We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (11 page)

“Purja!” exclaimed Riya.

“Why are you surprised?”

“Hmm, my mother just asked me to go to Purja as well! She wanted to me to revisit our ancestral home, and meet some old family friends.”

“Okay, that’s settled then. That’s fantastic. If you know someone from Purja, it’ll make all the difference. I’ve had three projects die because I didn’t have the right introductions. See if Bahsa can go with you. I don’t want you to travel there alone. Purja has always been a bit radical against Krashigar, ever since pre-independence times, and I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

“But I am not Krashigari…”

“Yes, yes,
I
know that, and
you
know that, and I’m just being cautious, you see?”

Riya bit back a retort, and had to be content with merely glaring at Dr Gudi when he turned his back.

Purja was a surprise. Riya expected a small backwater village, but she didn’t expect the calm that comes with being surrounded by backwaters and
Sugarpa
farms. The fields were shiny green, and the deep silence of the fields was broken only by insects buzzing and birds chirping. Time slowed, her breathing slowed, and Riya felt the endless chatter in her mind slow down as well. It felt like she was returning home. Bahsa walked behind her, as they headed towards the village centre. There was a small stone engraving there, proclaiming that this was the origin of the freedom movement, a small act of disobedience from an unlikely hero that somehow caught the imagination of a hitherto hopeless people. The village itself looked as if not even a single house had so much as changed a single tile on the roof in all this time.

They stopped at a house to ask for directions to Paparta’s house, and found that they were expected. Riya’s mother had already sent word about their arrival. Paparta, a slight balding man clad in white, opened the door and ushered them sedately into a cool room. A shy kid brought a tray with glasses filled with juice of a fruit that Riya didn’t recognize. They sipped in silence, as Paparta spoke, “Welcome to Purja. You look so much like your mother that for a minute I thought I was seeing a vision. You look like her, you walk like her; it’s only when you talk that the illusion shatters.”

“Yes, I know my ThuLu is still not fluent,” Riya replied in a flat voice.

“And one cannot miss the Krashigari accent.”

“Yes, that too.”

“So, anyway, welcome. I know you have never been here, but you know that as a daughter of the
Vaarta
lineage, this is your ancestral home. This very house is where your mother was born, and it remains in her name. We still hope that she will return and take it back, but those hopes are already dim. But we are very happy that her daughter has come back. You are after all a
Sumuka
-
Vaarta
.”

“Thank you,” said Riya as they lapsed back into the distinctly uncomfortable silence. “People here seem to speak in spurts,” she whispered to Bahsa. They listened to the sounds of the wind and the birds intermixed with the dull sound of a persistent argument somewhere in the background.

Paparta continued, “Your mother says you are studying here?”

“Yes, I’m here on a research project. It’s about the ship,” said Riya and she pointed upwards.

“Oh, the ship.” Paparta sounded interested, despite himself.

“But it’s only vaguely related. Actually, that was another thing that I was hoping you could help us with,” and Riya nodded to Bahsa. Bahsa explained that they were looking for Thuri people who still tattooed their faces in the old way.

At that Paparta’s face turned into a mask. He said, “Why do you want them?”

Riya explained that her project was to study the patterns of the tattoos.

Paparta seemed unconvinced, but all he said was, “You might know that the practice almost died out, but your professor is right: there are still some people left. My cousin knows some Thuris. I will ask him to take you to them.”

And after some more interminable minutes of silence, Paparta nodded to a small man who was hovering near the wall, and he brought out a trunk. “This is all your mother left behind. How will you take it?’, he said.

“Oh, we brought a vehicle,” replied Riya.

Paparta ordered the man to put the trunk in the vehicle, but they could tell that he didn’t want to give that order. He watched the trunk leave the house, followed it to the vehicle, and supervised the loading himself. Riya realized with a start that there were lots of people watching her, the neighbours had all come out to stare at her. The man who loaded the trunk introduced himself as the “cousin” and he led them to one corner of the village.

“This is where Shavo, one of the Thuris, lives,” he said. “He is very friendly, he will be able to help you in your research.”

Shavo turned out to be very helpful indeed, and the next few weeks flew by in a blitz of work. Documenting the tattoos, copying the patterns, hearing their stories, all these things kept them busy from morning to night. They made frequent trips to the outskirts, and even to a few neighbouring villages, because the tattooed Thuris had spread across the country. Eventually, there were no more new tattoo patterns, and for the first time Riya felt the satisfaction of a field season coming to an end. From now on it would all be a matter of analysis and writing, but at least that would be under her control.

The code was tedious. She had to sift through and schematize the tattoos, hundreds of distinct patterns. Some tattoos were composed of multiple parts, and the code not only had to analyse them as a whole but also consider the parts. Riya had to do a substantial amount of verification to make sure that what the computer said was different was actually different. She hardly left her office these days, and only returned to her house late at night. Her only breaks were when Bahsa invited—well, blackmailed her to go visit him, saying that his daughters missed her and that they always kept asking for her.

On one such dinner visit, the conversation turned to their trip to Purja. Bahsa had never been there before and he was especially pleased to have been able to go to the heartland of the
Vaartas
given their longstanding role in the history of the island. He asked Riya if she’d opened the box yet, and Riya replied with a start.

“Oh no! I just put it in a guest room and forgot about it. My mother will be so mad at me.”

“It’s probably old clothes, don’t worry,” teased Bahsa.

“Yes, old heirloom, out-of-fashion clothes, all moth-eaten.”

“Paparta really didn’t want to give you the box; did you notice that? It was like he
had
to give it to you.”

“I saw that. I just assumed it was because I’m half Krashigari. I always seem to generate weird responses in people.”

“No, I don’t think it was that. I think he was obliged to give it to you, because of your mother. But he didn’t want to lose custody of it.”

“That’s odd.”

“It must be treasure,” they said simultaneously and laughed out aloud, startling the twins who were watching a movie.

GavaNi came in then with some more snacks, and though Riya protested, she was also glad to eat them. They then settled down on the balcony overlooking the river of traffic.

GavaNi said, “So how is your project coming along? We hardly see you these days. Dr Gudi should give you a holiday.”

They smiled, knowing how much Dr Gudi enjoyed giving time off to his students.

“I think I’m close to the end. The coding is mostly done, and basically I see the light at the end of the tunnel. It won’t be sensational, but it is very satisfying to finally document such a little-studied practice from ThuLadvipa. It’s a bit funny that I ended up using my own heritage to get some progress on my project.”

GavaNi said, “But no, it’s not that strange. The
Thuris
and the
Vaartas
were one sect for a very long time, but after the teachings of Dapasya, the sect split into two. The
Vaartas
were followers of Dapasya but the
Thuris
rejected his ideas. Sometime during the Krashigari rule, everybody started hiding the old ways, and the tattoos were a lot harder to hide so they became really unpopular, and easy targets as well for Krashigari enforcers. Even now, the ones who are tattooed are from the really old lineages.

“Oh, I didn’t know that.”

“I don’t envy you. Just keeping track of all these sects is a pain,” said Bahsa.

A few weeks later, Riya presented her results to Dr Gudi. As the obvious conclusion appeared, he grew excited. He walked back and forth in the little room, rapidly twirling a pencil. Beads of sweat flowed down his bald head. “Riya, this data is fantastic. You have no idea how fantastic. This is a game changer. Do you realize what you have done? We will be famous. Not rich, but famous.”

Riya grinned. She’d already realized what the tattoos meant, and had spent several extra weeks checking and rechecking to make sure that her code was okay, and her hypothesis sound.

Dr Gudi continued, “It is obvious that the tattoos are some highly condensed version of the lost language of DevfaLa! It was never lost but hidden! The tattoos are a compressed representation of the language. Reminds me of DNA actually, the packing is so dense. Look at this one, and this one, it is as clear as could be. Did you find any overlaps?”

“Yes, there are some redundancies. Within a single family, for example. There are very strict rules. Brothers share a certain type of tattoo. And male offspring have the same as their father. There are oral records, now transcribed, that show unbroken lineages for hundreds of years.”

“This is the smoking gun, Riya. This is not only important from the point of view of DevfaLa, but also in my hypothesis that tattoos are precursors of language. I think that when Krashigar threatened total annihilation of the old ways, the people simply went back to an earlier ancient time when tattoos were a means of communication. Excellent work, Riya. Now let us recheck the data. It’s not that I doubt you or your work, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

Later that night, Riya went back to her house. She needed someone to join her in celebrating the discovery. Bahsa was visiting family on the other side of the island, and all her other colleagues were away on field work. She felt at a loss, and when she sat down, she remembered her mother’s box. Now that she had some time on her hands, she decided to open it.

The trunk was densely packed with items all wrapped in silk, everything in perfect condition. There were books and papers, photos and clothes (as she’d expected), small jewellery boxes and other items. At the bottom of the trunk, exquisitely wrapped in silken layers, were the original idols of the family
Vaarta
altar. Riya brought them out one by one and set them up on the table. The last package was a set of items used in the prayers and ceremonies. Riya closed her eyes and distant memories of these objects grew stronger in her mind, the feel, the touch, the smell. And then she saw the set of
bamsa
stamp seals.

She pulled out the
bamsa
wood and scraped it against the plate, adding a little water, till the paste came cleanly. She dipped the seal on the paste and then deliberately pressed it against the side of her forehead. The coolness of the metal. The paste itself. All those submerged memories. She looked at herself in the mirror opposite… and saw for the first time the patterns that were left behind on her forehead, like temporary tattoos. Tattoos. She hurriedly, with increasing impatience, dipped the seals one by one in the
bamsa
paste and pressed them against her skin. The dots and the lines, the swirls and the dashes. The patterns looked familiar. Suspiciously familiar. She remembered GavaNi saying that the
Thuris
and the
Vaartas
were historically connected. And if the
Thuri
tattoos hid the DevfaLa language in one way, then the
Vaartas
must have hidden it as well, but in another way. The seals had been passed down from generation to generation; fossilized within the tradition, surviving secretly during the occupation by Krashigar.

Many months later the paper was published to great fanfare. Dr Gudi was attending a conference in the capital, and no doubt being fêted by all the government for “his” remarkable discovery. After the news got out, the priests were really angry, claiming that they had known it all along and that Dr Gudi was betraying his country by exposing a secret tradition to the outsiders. Research was still a Krashigari custom to the priests. Riya also got a fair bit of attention, her story made her irresistible to the journalists, and there were a few profiles of her.

Riya had invited Bahsa and his family to her house. GavaNi had outdone herself, and had brought a series of steaming rich dishes. The twins wandered around oohing and aahing at the stuff that Riya had accumulated during her stay and had propped up on the bookshelves. After dinner, they sat sipping hot wine and reminiscing about the project, and about the future and what Riya would do once she’d received her degree.

Bahsa asked her, “Do you think you will stay here?”

Riya said, “I don’t know. I’ve learnt a lot about life here, largely due to you and GavaNi, but… I miss Krashigar as well. I grew up there, and even though I always felt more like I belong here when I was there, now I feel the other way. I’m stuck between the two worlds.”

“You need to find a project that needs you to be here half the year and there the other half.”

“YES! That would be the best. But seriously, I need to stay there for a while and figure out what to do next. I thought coming here would clear my head, especially with respect to my identity, find some sense of belonging. And yes, I found that, to a certain extent… but nothing is clear. Now, I feel neither here nor there.”

GavaNi said, “No, no, that’s not the way to think about it. You are neither here nor there, but that’s because you’re the bridge. The bridge between Krashigar and ThuLadvipa, the past and the present.”

“That’s very nice of you to say…”