Venus Crossing , livre ebook
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2009
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118
pages
English
Ebook
2009
Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
30 octobre 2009
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9788184758337
Langue
English
Publié par
Date de parution
30 octobre 2009
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9788184758337
Langue
English
KALPANA SWAMINATHAN
Venus Crossing
twelve stories of transit
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Dedication
8 June 2004
Sister Thomas and Mister Gomes
A Prostitute s Tale
Euthanasia
What Did You Do to Me?
The Arrangement
Incident at Abu Ghraib
The Life Uxorious
Fly Away, Peter
Eclipse
Shame
Acts of Aggression
Yellow Dupatta
Copyright Page
For Ishrat through many crossings, companion
8 June 2004
It was a day like no other.
The koel s impassioned kajri, so different from the muted chirpings of dawn, startled me out of sleep.
Almost at once, I heard the silence. It held its breath between the liquid throbs of music.
It wasn t light yet. The koel s song, drawing desire into a thin tremolo of despair, seemed part of darkness, a vestige of night.
Yet, when the clouds broke with light and the song ceased, the silence was still there.
The koel stopped. Sparrows erupted, released from their thrall to such music, so wild, so abandoned-indiscreet really-so close to dawn. They chirped louder to drown its memory. I imagined them in small kitchens, sipping tea, planning the day s menu, amnesic to the night s terrors. Plotting small malicious tricks to trip up that errant bird.
Through all their chatter I heard that stillness. The growing sounds of morning contained its pause. Not until much later did I recognize that silence.
It was the unusual reticence of crows.
It worried me.
I looked for the crows. In the first silky swish of light I found them in all the expected places: on window sills, railings, telegraph wires, trees, clotheslines. Black and grey intaglios against whitewashed walls. They were there, but they were different. They were still. They were watchful. Heads cocked to some distant signal, they were waiting.
From time to time one would lift its beak to the sky and utter a short harsh squawk. A brief flutter followed, the merest ruffling in their pearly necks. And then they settled down again, noiseless and tense. Waiting.
I was waiting too.
The light stayed mousseline, a milky gauze over commonplace things. When it grew brighter, it was not the brittle light of June. It stayed pliant, lapped over edges, splashed walls and doors, it pooled in the streets.
It was still early.
She wasn t expected till eleven.
The hours fell away, winnowed by the loft of my impatience.
And then, past the snarl of the day s logistics, I saw.
I had to be blinded with plastic lenses of mylar before I could see. Dark glasses in hand, I walked into a brake of rain trees. It was silent here.
In that blink of time-between opening my eyes inside their mylar shield and the luminous instance of the sun-all the world was erased. All windows, all doors bolted, I was trapped in total darkness. It was a moment of utter solitude.
I found it liberating.
Unwatched, unheard, untouched, my senses flared on red alert. Everything escalated: scent, sound, texture. I tasted teeth, palate, lips. This winged rush, death s foreplay, was followed by the rolling drumbeat of dread.
Fear grabbed me.
It lasted no more than an instant, but it was necessary to the transition I was about to make from absolute darkness to incandescence.
I turned my face skyward, daring the ill-tempered slap of heat on my cheeks, and presently, past a sfumato cloudscape, I saw the flat dial of the sun.
White past all whiteness, hard past all hardness, its rim cut precisely into velvet dark. It was brightness, a mirror to all mirrors, the world s reflector, there it was.
And there she was!
Venus.
Renegade. Wanton. Paradox.
A black corruption in the white. Cinder in incandescence, the mote in the all-seeing eye.
A solitary mustard seed sticking to the scoured plate of silver.
That mustard seed gave away the sun s gluttonous past. No longer could it pretend to ascetic purity. It was, finally, a creature of appetites.
That black pinhead put the sun in his proper perspective. Looking at them together, it was easy to see her as Venus, and him as the Sun, their intersection a long embrace that I was to ambush.
I tore off the mylars, guilty as a voyeur. Guiltily too, I trailed them through the day.
Certainly, I rationalized. I was equipped with information, my eyes had NASA gifts. I told myself repeatedly that the black dot was a sluggish planet 0.7 AU from the sun. It was slightly smaller than the one I was standing on, but much slower. A day on Venus would be a long trip, almost three quarters a year on Earth.
It is hot on Venus, around 464 C. That s hotter than Mercury, which is closer to the sun. Probably because the air on Venus is mainly carbon dioxide with a stiff fug of sulphuric acid, and the greenhouse effect is far worse than anything we ve yet achieved. Venus is 1.9 times as bright as our planet. Bedazzled, we don t notice her scars, acne craters of her volcanic youth. Astronomers, like twitchy parents, pose Venus as an awful warning: there but for the grace of God go we.
I knew all that.
I knew also the sun she crossed. He was so used to the whirl of planets, this conjunction was of no real consequence. He was sick of being told it would be another eight years before she came calling again.
A nomad, that one!
What s eight years in the sun s memory? Did she stop to think of that ? But then, that s just her sort. Footloose gadabout, not a thought in her head for him. See if he cared.
He himself had nowhere to go. He hummed at his work back and forth as he sat burning his heart out. Half of it gone in the last 4.5 billion years, 700 billion tons of hydrogen burnt every second, and only 0.7 per cent to show as light. If they wanted figures, he d give them figures, he d show them the great empty roar of his 15 million degree furnace, he d sit them down and make them listen to the rumble beneath his shining skin. Let them bring out their fancy gizmos, their wandering cameras and doppler recorders, let them cower at the furthest rim of his glory and gild themselves with it. He was tired of the myths, the measurements, the constant wrangle of fact and surmise. Deafened by prayers and supplications from creatures he knew nothing about. Vermin. Parasites. Sluggards fattening in his heat, dreaming up a mad circus called life.
He was tired of being stared at. He would like to be left in peace now. It had taken him long enough to get this rowdy bunch into orbit with all sorts of sidereal low life gatecrashing now and then.
Was that too much to ask, a few million years of peace?
What was he supposed to do about this little speck on his chin, anyway? She never hurt anybody. Let her stay. When she s done, she ll be on her way.
Oh yes, I rationalized.
It took up all my day and most of the night too, for its blackness was filled with memories of light. Of a long hour when the sun was spent and night held darkness in abeyance. Of tall tales that came up with the stars and outlasted their feeble light.
The next day, I suppose, I still carried that haze of wonder on my skin.
Nobody noticed.
Hesitantly I asked: Did you see it? The transit of Venus?
Is it a movie? someone asked.
Most sighed and said they had no time. By that very sigh banishing me to a special purgatory for idlers where I might have Venus for company.
Those that knew of it were all busy comparing horoscopes, convinced an event 31 million miles away must eventually show up in the bank balance.
Nobody asked: What was she like? Venus? By daylight?
And if they had, what could I have said?
For the truth was in my stories, not in what I d seen.
All I had seen was a black dot.
She had passed me by as she passed by the sun.
I walked home in the serene light of the evening star, now distant, now discreet, now no longer shown up in flagrante as she had been yesterday. I thought of all the times before.
In her Greek life, as Aphrodite, married to a brute and ambushed in Ares arms. Trapped in Vulcan s airy net, dragged across the heavens still in her lover s clasp and flung before the gods to await retribution.
I like that story.
The gods laughed at Vulcan. The lovers disentangled and walked home. They had separate homes. Ares belonged in the battlefield, and as for Venus-she was a vagabond. When her path crossed yours, she was always going somewhere else.
She was always in transit, you never knew where she came from, you never knew where she would go. You never thought to ask. That pixel you caught was all she left you.
It didn t matter, really.
It didn t matter that you never learnt the rest of the story.
It was enough that for one eidetic moment, she had looked your way.
Sister Thomas and Mister Gomes
Of the four women sharing the compartment at this late hour of quarter past ten, only three appear likely subjects of romance.
All three are reading love stories.
The pretty girl at the window is reading Lilac Interlude which is all about Janine Vermont, she of the retrouss nose and honey-blonde curls and a figure that, on page twenty-five, is yet unrevealed. Janine s voyeuse takes a break from her entertainment and, looking up at the fourth woman in the compartment, is overtaken by this mischievous thought: imagine that old fright in a romance!
She reads that last line again, substituting for the delectable Janine, the woman opposite.
And why not, Armand murmured, and why not, my sweet? His lips lingered on her neck, sending a tingle right through her It was too ridiculous!
Completely oblivious of Armand s arms tightening about her, Elsamma Thomas works at her crochet. She is a woman in her early fifties, spare and tall. The eyebrows, thick and untutored, are touched with grey. The eyes, their brown irises rimmed with a silver nimbus, are quick and questioning. She is wearing a print overall, showing the white collar and sleeves of the uniform beneath. Her feet, that are bare at the moment, rest on comfortable canvas slip-ons. The calloused ankles are meshed about with veins. But for the small gold cross at her neck, she wears no ornament. Her hands mo
