by Lavie Tidhar
I started walking.
The forest grew thicker with mean clusters of trees. I wended my way, brushing the branches apart, depending on my predecessor’s memories. Once, I spotted eyes peering at me; I drew on the hope that Vaidehi often frequented the forest as a child, and so there would be no wild beasts here. I would be safe.
I reached the cave before dark, glad, almost, for the cold stone to sit on. The implant initiated the daily transmission. I added to it a request for an audience with Seniormost the next morning. I was exhausted. I stretched out on the hard floor. Sleep descended mercifully quickly.
§
“We reviewed your download,” Seniormost said as soon as she’d established contact. “You ignored the implant’s guidance several times.”
“I did my best,” I said, though I knew I could have tried harder if I’d set aside my ego.
“You don’t understand these dynamics. Using anti–pheromones on your husband and antagonizing him, really! You know story–tellers will twist your eviction to claim that Rama banished Sita because his subjects remained skeptical after the test.”
Frustration made me snap back. “If story–tellers decide what gets sung about, you should influence them. Get a wife to distract Tulsidas. Make him compose a Sitayana instead of Ramacharitramanas.”
Seniormost sighed. “Child, calm down.”
She did not understand the reality here, this bright woman running the tiny women–only country millennia away.
“Gender–imbalance is deeply ingrained already,” I said. “Both in men and women.”
“That’s why we need agents.”
“Then choose a different intervention fork. How about the Mahabharata era? Kunti and Draupadi didn’t get bullied. Radha held her own.”
“We can’t identify representative Mahabharata time–streams,” Seniormost said. “From the candidate historically–correlated episodes, Ramayana offers the maximum gender ‘inflexion’ points.”
“Did you know about the Navabharata agent?”
“No,” she said. “But that is part of the challenge. Now here’s what I want you to do today. Study the implant’s data and complete your integration. Don’t get discouraged. We’ll talk tomorrow.” She disconnected before I could quiz her about how long she’d take to find a proper replacement.
Seniormost was right about my need to study, though. I had gazillions of questions, and the fastest way to proceed was exploiting my implant. Discarding my reluctance, I collapsed my boundary with the implant and integrated the old Vaidehi’s memories into my own.
Then I was Kalpana, and I was Kavita, and I was Vaidehi, and it was evening by the time I recovered my balance and sense of orientation.
§
I was almost asleep on the dry grass apology of a mattress when I heard steps. Someone was approaching. I opened my eyes a peep. A woman stood at the cave entrance, and a shaft of moonlight fell on her face. Madhulika.
I sprang up and assumed a defense stance. Crouched, ready to spring, I asked, “How did you find me?”
“I came to warn you,” she said, pulling her shawl tighter around her. “My coordinator knows your location. He may try to harm you.”
I had no reason to trust her. “Explain.”
“I asked him about you last evening. You see, we have been told things about Ambapur women.” Madhulika peered at me, as if deciding what to tell me. “You are supposed to be ugly and malformed, and incapable of womanly emotions like love because you women are genetic freaks and clones who pleasure each other instead of men, and oppose the natural order of humanity to the extent of using intelligence to compete with men instead of supporting and serving them. But you showed sympathy to me, as did the Vaidehi before you, so I began to have doubts.”
“You don’t look the way I expected a Navabharata woman to look, either,” I conceded, marveling that we were discussing the future while living a past supposed to change it. I stayed crouched as I spoke, though. Madhulika’s presence here could be a Navabharata trick.
She nodded. “My coordinator laughed and said your predecessor died because he sabotaged her fireproofing by jamming some signal. He’s the washerman who taunted your husband for the fire test. He claimed you were now hiding in a cave in the forest and he knew your location by tapping your sync signals. He downloads all data you transmit.”
My stomach felt heavy, like a weight had sunk in it.
“Till yesterday,” Madhulika continued, “I believed that I must be a role model — an ideal women who complemented men in accordance with our basic nature, our true gender role. Last night, when I realized that what I’d learned about Ambapur women was exaggerated, I wondered whether I’d also been fooled about other things.”
Ditto here.
“So, I came here,” she added.
“Well,” I said. “Right.” I lowered the stone.
She sat down. She looked very tired. The walk here must have been exhausting for her, given her advanced pregnancy.
“What’s your plan?” she asked.
Her mission was to nudge history in the opposite direction. I said nothing.
“Who is your coordinator?” she asked.
I kept my lips pressed tight. I wasn’t willing to expose myself yet.
“My coordinator may try to kill you,” she said. “He tried to kill me.”
“Kill you? Why?” I stared at her.
“When he realized I was rethinking this whole Ambapur–women–are–abominations business, he got very agitated. He threatened me. He even kicked me. But I shouted out, as if I had just spotted some thieves, and he slunk away.”
Even across the years, I remember Madhulika’s grimace at that memory, her closing her eyes for an instant.
She sighed then, a tired sigh. “That’s when I decided to leave home. I don’t want to live in fear of my coordinator. My husband means nothing to me; I lived with him only because of my mission. But I don’t want to bring up my child in a place like that. I am so confused.”
She tilted her neck back and looked at me. I didn’t know what to say — we were opposites, weren’t we?
I stuck to practicalities. “He’ll trace you using your sync button.”
“No.” She removed her shawl.
The wound was obvious despite the thick slathering of herbal paste. The right breast was tattered where the sync button was gouged out, and rags of torn skin hung from it.
I shuddered.
“I threw the button down the river. I also threw in blood–smeared clothes. They will drift back to the shore downriver, and people will assume I fell in the water.”
Night owls cried raucously, crickets chirped. I spread the grass thinner to make another place. Moonbeams lent silver highlights to her night–dark hair.
“Sleep,” I told her. “We can talk tomorrow.”
After a while, her gentle snores filled the night. But I could not sleep.
The Navabharata coordinator could locate me. He was accessing my messages to Seniormost. Yet I needed to tell her about this development.
After much thought, I encrypted my message using a code based on the Ambapur literature not available outside our country. The agent would know where I was, but would not be able to decipher my message.
Seniormost’s encrypted message came back fast enough, but brought no cheer.
You cannot switch off the sync signals, I decoded. The device sends out signals every few hours, whether or not you transmit a message, but you cannot control that. You will have to mislead the Men’s agent.
I pondered the information while staring at the culprit wart. It seemed to me that our country’s approach of Futurist agents changing past gender forks was doomed to fail. Navabharata, a country several hundred times larger, was flush with resources. If they wanted, they could send multiple agents to hunt down and sabotage every Ambapur agent. They could flush every gender fork with required role models. They could keep the past favorable, because a favorable past had made them rich enough to
manipulate the past — historical inertia closed the loop.
They could kill me.
As soon as it was dawn, despite the risk of being traced, I initiated contact with Seniormost. She had probably expected it, because she was present in the control room.
Again, I used encryption. As I completed my explanation, my voice broke. “They will destroy me if I stay here.”
“Just hold on tight, Kalpana. The tech team is working to find a solution. Give them time.”
And live under such hostile conditions in this primitive world? “You are only thinking of the mission,” I said, my tension too sharp to hide. “So what if it fails? It’ll just be status quo, it’s not like you will die.”
“No, we will not die if the mission fails,” Seniormost said, her voice low. “It was our fault we sent you without training. We did not explain things.”
“Trained or not, at least credit me for finding out valuable information,” I snapped. “And send a trained replacement for me.”
“We’ll talk about that later,” she said. “We are considering alternatives to keep the Navabharata agents at bay. I will call you back by evening.” Seniormost broke contact.
I was very restless after talking to her. Why weren’t they finding a replacement and recalling me? Then it struck me — maybe recall was not possible. Maybe that was why we never met agents, because sending an agent was a one–way trip, and this was a secret. Seniormost had been evasive about replacements when I had asked. We may not have the tech for it. Or maybe it was impossible to travel to the future, which is what my present was when I was in the past.
Maybe I was stuck in this primitive world, homeless, and being tracked by the Men’s agent.
I fought my panic and went through every sentence Seniormost had uttered, looking for information I might have missed earlier.
Like that part when Seniormost had looked sad and said, No, we will not die if the mission fails. Almost as if proposing a corollary: the mission’s success meant their death.
The thought stunned me.
In the rush of the past few days, I’d not thought about anything other than survival and fitting a role. Not pondered the concept of how changing the past affected the future, for example. Which future did it change? Were these alternate realities, parallel worlds, or just one world? If these were alternate worlds, why bother to change a different world? And if this was one world, and if the past changed, agents could alter history so that India continued as a jumble of cultures and conflicts and did not splinter into Ambapur and the right–wing Hindu Navabharata, and other nondescript smaller countries. Where would that leave my Ambapur and all of us who peopled it? Were Ambapur agents knowingly working on missions they would not return from, missions designed to kill our own country, like suicide bombers and jehadis a few centuries ago? No wonder I failed the psych profile; I lacked such suicidal conviction.
The moon was but a pale sphere barely visible in the dawn sky, and I remember seeking it out and staring at it, remembering how very far Mother was. I had looked at the wart, my link to my world, and also my betrayer. I looked at Madhulika, who was possibly not the enemy I had assumed her to be. Maybe no one was an enemy.
I was tempted to plunge into action that would make me safe. Attack the washerman, kill him. But Navabharata could send more agents and coordinators; it was a large country with plenty of resources. I would be safer if they thought me dead.
After peeping into the cave to make sure Madhulika was still sleeping, I walked to a rock overhanging the river. I removed my necklace with its miniature toolkit, and snapped it open to expose a tiny cutting blade. I prayed for strength, knowing that I was about to close the doors to my past, my people, my support. Then I began working out the wart from my forearm. Lucky for me that they’d not performed the binder operation.
§
Our journey upriver exhausted Madhulika and induced premature labor. I used every bit of knowledge my implant held to try and save her. I may have succeeded in a normal pregnancy, but she was carrying twins. As she tried to smile at the feeble cries of her newborn daughters, I stroked her hand.
“You will improve,” I consoled her. “You have to bring up your daughters.”
Our interactions on our long walk upriver had been gentle and companionable. We had splashed our faces using water from the stream. Sometimes, I would notice a strawberry shrub and pluck the fruit, and Madhulika gathered it in a fold of her uttariya. Or she would spot a gourd growing on a creeper, and I would split it open with a sharp stone so that we could share the sweet, juicy pulp. We had not discussed our contrasting credos — I assumed we would have enough time later.
Now she was dying.
“Bring up my daughters, sister Vaidehi,” she whispered.
“I don’t know your way of thinking,” I said. “My world was different.”
“Do whatever seems right, sister.” Her life ebbed out.
§
In the initial days, I was often tired as I adjusted to the sudden role of nurturing the girls. A secluded cave formed our base. Using implant triggers, I induced my breasts to produce milk. Luckily, the forests abounded with fruit trees and berry shrubs. Chores filled my days — collecting water, finding fruits, cleaning the girls, feeding them. Yet as life acquired a rhythm, I found time to soak up the forest’s poetry, its flowers and animals and the sunlight–dappled wings of butterflies. Fire kept away beasts at night; I sometimes stayed up late, enjoying the texture of the night with the owls screeching, the soft descent of dew, the scent of the parijata that bloomed all night and carpeted the grass at dawn.
Sometimes, I looked at the moon and thought of Ambapur.
Years passed.
I often missed Madhulika. She held a key to a view that would have complimented and enriched mine, and now I had no way of learning it. I wondered which value to bring up her daughters with — mine, or what I knew of hers, or the values typically inculcated in women in this era.
I finally chose a mishmash, something not warped by politics and power games. My memories and imagined extensions emerged as lullabies sung to the girls. Over time, the isolated episodes formed a rich tapestry, till one day I realized I could well be a bard singing a Sitayana, not an Ambapur version, nor, indeed, a Navabharata version, but one where Sita was a fun–loving person, even naughty at times, and where she shared a playful and rich relationship with her husband.
The girls thought I was their mother; it was simpler that way. When they were old enough to travel, I led them by hand from village to village. I talked to village women about life and its problems, and enacted fragments of what could have been Sita’s story.
In one village my daughters, now twelve, chattered about twin boys they had met. “Their mother tells stories like yours.”
I felt a flutter inside me. “What are their names?”
“Luv,” said one girl.
“Kush,” said the other.
I could not speak for a few moments. That Sita really existed, that she had twin sons… Emotion clogged me, thick, heavy, and I tried to force myself into thinking rationally. Sita was not a single historical truth, I told myself, though I had no way of confirming this theory of the construction of mythology. This woman storyteller could well be an agent of Ambapur or Navabharata.
Should I meet her? No, I thought, let me move away and continue my Sitayana. The world allowed hundreds of versions.
I busied myself all day, but that night, with no distraction possible, I found myself recalling Seniormost’s sad look during our last conversation. What had she thought when she lost contact with me? Did she think me dead? Or had she hoped I’d survived and assumed that, untrained though I was, I’d do what I could?
My gaze shifted to the moon. What remains fixed across time and space? What survives, what matters? Nothing, really. Yet one does what one should.
Forgive me if I succeed, Seniormost, I whispered. Forgive me if I fail.
§
Another new villa
ge, another day. We walk to the well, my girls and I, and women balancing water pitchers on their hips ask us, “Where are you from? Who are you?”
“I tell stories,” I say. “Would you trade lentil soup for entertainment?”
They nod.
By evening, women and children gather around the village center, where I wait for them with my daughters; some youths stand warily at a distance.
This is my life now, offering women stories that intrigue and stretch their world vision, yet fit within it. Listeners may wonder: did the story resonate because of its courage, hope, conflicts overcome? Should the mother–in–law have been meaner, the husband more righteous, the wife more chaste? Should the women in the story have laughed more, taken things more lightly? Could a woman rebel as the story claimed? Should she? Why not? Why?
“Once,” my story usually starts, “in a land not far from here, a king found an infant in a furrow, and he named her Sita.”
At this point, I pause to look at my audience.
I sometimes consider myself a vendor of silk to tapestry weavers. Listeners choose which threads they wish to weave into their own stories. They may chant them to insomniac children, use them to inspire or scold. Fragments of my tales will meander down generations. Of the tales sung by multitude of bards, which would live on to form the world?
My true story remains unsaid. I cannot speak of Ambapur or Navabharata, nor mention Seniormost, who may never exist in the new reality. I cannot tell my daughters about their real mother. Those would be anachronisms, threatening the fragile fabric that worlds rest on. Yet memories are slippery, and stories strung with their fragments more so, and I dread that when I am old, I will jumble up the past and the future with the present, sounding demented when I am being most truthful.
Then a voice usually pipes up, pulling me back to the reality I am creating.
“We have heard some versions of the Sita story before,” it says. “Tell us yours.”
And so I tell the story I think will fit.