs Mukhopadhyaya’s discomfort. “Not that they’ll do much here, not with all the voters back on Earth! But maybe the news feeds will pick them up in the background, the kids will like that."
Mrs Mukhopadhyaya was not really listening; she was looking up at the tree at the bottom of the garden, and she had had an idea.
___
The minister left for the evening session just as the mali came down from the tree. For a minute it seemed as though he would hurry past without asking any questions, but then the mali’s spectacles caught the sun and with it the minister’s attention; he appeared to take the whole scene in for the first time, stopped, and asked, “What are you all doing?"
“We’re fruit-picking," Mrs Mukhopadhyaya said, amused.
“I can see that!" The minister waved an impatient hand at Leila, who had been good-humoured about catching the fruit in her skirt, laughing as the juice spread and stained. “What on earth for?"
No one corrected his idiom. “For our neighbour," Mrs Mukhopadhyaya said gently, and when he still looked confused, added, “Parosi."
“I know what a neighbour is!" the minister said, irritated. “Why?"
“So we can offer them something to eat," Mrs Mukhopadhyaya explained, and the minister gave an impatient shrug, as though casting off the whole affair, and went through the gate.
After he had gone, Leila began closing the shutters again, and lit the lamps. There were people in the city who had come from northern latitudes, on Earth or on the other people’s home world of Xi Lyr, and found the snapshot-short twilight eerie, as though the way the days neither grew nor shortened were a constraint on their consciousness. Mrs Mukhopadhyaya found it familiar, and a comfort: it made her think about long-ago twilights in bigger cities than this, listening to the tuk-tuks and the low hum of the generators.
In the kitchen they chopped and sliced the spiky red fruit into neat slices, each as large as a human could eat in a bite, so when their neighbour came past the gate at the same time that they had the day before, Mrs Mukhopadhyaya called them back. “Please," she said, stumbling a little with their language, pointing to the plate of fruit slices balanced on the flat surface of the gatepost, “if you would like."
“You can eat also?" asked the neighbour in English, and the fruit was an acquired taste for humans, sour and strange but not poison, so they ate together, careful of the plate. After a while Leila came hurrying out of the house, trailing a long chiffon scarf and wearing fresh lipstick; Mrs Mukhopadhyaya had wondered before if there was someone at the evening class whom Leila thought was beautiful. “I’ll be back late, I left the door to the verandah open," she said, a little out of breath, and paused, looking at the plate.
“Eat before you go," Mrs Mukhopadhyaya said, and then, remembering when her mother had done the same for her, she picked up a slice of fruit and placed it directly into Leila’s mouth, as not to smudge the perfect lines of her lips.
“Thank you," Leila said, muffled and grateful, and said something polite to Mrs Mukhopadhyaya’s friend in their own language, so her eyes glowed like embers for a moment before she scurried away down the street.
Mrs Mukhopadhyaya said, curiously, “I know a very few words, and so does the minister sahib – but that does not happen, when we speak."
“It is a language," said her friend, and although they had no expression, only the petals of iridescence blossoming along the crystal lines of their body, Mrs Mukhopadhyaya could read that pause before speaking as the tentativeness of considered thought, “that lives in its speakers."
Mrs Mukhopadhyaya considered it in her turn. “But we learned from books."
“Yes." They paused, and continued, “You might yet speak it so."
Mrs Mukhopadhyaya nodded, thinking about what it would be like to see her eyes glow in the mirror. “What do you call the city?" she asked, in Hindi, remembering lessons in school of Ur, and Mohenjo-Daro.
The answer was more thunderclap and bells than word, but Mrs Mukhopadhyaya thought it was probably like Ur, too – a real, old place, from long ago, on that other world that she might someday see.
___
Much later, after the lamps Leila had lit had been turned off for the night, Mrs Mukhopadhyaya heard a banging sound from the kitchen. She moved through the house animated by curiosity, letting herself quietly inside. The outside door to the verandah was banging in the evening breeze; she sat silently on a wooden chair, waiting for her eyes to adjust, while the minister stumbled from object to object in the dark, muttering about food, using the same curses his mother had used.
“What do you need?" she asked, in Hindi; he startled so badly he hit the hard work surface with his knee, and almost fell, so she had to steady him, and bring him to her chair. He sat for a moment breathing heavily, and said, “You foolish woman" – but in Hindi, lovingly, and reached for the nearest, softest light.
After that he said nothing more, so she found the last of the fruit the neighbour had brought, placed it in a bowl and brought it to him; he ate it hungrily, licking the juice from his fingers, then looked up. There was a look of apology in his dark eyes that she did not try to decipher.
“I thought," she said, carefully, “that you did not want to come. That when we came, you did not want to stay."
He offered her his overturned palms, his hands still smeared with red. It would have looked like blood, were it not for the pomegranate tint of the juice, made pinkish by the dimness. Mrs Mukhopadhyaya was reminded, in that colour, of the sunsets that had seemed so alien.
“If we can get past this," he said, in his impatient, blunt way, “then I will no longer sit in the chamber alongside the worthy men, the naysayers, the delegates from Earth who have come to help us keep an open mind." In his voice was the bitterness of the fruit, she thought. “If we stay, then they will come. The others, from Xi Lyr. They will sit in that chamber alongside us. Or perhaps we shall go to their places of meeting. We can meet in either place; we will be we."
He paused, his hands wringing, a little helplessly; as though he understood he had not answered her question, but could offer nothing better. He had fallen into Hindi again, just for the last sentence. Mrs Mukhopadhyaya found it
a comfort.
___
The mali had come into the kitchen to drink some water – the day was turning hot – and to ask what Chotu should call the neighbour.
“They do not have names," Leila said. “They are the others. What does he call the minister sahib?"
“Uncle," Mrs Mukhopadhyaya said, and Leila nodded. The mali drained his glass, thanked them and went back into the garden; Mrs Mukhopadhyaya could hear him telling Chotu to say namaste, politely, and the distant chiming of the neighbour’s pincers.
“It is not only this," the minister was saying, carefully. In English, Mrs Mukhopadhyaya noticed, looking up at the screen, and Leila put down the dish she was washing. “Certainly, it is this. Perhaps twelve or twenty or two hundred years from now, there will be no city on Earth worth living in. Perhaps the waters will have engulfed them all, perhaps the politicians of the day will read back the record of today’s debates and answer the question definitively. But there is more to it. Ur is the great experiment. Ur is the first time two sentient species have lived in the same city; have lived as one people; broken of each other’s bread."
There was a murmur in the gallery; Mrs Mukhopadhyaya nodded. The phrase was calculated, for those in the ranks who came from Jewish and Christian backgrounds. English, she thought again. The view depicted on the screen tipped back slightly, to show the whole chamber, all homogenous old stone like every building in Ur, as though the city had been hewn out of the rock as the world was forming.
“We live in the remains of an ancient civilisation," the minister continued, and Mrs Mukhopadhyaya smiled, a little foolishly, as though he had looked into the house through the other side of the screen and seen the thought in her mind. “We more than anyone should live in the shadow of memento mori; remember you must die. Who built the stones on which we stand? We may never know, though there are xenoarchaeologists arriving every six months with the transports. But we will never know – we will never know what might have been, if we are not brave enough to see what will be. To say, we go on."
He paused, and looked at the assembled ranks with an expression of contempt, and in that look, Mrs Mukhopadhyaya saw years of frustration as the waters rose, moulded by pressure and anger into diamond. “Honourable delegates from Earth. If you have come in fear, go in fear. We will remain."
He had spoken his last words in Hindi. When he sat down, the chamber was hushed, and across the millions of miles of space there was another silence, as though all the Earth were quiet. The minister gave a small, inarticulate cry as he moved to sit, shattering that soundlessness; his eyes were shining with a bright white light.
___
The legislature went into recess that day and the next for the polls to be conducted and votes counted. There was a complex system of eligibility for voting on Earth, and high tempers and barricades around polling stations. On Ur, Mrs Mukhopadhyaya, the mali and Leila went together through the cool of the morning and voted in the foyer of the legislative building. The people from Xi Lyr were not voting – the colony would continue with or without the people of Earth – but they seemed to understand the gravity of the situation, and stepped back to let the humans past.
On the second day, the Speaker sent a message: the outcome was to be announced before lunchtime the day after. She would bring them the result shortly before planet-wide broadcast. Mrs Mukhopadhyaya was grateful for that short reprieve, at least. When morning came none of them had slept more than a little; the mali took Chotu to school and returned dazed and distracted. “The other parents were asking," he told Mrs Mukhopadhyaya, “but I said there was no answer. Not yet. Not yet."
Their neighbour arrived not long after that, body made pinkish with the late sunrise, and paused at the gate as though waiting for something. Mrs Mukhopadhyaya recognised that tentativeness as a refusal to enter uninvited, and lifted the latch.
“Have water," Mrs Mukhopadhyaya said to them in their own language, and they took it from her with gratitude, in a saucer. Mrs Mukhopadhyaya saw them start abortively towards the minister, then step back. He was sitting on one of the verandah chairs, quite still. During the course of their most of a lifetime together, she had seen him work days and work nights, reading reports two at a time with one in each hand; she had seen him at family weddings, checking his messages every five minutes; every morning she saw him reach for his data pad before his spectacles. She had rarely, if ever, seen this stillness in him; and never that light in his eyes.
“What happened to him?" she found herself asking, wondering after she had spoken if the neighbour would understand; but they did, with no further explanation.
They said, “He spoke in a language of Ur" – and Mrs Mukhopadhyaya wanted to say, no, that was Hindi. But they might all be here after this, she remembered. They might all be here, speaking Hindi and English and the language of Xi Lyr, and they would all be the people of Ur.
“Will you eat?" she asked, and when her friend nodded, she made up a tray of tea, coffee, water, fruit and pastries for all of them. The minister ate a bread roll when she handed it to him, although his mind was elsewhere. Perhaps not elsewhere, she thought: perhaps as much present, here in this garden in this city, as it had ever been. The mali refused food; he had begun work, planting out perennials not out of certainty, he said, but of hope. Mrs Mukhopadhyaya nodded and poured water into his glass. He had reached the end of a row and paused, leaning on his spade and sweating in the sun, when the gate latch creaked. It was the Speaker, holding an envelope.
“The vote," she said, her voice carrying cross the garden, “the result has come" – and the minister and Mrs Mukhopadhyaya, Leila and the mali and their neighbour, turned to hear it.
“We stay," the Speaker said, and sat down heavily on the grass.
Akbar learns to read and write
You may wonder how it was that Akbar – whose strategising had taken battalions to the stars; who took poets as well as generals on galactic campaign; and who loved the art and literature of her people with a passionate, critical love -- came to be illiterate. And you may wonder how she remained so, even after she had led armies, conquered worlds, and ordered their libraries be catalogued and copied.
I am afraid I do not know the reason for this. It may be that the child Akbar was disobedient, and could not be stilled long enough to study. She was heard to say to her tutors that the letters were unruly: alif and meem unravelled like string in front of her eyes, and perhaps it was more difficult for her than the other children. After the wars were over, I suspect it was because she was ashamed of her lack. When she resolved that she must learn, for the sake of her people as well as herself, she asked that it might be kept a private matter. Birbal, who loved her well, arranged that it should be so.
(You must remember how young Akbar was then, and how prideful. In the dignity of her later years she read well but slowly, and would encourage the children of her navaratnas to come to the dais and lead her through the obfuscations of the court economists. But that is another story.)
The tutor that Birbal found was a brisk and kind woman. "Jahanpanah," she said, "we learn at any age."
She had taught grown men who had played truant during their schooling and gone on to regret it. She had taught soldiers who had spent their lives on Akbar's campaigns, and come home knowing only the scripts of other worlds. She had taught a woman whose father's house had been a petty tyranny, whose freedom to learn had come with her marriage. There were always reasons, which were not important. What was important was the student's application.
So Akbar settled down to her studies, and in due course alif and meem ceased to dance around the page and came obediently from her pen. On a day of rain, some months after Akbar had begun her lessons, she noticed that her teacher seemed listless.
"What troubles you, adhyapika-sahiba?" Akbar asked.
(Does it surprise you, that Akbar addressed her thus? Akbar accorded her advisers respect, and her teachers too.)
The teacher did not at first wish to spe
ak of it, but the afternoon was cool and pleasant, and Akbar a willing listener. It seemed that there was to be a sitar recital in the darbar that day, given by a well-respected man, known throughout the kingdom for his talent. He was the brother of Akbar's tutor, and although she was pleased to see him perform to such acclaim, he brought to mind a secret sorrow. She had had talent of her own in her childhood, but she had been lazy about studying the instrument, and squandered her opportunity to play alongside him.
Akbar said, "Adhyapika-sahiba, we learn at any age."
After the lesson was over she went to Birbal and asked if someone might be found who could teach the sitar to a beginner, privately, with consideration for a long-ago regret.
Birbal said, "It shall be done, huzoor."
The darbar was full of musicians and those who loved music, and they directed Birbal to a man who had been a flagship musician during the campaigns, and who lived in a quiet retirement in Agra. He was happy to take Akbar's tutor as his pupil and teach her the music he loved.
Now, this man was a widower. His wife had died from a sudden illness soon after their return to Earth, and his grief had been all the more terrible for its being unexpected. When the first cloud of it had passed, he found that his ten-year-old son, who had been the apple of his mother's eye, now looked at his father as though he were a stranger. "A good boy," he told Birbal. "A good, obedient boy, who works hard at his studies. But I know nothing of him."
"What does he enjoy, this good boy of yours?" Birbal asked. "If you give him a little money to spend and a day free of study, what does he do?"
The sitar player did not know. He went home and gave his son a coin and said he should do with it as he pleased. He came back to Birbal to say he had seen his son and his friends on the curve of hillside above the palace, flying their kites in the spring breezes.
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