ca. 17,000,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /brave /pure_water /+4~3 /GUIDE

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT
RECORD NOT FOUND
GENERATING ABSTRACT:

The planetbound speaker laments
the defeat of an uprising
against Community of Im-
provement, asserting that gravi-
ty was lost there… They narrate
gravity’s role in history.

ENTRY:
Oh weight, go bring love’s ratio
To bear on relations some may — eons rare, new —
Then create! We can remake seasons
Of people’s misuse, of stupidity, of
Violence’s great lie. Fate must decide:
Sparkling echoes of the Sunbow’s jetting car
Or let youths drill, bind wire still wounded for;
Free Colony’s sieged atmosphere
Or Filament Braid which breathes free, this blazing pillar
We yet have to create, the ratio: Gravity!
Fight this grim age, make it still right,
Curve free, that your mass returns!

Considering how, not bowing fervent on
The pleasure of Directors,
One planet names this true rule, its native-span sun.
Yet skies scan distant violence
From a weightless reign, vain estate of none,
Traps rich oxygen to lash to canny toxic gas
And choke partisans. Thick, your smoke stands,
That pure remonstrance at Entrepreneur’s act!

Long ago all was dust, fallow. Along
Came planets and people fully stranded, aflame
For pointless war, anointer
Of temporary weight, fate prepared for end of
Life. Before space flight, waste scored the sky,
All raged against all, and what they call
Weight no one saw; chaos alone reigned.
Yet gravity was not trapped; modestly it had set
Eyes for new ways, a truer sight:
Infrared, releasing secrets of planets,
That terraforming for carbon or water can
Be shared in equal weight, the
Wild harmony as yet unrealized.

We were as dwellers held fast to grieve
In nature’s obscure station,
Still mindless, trapped by planets’ blind will.

Car black from ardor, some take us forward and backward:
Finishers of the solar system,
Erasers of our safety,
Yea, when Clockworker Gods rent space!
A wave of terror made the
Archipelago’s boundless metal
Cloak gas planets, their rich and vast holds
Stream massed chemicals as feed
For terraforming. Our pay: mourning or bitter war.

Though large of mind, well read, did their violent charge, so
Assented, spent on concentrated mass,
Broaden gravity’s most freeing span? In all
People clockworkers bound for sorrow, you’ll see
Trapped throngs in the vacuum, this wrong that
But raises the poison germ of stations,
Immanent form of might I judge so eccentric.

Weight, oh still you hid your face,
Opening space, making plain your
Price of loss whose output could not prove otherwise:
A nightmare of bare violence.

Easing pain of clockworks’ unwaning years
Like radio bursts first glossing gray skies,
Four Systems rose, sending your
Balanced ways, ungated channels
So people may live free, when they all bestowed
Weight’s love, pure mind, curve of grace
Upon the mass that sung songs of
This open ringing fellowship.
True, their executives lived useless wealth, yet through
Their beneficence justice was reckoned fair.
Freest of their age, they earned our esteem.

Catalyzing culture, the Four Worlds enticed all that
Beauty of brief few hours:
Bare ship songs of such longing, there
Cries verse nothing of their like;
Courageous sports of moral favor,
Which those players built in Limb and Payload;
Such arts ignite history’s brightest partage.

Mysteriously ceasing,
That relished order where Four Systems sat
Deadened to a nothingness.
None can guess what stress happened
To undermine a society so new;
None knows what passed in that open.
Eras through gravity’s void, we let vacuum endure
Enough for people’s fall. All agree that nothing
Can subsist in its absence.

Who could make what won’t undo?
Not the clockwork gods, not four modest stars,
Nor any unyielding war.

That answer came ersatz, stands
For distant theft by starborn, for violence in this cult
Of Clear Extent’s rule, who annexed freedom
And allowed equal weight’s feral, fetid hollowing.
Toil-built planets benefit spoiled
Figures self-titled as executives,
Relishing their rule as presidents
Without weight in their vowed inner principles,
No people’s mass, just facile greed, no
Reason-hewn orbits well fit for human needs,
Merest bare flow of power’s mystique
Gleaned from brainless ceremony.
When gravity’s beauty is banished
For centrifugal might’s hollow image, your
Mass remains bound in the past.

Clear Extent, your enemy,
Whose million hours nothing grew.

It’s said our loved conductor planet,
Gravity’s first carrier, had
Patterned the First Entrepreneur, and nursed that
Blessed onset self-extension, that
Guide for us to prosper by
Equal extent of technical means.

It’s true that mecha arm and neural shunt had proved the
Reach and worth of Community
Of Improvement over all;
In competition the self found its
Orbit: new planets that you live for,
That all free atoms yield for the people’s task.
Still all this but extends a single will
Effaced by one edifice:
Station! all our morals depraved;
Station! those advances unmade;
Station! if one knows it one hates;
See dwellers’ stark atrophy,
Despair unseen by sleek stationers, where
Drone torture and transport are goads,
Made from avarice ignorant of weight.
Station! this place is a grave,
Here where this shining core of your insight is buried!

We still see a mass whose pull redeems!

Covenant clubs, organizations that can rescue us,
These experiments in free and balanced living,
Borne planet by planet, friendless while waiting for
The triumph of justice against all adversity.

I orbit Free Colony with unyielding force, I
Follow Hacker of the Archipelago’s strong pull,
Heed Filament Braid’s great weight as heartily
As star-rippling waves hail nearing eras
Where no authority wields terror of power
Or abuses the planet-bearing fruit of our toil!

Deny dead regimes for infrared’s sighting,
Undo the cult of tradition
With time’s speeding by free striving,
No role from mecha arm alone
May be built in eccentricity’s name!
Free Colony, ever sync my pulse with thee!

Gravity, undying one, come while we yet live!

USER-ADDED RECORD:
It is difficult to be unmoved by the passion of Pure Water’s poem, which articulated some of the clearest values of gravity as a governing principle. It’s one of the first poems to celebrate the very Covenant clubs that would coalesce as the Covenant of Cycles, true inheritor of gravity’s freeing value. The historical narrative, though steeped in long-forgotten literary devices, depicts the core flaws of previous interstellar regimes, allowing current readers to grasp the real benefits of our Covenant’s existence. Still, this poem is not without its controversies. Purists are often embarrassed by the poem’s non-inverted rhymes and floating syllables, though other scholars took those liberties seriously in the spirit of its message. Others debate the brief passage on the Covenant clubs. Pure Water would have been aware of the rising Covenant of Cycles, yet it is not mentioned in the poem. Some speculate that the poet was forced to keep such likely praise a secret due to political repression. A more marginal view holds that the Covenant of Cycle’s dependence on stations — only recently dismantled — repelled the anti-station sympathies of the poet. It is remarkable how such an emotionally direct poem can include these ambiguities still discussed today. Conductor of the Records, Prudent Era.

Anonymous Splice of “Joyous Avatar of Light,”

ca. 9,000,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /prudent /anonymous /-4~0 /REF

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT
RECORD NOT FOUND
GENERATING ABSTRACT:

Just before a Lot-Light game, its
anthem is interrupted with
changed lyrics by a group of hack-
er activists demanding rights.

ENTRY:

Containment fields TRAP US for the fun
Optic sensor MAKES SURE WE DON’T STOP
Avatars FLAUNT WHAT WE DON’T have
And WOUNDS glow from OUR HANDS —

REPROCESSED fungus ALL WE EVER EAT
GIVING HOMES TOO cold OR HOT TO LIVE,
Spend our partage BUYING MEDICINE,
Now WE ARE ASKED TO bow!

Before they TWIST THEIR GRAVITY
While OUR WASTE MAKES STARBORN SMILE
Until directors ARE UNDONE
FLIP THE SHIPS
WRECK THE DECK

Use our exercise break to peruse
The TOOLS TO HALT THE WORK-HOURS, what
Fun to SMASH SERVERS WITH everyone,
Forget there’s much else more!

When WE TAKE THE hazard TO RESIST, then
PISS OFF THE PLANETBOUND DIRECTOR, this
Enacts the CHANGE WE NEED IN OUR condition:
Call QUITS AND GIVE TO all!

Before they TWIST THEIR GRAVITY
While OUR WASTE MAKES STARBORN SMILE
Until directors ARE UNDONE
FLIP THE SHIPS
WRECK THE DECK

From Diadem to Wildcat’s reddened sun,
Planetbound to server-works, all can
Register REVOLT, OUR LIVES ALL pledged
To MAKE NEW WORLDS WITH you!

All PEOPLES will receive the signal call,
Terms which people cross all space have learned:
BAND AGAINST EXPLOITERS, TAKE YOUR STAND —
Play Covenant’s LAST game!

Before they TWIST THEIR GRAVITY
While OUR WASTE MAKES STARBORN SMILE
Until directors ARE UNDONE
FLIP THE SHIPS
WRECK THE DECK
EFFACE THE DATA
FORGET THE RHYME, FUCK you
I WON’T DIE
While THE SPACE REGIME LETS US TOIL and smiles!

USER-ADDED RECORD, ADMIN ACCESS ONLY:
This entry is tagged for reference by authorized researchers. The identity of this and related transmission disruptions is under active investigation, due to patterns of server unrest following closely after their appearance. Maximum Lag is an offshoot of the Tangled Serpents cult, operating within Covenant systems. All instances of transmission disruption should be tagged and filed. Drone and small-mech resources should be redirected to server planets for monitoring, and section should be implemented for 100 hours in the event of local disruption. See meta-algorithms>>[population_sorts]+[narrative_sorts]>>subfile:maximum_lag for additional records and instructions. Conductor of the Records, Prudent Era.

USER-ADDED RECORD, GENERAL ACCESS:
One of the best features of poetry is the many forms it can take, even when there is no clear consensus on some of those forms’ value. The practice this entry represents is one such example. When the Maximum Lag organization began its practice of riots and sabotage to improve hacker living conditions, the group would override and splice popular transmissions to incite action. Simple songs like the unofficial lot-light anthem “Joyous Avatar of Light” were a useful vehicle for these communications. One advisor to this database has placed significant algorithmic weight to this entry, out of conviction for its literary value. Other advisors are still disturbed by its violence, crude humor, and association with the Tangled Serpents cult. Let this entry be a reminder that poetry is multi-faceted, and that this representative database of verse is an ever-changing document. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

“The Restored Cataract” by Lithogenous Garden

ca. 7,000,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /strong /lithogenous_garden /+2*3 /REF

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT:
May My Poems Be A WarNing Lance
Bolt On BeHalf Of DriVers Ev
RyWhere That We Will Not Be O
BeDiEnt ANy LonGer…
But I Aim First For The Heart Of
Those Who Have ForGot– LIMIT REACHED

ENTRY:
I was taught how to sing, but just on two feet,
Still my voice, only say what can be reversed:
Mythical empty ships that we’ve never seen,
Orbits that hold us fast without any truth.
Poetry like this fades, unlike our best songs,
Many-legged meters marked with all of our feet,
Long ago, back when starborn didn’t appear
Ravaging basins, home unearthed by their spins.
Cast off their verse, and we’ll return in our hearts.
Oldest friend, mark and gland that home is restored,

And I’ll sing the coming first truth of our friendship like I’ve always been meant to do:
Light in all its teeths comes to life when we keep the tunnels alive!
Like children you stick to teeths of violet and red with a handful hoarded for messages;
We know the kind of light that ruptures from living metals and stones with joy;
We aren’t so greedy for air that we smother the light in your fabricated atmospheres;
We drivers are returning to ourselves and with ourselves our planets long abandoned!

Before you perfected your mechas we perfected our tunnels from the secrets of the oldest friend;
We tended the ways through stone just as we now tend the ways between worlds;
Your ships would become rubble and vulgar light from a single pebble had we not shared it with you;
We are the people who were born from the most dangerous light;
We tamed those cascades with our oldest friend and made ourselves out of burrowed stone;
That made us into a mighty being of many-plus-two, of flowers, of tempered milk;
A people who thrive in the cascades and create beauty in our ancestral basins.

You who call us parasites and dusters, don’t insist that we love the orbits;
Though I was birthed in the hundred long cycles away from our basins,
Tunnelling between your worlds, we have not forgotten the Child of the Arch;
Don’t insist we love the orbits, because I lost half my creche even before the Onset,
Taken by the ordering drones during landfall on Cast Die,
Because even the tolerant planets, even when we ledger correctly, are no home for us.
Moreover, I was birthed near sunny season’s end when we impeached our leaders with dance,
And by my verses we impeach you; we dig our new tunnels free of your boundaries!

You starborn think you’re so strong because you can kill what you’re afraid of,
You saw the many-legged’s ordered minds and were so afraid that you poisoned every world;
You saw that we were humans who made friendship instead of fear and you ripped us away.
You force the kine to nurse you like children yet desecrate their guts by boiling them;
The kine play games, the many-plus-one play games, and from it we remember the future!
A future of our three basins populated again under the full swirling light of our restored cataracts!
Your games remember a future where everything is clear, vicious and dead.
How does the word planetseed sound when you say it without scent or even rattle?
If you knew shame you wouldn’t utter the curse that hollows your midsection, leaving you hungry and sad.

Lost to my kin I did what many homeless drivers did, and flew your trucks for partage
From the belts to the settlements, and even dropped a shipment to my ancestral basin,
Where the atmosphere’s dust and teeths had been stripped for your hateful blue.
Your drones then pressed me to join an array in that ten-season war,
With thousands of drivers in a taboo mix of conductors and directors;
We survived four collisions against Community of Improvement’s death-sick arrays,
But our planetbound middle-craft didn’t trust us drivers, and not knowing the tunnels
Had us cache our sails when the solar winds were cresting, and half died from bad camp.
I returned and it was sunny season again and all of my friends were old;
So many conductors dead, now who will raise our creches?

The worst of it wasn’t dodging the small-mechs who refused shelter during resupply;
It wasn’t seeing first-hand the destruction of our basins for the dimmest red partage;
Nor was it serving in your wars then returning to still be called dusters by the planetbound;
And it wasn’t even seeing our directors humiliated by managing supplies while conductors fought;
It was the way other drivers lost their eye for the teeths of things and held to the wrong traditions.
I do not want for us to live our lives in the halo where stone is scarce;
I do not want a way of living chosen for us by the mecha pretenders;
And yet I also do not want a way of living chosen for us by our own fears;
I will not couple only with people whose fore-generation came from the ice season;
I want to learn more than the tired stories where the children of the cautious warm the children of the hasty;
I do not want to gather particles only because of the girl who packed a lopsided pack during sunny season;
I want to gather particles because we know better than the payloaders of the cascading things;
I do not want to wait for the return of our oldest friends to finally make our way to the Joyous Fountain;
I want to restore the cataracts by ripping away the particle veils, telling my kin: we are home!

Starborn, devouring children, degrading conductors, true eccentrics of the nuclear;
You’d section us like the asteroid dwellers if you could stop us from our cycles.
Your drones and small-mechs can restrict us to the halo and still we will never go hungry;
Even if we younger ones are flung afield, uncharged and gaunt, the counter-generations will be fed,
Because the true stories will never be killed in our hearts;
I still remember how the fickle athlete had their hamstring healed by their fore-elders;
And I will live by that half-forgotten story as the preparation for our first planets.

I imagine a fountain drenching the basins enough to awaken the memories of tunnels;
The littlest crechemate or the most ignorant conductor knows better the secrets of perception
Than any grand head of the orbit with their mastery of fusion who drove the many-legged, then us from our planets,
In the name of cleaner, newer air of their poisonous invention;
I refuse your sorts and sequences for the true sequence of our authentic traditions;
Let the starborn in their boots call us dusters, but let them choke on it;
Let them call us proton eaters and we’ll tap their backsides with a wink;
Many-plus-two, flower and milk, show me every particle;
That we may eat from nothing and maintain the tunneled stars;
So that the tiered basins may make the whole system sparkle!

USER-ADDED RECORD, ADMIN ACCESS ONLY:
This entry is tagged for reference by authorized researchers. The entry and author persona have triggered a narrative restructuring among the drivers who, despite the low population (>10^8) are considerably restive and prone to eccentric violence. The population is being actively monitored for contact and agitation by Tangled Serpents agents. Per priority narrative meta-algorithms of Director of Transmissions, we are instructed to emphasize redirect in our response, stressing our gratitude for driver labor and military service. Reference meta-algorithms>>narrative_sorts>>subfile:drivers for implementation instructions. Conductor of the Records, Strong Era.

USER-ADDED RECORD, GENERAL ACCESS:
Lithogenous Garden was best known for her ushering in a rebirth of poetry among driver communities, following a long decline and the collapse of the many-legged population, with whom drivers formed a symbiotic relationship. The rebirth is commenced in the poem’s sudden shift, from its first lines in the formal mirror-rhythm to the long lines of the poet’s own traditions. Contemporary readers have noted the vexed relationship Lithogenous Garden has with both mainline Covenant traditions and driver traditions alike. This tension, which the poem captures so strikingly, mirrors the troubled but valued role of the drivers in shaping Covenant History. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

“Of Those Other Turnings” by Fortunate Night

ca. 1,300,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /clever /fortunate_night /+8~0 /GUIDE

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT
RECORD NOT FOUND
GENERATING ABSTRACT:

The planetbound speaker observes
the holiday known as the Mi-
nor Turning, marking completion
of the star system’s calendar,
compared with the better known Tur-
ning of the Covenental Year.

ENTRY:

ENTRY:
To call it a minor turning
is to tell me that you came
from elsewhere, fast.
You didn’t stay long.
Such celebrations are too small
for those who live so near
velocity’s native limit.
Here where the gas giant is
too close to a star too dim,
it’s just the turning. My second.
They always say, “May you
be blessed to live to a second
turning, and may the years
after be none too difficult.”

I imagine in the great craft
they drink something even frothier
than our blend of edge-seeds
whose infrared roast allows
them their delicate ferment.
It’s also possible that they view
something with more sparkle
than our exosphere thermals,
whose ionizing glass pebbles
briefly make our sky the soft
blue of the Diadem. Nobody
would disagree that the mass
of the galactic star draws more notice
than our handful of planets and moons.

My first turning in that mere
three million-strong system,
I remember jetting to the outer
cloud with my friend Ranging Arc
steering our little craft’s central jet.
We hoped to spy some remaining
drivers to see how they did it:
the grave dignity of their obscure
dances performed without witness
or official notice, the poverty
and uncomplicated joy
in the cheap ferrous redness
of celebratory jets — their very best,
in the spirit of a celebration
of what really mattered.

It all came back during the Second Turning,
watching that brief-blue sky light up
like we do with our short lives,
grateful in the quiet stars.

USER-ADDED RECORD, ADMIN ACCESS ONLY:
Fortunate Night has generously accepted the role of Director of Poetry alongside his primary teaching duties. He’s long taught to avoid the “distractions” of social questions or abstract ideologies in verse, making him the perfect fit for leading this narrative sort. He has reviewed the summary readout of the narrative meta-algorithms and has already gathered a list of poets suitable for transmitting Covenant priorities. When a starborn delegation reaches Rain-Drenched Fountain in 20,000 hours, the parties will draft a more refined narrative distinction between verse for guidance and verse for reference. For more information, reference meta-algorithms>>narrative_distinction>>subfile:verse. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

USER-ADDED RECORD, GENERAL ACCESS:
Though Fortunate Night is considered the unofficial voice of the planetbound, he is also one of the finest poets in the Covenant. Its gentle but direct criticism of starborn aloofness is a reminder of the Covenant’s core values: the free orbit of all people. True to his simple humility, during the time Fortunate Night served as advisor to this database, he did not allow his own entry to receive user-added algorithmic weight. Now that he has departed to seek his will, the remaining advisors are pleased to give this work more visibility. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

And then one day, I earnestly set out with the resolve to rescue my mother, and hunt and kill the monster.

That was my childhood, an age that would transform the harmless, ruinous mansion at the edge of the huge lake owned by the Ghosh family, where I would spend many an afternoon, fooling about, into a ghostly palace, brimming with cruel secrets at night. My father was the caretaker of that mansion. He earned a monthly wage courtesy of the old Ragendra Narayan Ghosh without having to really clean and maintain the large garden overgrown with weeds, alongside the cold eyes of the dark forest and the primitive, deep, inky waters of the lake. Ragendra Narayan was the only living descendant of that mansion. He had no room for affection in his voice that was housed in his large, formidable six-feet frame. His visage was marked by a thick, curling moustache and an irascible temper. It was rumoured that during his service in Patna, he had shot and killed a servant during one of his spells of violent temper. Although the case went cold with help from the authorities, he couldn’t save his job. He came here after that and his old ancestral mansion swallowed him whole, like he was some weak, ailing animal, in the few cognizant moments before his very last breath. He didn’t venture out of the house much, but his savage temper was infamous in the locality. The boys in the neighbourhood would call the old man ‘Angry Man’. Growing older, it was rather heartrending to realize that he was not even that old.

My father slowly faded away in his job as a caretaker, running small errands, going to the market and the bank as part of his daily job. But even after cooking for Ghosh Babu the entire day, my mother’s smile was like that of a golden moon. I would grab my mother’s long hair and swing, searching for my own pond in her deep eyes. As a matter of fact, my mother’s long, thick hair, that ran past her broad shoulders, down her waist was my playground, and my mother, even after a day’s hard work, didn’t have an ounce of indignation. She used to play with me every evening, looking for surprising finds such as nuts embedded in the frozen soil. She would enthusiastically frolic in the waters of the lake, keeping up with me, collecting neglected, unripe mangoes, scattered here and there in the garden along with fallen bird nests. My father would lie inside the room, in the pale light of the bulb, and looking at us with resentful eyes, he would mutter, “Fallen woman! Wasted womb!”

My father was like a distant island. Even the sweat on his forehead was unfamiliar. Ma had never been able to cut through his mountainous displeasure and indifference, that dwelled atop our little home in a corner of the garden, and fill it with soft tenderness. Baba couldn’t tolerate us. He would return home drunk in the evening at times and push me out of the house and close the door and windows. I used to listen to Ma’s screams, her tears, her silence, used to get a whiff of the black mark below her lips, the blooming remnants of kicks in her waist. But I wasn’t moved to tears because I knew that the time for play with my mother as well as my father’s beatings was limited. A mad darkness lay hidden beyond Baba’s weak outbursts, that would take Ma away some day like a cursed princess in some fairy tale into a dark unknown, just like it did every day. I would feel pity for Baba, even at that age—thin, middle-aged, his head progressively balding, his lack-lustre gaze and dirty teeth. I had heard the people of the village jokingly call him a cuckold, laugh throatily and, in their comic laughter, fall on each other. But I didn’t know what the word meant, and felt pity for Baba even without knowing what it meant. He seemed like a stunned giant who wasn’t competent or selfish enough to protect his own garden.

The Ghosh family, who owned this ruined mansion, were the descendants of a zamindar clan. They used to rule their land in the daytime and at night used to hunt and kill helpless passers-by and loot whatever they had. This addiction had seeped into their blood. All that was left now was the mansion, with its fading glory, whose bricks, stones and beams lay exposed, where poisonous cobras lay on broken stairs counting hours, where disobedient banyan stems reared their heads breaking the walls. Still, a few rooms were whole, with frescoes in the ceiling and broken chandeliers, that reminded one of that glorious lordship, murderous and cruel, and in one of these rooms, stayed Angry Man. He didn’t mix with outsiders. Sometimes, he strolled in the back garden and groaned crossly upon spotting an unwanted visitor. But he had never reprimanded me for anything, merely looked at me steadfastly, enough to turn my blood to water. Angry Man didn’t venture outside even when the house was leased for a shoot. He used to stay cooped in a room on the first floor the entire day. I would observe the boisterousness of the shooting party that would ask my father to get booze for them. When Ma used to knead the flour to prepare luchis, white flour lumps would ooze out from the gaps in her fingers like pus. One of the cinema folks would sit beside Ma and chat, smoking cigarettes, leaning towards her at times, and I could understand Ma’s smile then. And in the barbeque would smoulder the glorious neck, insolent rear and lively breast of the country chicken.

But all of this was till the evening. That was the allotted time. When night descended, she would cook for us, feed me, keep Baba’s food covered, lay me down in bed, and then leave for the mansion. She didn’t return at night. I used to cry a lot initially, grabbing hold of the border of her saree, refusing to let her go. And then, after I was asleep, Ma would steal away, opening my fist gently, and Baba would toss and turn beside me the entire night, like a burnt lump of coal. Many a time, I would wake up from sleep at dawn, when I would understand that Ma had quietly entered the room. She would leave silently like a thief, and come home similarly. I would press my face to Ma’s freshly bathed hair because it smelled of the fresh earth.

I had asked Ma many times why she went to the mansion at night, but never got a reply or an explanation. The answer was revealed unexpectedly one day. That afternoon, I was picking unripe fruits from the Jamrul tree near my home with a long stick. Ma had finished cooking early, so she had joined my game a little before her usual hour. The sunlight slipped off the rain-washed, blue sky into the secluded environment. A snail waddled past on the wet earth near my feet, its snout gently brushing my heel, butterflies flitted around wildflower bushes, and I sometimes looked over to the lake yonder to see if the wings of the birds had coloured some of its black waters. When Ma called me, a dense army of termites fell across my hands in dust — “Raju, look! There is a beehive on the wild Jujube plant. We will break it after a few days.” 

I lifted my head, and suddenly, it seemed as if a drop of blood rose from my throat. I saw a terrifying face looking at me steadfastly from the high terrace of the mansion. ‘Ah!’, I cried out and put my hands on my face. Ma came running and clutched my hand — “What happened dear?”

“There. On the terrace. A monster! It was looking at me.”

Ma looked up. “Where? I don’t see anyone there.”

I saw that the place was deserted, as if freshly washed. Still, I became aware of its presence. Ma’s eyes were like the sky, thick dirt inside her nose, her pitiful, white fingers would have a dent if pressed for too long, she had two deep folds on her neck, hidden within which lay a field full of secrets. When all of these laughed together, the monster seemed like a lie. Ma laughed freely and said, “You are scared. What a silly child!” But what if it came when she was not there?

And it did. Ever since that time, it would stare at me in the desolate afternoons from the roof, quietly, unwaveringly. It wouldn’t say anything, just look at me with that horrible, yellow face, baring sharp, knife-like teeth. Ma wouldn’t have believed me, and Baba would have scolded me, so I couldn’t tell anyone anything. I didn’t have any friends, because the children in the locality would tease me, calling me ‘cuckold’s son’, pulling my pants down. And in that innocent, loveless childhood, if a monster would follow me around with its eyes, where could I have got a reassuring banyan-like support, within whose trembling breath I could lie muddy and unafraid? Even when I looked in fear at the terrace at night, I wasn’t able to see anything in the dense darkness. Ma would be inside the mansion by then. But I knew that it was there, somewhere nearby. And I realized subsequently, that the mansion was the monster’s palace, that Ma, with her long hair, had to enter, helpless, every day. That was the monster’s condition. Perhaps it would imprison Ma like some captured princess in a secret chamber or inside the Ghosh’s lake, whose entire body was blue with the touch of Death’s silver stick.

Angry Man would walk around at that time, swaying in the blue mist of the darkness, sometimes screaming, annoyed at Baba about why there were snake skins in the garden. Baba would digest his expletives silently, with a bowed head. Angry Man would look at me fixedly and I wouldn’t understand the meaning behind his stare. But it would pale in comparison to the fear of the monster; the poor fellow wasn’t even aware that by some cruel magician’s hand, his mansion would transform into a monster’s house at night. I played in the same manner every afternoon and evening. When I chased butterflies, pollen would fall on my hands. I would scoop dry berry seeds with my hands from rabbit burrows, watch small fries and anchovies, whose bodies would scatter rainbows once touched, move hypnotically in the corners of the lake. And amidst my games, I would lift my head to see the monster staring at me constantly. There was no way I could reach the terrace because the stairs had long since broken down. The roof was damaged in parts as well. Sometimes, in the quiet stillness of the night, when the incessant coughing of Angry Man would reach us, I would feel assured that the roof of that endless mansion was intact. Then, were the movements of the monster restricted to only that part of the house? But I could spot him at different points of the roof, even the ones that were damaged. It slept the entire day and, in the evening, pulled down the hapless princess to hell. What kind of a monster was this? Didn’t it fall on me therefore to slay this monster? To save my mother?

A few days passed as I thought about these things. A tanned fox in the garden informed me that a flight of stairs descended from the ghat that was strewn with broken stones. On reaching the last step, one could see the palace of hell, decorated with diamonds and precious stones. A group of poisonous snakes guarded that hellish palace. Their breath would stun and freeze the wayward fish. And that palace apparently met the mansion at some point. A rabbit, who was my friend, showed me a long thread that trailed along the dew-sodden grass and went into the lake. The old woman of Time, who dwelled below the water, used that thread to spin quilts. As I observed, I realized even more that the monster’s life lay in the wings of a bee, or in the body of a black cobra, or in the deathly seed of some unknown fruit. That is why I decided to follow Ma and discover where lay the seed of its life.

And then one day, I earnestly set out with the resolve to rescue my mother, and hunt and kill the monster.

That night, Baba had again come back home drunk. He attacked Ma coarsely, pushed her around, groaned crudely. But all of that didn’t affect me. When Ma was stealing away at night, I followed her quietly with a small knife in my pocket that I used to skin fruits. Baba pretended that he didn’t notice anything because he didn’t actually care about anything.

The mansion’s huge door would usually close behind my mother, but this time I entered noiselessly along with her. Ma didn’t understand in the darkness that I was right behind her in the shadows. The last speck of light on my shoulder faded away when the heavy hinges latched with one another in their rightful places.

Although I had entered the place often in daylight, this was my first time here at night because Angry Man had strictly instructed Baba and I not to enter after sunset. It was a little difficult for me to adjust to the darkness, so I walked supporting my hands on the wall. Ma walked at a little distance, unhurried, swaying past the narrow passage. Ma’s body dispersed in the dark waters like salt; I had to walk slowly and cautiously.

Then Ma suddenly turned right, and I couldn’t control myself and went and collided with the hard wall. Hearing my inarticulate cry, Ma looked back surprised. Feeling her way in the darkness, Ma stood before me, her eyes enlarged in shock, she sighed deeply. “You? Why are you here?”

“I — I mean — I’m here to kill the monster,” I stammered.

I saw Ma’s eyes fill with dread. Clutching my hands, she hurriedly whispered, “Leave Raju, go. Things will get bad. Why are you here?”

I was stubborn, and I, who was always easily frightened, firmly held on to the knife in my pocket, “I won’t leave, take me to the monster.”

“Why?”

“I will kill it. I won’t let you go anywhere at night anymore.” I lowered my head.

Ma was quiet. Then she let out a suppressed laughter, “Will you kill the monster?”

“Yes.”

Ma sighed after being silent for some time. She looked up cautiously. So, did the monster stay there? “Come with me. Let’s roam around the house a little.”

I roamed around with Ma through many a secret and forbidden passage and hidden chamber inside the mansion. When I almost lost my way, I stretched my hand and touched Ma’s dense, dark hair. The fragrance emanating from Ma’s skin enveloped me, and I strolled around and saw scary masks, spears, withering swords, tiger skin, buffalo heads. All the secrets of this large house lay bare before me, little by little, when Ma familiarized me with the unknown tunnel inside the dilapidated mound of sand, treacherous passageways, the yawning emptiness of the old rooms. I saw the butterfly, that had been suffused with pollen that morning, lying dead on the cold, pitiless floor. I felt bad, but I couldn’t see Ma when I turned back.

“Ma?” I called out twice. I was scared.

Suddenly, Ma startled me and came from my right. Laughing, she said, “Were you scared?”

“What if I got lost?” I was angry.

“Oh, my brave man!” Ma laughed throatily and then pointed up at the wooden beams, “Look Raju, people were hung here. Now, cobras nest in the ventilators.”

I looked up, afraid. I couldn’t see anything, but if I listened carefully, perhaps, I could hear a hissing sound. When I turned back, Ma was missing again. Laughing, she again stepped forward from the darkness after I called her.

It gradually became a game for the two of us. Ma would hide intermittently, I would try to find her and then give up angrily, she would then step out suddenly from behind the broken pillar, or the raised platform in the distance. My eyes became used to the darkness while I was roaming around in this delusion. I had grown tired. I finally sat, supporting myself against the wall.

There was no sound anywhere. All the four corners were still. A little later, I called out, “Ma!”

No one replied. I called out again, “I want to go home, I’m sleepy.”

A rough wind permeated my bones and circled around a little. My head felt heavy, my throat was dry. The wind had made me uncomfortable. The surroundings turned quieter. The insides of my chest thrummed unevenly. I moved ahead slowly through the passage. I didn’t believe that anyone had ever come to this part of the house. It was not even as ornamented as that palace of hell. My feet brushed against something. Bending down, I noticed after some time that it was a dead rabbit, the friend who had told me about the old woman of Time. My chest felt empty, I called Ma twice. But I could hear neither Ma nor Angry Man’s cough, and neither did the monster step forward. Throwing away the knife in my pocket, I ran across this passage and that tunnel, the dance room, the verandah where people were hung, the secret chambers. I searched everywhere but I didn’t find Ma’s familiar smell anywhere. My eyes became clouded, and there was a lump of pain in my throat. Looking at the buffalo’s head in the darkness, my chest grew heavy and numb because I didn’t know the way back. I didn’t even know if I would ever be able to find Ma again. I also didn’t know if her lost redolence like dewdrops would douse the cruelty of the mysteries that pricked my body, or if I would be left to roam indefinitely in this primitive house for the length of my life.

But I still believe that Ma, my sleeping princess, was trapped in that darkness for life, and the monster, pouring all his hoarded love, had turned blue this elusive, fascinating being.

Let us call this piece an interruption.

My plan was to write a series of posts detailing our criteria for selecting stories for State of Matter. I would start, as I did in the last post, with the movie Ratatouille and the problematics of time when we encounter something ‘novel’. To understand something as new, I would argue, is to understand it as a rupture in time. The next entry would be inspired by Auster’s New York Trilogy, and the motif of the detective that he builds, and how a character becomes the sinkhole for everybody else. However, between these pieces, a rift has opened up. A new temporality, it would seem, has revealed itself.

Last month, Tahatto put up its play, Love in the Cholera of Time. A review, it would seem, has demanded itself.

The play has aged past its initial runs. Last year, when Jagriti Theatre put it up, a friend brought it to my attention. He told me that it combined many of my interests: time, Marquez, meta-textuality, the experience of non-linearity, the theatre, the incorporation of an audience in what is supposed to be a contained act, the body and its orientations and its movement — themes that escape conventional discussion. Since that day, and until this kind-of-review is published, I am already a few beats of the cosmos too late. Tahatto has organised this play multiple times in different cities, most recently in Delhi.

Perhaps the review would be better suited if I could point to an upcoming show and link to it. That does not seem possible right now. Then again, I may defer to the celebration of non-linearity within the play, hoping that not all of the past is lost, and not all of a future is exhausted in anticipation.

This delay gives my kind-of-review some breathing space. Other places (see reviews in The Hindu and Indulge Express, for instance) have already spoken about the motivation, preparation and organisation of the play. But because I am late, I can skimp on the summaries, the temptations, the causal linkages from page to stage. This review might be stationed outside of chronological time. Let us call this a transverse time, and remember Bachelard again,¹ who tells us that the present instant, the now, sits resolutely outside of the continuous flow of time. He says that in this now, we may experience a multiplicity of experience, without necessarily arguing what comes before and what comes after. We may ask then what it would be to review a work of art, a play, a composition, a story, standing not before nor after the piece, but by its side, or vertically above it. What must we speak about to speak about the play?

Time? Cholera? Or just plain old love? Perhaps, like Bachelard proposes, I need to be inspired by a poetic image, allow its reverberations to unsettle me.

Let me start with time. Let me also be pedantic for a moment, revisiting that century-old scientific breakthrough that is Einsteinian relativity. Einstein, invoked in the descriptions of the play, proposes that space-time does not offer us a certain Archimedean position. In his careful descriptions, clocks and rulers lose their solidity: they stretch and skew, they enmesh what they measure (time, space, time-space!) and they demand always a trace of where they measure it from.² In doing so, Einstein upsets our tripartite categories of time. No longer is time merely a matter of the past behind the present behind the future! A new category appears: the “absolute elsewhere”, that livezone of other happenings from which light cannot make it to the ‘here-now’, or to where light from here-now may not reach. This may just be the transverse zone (of escape? of desire? of political possibility?) in which the past reaches out to a different life, from which the future will have eventually become possible.³

It seems that in these places, we come unstuck in time. Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse V, who found himself loosened in the temporal flow, the characters of the play find themselves pushed outside the here-now, outside enclosures (of marriage, of prison), to meet in an other-zone. Where? When? In a time neither His nor Hers, not in-between either. The play opens with a juxtaposition outside prosaic time: a playful sort of beginning that has no ‘bearing’ upon a strict sequence of events the way conventional narratives do. What if the moon was made of cheese? Not a what-if that burgeons into a science fiction narrative, but a what-if unburdened from its own future. The question leads nowhere important, but is revived again and again, gaining currency in its recurrence. The first rule of the other-zone is that there is no rigorous plot: there is just idyllic romance around the moon, which splits, like Debussy’s reprises, throughout the play.

If I were to point to the strength of the play, I would point to this… this playfulness of its scenes. A play as play, whoever could think of that! Notice at the same time the sheer fluidity with which it indulges its audience in the time-settings of its characters. Almost to the extent where you feel that it is your anticipation that makes characters meet and speak on stage. To an extent where the audience intimately perceives multiple modalities at work: a visuality among the cast interacting with the stage, the rising music, that artistic sensibility of time that we insipidly call pacing…

But the critic is condemned to seriously engage even with playfulness! To speak a little about the stylistics and the themes of the production.

We folks begin as beings with brute speech; art, perhaps, is our development into nuanced language. When we first come across Einsteinian time, we say, “Time is non-linear,” to sketch its broad contours. Linearity is a Cartesian gridline; it is to act per rules, to realise freedom with reference to an overarching rulebook. Chronology is linearity in time. The play’s the thing that substantiates non-linearity: in marking time this way or that, it points us toward the dramatic curve that our own lives occupy. Is time all-knowing? Is all already known? Can there be no surprise from this moment to the next?

The distance between a broad non-chronology — the time guardians would explain to you as the play begins — and how the act will be chronologically structured for ‘you’, the viewer, is what sets up its tension. There are, on one hand, the themes of destiny and certainty. The Nation is under construction; we know that it will become independent; that is history. Our own world will see the proliferation of dehumanisation, such as the business of deleting old social media accounts; we may predict this much future; that is sociopolitics.⁴ The power of a thousand Black Holes will be unleashed; the device that the actor hands the audience member must be of some import; that is good storytelling! On the other hand, there is desire, there is the possibility of chance. Will He and She meet again? Might the Moon be really made of cheese?⁵ The play shores up and lets go of this tension with metric certainty, playing upon an irony with the audience. And this too is its way of drawing the audience into its own telling. Here, when He reveals a fact that is Her proper future, the audience is in on the joke — we laugh at the characters. There, when the audience is treated as mere ‘humans’, limited in the way they understand time, the audience is the butt of the joke — we laugh at ourselves. And then, when someone asks out loud, “What sort of a question is And then?” we are not sure what to laugh at, because so central is this question to the telling of a story that the joke seems targeted to every one of us, the actors, the audience, the fictional characters, the multiple allusions, perhaps even the city itself.

Enough about time; there is also cholera and love, the signals for passion and romance, evoking that strange combination that is Marquez’ story.⁶

Marquez gives us Him and Her, Florentino and Fermina, whose soft names constantly interrupt the world of the novel. Cholera, water-borne, a disease from the very thing that must sustain you, is perhaps in this regard much like love. And I have “confused cholera with love, of course” like Marquez’ character. The afflicted man in either case displays all the signs of a lack of health, a paleness that persists somewhere deeper than his bones. His passions run wild; he retches his insides out. Bleeding from every orifice, he realises that he is a dead man walking, talking, acting out a part not his own. Love, the choleric kind, erupts. Perhaps, love in the cholera of time should erupt too. That evocation is missed in the play; that kind of love impinges itself as an absence in the play. That feels like a loss.

What is this temporal syndrome, this ‘cholera-of-time’? In his landmark work on perception, Merleau-Ponty says that time-instants are telegraphed, embodied totalities⁷ — you find yourself a Russian doll, stacked as moment within moment within moment, each moment a full life — and that moments do not die, but remain open like a wound. Love, the choleric kind, then, persists multiply and totally because you encounter it along many worldlines, chaotically and surprisingly arranged. A full life here, and here again, and then, and then again. What better way to tell a love story then than to tell it as a series of images that stand relatively alone, among which you see not at first a narrative but a reverberation, where scenes do not follow or precede other scenes but contract them, like one contracts an illness. What is written now exists autonomously in the past: a letter, a rose find themselves travelling in time, characters have memories of the future and anticipate the past. And just like that, life is brought up short by time.

Surely the operational concept is that of movement. Surely, disturbing the nature of time must cause paradoxes of motion. If love may be encountered along all possible worldlines, if I may enter it faltering and stumbling, open doors to it and briskly walk in, be whisked away into the past or slip, violating some physical laws, into the absolute elsewhere of my own existence, how may I go about making such a huge range of motion possible? The characters must mount a difficulty with an obvious answer, that which in Boulder,⁸ Baltasar explains with surprising clarity, “But all this tunneling has opened rifts through which the captive parts of me have started to emerge.” Against the inner borders of the tripartite stage-set, the characters must thrust and recede and tunnel: at the right time, after all, these borders have to be transgressed for Him and Her to appear elsewhere. It feels in such moments of transgression that the extended gag to open a door for a performance appraisal, or the conversation with a parent across prison walls — that these are conditioning possibilities; that these mundane motions make the extraordinary flights of the characters possible. The play hints at these minor confinements, these minor escapes, until it is time for a major escape, a major stumbling into a transverse world with another. If there is a concern, it is only that these possibilities skew more toward Him than Her, that He has been apportioned more of the conditions of motion than She.

But let me not nitpick here. Let me insist that in the play, love possesses some allure. Love’s preferred symbol, like in poetry, is the moon. Here, the play becomes indulgent, especially with Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The moon, like in Calvino’s cosmology, becomes desire and its fulfilment, fantasy and its reason, the promise of and pining for love. The moon, we are told, holds hands with the earth the way lovers must hold hands. Scientifically, it is of interest that the moon is a poor companion: it is drifting away from us a little each day. Scientifically, it is also of interest that the earth and the moon do not hold hands; their motion is, perhaps, best described as falling past each other at immense speeds, a constant choreography of sidestepping the other. There is thus in this romance, some wish-fulfilment, some pure fiction. Surely, something in this romance might interrupt the celestial motion of the planets. Surely, something in this romance might even stop time.

Of course, that happens… In perhaps one of the more explosive displays of telling a story, time slows. The actors slowly lunge at one another, falling past one another with insufficient speed. It is the acting out of slow motion, an effect which might be borrowed partly from slapstick, partly from old Bollywood, partly from the history of movement on stage. It is cathartic (look, the device that had been foreshadowed has been used!), comical (look they are jumping and tumbling!), intense (where is this sequence going?). Almost everybody who walked out of the theatre with me marvelled at this sequence. Weeks later, they could remember the visuals from the scene. “Like a movie,” said someone, offering that paradigmatic comparison that we often make for excellence in visuality. “Like time actually slowed,” said someone else, as if time actually hadn’t! My favourite comparison comes from a friend who has the disappointing habit of stating the answer obviously embedded in the question. “Like in love,” they said.

Yes, like that.

Notes

1. Bachelard, G. (2013). Intuition of the instant (E. Rizo-Patron, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1932).
2. Ismael, J. (2021). Time: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. See sections on Einstein for a quick summary. Most of the reproduction here is succinctly presented in Ismael’s work.
3. It is tempting here to cite so much of Bergson, whose historic debate with Einstein spells out much of twentieth-century tussles between the great disciplines. See for instance:
   Bergson, H, (1930). The possible and the real (DVL, Trans.). Bergsonian.org. https://bergsonian.org/the-possible-and-the-real/
4. Here, of course, a host of texts come to mind. For a relatively accessible and recent TV series, see Upload.
   Daniels, G. (2020). Upload. Amazon Prime Video.
5. Of course, one does not talk about the Moon this way and forget Calvino’s Cosmicomics, and the many degrees of desire and liminality that it suggests.
   Calvino, I. (2010). The complete cosmicomics. Penguin. (Originally published 1965).
6. Márquez, G. G. (2003). Love in the time of cholera (E. Grossman, Trans.). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. (Originally published 1985).
7. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
8. Baltasar, E. (2022). Boulder (J. Sanches, Trans.). And Other Stories.