I’ve had enough. I can’t stand this anymore. I’m sick to my stomach of waiting for dying men, women, children to appear. To index their lives. To find a way to escape from Mumbai. Wait. Index. Hide. Over and over.
Another skyscraper tumbles in the distance. It’s the Destroyer; she is closing in.
I don’t think I can keep Nisha safe any longer. The thought makes me shake. The wrench drops from my hand and fills the balcony with a clatter. I clench my fists till my knuckles go white. The panic attack passes, and I take in a long breath. Exhale. The air smells of salt, mildew, and rot.
Nisha and I are on a balcony on the 25th floor of Windermere in Powai. The lake has long since dried. We are the only ones left in the city.
On this tiny balcony, Nisha has made some space for us by sweeping stacks of overflowing paper into the apartment. There is nothing in the sky except an August waning gibbous moon. The Destroyer has taken away the stars. But she will not take Nisha away from me.
Below, lights shine on an empty street. The breeze pushes paper (so much paper!) and plastic bags. Cans roll about like empty skulls. The traffic lights blink green, yellow, and red, for no one.
There could be worse things than losing Nisha, I tell myself. What if the Destroyer finds me first? What will Nisha do then? I push the thought away. I force the shaking to stop. Does she worry, I wonder. She does not show it. She has indexed so many lives, she is so full of information that she can barely communicate anything anymore. Her memories and the indexed data are beginning to get mixed. Brahma’s Last Day is near, she said once, her voice calm, her lovely face without a trace of fear.
She’s busy scanning the pavement for a dying man as I put the last screw on the telescope stand.
Let’s build a telescope, I’d said. I had a hunch that the Destroyer was doing something to the moon. Besides, the project gave us a purpose while we wandered in the city, along its abandoned highways and through deserted intersections. We scavenged for parts, cylinders, mirrors, and lenses and rigged this scope. We’ve taken spare parts from dusty shops in Lamington Street, from rusting metal-cutting factories in Ghatkopar, and haunting antique shops in Colaba. The shanties…we don’t care to walk into them anymore.
How did we arrive here? Why are we here? I am no longer certain. I’ve begun to disintegrate like everything around us. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what my purpose is. I think I used to know, but my memory seems to have overflowed like the sewers of Andheri.
“Is your moon up yet? Let’s get indexing!” Nisha says as I spread the steel legs of the tripod on which I am about to mount the scope. She is cheerful. It melts my heart. I walk toward the balcony’s railing and scan the horizon. Nisha hugs me from behind, then massages my neck and shoulders. When did I begin to love Nisha? I tremble: even this memory I cannot access.
Nisha is beautiful, dark. She is like her name—night, darkness—like a dark granite goddess set in the recesses of an ancient shrine. She is powerful with the weight of indexing the world’s prayers, hopes, wishes, and dreams. Plump, rounded, full, alive. She says I am feminine, mysterious. She can’t see, of course. She can only comprehend time, a little in the future, that’s how she indexes the world. She can never see me as I am, and calls me Chaayaa—shadow; what is the shadow of darkness I wonder. I was powerful once, I think, and a shadow is what’s left of me now. I’ve asked her how she can love me, not knowing who I am wholly. She says love’s like that. Love loves.
I’m like her in many ways. Dark and longhaired. Strong willed. But more and more I find someone strange staring back at me when I look at my reflection. Nisha, in her philosophical calmness, says we are all headless. Try, she says. Point your finger at anything and then call out its name. And then do that to your head. I have done that many times. Point finger—this slum. Point finger—that dance bar. This sewer. That high rise. This thing. That thing. And then I point to my head. There is headless-ness in me. I see nothing. Nisha loves me nonetheless.
Nisha keeps the history, the memory, and the data of this world-line. It’s an immense index. She has littered the whole city with the record of every life, every interaction, every instance, every relation, and their interconnections to everything else. She has built copies and back-ups of the copies to save the information from the Destroyer. She has printed the data and stacked the pages in alleys, shops, stadiums, and floors of every skyscraper. She has indexed, copied, backed up so much data that Mumbai cannot hold it anymore. The concrete buildings seem to be giving in to the weight of the information. Floors are collapsing. Roofs are caving in. Spindles of rebar punch in the ruins.
From the balcony, through the haze, I see structures in the distance and wonder if they are buildings rotting in the skyline or massive stacks of papers, or calcified heaps of bones.
We have been shunted out of the universe. We’re trapped. Cast aside like empty rail cars into a world that is coming to an end, consumed by the Destroyer. We have to find our way back into the network of the world-lines, take the index, and rebuild this world. We’ve been digging through the lines of possibilities, of histories, of worlds, by indexing every instance of every interaction, to find the source from which we can travel to other world-lines. It’s a maze and we’re almost out of it, almost out of this limbo. But Nisha doesn’t know I am disintegrating too.
I’m afraid to look at the moon. If my hunch is correct, we are close to the end of this world. I lean on the balcony to see if the moon is up.
A structure collapses somewhere far off. A moment later wind rushes past. A roil of papers churns in the street, the sound a hypnotic song. Papers lift from the broken floor facing us. They flutter and waft, adding to the song.
In the sector of the sky between the two buildings, the moon arrives. It stays suspended, all lit up, like it’s onstage. It’s got no lines to say. No song to sing either. It’s a prop, only there to shine, to behold.
I move the telescope apparatus on its slider and take a nervous gulp. Nisha removes the black cap on the top, and light pours inside. It ricochets off angled mirrors, passes through lenses, and emerges from the eyepiece.
As I look I have a sudden memory of the spinning of the world, of how the stars used to arc across the skies. I remember being giddy at the thought that we were whirling so fast in space. But now the moon does something strange: it flickers. Its terminator shifts into a deep crescent.
I shrink from the eyepiece and look up. How many days have we been on this balcony? Did they pass without sunrise? Have I lost time, or is the world whirling into a death spiral? I feel nauseated while the moon shows its deathly grin. There is a Destroyer in the heavens, and we are all in its maw.
Nisha squeezes my hand. I look at the moon again, and take the event apart. I index space-time components. In the regolith, I see the last footprint of man. As I record the data, a meteorite hits and the print is erased.
No! It’s the Destroyer again. Erasing everything, erasing this world—pixel by pixel, byte by byte, instance by instance. We are the last words on a burning paper and the flames are closing in. My heart pounds.
“There!” Nisha shouts. She points. A dying man has appeared on the pavement, as if he has fallen onto the street below. An instant later we find ourselves standing beside him. My mouth is dry. Will the interconnected possibilities of his life open the final branch of our tunnel?
“Index him!” I say. Nisha has already entered his body. She is already in the past, scanning his whole life. The whole reel of what he did, everything he could have done, who he loved. Nisha lives it all in the dying man’s last instants, cataloguing every instance of his life. Correlating events, seeking pathways from his life’s possibilities out of the maze.
I look back at the dying man. His shirt and pants are tattered; he’s missing one sandal. His hands are rough; his face is like a ripe leaf of an old banyan tree. His leg bears a scar. Nisha will record how the salty blood feels on his cracked lips, its warmth as it oozes through his nose and ears. The man starts to wheeze as recognition dawns on his face. He knows me. They all do.
I wonder if he can tell me anything about me. I kneel down beside him.
“Can you tell me who I am?” I ask.
He parts his lips. I lean closer. I smell his sweat, his phlegm. I smell piss and shit. In his eyes I see a dying man, kneeling and looking at the Dying Man.
I pull away, stunned. My memories return—I’ve looked at dying babies, children, and women…. In their eyes I see what I see, not what they see.
Nisha transits from the Dying Man. She’s in a trance, her eyelids partly closed, correlating his events with every other.
“Tell me, Nisha,” I say. “Who is this dying man?”
Nisha fumbles for words. To her, each word is contextually related to every other, and every one, and every when, everywhere. And they weave a labyrinthine fabric. What the words weave is an endless entropy of wants, desires, and will, a web of life that is so dense that the moment Nisha delves into words she becomes lost.
“He is…every man,” Nisha says at last. Then quite suddenly, her computation stops. Nisha opens her unseeing eyes.
“This is the last dying man,” she says. She begins to tremble.
Impossible! It means Nisha does not see any other future. We are at the end of probabilities. There are no more lives to index, no more possibilities. This world has but a moment left.
The dying man whispers. I hear a sound, but it’s not a language I understand. His words are a language I should know, I may have known once, but he might as well be a dog, or a bird, or a cricket. And then he goes silent. All I hear is the breeze.
I hold his hand. I won’t let him go this time. Not again. I won’t lose another one. Not the last one.
I hear the dull roar of buildings collapsing. I think frantically. Where can we hide? This world is ending, and there is no more space-time left. We are so close to the end of the tunnel. We have missed something, somewhere. I can’t think straight. The girders holding the buildings groan, metal gives in, and concrete slabs plunge into the advancing waters with a splash. The Arabian Sea is moving into the city. This is the beginning of the end.
The man’s words. Nisha would have indexed the man’s words. They are important. They have to be.
“What did he say?” I turn around to ask Nisha, but all I see is the back of my head. Nauseated, I close my eyes tight. No! I will not let this trickery defeat me. I will not let this go. “Tell me, Nisha! What did the man say?”
Between sobs, Nisha says, and her voice is my own, “He said, ‘Who is present to the question,’ is what he said.”
What? I asked him who I was. What in hell did his answer mean?
Who am I?—Who is present to the question?
It made no sense.
I scream. In the emptiness of the street, my voice echoes. A street lamp flickers. Fades out. I grab the man’s sandal and throw it at a trashcan. Water begins to rush in; it sweeps the trash can away. Debris—paper and trash from the street—swirls. The street lamp topples. We stand on the roof of the only building left erect in the roiling water. I embrace Nisha. If we are to die, we’ll die together.
The Moon fades, the sky goes black, space-time undulates, and I meld into Nisha. I seem to have four arms and I can now see her index of the world, her life’s work, the catalogue of every instance. Is she me? Or am I she? Have I always been two? Have we always been one? I sift through the index, awed by the possibilities of all the lives, their loves, their dreams, their hopes. I live them all, wear them like a garland of skulls.
The sea froths and ferments. I watch it rise—no longer afraid—as all creation is sucked into a vortex.
◊
In the depths of the invading waters, Nisha and I face the Destroyer. He is blue all over and reclines on a giant ten-headed serpent that rests on the bedrock. From his navel arises the vortex. He holds a Golden Egg in his palm, the very beginning of time. Nothing else remains. There is only the blue light of the Destroyer, the Golden Egg, and us. He is grinning, his mouth the upturned crescent of a moon.
Too many hands have slipped from mine; I will not let him destroy the Egg. I lunge at the Destroyer. The Egg falls from his hands as he swims away. It drifts to the sandy bed.
“Nisha, take the Egg!” I say and swim toward him, but he changes into a fish. I catch him by his tail, but he changes into a turtle. I try to crush his shell, but he changes into a boar. I hold him by its neck, but killing him is not the end. He will only change into something else.
The Destroyer laughs. Something’s wrong.
I pick up the Egg. He has tricked us. The Egg has swallowed Nisha whole.
I plunge inside the Egg, taking the Destroyer with me.
◊
There are no worlds in here; there are no indexes. No light. No dark. Inside the Golden Egg, there’s nothing. There is neither Nisha nor the Destroyer here. There’s nothing except me.
I wriggle to break out, and as I do, coils of probability foam around me. I squirm, and bubbles of possibility begin to float around me. I can do this. And then in the burst of a thousand burning suns of Brahma’s day, I strike the Golden Egg with all my arms, with all my force, and crack its shell.
In the blinding light of dawn, I know.
◊
I am Kali. I am the Destroyer. I killed the Golden Egg. I created the first death. I am the one who keeps the Index of every dying man, so I can build and rebuild the world. I am the one who waits till Brahma’s last day for the Last Dying Man. I have won, I have lost, as I will again and again.