Mar 28, 2016 Original Short Story
Polaris-Bound – A Short Story*
March 24th, 2013
©By Vijaya Sundaram
The stars were very bright that night. I looked up, and saw Polaris, and became still. I knew that I had to do something within the hour, because if I didn’t, I would lose the game which had released me as a pawn into the night those many decades ago.
The man stood in his toll booth, counting change. Car after car came by, slowed down, stopped. Anonymous people rolled down windows, spurted out change, exchanged meaningless words, and pushed off into the night, so many flashing streaks of light, released like arrows into the unknown.
The man was alone. There was another, just like him in an adjoining tollbooth, also alone. They did not communicate. They didn’t need to. They were both from different worlds. Each did not exist in the other one’s world. I wasn’t interested in the other one. He seemed dull, dull as a drainpipe filled with leaves.
Loneliness is an absolute thing. It cannot be described. It cannot be reduced to songs, stories, descriptions, but we try, anyway. So, I’ll tell you about this man, because he was lonely, except that he didn’t realize it.
I watched him from the side of the road. I saw him sigh, his shoulders rising, chest filling with air, and falling, air flowing out from him, making little puffs of cold mist that dissipated in all directions. His mouth was the toll booth, and the hot air left him, and it seemed like so many cars coming and going into a cold night.
Crouched in the tall reeds by the side of the road, I watched him calmly, dispassionately. I was trying to get a read on him, you see.
I watched him pull out a thermos, pour himself some coffee, click on an old-fashioned radio.(Where on earth does one get a radio like that these days? I wondered.) He sipped his coffee and drummed his fingers. He looked at his wristwatch (Doesn’t he have a cell-phone? Nobody wears a wristwatch these days!), stepped out of his booth, did a few stretches. He seemed restless as a thirteen-year-old boy in a classroom (I know, because I’d masqueraded as one, once, long ago). Again, his shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.
“Can you hear me?” he spoke urgently into the darkness, his head tilted towards the stars. The man in the adjoining tollbooth seemed not to register that he had spoken.
I wondered when I would go up to the first man. My knees were getting stiff, deep in the tall grass by the side of the road where I crouched. I was biding my time, though.
He looked up and down the roads approaching the tollbooth and saw that there were no cars coming up (it was 2:00 a.m.). He seemed to make a decision. He went inside again, reached down, and pulled out a saxophone.
And he began to play.
And the music poured out of his horn like the cry of the accumulated lonely nights of all humankind. It spoke of despair and hope, it spoke of dreams that arose with the dawn and died with the day. It lingered in the air like the smoke from his cigarette, long after it had been crushed underfoot. It poured down the slopes of his being, like an endless waterfall, the kind in which people perish if they step into swirling waters, little knowing the danger down the line. It swirled around like the kind of eddies which sink ships, and leave nothing, except a single suitcase floating on the surface. It spoke about night after night of no one to go home to. It climbed up my spine and shook my brain-stem. It made the air shiver and weep. Or, was it just me?
I shivered, and wept.
And I turned back into the tall grass to where I needed to go. I had learned a lot by reading and listening to people in the past several decades. I had paid close attention to all the noise and chatter that poured out of their computers, their phones, their television sets, and I had seen the horrors they had endured through all the hatefulness that seemed to dog the footsteps of their kind. I had seen the ice-caps melting, and their forests dying. I had heard their politicians lie, and their talking heads nod endlessly as they passed on the lies, pocketing the change – different type of tollbooth workers, they seemed to me.) I had seen their dying and their dead. I had seen children reduced to skeletons, hunger big in their eyes and in their bellies. I had been filled with a hopeless rage, and a helpless horror.
But I had also seen their women thrown into the pits of hell and rising again stronger, more determined, despite their pain. I had seen little children picking up the trash that littered the woods around them. I had watched a teenage boy make magic out of wasted bits and pieces of trashed electronics, so that his people could have working radios. I had seen a teenage girl find a way to provide water purification through the power of the sun, and it cost very little, and would help millions. I had seen an emaciated man feeding his emaciated dog before he fed himself, and I knew that there was something here that was not to be denied.
Still, I had been determined to do what I had come there to do. I was not about to lose the game, and go back to my people to face the consequences.
Tonight, however, I saw and heard something that was beyond all that I’d seen. I heard in that music all that I needed to know about this lonely being, and all of the lonely beings on this strange planet. I understood them. I looked up again. The stars blinked back at me, brighter than they had ever been. I sighed.
These people might yet be saved, but I wasn’t the one about to do the saving.
I had lost the game, but I didn’t mind. I was ready to go back and explain why I hadn’t destroyed this tragic, flawed planet, this beautiful, blue pebble that swung around the sun, full of death, full of life, full of music.
And the music followed me all the way to my home, far, far away.
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* This is a story I wrote in 2013, and shared on my now-private first blog V-Hynagogic Logic. I decided to share it on my new blog today.
Tags: #Alien, #Music, #Philosophical Science Fiction, #Saving the Planet, #Science Fiction Short Story
Mar 21, 2016 Climate Change is Real!, Daily Life
Climate Change is Real: Day 3 of my Lone Vigil
©March 21st, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
©March 21st, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
6:58 a.m.: I awoke BEFORE the alarm on my i-Phone went off (yes, yes, I’ve succumbed completely to the many enticing temptations of this instrument from Hell, including using the Record function, checking the weather, checking how many miles I’ve walked, looking up abstruse things on the Internet, and so on, but I AM a responsible driver, please note).
I did not groan or moan. No, sir! I was wide awake, and ready to face the elements. I WAS going to be on time, dammit! I was!
Heated up yesterday’s coffee (I know, apostasy for a true connoisseur of coffee), poured it into one of the three trusty travel mugs which I’d bought from that Satan company, Starbucks, three or four years ago, and which has stood me (and us) in good stead over that period, let the dog out, wiped her snow-clogged paws when she returned, got abluted, got dressed, and ready to go out at 7:30 a.m..
Then, I realized that I needed this and that and the other, and when I had found the gloves, put on extra socks, taken out the unused ear-buds for my i-Phone, and headed out, it was 7:47. (Warren, I need more practice being there on time at 7:30. What did your devotees on the road think when they saw that there was no one there for the last two days of last week, and the first day of this week at 7:30 a.m.? They’ll think you’ve abandoned the cause. So sorry! I shall do better tomorrow!)
It was 28 degrees, and the snow blanketed everything. The sky was white, and the ground was white, and my coat was a chillingly pale ice-blue, my scarf a beautiful indigo ikat one, just for contrast, and my cloche hat was a dark forest green (this is for those who care about fashion and such things, you understand). Thus attired, your fashion icon (NOT) stood at Warren’s intersection, and, checking her time, noted that it was 7:53 a.m. Pah!
As soon as I got there, the first car that went by gave me the universal sign of approbation (or, rather, the passenger did): The thumbs-up. Yay!
I began to sing, first in Bhairav thaat Vibhas, one of my absolute favorites, and meandered up and down the aroha and avaroha, then doing several slow gamak taans, and then some paltas. The tamboura drone mysteriously switched from E to F drone. I think it must have been on shuffle. Not to be deterred, I went along with the shift. I sang Miyan ki Todi. Todi is a late morning raga and its mournful tones suited the mood of the snow drifting down steadily, increasing in speed as time went on …
… as did the cars, although they were somewhat slower than usual. I got nothing but smiles, waves and thumbs-up signs for the first fifteen minutes from several people. After that, it was just grim-faced commuters too focused on the weather to think about the Climate, or my husband’s “Climate Change is Real” sign. Draw your conclusions, folks!
I drifted into thinking about the Fibonacci series, for no particular reason, except that I got tired of singing aimless paltas in Todi (this vigil is certainly causing me to discipline my singing) – so, I tried singing sargams going up and down the scale, using 1, 12, 123, 12345, 12345678, 12345678910-11-12-13, and back again, up and down the scale. The nice thing, of course, it that it comes to 32, so it fits neatly into two cycles of teental (a 16-beat rhythmic cycle in Hindustani classical music). I could develop this as an improvisational diving board, I suppose. I communed with this for a while, and enjoyed myself. (And no, I am not some mathematical whiz, far from it, actually!)
The snow drifted steadily down, and the landscape was beautiful around me. I wondered about the two geese I’d seen taking off from the Fells from right behind me on Friday. I wondered if they’d made it. I’m sad about the birds, very, very sad. Just read about Adélie Penguins at a colony in Cape Denison being decimated. I also read a more optimistic report that they might have just picked up and moved one. Whatever the case might be, I fear for all animals, and for people everywhere. I also feared for the beautiful bulbs I’d planted in the fall, and which had just begun to come up. I was sad.
Sadness did not possess me, however. There’s something lovely about standing there, defying the elements, or celebrating them, rather, and singing in the snow. I recommend it, especially the getting up early part (no, seriously! I might be turning into a morning person, heavens forfend)!
A Confession: I must admit that I haven’t been as good as my husband is about using resources. I found I was more wasteful with water than I liked It’s only more recently that I’ve become less so. I used to be impatient about composting (although I WANTED to compost), so I let him take care of it. Now, I do the composting. It took me a few years (about eight years ago) to stop buying bottled water, and remember to take my own to work. Now, we never go anywhere without carrying our own water. I recycle that which needs to be recycled, but I need to stop buying things in packaging, period! So, I’m going to sew little cloth bags in which to put perishable vegetables, and take those to the market when I shop, instead of using the “recyclable” plastic bags they provide.
And I think: If it takes me, an informed person, SO LONG to get going on doing the right thing, how can I judge those who don’t even try? Those who live in glass houses, and so on.
And YET, try we must.
That is why Warren’s vigil matters. That is why we must keep on repeating its message. If the GOP likes to invent facts and hammer away at them so much that people believe them to be true, why should it be harder for us to speak the TRUTH? All we have to do is repeat true facts, and THIS mantra over and over and over:
Climate Change IS real!
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Tags: #ClimateChangeisReal, #ClimateVigil, #Recycling, #Saving the Planet, #using the Fibonacci series to create patterns Hindustani vocal music