Lost!

 

Ashima was inside a machine that hurtled through the space-time fabric, slicing it with the silence of vacuum that filled the empty spaces in the Milky Way. Around her at a distance were nebulae with their vividly colored stars. She could see sparkling stars dot the space outside and blue, red and yellow clouds creating swirls that breathed warmth into the cold, unsympathetic blackness.

Ashima looked out of her speeding vehicle. She was sitting curled, as if in a womb and she had no control over her own situation. Fifty and with knees that hurt, this was an uncalled for adventure… she would love to be out of it. Ashima had a bad left knee. Her kneecap had got displaced for some reason, which she herself had not been able to figure out. After two years of physiotherapy, she was able to walk. But, she could not run, jump, dance or crawl…

As Ashima tried to move her mind away from the pain in her knees, a blinding light seemed to tear the space-time continuum and she landed with a thud on a solid surface. The capsule in which she had been hurtling opened and the seat almost ejected her out. She was back where she had been last week…in the grasslands of South Africa.

“Is it in Maropeng again?”Ashima wondered.

Around her was a clear blue sky, the kinds of which can only be seen in South Africa. She had been a bit intimidated by her adventure into the cave of Mrs Ples, the Taung child and the Little Foot, the home to two to three million-year-old fossils that had been discovered from the 1940s to the 2013 if she recalled right.

The cave had been dark. She had gone with her family and a guide. They were in a group, which was being given a conducted tour of the cave. The cave had been fascinating though intimidating too. The guide had shown them minerals on the walls of the cave and fifteen meter long stalactites… evidently lot of South Africa had subterranean caves… they were even explored in King Solomon’s Mines. And the lake in this cave had reminded her of the lake seen by Allan Quatermain and his cronies. She had just re-read the book before coming to South Africa. The huge lake with it’s blind worms squiggling in the corners brought to her mind the blind fishes in another cave of subterranean Africa on the edges of Kalahari. The blind fishes had been colorful, almost like bits of flame. They were part of a TV documentary by Richard Attenborough. They had watched it just before they caught their flight to South Africa from Singapore… only here the worms were tiny and colorless, almost white.

The guide had clearly stated that the group was not allowed to wander as the cave systems were enormous and if one wandered away, one could be completely lost and eventually die of starvation… It had been difficult for Ashima to keep pace but she had come all the way to see this… see it she must… so she had trudged along till she almost collapsed from exhaustion. They had to crawl or slide along parts of the cave. As Ashima could not put her weight on her knees or crawl on the hard surface for fear of injuring her kneecap again, she had to bend double and walk. It was really tough, even though the stretch was short. She felt breathless and on the brink of collapse! Finally, when her heart beat till she felt exhausted with it’s pace, she told her family she could not survive the ordeal! Her twenty-year-old son had called the guide, who had been very kind to her. She helped Ashima take off her woolens which she had needed in the cold wind outside but was not needed inside the cave with its constant perennial temperature of 18 degrees Celsius. The group stopped as she rested and she went slowly the rest of the way. In any case they had been close to the exit. Despite the terror of the situation, Ashima had a tremendous sense of achievement and she had decided that she would make herself physically fit to see more of the subterranean world! But, definitely not this soon… and also she needed the time to improve her fitness level…maybe in a few years…not just yet…

The guide had also said that no one knew exactly how far these caves could stretch… Such caves were made of limestone and they formed a receptacle for varieties of fossils over the last three million years. They believed that the hominids fell into sudden sinkholes that appeared in these sites… what if she too fell into something similar, thought Ashima… Just as she feared, like Alice in Wonderland, Ashima was plunged into a hole that seemed to stretch out endlessly… she was falling, falling into a sinkhole… all alone like the millions of years old Little Foot they found… Ashima passed out.

When she came to, Ashima found herself surrounded by strange monkey like creatures almost as tall as her. They were looking at her and making funny noises. They looked like the pictures of hominids she had seen. Ashima was terrified! She was lying on some kind of soft fern. It was a pale colored world… the vegetation around was more brown and white, actually sepia toned, and there was a strange kind of light that emanated from the walls that surrounded the group. Was it some kind of phosphorescence?

Where was she? As she regained her consciousness, she could hear the trickle of water… her throat felt incredibly parched… These creatures were touching her with their furry hands… she fainted again…this time from fear.

Ashima came to her senses again as some kind of a soft receptacle was being pushed into her mouth and she felt a trickle of water flow down her throat…she was too scared to open her eyes. Reluctantly, she looked up and she found a pair of kind eyes looking down at her. The face was that of a hominid. As soon as she opened her eyes, more of these creatures came running to see her…

“Where am I?” wondered Ashima, “In some subterranean world? Who are these creatures and what has happened?”

From a distance, she heard a voice say, “I was lost too and I landed in their world… I have seen eyeless monstrosities. I have battled sightless dinosaurs. These creatures are very kind compared to those…”

Ashima turned to the source of the voice. A man dressed in ragged khaki and with a long beard stood at a little distance. His beard was of an indeterminate brown…Ashima’s whole body felt cold and hurt… she felt all her bones were broken.

“ There was no speech a few million years ago… we have both travelled back in time to a time lock,” the reedy voice drifted to her as the man came forward to her line of vision.

He had a frayed unkempt wispy beard and an uncouth look about him. His clothes were in tatters. His feet had the remnants of boots on them. She looked at him from the side of her eyes in surprise. He saw her look and started speaking again.

“I am Professor Nowiki from Poland… I made a time machine, which I hoped would help me travel back in time to meet Prof Lidenbrock, the one who went into the Icelandic Snaefellsjokull volcano and came out of Strombolii… I wanted to join his expedition. I was living in the early twentieth century… The first trial took me to a world, which was filled with sightless monstrosities. When I managed to escape back to my machine, the time knob malfunctioned and brought me here. As I stepped out of the machine, it collapsed into a sinkhole and disappeared… I cannot access it any more… I have been in this time lock for almost a century now… I think…”

As his voice faded, Ashima felt terrified. She was surrounded by curious furry hominids. They occasionally touched her. Some of them touched the professor and then her, perhaps to sense the difference. She wanted to get up and run away. She wanted to be securely back with her family… Her whole adventure had landed her in a nightmarish situation. Would she ever see her family again… her two sons and husband…She was desperate to see them, to find them…As tears trickled down her terrified eyes, she heard her husband’s voice calling out to her, “Ashima, Ashima…. what happened? Why are you shivering and weeping?”

And Ashima opened her eyes. Thank God she was on her own bed, by her husband, Sharad. What she had witnessed was, in reality, a nightmare… it was still night…

She sat up and told Sharad the story… “Well it is a good story… you could write it down at some point… maybe an impact of visiting the cave and watching too many adventure movies, Star Trek…”

Ashima took a sip of water from the bottle by her bedside and laughed and said, “You are right you know… except, maybe, the bearded guy was perhaps a figment contributed by my love for Journey to the Centre of the Earth… And I really want to see more wonderful things like that cave, maybe go down the Snaefellsjokull volcano…”

“ It is 3 am! Night still. Go to sleep now… crazy woman,” said Sharad half asleep. Ashima lay down, cuddled close to Sharad and closed her eyes again.

 

Book Review

Title: Me and I

(ISBN 978-93-5195-188-9)

Author: Nabendu Ghosh (written in Bengali in 2003)

Translator: Devottam Sengupta ( translated in 2017)

 

Me and I is a science fiction set in Calcutta, exploring the concept of Earth’s twin in the universe. It was written by Nabendu Ghosh for his two grandsons in Bengali, and then translated by one of them as part of his centenary celebrations. The translator, Devottam Ghosh, is a lawyer by profession.

I enjoyed the book. It is an ideal read from eight to eighty, a story well told. The protagonist Mukul has a twin in the planet that is Earth’s mirror image. His parallel is known as Lukum and Earth is spelt as Threa.

The explanation is given by an eccentric gentleman, Professor Noni Gopal Sinha,who is Mukul’s friend and mentor on Earth.

“They’re both, opposite yet identical. Mirror images, really. Just as there are a couple of hundred twins among a million people, similarly I’m sure you can find a twin — identical yet opposite — planets among the billions that exist out there.”

So, it is an inverse parallel universe which is dwelt on briefly as the story unfolds.

The story has multiple layers. On the surface, it is a story for children… a nineteen-year-old boy’s adventure with an alien in outer space. It has been woven very well into the fabric of Indian life. Perspectives on religion, science, society, countries and cultures are layered into the folds of the story. It explores the environment that leads to creativity and the environment that does not. An ideal needs to be somewhere in the middle… perhaps… a point for the reader to ponder…

The book has well-researched scientific facts… on different theories of the universe. Though the author, Nabendu Ghosh, says that he would like “to classify this flight of imagination as a ‘modern(or contemporary) fairy tale’”, it touches upon Einstien’s ideas on gravitational waves and theory of relativity. It dwells upon travel at the speed of light and it’s impact on humans.

A surprising novel from a writer of stories linked to social reforms…but then, one wonders at the end that has the author not made you think again of larger issues that are relevant even in the twenty first century…

Perhaps, because Nabendu Ghosh was into writing for films, this book is very visual and would make for an excellent movie. I can visualise the whole scenario as I read the book…

May we then expect a Tollywood(Bengali movie) version of Me and I in the near future?

The Story of a Doe-eyed Jinn

 

Thousands of years ago, when mankind was still young and believed in magic, there was a tiny green island peopled by simple, god-fearing fisher folk. In the little village by the seaside, there lived a beautiful girl with pale white skin, pomegranate red lips, jet-black hair. She flit from home to home through the day, bringing happiness with her good nature and helpful attitude. She would play with the children and do little tricks that kept their tears at bay. She would climb tall trees and pluck fruit for the little ones. She would help mothers and wives with household chores and she would listen to the old folks’ tales of glory till they were filled with blessings for her kind heart. She was a winsome little soul and everyone agreed that the man who won her heart would be a lucky one.

One day, a great magician came to the village in a fabulous flying carpet made of gold and silver. He glowed with a magical aura and no one could touch him. He wore a strange robe made of glistening orange and black. He had a long beard and long hair and spoke in a deep, drowning voice. He was like a king from heaven. No one in the village had seen anyone like him. No one knew why he had come to their village and no one asked. He went to the village elder and demanded shelter. The village elder fell under his spell and gave him what he wanted without any questions. In fact, the whole village fell under his spell.

They were stunned by the magic he performed for them. He could stop the rain from wetting the village. It would fall all around but not into the village. It seemed like he had built a dome to keep off the thunder and lightening. He could extend night and day for the village.

The young doe-eyed girl watched him with fascination. The magician saw her from the corner of his eyes and followed her with interest. It would be nice for him to have someone like her around, he thought to himself. In any case, he was tiring off the village and the time had come for him to move on…

The magician came from beyond the stars and the moon. He had travelled around the world in quest of a special magic that would make him more powerful than the men who ruled his home. He wanted to be a king. He was a man who loved power and lived for only his own needs. This young girl could ward away his loneliness and help him find the magic. The magician approached the village elder and asked for the girl’s hand. The village elder was totally under the magician’s mind spell. He would do whatever the magician asked. He agreed. The young girl agreed. Only her mother worried. But the magician put a spell on her mouth so that she could not utter her protests.

The girl went off with the magician on his flying carpet…

For the first few days, the girl lived as if in a dream. They soared among the stars and the moon. From the carpet, which turned invisible and became like a big home, she could see the aurora borealis, fabulous sunrises and sunsets, even the whole Earth as she flew further towards the moon with her magician. Oh! How the girl loved the magician as she saw the wonders of the universe soar past her…the fabulous nebulae, the distant suns, the stars with their swirls of gas and fire…oh! She was fascinated!

At last, they landed on the snowbound ice-cap of the polar region. The magician said, “Now, I will train you and then will begin our real work.”

First, he created a home for them under a warm glowing dome where the temperature was as warm as that of the doe-eyed damsel’s island. It was like a little oasis of warmth in the cold desert of ice and snow. There, he started training her. Sometimes, they would step out into the cold and create a fire with a powder. Sometimes, they would create illusory landscapes, like a volcano or a flower garden. The magician taught the maiden how to keep her body temperature constant in cold and warm weather. He taught her to change into a bird and soar the skies. He taught her how to control her and others’ minds, how to move objects from a distance. She learned fast.

After six months of intensive training, the magician told her it was time to start work…to look for a new magic…

They set sail on the magic carpet and soared the world, visiting deep caverns, river and sea-beds for ancient magic. And the doe-eyed winsome girl became an expert magician. She could turn to dust a predator lurking in the deeps of the sea, swim like a mermaid into underwater caverns, create light and darkness…just like her magician. In addition she had a pure heart, a necessity that the bearded magician for all his charm lacked. It was with the echoes of her heart that she would be able to feel the pure magic. Unfortunately for the magician, his heart was tainted by personal ambition and greed. It could not sense the echoes of magic that needed a pure heart. He had searched everywhere on Earth for the magic but it was lost to him.

Another six months passed. The magic was still concealed from them. Then, one day as they delved deep into a dark cave on a mountainside, they found the magic in a rock. It echoed in the doe eyed girl’s heart. She heard the echoes and told her magician. The magician took out a ring and put a halo around the rock. It floated up, became tiny and swept into an empty socket of the ring. It was strange magic. The magician was very happy. He said, “I know this is the right magic because it responded to the call of the ring.” That day they went to a nearby village and partied with the villagers. They had visited the village earlier and the villagers knew them as a devoted couple. They had fireworks and fancy food. They sang and danced late into he night.

That night they all went to bed late.

The sun caressed the doe-eyed damsel with its morning rays. The doe-eyed damsel woke up to an empty bed. Her magician had left with the ancient magic, ring and carpet. He left a note bidding her farewell forever. The doe-eyed damsel wept till her eyes were swollen and red.

When the villagers heard of her plight, they condemned her as an abandoned woman. Her husband left her because she was flawed, they said. The doe-eyed girl cried and cried and then decided to return home. She took to the skies like a swallow, alighted at her village and returned to her original form. When she returned without the magician and wept out her tale, people turned their faces away. Her mother hung her head in shame for an abandoned wife was considered a valueless and shameless commodity in the world of men. Her mother could not take in the shame and died of a broken heart. The doe-eyed one no longer brought smiles to the villagers but, in their opinion, only bad luck.

She lived in the outskirts of the village and perfected her magic. One day, embittered by a sense of rejection, she took the form of a black crane and flew all the way to the desert sands. There she haunted caravanserais for a few years hoping her magician would return at some point and find her. When the bearded one did not return and men jeered at her and wounded her self-respect, she started turning them into lizards and cockroaches. People began to regard her as a woman with a black heart. Only the wicked came to her for magical help and she obliged. She was a woman who had lost her senses in a battle to survive with honour.

Sometimes, she would turn herself into a whirlwind and baffle men who had jeered at her. Sometimes, she descended like black smoke on unsuspecting wayfarers and frightened them with ugly faces.

One day when she descended on a group of travellers as a whirlwind and started making frightening faces at them, a clever trader outwitted her. He said, he did not believe that she was a powerful magician. The doe-eyed one wanted to convince him. She asked, “What can I do to convince you? Should I turn you into a worm?”

He replied,“ I will believe you are a really powerful magician if you can get into this tiny jar” and he waved an empty wine bottle under her nose.

“Oh that is easy,” she replied and turned into black smoke and entered the jar. The trader promptly closed the jar. However much she shouted, he would not let her out. He took the jar to the next caravanserai and threw it among all the empty bottles that littered the garbage area.

The doe-eyed one waited patiently for someone to open the bottle. She turned herself invisible and made a home in the old wine jar, waiting for more than ten centuries to be let out…

 

 

Medley

Why is it...

It is all right to be different, not to be the same.
We are still all a part of the big game.

We still look at the sky each day
And see it brightened by the sun’s ray.
We still see the rainbow light up in delight
With the dust washed clean from our sight.
Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red
Bring happy thoughts to our head,
Thoughts that glide and thoughts that play,
Lightening our burdens by the day.
If the different colors light up our lives
And fill our being with happy smiles,
Then why its it when we are not the same
We get thrust out of the game?
Why is it the differences matter more
Than ideas that make us soar?
Why is it we fear and hate the unknown
Instead of learning and making it our own?

It is all right to be different, not to be the same.
We are still all a part of the big game.

That is why each sunrise
Brings colors and blue skies,
And each sultry, soft, starry night
Punctuates the darkness with a silvery light.
That is why we have calm and storm
And each bird, it’s own color and song
That sings, harmonises and celebrates
The bounty of this infinite space.

The Human Dilemma

Prologue

The other day I was sitting in an open space, watching white clouds float in a vibrant blue sky… It was so relaxing…almost therapeutic. Like the erstwhile Wordsworth who felt gleeful when he saw the daffodils, my mood swung to an all time high. I decided to stock up the happy feelings for times when I feel vacant and pensive like good old William did two hundred years ago. Then as I gazed, I saw the clouds float into and away from each other. Watching them change shapes and shadows, I started thinking of the fluidity of all beings and existence.

I suppose currently, we are all perceived to be loose conglomerates of small dots, which scientists like to refer to as atoms, as is a table or a chair…theoretical physics… While we cannot see the molecules, they pretty much behave like the clouds in the sky, except for longer durations…just stay adrift, held together by neutrons…all particles … Do we exist or don’t we? Are we real or aren’t we?

The other day in a TV show, some intellectuals were proposing that we all were a part of a computer game for some kind of creatures we might refer to as aliens in our present state of existence as earthly humans. Our world is the grid they created. So, are we dots or holographs or computer images?

Are we all a part of some game? Omar Khayyam, more than a thousand years ago, had also seen mankind as part of a game. Perhaps, in those days chess would have been equivalent of a computer game.

‘Tis all a chequered board of Nights and Days,
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays.
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays
And one by one in the Closet lays.(translated by Edward Fitzgerald)

Humankind as chess pieces in Destiny’s grip and the chess board being our grid or world…perhaps he was being fatalistic but, on the other hand, Destiny could be a gamer…who knows what the wise old poet-astronomer felt exactly. Perhaps, he was in touch with the game players and helping them develop algorithms. Perhaps, he was telepathic or one of the gamers disguised as us…who knows!?!

In Hinduism, they say mankind is maya or illusion. None of us exist except as a part of Brahma’s dream or as a figment of his imagination…So, is Brahma a creator of games…the Master Creator? Was he created by someone else to cater to the Hindu population of Gods, which amounts to 330 million? Mind you there are those in Hinduism that will say that there is only one God and the vast pantheon are projections of the human imagination so that man can focus better, a form being easier to focus on than an abstraction. Or, is Brahma the only Creator, the only manipulator of divine energy? Now, I have really ended up confusing myself… Is all creation divine? What is divinity? Who is our maker? And if we are projections or part of a game plan, then who are the players and who created them?

One of the latest theory talks of man originating in Africa as clones of giant extra-terrestrials. Adam is seen as the first clone in the Garden of Eden, which is supposed to be somewhere in Zimbabwe, and our creators are projected as gold-hungry tyrants and separate from God. God, they say, is the good one. These aliens are not. They say that groups of aliens came to different parts of the world and created clones that were much smaller in size and not as powerful as them to resolve their labor issues. They needed miners for routine work. So, the first humans were miners and people they saw as God who came with flashes of light were the extra-terrestrials. These are the Gods recorded in ancient Mesopotamian, Mayan, Egyptian, Hindu and other myths, according to this school of thought. They are even trying to build the biblical myth into their proposal. I wonder if these terrifying extra-terrestrials would also have followed or follow our laws of physics and be a loose conglomeration of atoms in motion?

The Christian myth has also been disproven by many as the timeline proposed is perceived as unrealistic among other arguments. Earlier, man turned to religion to figure out the reason for his existence and annihilation. Now, he is extending his frontiers to probe the unknown. In the process, some are rejecting the older myths as hogwash and proposing newer ones which seem more exciting.

The new God is Science. Now there are people who believe in Science and not in God. They are trying to explain our being and existence through science. I myself harbour scientific nerds in my home. However, they believe in God too. They belong to the category that believe in both Science and God. Ultimately, nerds, non-nerds, theists, atheists, gnostics and agnostics, all get stuck at the same question.

How did the energy which was the focal point of all creation come into being? And then how did it all evolve into us…Darwin, metaphysics, physics, astrophysics, history, aliens, religion…

When my confusion is at its utmost, I try to quench it by reading Arthur C Clarke’s science fiction, which does try to make room for divinity in its own ways. My father turns to Upanishads. Isabel turns to the Bible. Steven Hawking turns to Science. Eric Von Daniken turns to alienology. Spencer Wells turns to our DNAs and genomes. Yet, our quests seem to be unending…like the white clouds that keep adrift on vibrant blue skies all over the world. And we will continue probing for answers as will the outer space probes that reach out to places untouched by us earthlings…among the star-studded galaxies.