Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  “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. Yes, 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?

  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 moth
er’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 was 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 think 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 p
ublish 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. Still, 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.