Short Story: Anywhere but Here - Kankana Basu

This short story by Kankana Basu is a part of Kitaab Quarterly Vol-1.

She lay on her side covered to her neck with a light sheet and observed her fever rise. It started from her toes, shivered up her legs, and permeated through her entire torso, filling her limbs with molten heat. She rubbed the soles of her feet together for warmth (a desire for warmth when she was already burning, how strange!) and felt a kind of ecstasy steal over her. She wondered why people made such a fuss over fever and went charging for their paracetamols when fever could easily provide a kind of addictive high; a temporary suspension of sanity and the senses heightened awareness of one’s surroundings and a slow burn of the soul… She genuinely looked forward to this cusp of seasons- autumn to winter, November to December- when her respiratory system dutifully packed up due to the smog and cold winds prevalent outside, and she could avail herself of sick leave and lie in bed for some rest.

She watched the train of thoughts drift across her mind in a detached fashion- the chapter on genetic mutation to be finished, examination question papers to be set, grocery shopping due soon, the car needed servicing- the mundane thoughts of a middle-aged spinster who lived on her own and taught high school for a living. The fever was rising steadily, and she was content to drift between sleep and wakefulness, the no man’s land of the mind.

When the face flashed through her mind suddenly, she felt herself go stiff with shock. A not-totally-human face with grey-blue skin and speckles, the bit of shoulder visible showing scales. The creature was arched back in pain and anguish of some kind. The vision disappeared as swiftly as it had appeared, leaving her palpitating with alarm. What had she just glimpsed in her mind’s eye? And why did the creature, appearing as it did for a millisecond, feel so familiar, so intimate, so close….?

She had barely started to rise to a sitting position when the face appeared again. Calm this time, almost contemplative. Watchful. In quick succession came another vision. An expanse of dense lonely forestland bathed in intense green light. Not the warm gold sunshine that washed planet earth every morning but an eerie alien light that did not belong to any place she consciously knew.

She fell back on the bed and shut her eyes, the startling visions playing out repeatedly in her mind. Who or what was that bizarre-looking creature and why had it shown up in this abrupt manner? Was it possibly a nightmare or the hallucinations of an ill body, and a distorted mind? But how did one explain that sharp and instant tug of recognition she had experienced, the deep sense of kinship? Was it remotely possible that she, in her fevered state, had fallen through some portal and emerged in another time and another place, for a millisecond?

After all, as some of the traditional Indian philosophers were fond of saying, one’s spatial and temporal moorings were mere fabrications of the human mind and every person was responsible for creating their own reality. You were who, where, and when you thought yourself to be, and the life you found yourself in was one you consciously or subconsciously crafted, according to those self-styled gurus. Or was the speckled creature someone she had known in one of her past lives, as the Hindu scriptures with their theme of rebirth, would probably inform? That shocked feeling of familiarity, the instant sense of empathy with its pain, was it possible, was it just possible, incredible and horrifying as the idea might seem, that the creature was…herself? Was her present avatar as a human merely a reincarnation of past lives, then?

Had she led a thousand other lives, maybe, on a thousand other planets? There was another possibility, she ruminated, one that would find favour with writers of science fiction- that she was, astounding as it might sound, straddling parallel universes. Her doppelgangers and duplicates were striding alien lands, in all probability, and anchored to diverse time zones simultaneously. She suddenly recalled the feeling of never belonging in her childhood, a conviction that got progressively intensified as she grew up. Never really bonding with her giggly fun-loving classmates at school or the worldly material-seeking contemporaries of her adulthood, never really seeking the goals they did, always vibrating to a different frequency, dreaming odd dreams, choosing to trace shadows rather than chase rainbows. The sensation that she had been roller-skating through her worldly life was never as intense as now, a feeling of gliding through events, always a little elevated and never really touching the ground. Was she then actually an inhabitant of some other land and her presence here on earth merely a half-baked shadowy affair? Which, then, was her absolute reality? Her garbled thoughts spun round and round as they always did when she had a fever, spiralling down an endless helix only to spiral up again. When she finally drifted off to sleep, she dreamt she was wading through flowering meadows, bathed in green light. And the landscape around her shimmered with the fluttering of twelve-winged butterflies.

She grinned to herself as she manoeuvred her car into the morning traffic and drove to school a few days later. If her students could hear the wild fancies of her fevered state, she thought in amusement, they’d declare her loco instantly! She’d share her experience with her close friend and fellow Biology teacher, the inhouse mystic, who was fond of propounding the theory to all and sundry, that the cosmos was nothing, but an enormous castle of mirrors and everyone’s life was a direct reflection of their thoughts and desires. All of those came bouncing back. Beware of what you wish for, ladies, her friend was fond of whispering in a hoarse voice in the teachers’ room, for all of us basically reside in a land of mirrors. And although her fellow teachers generally cracked up at her theatrics, there were some who felt a twinge of uneasiness. Let’s see what my pal makes of my alien, she thought in amusement, and how strange that the grey-blue face refused to recede from memory even though it was nearly a fortnight since the sighting. It popped up at the unlikeliest moments.

It was the last day of school before they broke up for the vacation. The sun hung low, a golden orb, as students spilled out of the school building and into the sunlit yard. She made her way to the car waving and smiling at the students who swung by to say goodbye. She sat still with her hands on the steering wheel and watched groups of students leaning into each other, strolling around with arms entwined, arms over each other’s shoulders, moving in for group hugs, stretching their goodbyes as long as they could before dispersing for the vacations, their brown bodies clumped in camaraderie. How wonderful is this sense of belonging, she thought with a pang, how precious. It’s the one thing that made humans infinitely more human. She thought of the lonely little apartment waiting for her return every evening. Artistically done up, for sure, but as silent as a tomb. Music and books were loyal companions, it was true, but nothing compared with the warm connectivity of another fellow being. She found herself suddenly wishing that her single mother (now doing an Abstract Art course in France) had been more of a mother and less of a globe-trotting bohemian. Or that she had married one of those awful chauvinistic men who had wooed her in her thirties. Ah well, she thought in resignation, que sera sera…. She switched on the engine and glided out of the school gates.

Her fingers drummed on the steering wheel as she waited for the traffic snarl to clear; her drive back home happened at a particular bad time every evening. Her gaze roved over her surroundings on either side of the road. What had once been the lush green outer periphery of the metropolis with endless expanses of Alfalfa grass where cattle grazed dreamily, brooks gurgled happily and flame-of-the-forest and Gul Mohur trees burst into exuberant blossoms every Bombay summer, was now an arid dusty landscape sans vegetation. Hundreds of trees had been felled to make place for an ugly metro-railway shed, and warehouses and other monstrosities had displaced the meadows. One no longer heard about leopard attacks on the hutments at the edge of the forests and the frequent man-animal conflict of earlier days, for the simple reason that leopards had totally vanished. She felt a sense of personal loss when she remembered the sheets of monsoon rains that had lashed the dense foliage every year and how, as a child, she had gone squelching in the mud to gather foxglove, anemone, marigold, and other wild blossoms. Even the monsoon pattern had changed- June was no longer synonymous with thunder, lightning, and waterlogged streets. The rains could come at will and overstay their welcome, often stretching right into November. The Arabian Sea, too, had turned unfathomable and treacherous, moving into sandy banks stealthily over the decades, devouring strips of coastal land and frequently, vomiting garbage on the beaches at high tide. She wondered resignedly what kind of a life future generations of Mumbai residents were going to inherit.

She stole a quick look at herself in the driving mirror. She looked terrible and a far cry from the well-groomed attractive fortyish woman who set out for school every morning. She looked frazzled, exhausted, and frumpy, as she usually did at the end of the day. Well, what do you expect, she demanded of her reflection, it was no joke teaching hormonal sixteen-year-olds!

There was a despondency to her this evening, a feeling of aimlessness. Her life seemed to stretch endlessly before her, dreary and filled with drudgery and repetitiveness; school, home, shopping, reading, quiet TV dinners followed by school, home, shopping, good music, a movie with a friend on a good day or a short vacation with colleagues, followed by school, home, shopping. She felt listless and jaded, and suddenly wished she was anywhere but here, at this particular point in time. Be careful what you wish for, her colleague’s voice seemed to whisper in her ear, we are but inhabitants of a mirror land.

On an impulse, she swerved off the arterial road and drove into a by-lane that went deep into the last bit of forest land left. The tree-lined lane made a long, curved detour and emerged to join the main road again, the junction being very close to her house. She loved this less-used green leafy road where the branches of trees entwined overhead and sunlight filtering in, in colourful sparks, gave the road the feel of an enormous church with stained glass windows. She remembered walking on nature trails in this area in her childhood, grabbing bunches of clover, munching on their juicy sourness, and repeatedly tapping touch-me-not creepers with their minuscule powder-puff blossoms, till her father commanded her not to harangue the poor plants. Squirrels had squeaked indignantly at their intrusion and a chameleon had slithered up a tree trunk, changing colours before their very eyes!

She was coming to the part she liked best. A long stretch of road lined with ancient tamarind trees, the trees set at equal distances from each other and standing like sentinels. The trees with their thick trunks and feathery leaves were laden with dusty mud-brown sickle-shaped tamarinds but she knew that if one bit into them, their insides would be juicy and tender-green. The trees threw long shadows of early dusk and their shadows alternated with the sunlit strips of the road creating a light-and-dark zebra-like effect. She decreased speed and glided through the stripes of light and shade, feeling a trance-like state of mind creep upon her. There was something soporific about moving down an unending corridor of long shadows and unconsciously, her foot, on its own accord, softened over the accelerator. Bands of orange sunlight and lavender shadows alternately caressed her face and she had the dreamy feeling that she was freefalling through time and space, partially awake, partially asleep. One moment she felt she was cruising along and the next she felt the car was stationary, the trees playing strange tricks with her mental faculties. She leaned back in her seat, loosened her seatbelt, and found herself surrendering willingly to the temporary status of a somnambulist driver.

When the truck carrying heavy metro-rail equipment rammed into her car from the rear, the state of sleepy inertia continued for a millisecond before she was catapulted out of her seat. Flying out of the car in a shallow arc, she hit the ground with a thud. She lay motionless in the crimson light of the setting sun and felt waves of pain beginning to hit her. A long shrill scream sounded somewhere in the background. Her own….? Her left arm, she noticed abstractedly, lying on her torso, was bent at an impossible angle and tufts of bloodied hair lay on her chest. What just happened, she wondered fuzzily. Why was there blood-drenched hair all over her, had her scalp come loose at the impact of the accident? All around her was deadly silence and she wondered vaguely what had happened to the people in the other vehicle. A warm sticky liquid was beginning to seep into the ground all around her and she shut her eyes. How long would it be before help arrived on this lonely stretch of road? Was she destined to bleed to death? How long was she likely to survive in this condition? Waves of pain and agony washed over her body suspending all thought.

She may have lain for a few moments or maybe an eternity with her eyes closed, she was not sure which, when there was a sudden hectic rustling all around her. Her eyes flew open in alarm. Had leopards suddenly come out of near-extinction and were they stalking her? She was lying on a deserted flower-filled meadow, she discovered, that heaved and shimmered with the fluttering of many-winged butterflies. There was not a soul around. There was no sign of tamarind trees either, or a Mumbai sunset, and she was bathed in an intense green light. When she saw a figure appear on the horizon outlined against the green sky, she almost sat up in excitement and anticipation. The tall silhouette began to walk towards her slowly and purposefully, and she smiled. So, this then was her destiny. There was a sense of inevitability as the figure came close, a feeling of joy, bordering almost on euphoria. The figure was so close now that their bodies almost touched. The grey-blue face that bent over her was filled with an odd tenderness and when the creature held out its great scaly arms, she went into its embrace ecstatically.

Author’s Bio

Kankana Basu is a Mumbai-based novelist, journalist, poet, book reviewer, and commercial artist. Her published works of fiction include two collections of short stories, Vinegar Sunday and Lamplight: Paranormal Stories from the Hinterlands. A stand-alone short story, Graveyard Shift, features in The Pleasure Principle: The Amaryllis Book of Erotic Stories. Her full-length novels include Cappuccino Dusk (Long Listed for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize), Spice Corridors, The Zyphon Sleeps Tonight (YA Sci-fi), and a novella, The Messiah.

Her journalistic writing and book reviews have appeared in The Times of India, The Asian Age, The Hindu, The Deccan Chronicle, and The New Indian Express, and her short stories and poems have been featured in Femina (a Times of India fortnightly magazine), the Air India inflight magazine, Swagat, the Tata Lit! Fest magazine, Verse-Virtual, The Sunday Hindu, and others. Currently, she reviews books for The New Indian Express and assists in the Bengali-to-English and novel-to-cinema translations of the works of her grandfather, the late Bengali writer, Saradindu Bandopadhyay.