Chasing the northern lights

We run, three-legged, to touch the face of the sky. In its gut churns a legion of excited particles, or is it a colossal cat’s eye?

Nebulous, nebular, nebulium. Are you aware of the risks, they had asked before laying the consent form on the table. We pant.

For seven years, we had seen no stars from the attic of 1/B Shyamaprasad Lane but for the plastic constellations pasted to the lime-plaster ceiling. Falling stars were choking hazards. Our boredom in that room had its own seasons. In the evenings, we threw ourselves into our ritual games. Sometimes we tried to snatch lizards’ tails without rising from the bed. At other times, we followed the concrete fissure on the floor that stretched from near the foot of the bed to its rightful end without blinking. The crack on the floor spread as the edges of drifting continents on the old map glued to the attic’s wall. That world was flat and fading. And you would think we are the same person but whenever we tried to tell the thing-we-cannot-see that was on each other’s minds during the games, we would be gridlocked.

They had seen us coming, Baba and Ma. The first time Ma saw us floating in her body she recalled encountering two faceless equestrians dragging the sun across the sky in her dreams the previous night. It was a sign, she had said. As a man of science, Baba had said, he was not one bit worried. It was only a matter of time. After all, Baba reasoned, it was physically possible that we were already leading separate lives in some other world. Unless we didn’t exist at all. But it was a matter of time before Baba’s dreams too began to fester. An avowed atheist once, he was spotted clutching the collapsible gate behind which the son of Sun and Shadow mounted a raven. He was praying for hope and money; mainly, money, so that we could be separated. Even so he would come to the attic to combat sleeplessness in our company. While he explained to us how the universe works, we would stare at the plastic stars and doze off.

Wayward black-and-yellow taxis honked us up when nights awash with halogen lights broke into dawns. Baba was no longer by our bedside then and we opened the wooden window shades to look for the beggar with a ballooned vocal sac — a frog on two legs waiting for tropical monsoons. Giggle. Ma brought us bitter-sticks to chew in the morning but we didn’t see much of her otherwise. We heard her rubber slippers, her sing-song voice. Leaning on the window rails, sometimes we saw the girls and boys she taught at home come and go. We saw them brake their cycle outside the main gate and pinch each other’s butts.

Here, thousands of miles away from that narrow lane, we are now riding the waves of dark dust. The townhouses, the farm in which they run experiments on cattle, the gas station from where Baba bought gummy bears and the pop that tasted like toothpaste the day we got here, the beams of the occasional cars are nothing but specks in the distance. We turn our eyes away from the earth, unwilling to miss the tricks the night sky will pull on us.

We had started losing sight of Ma sometime after we bit her brother. He had sneaked up to the attic to lick our earlobes and we dug our teeth into his fleshy wrist. Under his guttural breath, he had whispered, beast. We had grinned. Later he brought Ma upstairs to take us to task. Holding up the arm reddened by our teeth, Ma asked us, what were you thinking? We said, beast.

We were the last passengers to board the three flights that brought us to a part of the map that had faded years ago. In the town to which we moved, roads did not meet the sky for miles and you found mosquitoes larger than those bred in Shyamaprasad Lane’s drains over the monsoons. There were no mountains, but it would be a cold town, everyone had said. However, it was the summers that shocked us. While the heat wrung us, we were always on the verge of being tossed by the winds when let out after dark in roomy but stiff cotton skirts. We suppose most of our neighbours in this town, like our neighbours elsewhere, knew of us without having set their eyes upon us.

Our bare feet had never touched the dingy Shyamaprasad Lane. Having moved to the prairies, though, we could uproot grasses with our toes. Of course, the blades of grasses scratched our ankles in protest. They were inclined to conquer newer heights and did not take kindly to our trampling feet.

When Baba broke the news of his appointment in the new laboratory and his desire to move to this town to Ma, she asked him who put such an idea in his head. A film of brightness shone over Baba’s eyes that afternoon and he offered an inspired lecture on the shape of parallel futures but Ma’s curiosity was finite. She chose not to come. We, however, had no real choice. When we cried, Baba told us that we could spend the rest of our lives in an attic or live in a town where the sky produces its own neon light.

Twice this summer we read aloud the predictions about the northern lights from the morning papers. On both occasions, the lights had weakened by the time Baba returned from his laboratory and we could not chase it past the sphere of the city lights. Without complete darkness, the spectacle is half-realised, Baba said, and there is always a next time. Today would be no different had we not run off.

When Baba was signing the consent forms that the doctors handed to him we had asked, why is this necessary? He rolled his eyes and remarked that we would not understand. We asked, why is the surgery necessary? He reasoned, life would be easier if we could become our own persons. We are our own persons. So we asked him yet again. Why is it necessary? He said he was tired of watching us hide.

We are not hiding, not any more. We stole out of the apartment when one by one the aisles of the supermarket at the corner of the street were plunging into darkness. A lady in a tattered military uniform was rolling on the ground of the bus stop. As soon as she spotted us she became motionless — a filthy-haired mannequin nailed to the ground.

Run faster, we tell ourselves. We are not any closer to touching the sky and the green light is already paling. We swiftly make our way through groups of fireflies until we can no longer see.

We do not know how long we lay under the open sky. Sharp beams of torchlight find us collapsed on a cold field a few miles from our apartment. When we open our eyes we see Baba and his laboratory campus’ security guards stare down at us. We are carried back to the apartment without a word.

Next morning no ambulance comes for us and Baba offers us the last of the bitter-sticks we had brought to the town with us.

A week or two of silence later, over breakfast we ask Baba how the universe works. To which Baba says, she is a remarkable woman. Who, we ask, even as we realise it must be she, the deserter. We have barely spoken of Ma since we got to this town. But now Baba tells us of the time she had driven her brother out of the house. Her brother had wanted to plant a video recorder in our nursery. His plan was to gather footage of the rare, exotic babies and distribute it among interested viewers. Apparently, there was a market for images of deviant babies. He would donate some of the proceeds to fund our surgery, he had said, but Ma put her foot down. Once we were born she did not desire us to be separated or to alter us in any other way. At any rate, that’s how Baba’s story goes.

Except she could not bear to look at us either, we say.

Baba vigorously nods his head like an angry puppet. We take a hard look at him. For the first time it occurs to us that he has shrunk over the course of the past few months. Engulfed in his momentary wrath he appears even smaller. Is he deluding us or himself, we wonder. Or is it just the way you sum things up? We watch him quietly tackle a large lettuce leaf perched on an open sandwich with a fork and a knife. Perhaps he is forming sentences in his head. But we do not wait for him to finish raking up the past or to explain why he is willing to let us slip through after all these years. We simply charge toward the crisp autumnal daylight.

Torsa Ghoshalis the editor of Papercuts. Her debut novel, Open Couplets, will be published by Yoda Press in 2017

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