Fiction

The Creator

by Jaideep Saikia

There were certain things about Supriya that he would never understand. Last Wednesday, for instance, she had suddenly announced her decision to have a baby. It was a decision alright, for although he had just about enough intelligence to realise that a decision like that isn’t quite like a decision to give up smoking, the authority with which she said it gave him the impression that she was perfectly capable of it, and without any aid at all.

Now, the desire for pregnancy in itself isn’t an incredible idea—most women tend to realise the need to procreate when their lives reach a point when it seems that the only justification to live on is to produce members of her own kind. He wryly recollected what his mother had remarked once, a long time ago, at a luncheon they had hosted to celebrate his return from Sheffield. His mother still bore signs of having been a beautiful woman. She had treasured an old photograph of herself: she was about eighteen; a rose on her hair and the pose although not flattering enough by today’s grim standards had a certain timelessness about it. People could still relate her to that old black and white photograph. But for all that his mother had still remarked, ‘I think I’ve done enough for a couple of lifetimes, bearing and nursing my son to his present state of maturity.’

But Supriya was different. She was meant to be different. She was a neurosurgeon and that meant she knew people’s minds. Nights, after she operated, were, for him, nights of great despair. For she had taken it upon herself the task of liberating his mind. She was quite adamant about the inter-changeability of the mind and the brain and as a result, claimed that as she knew quite a few things about a brain she must know a mind as well. But it was only named like dura mater and arcuate fasciculus which came his way. And much as he tried to tell her that she was merely talking parts, she was unquestionably certain of her understanding of the whole as well.

Supriya was a good surgeon. She had taken her MD from John Hopkins and had been an assistant to the legendary Penfield. She loved the West and now she was missing it. She would spend hours poring over the cards and gifts her friends sent her, complimenting every gift in an inimitably special way. ‘This scarf’s from Hermes. Cindy’s speech clinic must be doing well’. ‘Doug never got past 15th Street bargains…’ ‘I miss Al’s goulash…’

A quirk of fate had brought them together, at a conference in Boston. It was one of those inter-disciplinary things which were in fashion those days, a matrix that attempted to bring together differing views. Supriya was one of the speakers. Her paper, ‘Sustained release and inhibition in the substantia nigra’ had created quite a stir when it was first presented in the Ithaca session of the Neurology Congress. And now when it was well known that she had revised some of her earlier positions to suit the Wilder hypothesis, almost the entire neuro-scientific community had gathered to listen to her.

He was in Boston on a holiday. ‘A tactical retreat’, that’s what he called it. He didn’t care much about names and since most of it was paid for any way he couldn’t be bothered what people said. Sabbaths have an air about them—it was clear to him that the word was coined to lend a kind of easiness to forced abstinence. He had a theory that even bees didn’t work Sundays.

It was the height of summer, the Massachusetts version wasn’t very different from the one he had left behind in Sheffield. He had been working on his doctoral dissertation, an aspect in neuro-linguistics that depended heavily on the Cartesian distinction. After four and a half years of rigorous research, his thesis had run aground. There were serious anomalies. He was unable to resolve them. Although he could have gone ahead and submitted his partial fulfillment, a strange notion of right and wrong had prevented him from doing so. At last, he had gone up to his director of studies and announced. ‘Chris, I am hit bad. I am not sure I agree with what I’ve been doing anymore. I am sorry. It was as simple as that.

Professor Peacocke had peered at him through his half-moon glasses and had shifted uneasily in his chair. The Hang Seng Center for Cognitive Sciences held a lot in store where its graduate students were concerned. This one was particularly bright. A trifle eccentric for their liking but they had been prepared to overlook all that for his fellowship. In an orbit of fellows among which even a FIDE chess master was present, the combination had to be right. But for all his idiosyncrasies he’d make a wonderful addition. All that he was required to do was to quietly graduate. And this half-crazed asshole was throwing it away. All because he had sighted a few ad hoc hypothesis that wouldn’t yield to his primary thesis. Professor Peacock had tried to reason with him, academically in the beginning, countering argument by argument, assuring him of the progressive nature of the anomaly. He had even made a veiled attempt at blackmail—the Center might not be prepared to fund him for another year. In the end, he had sighed and let him go, for he had come to like this diminutive Indian. Professor Peacocke hated partings. He was too business-like to look emotional. He had merely arranged a study tour for him.

It wasn’t as if the Anglo-Saxon ideal of ‘never-give-in’ did not appeal to him. It did! He was an ambitious man and he knew that success is a creature born of stubbornness. But this time he was running away—from obstinacy, from cock-sureness, from the need to be correct. Creation, the primal axiom of being, was eluding him. Entropy and decay—the definition of life! Or, as his estranged friend Rajit would say, ‘life—a pause between two eternities’. He remembered a film he had been to or was it a novel? The killer doctors in one of the death camps during World War II. Flosenburg, was it? The beautiful Jewess strapped to the operation table, neurosis in her hazel eyes, uncomprehending, as the death doctor explained in great detail the surgery which was to be performed on her, to remove her ovaries. The attractive Jewess pleading with the doctor to leave at least one of her eggs intact.

Are you the rebel?

Ecclesiastical, somewhat demonic…

Fugitive from progress?

Are you not he of dispossessed utility?

Triumphant in your distances, in

Your ill-gotten, materialistic mores?

Creation, my friend is a dying metaphor.

 He had breezed through his first half-term like a sightseer. At Berkeley, he had devoted his time to cross-words. In the east, in Cambridge, Chomsky had begun to bore him. A minimalist program, he had told a forbidding MIT sophomore, was like making love with clothes on. His American friends found him crazy, pompous, amazing. He was bored stiff. He was beginning to regret the study tour. Maybe should have gone home instead.

It was during one of his walks when he first bumped into her. The Memorial Drive on Lexington Avenue meant different things for different people. Centuries earlier it had been a place marked by terrible social seismicity, with the creation of a new nation. The Fourth of July was nigh and a ragtag band was playing the Yankee Doodle. He paused to watch. A man with a sham orthopedic crutch was hobbling about the crowd, distributing leaflets, yelling, ‘No taxation without representation.

‘Hey bubba, hop in, join the tea party’, one of the ragamuffins shouted. Tea party? Where’s the tea?

‘The Boston tea party. The boarding of a company ship by a group of patriots disguised as Indians’.

‘I am sorry’, Supriya had appeared by his side from nowhere. ‘Native Americans, Sioux I think’, she once again solicited.

The first thing he had noticed about her was her clinical looks. He knew she was a doctor instantly. She had darted a look at him, one of those ‘you-still-hanging-around’ looks as if her earlier ministration was only to civilise him, and now that he was less of a heathen he should he off to whence he came.

‘Say, aren’t you Dr. Supriya Reddy? I mean I was at your presentation yesterday. Pretty smart paper. But I think your conclusions about neocortical commissures are somewhat unfounded. Sperry, R.W. 1970, et al. You know’.

‘Are you a neurologist, Dr…? She asked, a curious frown shaping up in her confident temple.

‘No, no, a linguist, a cognitive scientist…a defrocked one. I don’t know’.

‘Tea?’ she had offered. Soon two irreverent expatriates were leaning over a pair of paper cups brimming with a measure of good cheer between them. The morning had worn on as brew and minutiae accumulated. In the end, they were both tired of the paper cups and had decided to continue their trivia in her apartment, with renewed interest and real glasses.

They met the next day. And the next. And for the last six years, they have hosted a party in remembrance of that fateful July day when two crazy Indians decided to give up their freedom. He named the event the Boston tea party.

Away from the cares of academia, he took to unusually long hours of sleep, waking only to eat whatever defrosted nutrition Supriya was willing to provide. In the beginning, Supriya had protested: he still had a future, she’d say, perhaps a hopelessly watered down one now, now that he has chosen to forego his PhD. But there were other things he ought to consider doing. Writing for instance! The Arundhatis of the world was making a pretty penny, weren’t they? By merely manipulating their memories to commandeer a readership. Selective recall, she was convinced, had the ability to perpetrate the worst manner of awe. But Supriya’s exhortation fell on deaf ears. He refused to budge.

Supriya’s practice was thriving. Her private clinic received more patients than even the state-run ones. She had instituted two categories of entry for her patients. The convenient hours of the day were reserved for the privilegentsia, for the ones who were willing to undergo an MRI to account for a headache. Custom-designed chambers entertained this clientele, strictly by appointment. Supriya brought to the chic interiors a highly personalised service that would have put even a Lufthansa business-class stewardess to shame.

But from two in the afternoon till about five in the evening, she flung open her clinic’s gates to the hoi polloi. They came in droves from even the remotest of corners. Once a week she even arranged to ferry these people to her clinic, stationing off-duty city buses at well publicised, pre-ordained points. And, of course, the consultations were free.

‘I think we doctors have a duty towards our less fortunate brethren,’ she told in the course of a T.V. interview conducted by a private channel. ‘Why Assam? Well, why not? It is backward, in need of well-qualified doctors,’ she said, theatrically pausing for effect, ‘besides my husband’s an Assamese and I am Assam’s daughter-in-law.’

‘There must be wisdom in it’, his thoughts had begun to veer again. Like Herzog, Bellow’s uncomprehending Jew, his mind had lately begun to chart obscure cartographic positions. He admitted he was a little off-balance, a trifle dazed by the ambiance that permeated his outer being. But he knew or at least felt he knew that like Herzog he too could recover his balance by staggering, or by admitting a bit of madness come to his senses.

Somewhere deep down in the dark recesses of his brain an alligator was stirring. It was a huge prehistoric beast with a skull that sprouted rotten, scaly cacti. The gator had always been with him, ever since his sire’s spermatozoa had embedded itself onto his mother’s egg. It was a silent beast, content to be among the gooey mass of neurotic slush that encompassed it. A creature whose existentialist dilemma extended only to its ability to feed, flee, fight and fuck.

He had acknowledged the presence of prehistory in his brain long before he took notice of Darwin’s dangerous idea. Creation, he knew, was a summation of the arduous process of evolution as it staggered up from Jurassic skulls to well-formed cerebella projections. But primeval concerns remained, like the scaly-headed monster’s ability to congress, and produce other scaly-headed monsters. Yes, that continued to be the axiom of being.

But even a Darwinian ascendance cannot prevent the preponderance of some over many. For every form of life that survived there were countless others that had to perish. Nature was a ruthless selector. It weeded out the weak with impunity. In Darwin’s realm if you are weak you had to go. Unless, of course, your weak existence provided a measure of succour for the strong. Or you happen to be a samurai crab—revered like the interpreters of the shastras, protected by the system.

The frail old man who frequented Supriya’s clinic wasn’t a samurai crab. In fact he hadn’t anything out of the ordinary that could prevent him from joining the club of the weak. Oh, he had one attribute that distinguished him from the others. He had developed symptoms of a disease normally set aside for the prominentis. He was thought to have Parkinson’s disease.

Here was an opportunity, thought Supriya. A member of the teeming millions with a disease that normally afflicts the Muhammad Alis of the world. And it had fallen pat onto her lap. Maybe she can yet get a paper off for the Edinburgh seminar. Supriya began a course of anti-Parkinson’s therapy on the man.

‘Jesus, Supriya, you damn well know that these are pseudo symptoms,’ he had confronted Supriya’s enthusiasm. ‘Aren’t you running a grave risk by administering amantadine? Is it a double-blind study or what? Even the MRI hasn’t detected decreased nigra width.’

But Supriya would not be moved. The symptoms are clear, she had declared. The man was suffering from dopamine depletion. She had even shown him the latest medical journals to substantiate her claim. ‘Besides it’s the free samples the man’s interested in’.

He continued to attack the neat, fail-safe system she had so labouriously erected. Symptoms, he tried to tell her, contained in its very definition a restricted field of observation. Even magnetic imaging map areas of pathology that are only conceivable. What you cannot imagine you cannot see. Pictures map only what they are asked to map. His argument that even the most sophisticated imaging technique could not map vital areas did not convince Supriya. And why should she be? She followed a system whose corroborative power lay in its ability to arrive at a prognosis by matching itself with itself. There just wasn’t a way out of the system. Supriya was the system.

Long ago a poet-relative of his had exorcised him of whatever dalliance he might have attempted with poesy. ‘Some people are poets, some write poems’, the poet had decreed, one evening, when he had approached him with some poems he was hoping to submit to a local newspaper. That was his last attempt. He never attempted verse again.

But today, he needed to speak out—no, not assertively, for he could never be that, but with the voice of ambiguity. Poetry and logic, for him, were mutually exclusive concepts. They constituted his universe. A universe where paradigm shifts were the only justification for progress. But Tom Kuhn’s critique—which during his under-graduate days had been a source of immense intellectual agitation—made little sense after all these years. Structures of the scientific revolution, eh! When all he ever encountered were impossibly dry rotations.

As a child, he had contemplated going off to dig in the Valley of Kings. There was something of a mole in him, he would later tell his friends, industriously moving his way into the historical innards of the past. Perhaps he would never have to resurface with his finds. What a neat headline it would make: Egyptologist enters crypt to entomb himself! Looking back he marveled how apt that comparison had been. If only he could retrace his footsteps back to his womb and entomb himself, surrounded by the vast Egyptian pantheon. Taweret, the pregnant hippopotamus, Hathor, the cow-headed goddess. And, of course, Anubis. His dear, dear Anubis.

Stealth Anubis of Luxor

came by yesternight

Ma’at too came, astride

versions of ancient truths

 What would he do if Anubis was to actually visit him? How would he welcome that pre-historic, deified Hyena?

I, soulless and ethereal

Offered historical remains of unborn selves…

  Yes, perhaps he could do that. But would a castaway zygote make a wholesome meal for Anubis? A scavenging jackal perhaps, but one rather high in the pecking order. He would have to be content. There is nothing else he can offer.

He was trying to cross the road, to get to the office across. Cars, cows, anger interfered. He was developing a cramp in his left leg. He shifted his weight onto his right. He looked for a way to cross the road. Others were doing so skillfully. Women were yanking their children past. The children were yanking their heavy school bags past. And two cows were slowly making their way across.

He ran to the nearest cow. Her bones showed. The udders were filthy, utterly dry. A horn was broken. But she lolled past the deluge, uncaring, her right of way predominantly marked. He made his way through the cars holding onto the cow’s tail. He wished he could thank her at the end of it all. For the crossing could have been a lot worse had he not the emaciated cow’s tail to guide him across. But the cow was already moving towards the heap of refuse. Gratefulness did not make much sense these days.

‘May I speak to the Customer Services manager, please? I wish to speak to him about the water purifier, the aquaguard your company had installed at our residence about a month ago’

‘A moment please’, the receptionist busied herself with incoming calls. She had one phone glued to her right ear, another on her left. As she listened to both these, she was talking to another one. A fourth one she cradled on her lap. A fifth was ringing.

‘Could you give a call later in the day? We are kind of busy today.’ His gaze had disturbed her.

‘Our phone’s out of order. Besides all, I wish to know is how does one clean the pre-filtration unit in an aquaguard. It is giving some trouble.’

‘First floor, third cabin, Mr. Nath’, she returned to her calls, and her jugglery.

A month ago a salesman had cajoled them to buy an aquaguard. ‘Aquaguard very good,’ the salesman had sworn. ‘Municipality water poison. It makes cancer. Aquaguard treats poison water biologically, chemically and ultra-violetly’. The salesman had paused to demonstrate, adjusting the flow of water, filling up a glass. ‘See, now you drink poison water and live long,’ he had beamed triumphantly.

‘Use a belan, a belna mari. Beat the filter well. That’s how everybody does it,’ Mr. Nath said.

‘Isn’t there a more human, I mean less violent method to clean the filter?’

‘I am afraid not. Everybody needs the danda nowadays,’ he let out a huge roar of laughter. ‘Yes, danda, that’s what everybody needs.’

Anubis is vulpine

Scavenging his terrestrial fare

Necrophilic his spoors I follow

‘I want to have a baby’, Supriya said again, this time a little defiantly.

Motherhood meant different things for different people. Long ago when the sun was still burning bright and the moon was attracting the pacific waters into its periodic frenzy, the passage of a calendar month had the auspiciousness of creation. Men and women met to create images of themselves so that in turn those images could meet to create similar images. But today when test tubes and clones held sway that image had receded into the shadows. Science was becoming an art. An art that churned out images for the sake of churning out images. There was little the artisan could do with his own image. Oh, he could feed it with the various brand names that lined the shelves of the super-markets. And send it to a management school that taught how to create more brand names. Honourable existence hinged on degrees and the degree of sophistication one was able to achieve. Men, dogs, even the mute squirrel fought in turns for the last available morsel. And even as science laboured into the night to seek cures for the various virii that afflict the world, science the art was unleashing another installment of affliction.

Majuli was an island he had come to like. It evoked in him images of a perfect progeny. The river had sired it and now the river was taking it back into her bosom. And men, foolish men thought they could keep the child away from the mother.

A man, an educated man who spoke many languages had come to that perfect island. He said he wanted to change the island. He imported various ideas from abroad, ideas like profit maximization, like chaos. He gave these ideas a local odour. At first, the people flocked to him, forgetting that centuries had gone by on the island without any ideation. But how could they resist the logic of the west! It was the fashionable thing to do. Even the paddy of Majuli which had from time immemorial learnt to grow underwater and survive paused to listen to that logic. Logic was new for the islanders. The island had never known any logic.

But this man whose messianic mission had brought logic to Majuli fell to the contradictions of his own logic. How could he survive? Did he not know that Majuli’s time had come? Why had he then forced his logic onto a people whose existence had depended only on poetry? If only he had listened to the plaintive tunes of paar kora raghunath sansar sagar!

It was midday. His bus had reached Tamulpur, the place where the newspaper had said the army would hold its free sterilisation camp. He got off the bus and began to walk towards the camp.

His blood surged in his veins. Centuries began to cry out. He saw neutrinos forming themselves in the primordial soup, the water bubbling with stellar life. He felt the meiotic separation. Tiny tadpoles swam out of his belly and began to encircle him. A huge crocodile appeared out of nowhere. It lashed about wildly trying to mount him. All of a sudden it began to vomit. The crocodile was throwing up hyenas. The hyenas began to scamper all around him. They threw up their heads and began to laugh. He tried to shut his ears but the crocodile had bitten off both his hands. The hyenas snapped at his bleeding appendages. They made for his testicles. He fell down writhing in pain, trying to get away from the vicious jaws. But the hyenas had metamorphosed into a huge mountain gorilla, beating his chest, driving away weaker males, asserting harem rights. The chest split and from the bloody pulp, a human baby with two heads and four hands crawled out. The baby had no eyes. It groped its way into the darkness.

An aproned army captain was taking his blood pressure. A nurse stood nearby. Posters hung all over the tent. One said, hum do, humare do. Another do ke baad kabhin nahin.

‘How many children do you have,’ the captain asked. The nurse was preparing an injection. A gush of wind outside made the tent sway. The bamboo pole that held the tent in position let out a querulous creak. His face was calm, almost triumphant. He said, ‘plenty, all stillborn’.

About the Author:

Jaideep Saikia is a security analyst and author based in North East. With over two dozen peer-reviewed and published papers on security and strategy. He is also the author of several books, including the best-selling “Terror Sans Frontiers: Islamist Militancy in North East India,” “Terrorism: Patterns of Internationalization” and “Mind over Matter”.

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