Until Satyid Voices Wake Us

If my mother reaches Loki’s Star, I wonder. I wonder if she’ll remember us. Remember the day she left me on Earth, on the beach in Varkala.

It was the last day of the final year of evacuation. Most of the men in our home village, my father included, had long since departed.

That left my mother, Rakta, alone to care for me and my sister.

After the final EVAC order was announced by remainders of Maharashtrian government — the last carrier launch, before the last evening in memory—she packed up her subzhi and cold rotis from last night’s meal in a steel lunch-tiffin, stuffed some washed clothing into an unwieldy bundle on her head, and fled to the desolate, waste-strewn beach where K-81 would hopefully ferry what was left of my family to safety on Loki’s Star, 1200 light years away. She was allowed one child. My sister Jyoti, being a girl, was left behind.

Reaching the ship amidst a screaming, crying carpet of evacuees meant carrying me on her shoulders through the crowd. She asked me to wait before carrying the bundles of food and clothing to the ship first. She would come back to get me, she said.

But she never returned. So I stood there, alone, listening to the ship’s thrusters bellow like fiery lions, as the K-81 took off above the howling din.

I don't know how old I was exactly, but she called something out about Jyoti, and I never heard from her again.

We didn't know the sun would be permanently obscured by the Satyid spores in preparation for the arrival of Earth’s new hosts. Their sensitivity to sunlight necessarily required blotting out the sun like a great inky cloud, ending humankind’s domain.

We, the remainders, were expected to die. Or else go into long-term hiding to survive the Kali Yuga, which is what the TV gurus were calling it.

Most of the remainders, however, were women, since connections were needed to secure a flight on the shuttles. Money wasn't good enough. The grim future of Earth, then, was to be female.

My name is Krishna. I passed out on that beach, and awoke alone to silence, a bleeding, throbbing puncture in my neck, and surrounding darkness. So I did the only thing I knew to do - I started crying.

Silence

Mother, of course, was gone. It felt like if she was there, she’d have embraced me in her warm arms, and shushed me. And told me, “Main yahaan hoon. Main yahaan hoon”-- I was safe, and that she loved me. I waited, and cried, and waited, and cried some more.

– Silence

Instead, the warm light, the aquamarine glow of the neuron-like vines our hosts brought with them – living memories of their home, and their mothers – welcomed me, swaying, almost musically, between filthy cracks in the concrete, like slithering Diwali candles. A note, scrawled in loose Hindi by some stranger, was stuck in my bag, which had been gone through and looted.

“I got bad news. Good luck child.”

The glow illuminated some stainless steel teapots, signage advertising “All-Day-Breakfast” and some toppled plastic chairs. It was a teashop, for a morning that would never come again.

The tendrils swayed toward me as if blown by an unseen breeze. I suppose I felt comforted by them. Perhaps they missed their mother too. Perhaps, far, far away, they left behind a sister, and a mother too? Perhaps we comforted each other in the same way.

After I came to my senses, and my hunger, I thought of all those bootleg apocalypse movies I had watched on my uncle’s laptop, like The Terminator, 28 Days Later, I am Legend—where do I fit in them? Do I find love and re-populate the earth? Cure some unspeakable disease?  Become a living Gilgamesh of the future? Rebuild the future for my family?

But the truth, the horror of it, was very different. Once the electricity went out, the cellphones turned dark, and the sun became a permanent eclipse, the plot went black too. No film director or movie script told 14-year-old me what to do, or where to go next. There were 4 directions, and the only certainty in the real world was starvation.

In my bag, what was left was an idol of great Vishnu we brought along for life on the ship, and a photo of my mother - "In case you need to find me", she said - a wedding photo. She, like my sister, had been left behind. Much of her family's dowry was spent marrying off her two sisters, and very little was left for her. What remained for her were bleak prospects. Even her name -- "Rakta" was an afterthought. Whatever her blood type was, it had been printed on the birth certificate for her name by mistake. Instead of re-printing the document, it being a charity hospital for the disadvantaged, they had just crossed out the blood code with two brisk strokes of the pen – O-negative, it would have been. Thus her name, Rakta.

It has been 8 years to the first day, and I have made far more than peace with the Satyids, perhaps more than I care to admit. True, I was young and careless, lonely and defenseless, friendless and bleeding, but I chose them willingly. The binding parasites they brought, mouths blood-red and ulcer-like, and wrapping-tendrils bone-dry, and textured like a withered tree-branch, must be wound around the limbs like a surgeon sutures a bandage to a patient. My best description of the plant, roughly, is a tick-like banyan tree. They range from four to twelve inches in diameter, with tendrils about four times as long. The home world, their home world, has no sun, so they glow in darkness.

To deny them, like denying water if you were a fish, is to deny their benefits. Once attached to a limb, an arm, a leg, or any wound, the excruciating pain of toxic flesh is nullified. Grievously wounded women sob in relief. Blurred vision, then, is followed by reflexive vomiting, fluid in the lungs, sometimes hallucinations, and sometimes sleep. But whether one dreams of the Satyid’s drowning home world or staggers blindly around hallucinating under the new understanding, the change is inevitable. Memories begin to slowly dissolve, like salt in a solution. The physical change, the glow, though, is much faster.

And will I glow too? I asked myself. Will I also see in the dark? But it was not important to glow, or to see in the dark. That was not what I wanted. The Satyid augmentation brings the one thing every power and every strength, every conceivable advantage the bodily realm cannot provide. When half the Earth’s population has left, and the other half is broken up, or dead - it brings a family.

I had searched for Jyoti in darkness for a long time, a long, long time. Most see Kali Yuga in this dark end for Earth, but for us, the augmented, this will be Satya Yuga, the coming of an eternal day, in the endless night. Now we are one, and I am no longer search alone. My mother is with me, and she is legion, for we are many.

---

“Satyid memories replace the human ones” I explain to the guide. I’m led through the labyrinthine scuttle-halls of the Janata Vasahat slum. Once a home to tens of thousands, it is now a sparsely populated palace of corrugated metal. The bioluminescent aqua glow of the neural vines , or memory-vines as they’re called--climbing as they do along the rafters--flicker, and illuminate passages, like clay-wrought oil lamps.

“It is Satyid-Diwali?” my guide says, humorously. The comparison is not lost on her. A woman cooks a meal of daal and rice on a open stove. Smell is memory :

The mustard seeds drop, one by one, into the pan of oil - Tadka. Pop. Sizzle. Pop. The Jeera is added next. “Make sure they pop, that’s how you know the oil is hot enough” Rakta says. She’s wearing a grimy blood-red kurta. Aroma – Mother—Biriyani

We pass a shack I had passed decades before. A potter here, a street beggar there, a seller of candles, a man with a limp. None of them see me in the dark, yet I see them all perfectly :

“Playing hide and seek are you?” Rakta chirps, teasingly. I crawl out from under the plastic table we’re using as a desk, and reach for the warm, suckling comfort of her nine tentacles. Father will be home soon.

“Do you celebrate Diwali on the home world?” The guide asks, referring to my destroyed planet. I don’t think she knows it’s gone.

“We celebrate it now,” I say. I hear a firecracker burst, far in the distance. The sound is memory :

“Do you hear the firecrackers!” says Rakta. Across the city is a vast network of memory-vines, blooming and breathing in celebration. I want to turn back to my mother, to see her face again, her voice is the same love I remember, but I can’t face her again.

“In there,” the guide finally says. It seems she means to wait outside the hovel. I open the door to find Jyoti, lying down on a cotton cot. She has festooned her walls with Satyid fungi for light and decoration. A precious can of petrol is set alongside a stove. I extend a tendril-bandaged arm to her.

“Krishna?” she asks.

“Krishna?” I reply. “Who’s Krishna?”