I saw myself falling again toward a pale sun, surrounded by demonlike wraiths that stretched long fingers toward me. “This is who you are,” Rahul Moghe whispered. His hands raked my bare chest. As I bit back a cry of pain, I perceived it—his mind, opening before me like sunrise on a new world. I saw the power, the beauty, the ruthlessness of him—the mountain ranges, the sheer cliffs, vast Escher-like vistas. He was letting me into his soul.
And I turned to him, reaching out exploring arms toward this stupendous geography. As we lay entwined, he changed beside me—his skin paled, then darkened; his hair changed colors like a kaleidoscope. Arms and breasts and thighs moved against my skin—I had a glimpse of a great, hungry creature, all orifices and phalluses—and as I joined with him, I could no longer tell body from mind. Then, just as our bizarre mating reached its climax, he tore into me, tasting and feeding, ripping and slicing.
When eons later I opened my eyes, I was weak but able to think. Rahul Moghe lay beside me, asleep, one arm flung over my chest. Afternoon light filtered through the green plastic curtains. My mind felt as though it had been shredded and trampled on. To my horror I saw that the covers over my chest were stained with blood. Warily I groped about in my mind for him, but he was gone. Slowly and carefully I put myself back together, like an injured animal licking its wounds.
Just then I saw the door open halfway. An olive-skinned woman stood there, holding a pile of clean sheets, her mouth open. She backed out and shut the door behind her. Had I dreamed her? And if not, why had I not felt her mind? Why had Rahul Moghe not stirred, not known she was there? It came to me that she was a blank, one of those whose minds were inaccessible to me. And to him, also, I realized.
I must have fallen into exhausted slumber, because when I woke again the room was dark and the phone was ringing. Moghe stirred beside me, cursed, and turned on the lamp. He grabbed the phone and spoke into it for a few minutes in Hindi. His mind was quivering with excitement.
“Another of our kind has been found,” he told me. “You are too weak to travel with me. I must leave you for a few days. Do not think of betraying me. A man in the hotel who is my servant will look after you.”
When I found my voice it was barely a whisper.
“Where … ?”
“Bangkok,” he said.
I fell asleep again and woke some time later to find a strange dark-haired older man in the room, dressed in the hotel livery of white and green. His mind was like a cowering animal. “This is Odylio,” Moghe said. “He will feed you and check on you. Perhaps without me you will recover faster.” He leaned toward me, and for a moment I saw the mouths of the demons that plagued my sleep. “Wait for me, Arun,” he whispered, and then he was gone.
That night Odylio fed me soup. He did not try to talk to me. I was too weak to play any tricks with his mind; besides which, I suspected that whatever Rahul Moghe had done to this man could not be reversed by my poor skill. In Moghe’s absence my mind slowly cleared; I began to think of escape, although it seemed impossible. Perhaps the soup had some drug in it—I was still unnaturally weak. I lay helpless, sensing the minds of people passing by outside the door, but I could not even cry out.
Then, next morning after breakfast, the olive-skinned cleaning woman opened the door. She was holding a pile of towels. She gave me a nervous look and began to back out. I raised my hand weakly from the bed. “Help me!” I croaked.
She came slowly into the room, her eyes wide. She looked at me and said something I could not understand. She set the towels down, picked up the phone, and began speaking breathlessly in what I realized must be Portuguese.
I had avoided and feared blanks all my life; the irony of being rescued by one was not lost on me. I was taken to hospital by the police; lying there with the IV in my arm, I closed my eyes to stop the tears of relief and gratitude and to remember the face of my deliverer.
The police did not believe my story. Although I did not think there was much point in telling them the truth—mere forces of law and order could hardly contain a person such as Rahul Moghe—I was too weak to invent something more plausible. The hotel receptionist had said very clearly that the person who had checked in and taken the key of Room 323 was a young white woman called Marie Grenier from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nobody knew anything about an Indian man.
I never found out what, if anything, the Brazilian maid told the police, or whether they had believed her.
That night, I sat up in my hospital bed and detached the IV from my arm. I found my clothes folded neatly at the foot of the bed, and changed into them with some difficulty. There were bandages on my chest that hurt every time I moved. I dragged myself from corridor to corridor under garish fluorescent lights, choking on the antiseptic smell, until I came upon a side exit.
The cool night air revived my senses. With the last of my strength I found the nearest subway station, took a train journey that I can no longer remember, and went home to my apartment. I didn’t have any of my things with me—I had to find the manager, who was not amused at being woken at four in the morning. I fell onto my bed and slept until noon.
When I woke, my mind was mercifully my own. I was bruised and injured physically and mentally from my ordeal—I thought longingly of Sankaran’s healing presence—but at the same time I dared to hope that I would recover.
I resigned from my job, telling my colleagues I had found work in Florida. I withdrew my savings from my bank and rented a room in a ramshackle apartment complex in Cambridge. I requested an unlisted phone number, obtained a post office box under a different name, and immediately wrote Janani to let her know how to reach me.
If it had not been for Sankaran, I would have fled to the ends of the earth. I don’t think Moghe understood that. I believe that my subterfuge paid off because he expected me to leave Boston, to run before him as I had done before. I would no longer run.
Within a few weeks, I found a job working with a medical company as a lowly computer technician. It paid enough to keep me alive, and to maintain my car. Now assured of a livelihood and a roof over my head, I could no longer avoid thinking about my ordeal with Rahul Moghe and what it implied about my past. Janani’s last parcel, which came a few days after my new job started, confirmed that I had not dreamed up the events in that hotel room.
The parcel contained the usual junk that Janani had sent me over the years, bits of broken metal and shards of ceramic, some with drawings and etchings on them. There was also a letter.
I read it. I looked at the contents of the parcel that I had piled on the bed. I read the letter again. I remembered Rahul Moghe whispering impossible things into my ear.
“Alien, alien, alien,” he had said. “You and I owe our allegiance to a different star.”
I looked at the strange objects on the bed. Whether I wanted them to or not, they began to make sense. The ceramic pieces, burnt black on one side, red on the other. The strange etchings, the pointillist ones in particular, one of them showing me a pattern I had seen before, not only on Sankaran’s computer but also in my fevered dreams: the constellation Sapt-Rishi as seen from Earth. Then the pictures Janani had taken, of the boys so like me—they were all me, I realized, at various stages of formation.
I could no longer avoid the truth of my origin. I sat on my bed, watching night fall, shadows moving out from the corners of the room to fill it with darkness. Headlight beams swept across the curtained window, and through the thin walls I could hear my neighbors having an argument about laundry.
I laughed hysterically. After a while I started to cough, so I got up, turned on the light, and got a drink of water. Looking out of the grimy window at the busy street in front of my apartment complex, I had an impulse to cry.
Instead I went to the local pub and drank myself stupid. I told the bartender I was an alien. He gave me a sad look from beneath long, dark eyelashes and went on polishing glasses. “You won’t believe how many people tell me that,” he said. This set me off laughing again, until I wa
s weeping large tears onto the bar. I don’t remember how I got home. I slept like a dead person until late the next afternoon.
When I woke I had a headache the size of Antarctica; I staggered into the shower with my clothes on. Under the cold water some of my reason returned. I stripped, looking down at my all-too-human body. I thought about the notion that Janani was as much my murderer as my progenitor. She had burned me, Moghe had said. I understood now that I was stuck with this body, this gender, because of that. Unlike him, I could no longer change form; nor could I tell friend from foe. “Damn them all, Moghe and Janani and all,” I told myself.
I spent two days in this insane state, staring at the things on my bed, rereading Janani’s letter. Rahul Moghe appeared in my dreams, and sometimes I would wake terrified, feeling as though I was still his prisoner, that my escape had only been a trick of the mind. Then, slowly, sanity would return.
On the third day, a colleague, Rick, called from work to ask why I had not come in. I stammered something about being sick. Rick commiserated and asked when I could come in. They were having a problem with the computer system.
So the world pulled me back. I spent the next few days working out and fixing the glitch. Having to focus helped me a great deal. When two other technicians took me out for pizza after it was all done, I saw myself in the mirrors that ran along two walls of the restaurant. There I was, a skinny Indian guy with stubble on my chin and pizza sauce at the corners of my mouth, grinning and guzzling like everyone else. Rick’s people had immigrated here three generations ago from Holland. Aichiro was a second-generation Japanese immigrant. So what if I’d come from a farther shore than anyone else? This was Boston, one of the great melting pots of the world, where nearly everyone was a stranger. My two colleagues were both married, and I, too, had someone I loved, someone to wait for. The revelation about my true identity seemed, all of a sudden, irrelevant.
As soon as I could take leave from my job, I booked a flight to India. It was too late to attend Sankaran’s wedding. Much as I wanted to see him, I felt this wasn’t the right time. As for Janani, I had no idea what I would say to her, but she owed me some answers. I also had to admit to a growing worry about her silence. Why had she not written to me? What had happened to her in Thailand? Surely it could not be a coincidence that she and Moghe had been headed to the same place?
I did not know how much I had missed being in India until I was in Delhi, taking in great lungfuls of warm air that smelled of car exhaust, roasting corncobs, and 11 million people. From the Inter State Bus Terminus I took a night bus to Rishikesh, traveling with a group of elderly pilgrims who took pity on me and shared their dinner of parathas and pickled mangoes. As dawn came I woke from uneasy slumber to find myself breathing in the scent of the Himalayas.
It took the auto-rickshaw man only about ten minutes to locate the address I gave him. He piloted his little vehicle through narrow, twisting streets, past amiable gatherings of cows, goats, and people to a small row of shops. Their shutters were still down, and the shopkeepers were bustling about in front of their shops, putting up the cots they had slept in. At last I came to the place Janani had lived in for the past ten years.
I searched for her with my mind, but she was not there. A handsome, middle-aged woman in a blue cotton sari was raising the shutters. She was chewing on a neem twig. Every few seconds she would rub her teeth with the twig and spit in a corner in front of the shop. (I remembered, with a pang, Janani teaching me how to brush my teeth in just this manner.) Behind the woman I could see two large, old-fashioned sewing machines and a number of finished clothes on racks. An array of grimy bottles stood on a shelf—Janani’s herbal concoctions. I smelled the familiar aroma of tulsi. Heeng. Dried amla.
I put my palms together. “Namaste,” I said. “My name is Arun. I am looking for Janani-behn. Are you Rinu Devi?”
Her eyes widened; the neem twig fell from her mouth. Her mind was quivering, tense. I found her reaction puzzling.
“Janani is not here,” she said with outward composure. “She has moved to foreign lands.”
“I know she went to Thailand,” I said, coming into the shop. I was aware of a curious urchin or two hanging about, listening. The woman’s mind was bristling with fear and dislike.
“I am just a friend,” Rinu Devi said, sounding placating. She gave me a wary look. “Janani’s helped me run my shop these past few years. Then recently she met someone and got married and went to Thailand.”
She was lying. I looked outside. It was still early, and only a slow car or sleepy bullock cart went by. The urchins had gone back to their business for the moment.
“Look, Rinu-ji,” I said. “I could be nice and spend the next two days trying to persuade you to tell me the truth. Or I could mess with your mind. Janani must have told you what kind of monster I am.”
She gave me a look of loathing.
“If you must know, Janani went to a place near Bangkok, I don’t remember the name, because she heard that one of your kind had landed there. Someone new. She went to organize a burning. It’s been nearly a month and she has not been back. How can I say what happened to her?”
“Did she leave any message, any note?”
“No. She wasn’t one to confide in me about these things. She told me just this: that she might not return. She expected danger.” Rinu Devi’s mind was calmer now. She was feeling more confident. Yet under the façade I sensed strong emotion.
“That’s all she told you? Why didn’t she confide in you?”
“She knew I don’t like her involvement in the network. I’ve never understood why she wouldn’t just want to kill the aliens instead of … of changing them. We … we had disagreements.”
I took a deep breath.
“What network?”
She raised her eyebrows in mock astonishment.
“Oh, she didn’t tell you? There are other people like her who can sense the aliens. Whenever they hear of an unusual event—like reports of strange lights in the sky—they go to that place. If they find one of your kind, they burn them to take away their power. What’s left is like an empty gourd.”
“Where is this network? Where are the other people like me?”
She curled her lip. Her mind trembled with spite.
“Mostly in mental hospitals,” she said. “Or wandering the streets, begging, I don’t know. Janani didn’t go far enough with you—she said you called out to her, as your old self died. She pulled you out of the fire too early.”
I sensed it then: my ghost self. It stood at the edge of my consciousness, a limb raised, as though to beckon. But I am dead, I thought. I am dead.
Into the silence between us came the sounds of shutters being opened, a cot being dragged across the ground. Mingled with the smell of Janani’s herbs was the pungent scent of pine. Away and below us the great Ganga rushed frothing toward the plains.
When I spoke, my voice was barely a whisper.
“But why … why do they do this to us?”
I already knew the answer. In her last letter Janani had said that they had to burn me to save me, to make me human. Rahul Moghe had escaped this ordeal by fire, she wrote, and look how dangerous he was. But apart from him, she had said nothing about others like me or about a network. Perhaps my species was indeed hostile to humankind. And yet … what if that was not the case with every individual? What if some of us were different? What right did Janani and her network have to deny us the chance to be who we were?
“You really don’t know much, do you?” said Rinu. Her tone had lost some of its bite. “You are alien—enemy. You want to subdue us, enslave us!”
“But—,” I began.
She waved an impatient hand. “I can’t answer your questions. I don’t know who these network people are. I just wanted her to leave the whole thing, to have a life with me … .”
Her eyes filled with tears. I sensed her mind turning over, like a cat turns on its back, exposing the belly. Here she was, vulnerable, all p
retense lost. Her hatred of me was not gone but contained, as water is by a dam.
“Did you love her?” I asked.
She wiped her eyes with the free end of her sari.
“How could I not? We were friends as girls.” She hesitated, looked at me with defiance, chewing the end of her neem twig with strong white teeth. “We began like sisters, but then we fell in love. She left me to work for the network. When she came back here after years, I thought … I thought …”
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 60