Time Travel: Recent Trips Read online

  I am enjoying this, even though my poetry is that of a beginner, crude, and direct. Wajid Ali Shah also wrote in the commoner's tongue, which makes my deception possible. I also suspect that these scientists don't know enough about poetry to tell the difference.

  My dear teacher, the Maula, would talk for hours about rhyme and lilt, and the difference between a ghazal and a rubayi. I didn't understand half of what he said but I learned enough to know that there is a way of talking about poetry if you are learned in the subject. And the scientists don't seem to react like that. They just exclaim and repeat my lines, and wonder whether this is a fragment, or a complete poem.

  One day I want to write my poetry in my own hand.

  Imagine me, Gargi, doing all this! A person of no importance and look where life has got me!

  I now know who Kajori is.

  I didn't know that was her first name. Even the older scientists call her Dr. Mitra. She's a tall, thin woman, the boss of the others, and she always looks busy and harassed. Sometimes she smiles, and her smile is twisted. I took a dislike to her at first because she always looked through me, as though I wasn't there. Now I still dislike her but I'm sorry for her. And angry with her. The dead man, her lover, she must have sent him away, trapped him in that place where he floats above the delta of the river of time. It's my dreams he comes into, not hers. I can hardly bear his agony, his weeping, the way he calls out for her. I wonder why she has abandoned him.

  I think he's in this building. The first time this thought occurred to me I couldn't stop shaking. It made sense. All my hauntings have been people physically close to me.

  They won't let me leave this floor. I can leave my room now, but the doors to the stairs are locked, and the lifts don't work after everyone leaves. But I will find a way. I'm tired of being confined like this.

  I realize now that although I was raised poor and illiterate, I was then at least free to move about, to breathe the air, to dream of my mother's home. Siridanga! I want to go back there and see it before I die. I know that the sea has entered the cities and drowned the land, but Siridanga was on a rise overlooking the paddy fields.

  My grandparents' hut was on the hillock. Could it still be there? The night market makes me feel restless. The reflections of the lights dance on the windowpanes of the opposite building, as though they are writing something. All this learning to read is making me crazy, because I see letters where they don't exist. In the reflections. In people's hand gestures. And even more strangely, I see some kind of writing in the flow of time, in the dreams the dead man brings me. Those are written in a script I cannot read.

  I "discovered" a whole verse of Wajid Ali Shah's poem today, after hours at the scope. There was so much excitement in the analysis room that the scientists let me go to my quarters early. I pleaded a headache but they hardly noticed. So I slipped out, into the elevator, and went up, and down, and got off on floors and walked around. I felt like a mad person, a thief, a free bird. It was ridiculous what an effect this small freedom had!

  But after a while I began to get frightened. There was nobody else on the other floors as far as I could tell. The rooms were silent, dark behind doors with glass slits. I know that the scientists live somewhere here, maybe in the other buildings. Nondini tells me we are in a cluster of buildings near the sea that were built to withstand the flood. From her hints and from the TV I know that the world is ending. It's not just here. Everywhere cities are flooded or consumed by fire. Everything is dying. I have never been able to quite believe this before, perhaps because of my peculiar situation, which prevents me from seeing things for myself. But ultimately the silence and darkness of the rest of the building brought it home to me, and I felt as if I were drowning in sadness.

  Then I sensed a pull, a current—a shout in my mind. It was him, the dead man. Kajori! he called again and again, and I found myself climbing to the floor above, to a closed door in the dark corridor.

  I tried the handle, felt the smooth, paneled wood, but of course it was locked. With my ear against the door I could feel the hum of machinery, and there was a soft flow of air from beneath the door.

  I called back to him in my mind.

  I can't get in, I said. Talk to me!

  His voice in my mind was full of static, so I couldn't understand everything. Even when I heard the words, they didn't make sense. I think he was muttering to himself, or to Kajori.

  " . . . rivulets of time . . . two time-streams come together . . . ah . . . in a loop . . . if only . . . shift the flow, shift the flow . . . another future . . . must lock to past coordinate, establish resonance . . . new tomorrow . . . "

  The chowkidar who is supposed to guard the elevator caught me on my way downstairs. He is a lazy, sullen fellow who never misses an opportunity to throw his weight around. I am more than a match for him though. He reported me, of course, to Nondini and Unnikrishnan, but I argued my case well. I simply said I was restless and wanted to see if there was a nice view from the other floors.

  What could they say to that?

  I tried to make sense of the dead man's gibberish all day. At night he came into my dreams as usual. I let him talk, prompting him with questions when something didn't make sense. I had to be clever to conceal my ignorance, since he thought I was Kajori, but the poor fellow is so emotionally overwrought that he is unlikely to be suspicious. But when he started weeping in his loneliness, I couldn't bear it. I thought: I will distract him with poetry.

  I told him about the poem I am writing. It turns out he likes poetry. The poem he and Kajori love the best is an English translation of something by Omar Khayyam.

  "Remember it, Kajori?" he said to me. He recited it in English, which I don't understand, and then in Bangla—"Oh love, if you and I could, with fate conspire," he said, taking me with a jolt back to my girlhood: me sitting by the Maula in the mad confusion of the market, the two of us seeing nothing but poetry, mango juice running down our chins. Oh yes, I remember, I said to my dead man. Then it was my turn. I told him about what I was writing and he got really interested. Suggested words, gave me ideas. So two lines of "Wajid Ali Shah's poem" came to me.

  Clouds are borne on the wind

  The river winds toward home

  It was only the next day that I started to connect things in my mind. I think I know what the project is really about.

  These people are not scientists, they are jadugars. Or maybe that's what scientists are, magicians who try to pass themselves off as ordinary people.

  See, the dead man's idea is that time is like a river delta; lots of thin streams and fat streams, flowing from past to present, but fanning out. History and time control each other, so that if some future place is deeply affected by some past history, those two time streams will connect. When that happens it diverts time from the future place and shifts the flow in each channel so that the river as a whole might change its course.

  They're trying to change the future.

  I am stunned. If this is true, why didn't they tell me? Don't I also want the world to survive? It's my world too. This also means that I am more important to them than they ever let me know. I didn't realize all this at once; it is just now beginning to connect in my mind.

  I burn inside with anger. At the same time, I am undone with wonder.

  I think the dead man is trying to save the world. I think the scope and the dead man are part of the same Machine.

  I wonder how much of their schemes I have messed up by locking the Machine into a different time and place than their calculations required.

  What shall I do?

  For now I have done nothing.

  I need to find out more. How terrible it is to be ignorant! One doesn't even know where to start.

  I looked at the history books Nondini had let me have—talking books— but they told me nothing about Rassundari. Then I remembered that one of the rooms on my floor housed a library from the days before the scientists had taken over the building.

  I t
hink Nondini sensed how restless I was feeling, and she must have talked to Kajori (I can't think of her as Dr. Mitra now) so I have permission to spend some of my spare time in the library.

  They might let me go to the night market tomorrow too, with an escort. I went and thanked Kajori. I said that I was homesick for my mother's village home, Siridanga, and it made me feel crazy sometimes not to be able to walk around. At that she really looked at me, a surprised look, and smiled. I don't think it was a nice smile, but I couldn't be certain.

  So, the library. It is a whole apartment full of books of the old kind. But the best thing about it is that there is a corner window from which I can see between two tall buildings. I can see the ocean! These windows don't open but when I saw the ocean I wept. I was in such a state of sadness and joy all at once, I forgot what I was there for.

  The books were divided according to subject, so I practiced reading the subject labels first. It took me two days and some help from Nondini (I had to disguise the intent of my search) before I learned how to use the computer to search for information. I was astonished to find out that my housewife had written a book! So all that painful learning on the sly had come to something! I felt proud of her. There was the book in the autobiography section: Amar Jiban, written by a woman called Rassundari more than two hundred and fifty years ago. I clutched the book to me and took it with me to read.

  It is very hard reading a real book. I have to keep looking at my notes from my lessons with Rassundari. It helps that Nondini got me some alphabet books. She finds my interest in reading rather touching, I think.

  But I am getting through Rassundari's work. Her writing is simple and so moving. What I can't understand is why she is so calm about the injustices in her life. Where is her anger? I would have gotten angry. I feel for her as I read.

  I wish I could tell Rassundari that her efforts will not be in vain—that she will write her autobiography and publish it at the age of sixty, and that the future will honor her. But how can I tell her that, even if there was a way she could hear me? What can I tell her about this world? My wanderings through the building have made me realize that the world I've known is going away, as inevitably as the tide, with no hope of return.

  Unless the dead man and I save it.

  I have been talking to Rassundari. Of course she can't hear me, but it comforts me to be able to talk to someone, really talk to them. Sometimes Rassundari looks up toward the point near the ceiling from which I am observing her. At those moments it seems to me that she senses my presence. Once she seemed about to say something, then shook her head and went back to the cooking.

  I still haven't told anybody about my deceit. I have found out that Wajid Ali Shah and Rassundari lived at around the same time, although he was in Kolkata and she in a village that is now in Bangladesh. From what the dead man tells me, it is time that is important, not space. At least that is what I can gather from his babblings, although spacetime fuzziness or resolution is also important. So maybe my deception hasn't caused any harm. I hope not. I am an uneducated woman, and when I sit in that library I feel as though there is so much to know. If someone had told me that, encouraged me as a child, where might I have been today? And yet think about the dead man, with all his education. There he is, a hundred times more trapped than me, a thousand times lonelier. Yet he must be a good man, to give himself for the world.

  He's been asking me anxiously: Kajori, can you feel the shift in the timeflow? Have we locked into the pastpoint? I always tell him I feel it just a little, which reassures him that his sacrifice is not for nothing. I wish I could tell him: I am Gargi, not Kajori. Instead I tell him I love him, I miss him. Sometimes I really feel that I do.

  I have been speaking to Rassundari for nearly a week.

  One of the scientists, Brijesh, caught me talking into the scope. He came into the room to get some papers he'd left behind. I jumped guiltily.

  "Gargi-di? What are you doing . . . ?" he says with eyebrows raised.

  "I just like to talk to myself. Repeat things Wajid Ali Shah is saying."

  He looks interested. "A new poem?"

  "Bah!" I say. "You people think he says nothing but poetry all the time? Right now he's trying to woo his mistress."

  This embarrasses Brijesh, as I know it would. I smile at him and go back to the scope.

  But yes, I was talking about Rassundari.

  Now I know that she senses something. She always looks up at me, puzzled as to how a corner of the ceiling appears to call to her.

  Does she hear me, or see some kind of image? I don't know. I keep telling her not to be afraid, that I am from the future, and that she is famous for her writing. Whether she can tell what I am saying I don't know. She does look around from time to time, afraid as though others might be there, so I think maybe she hears me, faintly, like an echo.

  Does this mean that our rivulet of time is beginning to connect with her time stream?

  I think my mind must be like an old-fashioned radio. It picks up things: the dead man's ramblings, the sounds and sights of the past.

  Now it seems to be picking up the voices from the books in this room. I was deaf once, but now I can hear them as I read, slowly and painfully. All those stories, all those wonders. If I'd only known!

  I talk to the dead. I talk to the dead of my time, and the woman Rassundari of the past, who is dead now. My closest confidants are the dead.

  The dead man—I wish I knew his name—tells me that we have made a loop in time. He is not sure how the great delta's direction will change— whether it will be enough, or too little, or too much.

  He has not quite understood the calculations that the Machine is doing. He is preoccupied. But when I call to him, he is tender, grateful. "Kajori," he says, "I have no regrets. Just this one thing, please do it for me. What you promised. Let me die once the loop has fully stabilized." In one dream I saw through his eyes. He was in a tank, wires coming out of his body, floating. In that scene there was no river of time, just the luminous water below him, and the glass casing around. What a terrible prison! If he really does live like that, I think he can no longer survive outside the tank, which is why he wants to die.

  It is so painful to think about this that I must distract us both. We talk about poetry, and later the next few lines of the poem come to me.

  Clouds are borne on the wind

  The river winds toward home

  From my prison window

  I see the way to my village

  In its cage of bone my heart weeps

  When I was the river, you were the shore

  Why have you forsaken me?

  I am getting confused. It is Kajori who is supposed to be in love with the dead man, not me.

  So many things happened these last two days.

  The night before last, the maajhis sang in the night market. I heard their voices ululating, the dotaras throbbing in time with the flute's sadness. A man's voice, and then a woman's, weaving in and out. I imagined them on their boats, plying the waters all over the drowned city as they had once sailed the rivers of my drowned land. I was filled with a painful ecstasy that made me want to run, or fly.

  I wanted to break the windows.

  The next morning I spent some hours at the scope. I told Rassundari my whole story. I still can't be sure she hears me, but her upturned, attentive face gives me hope. She senses something, for certain, because she put her hand to her ear as though straining to hear. Another new thing is that she is sometimes snappy. This has never happened before. She snapped at her nephew the other day, and later spoke sharply to her husband. After both those instances she felt so bad! She begged forgiveness about twelve times. Both her nephew and her husband seemed confused, but accepted her apology. I wonder if the distraction I am bringing into her life is having an effect on her mind. It occurs to me that perhaps, like the dead man, she can sense my thoughts, or at least feel the currents of my mind.

  The loop in the time stream has stabilized. Unnikri
shnan told me I need not be at the scope all the time, because the connection is always there, instead of timing out. The scientists were nervous and irritable; Kajori had shut herself up in her office. Were they waiting for the change? How will they tell that the change has come? Have we saved the world? Or did my duplicity ruin it?

  I was in the library in the afternoon, a book on my lap, watching the gray waves far over the sea, when the dead man shouted in my mind. At this I peered out—the hall was empty. The scientists have been getting increasingly careless. The lift was unguarded.

  So up I went to the floor above. The great wood-paneled door was open. Inside the long, dimly lit room stood Kajori, her face wet with tears, calling his name.

  "Subir! Subir!"

  She didn't notice me.

  He lay naked in the enormous tank like a child sleeping on its belly. He was neither young nor old; his long hair, afloat in the water like seaweed, was sprinkled with gray, his dangling arms thin as sticks. Wires came out of him at dozens of places, and there were large banks of machinery all around the tank. His skin gleamed as though encased in some kind of oil.

  He didn't know she was there, I think. His mind was seething with confusion. He wanted to die, and his death hadn't happened on schedule. A terror was growing in him.

  "You promised, Kajori!"

  She just wept with her face against the tank. She didn't turn off any switches. She didn't hear him, but I felt his cry in every fiber of my being.

  "He wants to die," I said.

  She turned, her face twisted with hatred.

  "What are you doing here? Get out!"

  "Go flee, Subir!" I said. I ran in and began pulling out plugs, turning off switches in the banks of machines around the tank. Kajori tried to stop me but I pushed her away. The lights in the tank dimmed. His arms flailed for a while, then grew still. Over Kajori's scream I heard his mind going out like the tide goes out, wafting toward me a whisper: thank you, thank you, thank you.

  I became aware of the others around me, and Kajori shouting and sobbing.

  "She went mad! She killed him!"