from Uncertain Curtains
1
In the lower half of the fine-netted curtain, a horde of zebras grazing on a ground that is obscured by their bodies. Their stripes have been portrayed as though seen through lenses of differing curvature. This distortion has resulted in a continuous linkage, all the way down the horizon, of zebra to zebra on the basis of the two colours of their stripes. So where the curtain is flat, there are, instead of zebras, horizontal bands of black and white, occurring alternately, rising into humps at a fold in the netting or plummeting, and simultaneously decreasing in width, to form, along with bands joining them from the other side of the fold, what appear to be concentric pears around seeds of peaches. On looking closely, and after a while, it becomes clear that the zebras seen through this distortion are nothing less that the terrain on which they are grazing, and in fact representing with contour lines. By approaching closer or moving away, the viewer can affect a change in this terrain. Likewise, by looking at it from another angle. If this is done sufficiently rapidly, for example, by shifting suddenly to the right end, then one gets a glimpse of the sunlight grazing the tops of a horde of cumuli moving northward, the rest of their bodies silhouetted, sometimes less opaque so as to appear like soft oranges exuding a cheery blush.
4
In the lowermost part of the curtain can be seen the wavy lines traced out by fingers on the sand of a beach. The water has withdrawn into the sea but is not very far from these undulating and unbroken shapes, having just passed the criss-crossed stitching which separates the bottom end of the netting from the rest of it. This larger section one is given to imagine as the sea itself, on whose surface the sun casts a glimmering pinkish light. Upon closer and longer examination, it becomes evident that the area of sand on which these primitive inscriptions have been made is itself uneven, rising and falling like the waves. This realisation explains the fact that sunlight falls only on some mysteriously selected regions in the more or less flat surface of the curtain’s lower part. Soon the graininess of this fading light begins to suggest the possibility of an infinitude of sand, undisturbed by anything but wind storms and sidewinders nosily sliding down a dune, although there is nothing to tell that this process is ongoing. Visible through the window in the movement of the shaggy, sprawling branches, the wind, too, does nothing to prove such convictions right.
7
The lower part of the fine-netted curtain is a block of wood which exhibits alternating dark and bright bands in various patterns resulting from the different angles at which that area has been chopped. This haphazard job of the lumberjack has given rise to unforeseen folds in the curtain. From this observation, however, it cannot be inferred that he was drunk. In fact, it leads to another observation: this wood is a hologram which reveals shapes of animals, birds, vegetables, and insects – alas only through patterns of bands – that were associated with it when it was part of a tree. But on closer examination there representations of life forms turn out to be puzzles in which a tiny metallic ball has to be inserted into an aperture at the centre of a carefully constructed labyrinth within the frame of their bodies. Above these wooden, fossilised depictions, flames, potentially infinite in form, are to be seen. If the stitches sometimes do permit, in certain areas along the horizontal stretch of the netting at the bottom end, the radiance from the flames to fall on these puzzles, it is probably to assist the beholder better to spot the aperture of his or her chosen animal, bird, insect, or plant. This, whatever the choice may be, can always be made to coincide with the sun if the viewer only moves slightly to the right and bends down a little.
8
Cardiograms of fifteen or so healthy people are displayed, one above the other, in the centre of the lower one-fifths of the curtain. The manufacturer has exaggerated their wellbeing by not having scaled down the graphs after transferring them from the paper used in hospitals to the fine grid of the curtain. The factor can be guessed to be roughly ten. However, scaling down itself is not going to affect their health. But on moving our gaze to either side of this band of normal pulses, disturbing, and often unbelievable, graphs present themselves. Towards the right, they begin to resemble seismographs while in the other direction, grooves on records somehow gone haywire. A closer look will reveal that from the left-most end of the curtain to the right-most there is no rupture in these graphs, i.e., they are continuous. This revelation sheds new light on the already obvious fact – that the graphs are static – and leads one to propose that as we go from left to right, the frequency decreases and zany, chaotic outbursts of sounds coagulate into the oeuvre of a Coleman or a Carter, which is the lifeblood of the fifteen healthy people who, like rats and elephants, may perceive the tremors of earthquakes thanks to their healthy diet and regular brushing of teeth. But if we look for further evidence to support this claim, especially outside the window, then we must not expect anything more than the rent in the single, uniform mass of cloud: the only bright portion in the western sky from which, alas, we cannot tell the sun’s location.
9
To be wave or particle? That’s the question the lower end of the curtain asks, where more than a few results of Young’s double-slit experiment, as seen through the interferometer’s eyepiece, have been rendered in watercolor, naively linked up by wavy lines of yellow and black as if the experiment were performed using n-slits on a table as long as the horizon, which in this case would be the criss-cross stitches above the lower section. The observation that the horizon, no matter how thriftily represented, is over the double-slit experiment results alludes to the famous experiment done underground to refute the existence of ether. The previously construed naiveté of the painter can now be seen as the tact in portraying the irony of experiments conducted to study light. The haphazard linkage of results are nothing less than an imagined resultant of manipulated or copied data from a sophomore practical. The spiritual metaphor of dark and light continues from the work itself to the lab and the quadrangle, from the inferno where the mind is moulded to the purgatory from whose peak the student slam dunks. In actuality, the bands are the sum of his days presented to him with divisions of sunlight and darkness, as if to warn him that outside the university, he will learn other uncertainties, he will see darkness spreading slowly but further and wider than light, he will know that the horizon is a rim of just another basketball court where the sun gets dunked – if one looks outside the window – with that tenderness with which nature treats his ignorance.
12
Very often, photographs of a twilight sun will show bands of colours in the form of parabolas gradually becoming more and more eccentric towards the horizon, a phenomenon that can be seen in the sill-end of the netting. Here, though, colours are absent from the bands, or present only within the sparkling dots created by the refracted light. In other regions there is an ethereal golden spread which gives the curtain the appearance of satin. Between bands of this colour and texture there are the bands with various shades of grey. Between indifferent bands of promiscuous gold is the darkest of the grey, as promising as the breeze found in glades during midsummer. As these fade into brighter greys, which merge with the dimmest of the dispersed glimmer, they trace out light’s path back to its unbearable source which penetrates through the atmosphere, negates the aura of the living and turns everything into a blunt and speechless silhouette.
13
Melting oil torpidly descends through the two, closely-spaced layers of hollow fibre forming that part of the curtain below the criss-cross stitches with which they are bound. The curtain above this region is made of a single layer of fine silk. When the temperature of this surface, which has more exposed area, goes beyond 20 degrees, it begins to melt the oil that has remained condensed between the sealed double-layer of the stitching, which stretches across the width of the curtain. The fact that the oil has begun to melt can be affirmed by the appearance of wavy bands, concentric rings and other patterns which simulate a delayed, almost frozen, trickle from a source close to a glass surface (like wiper fluid on the windshield) but which is in fact the tardy movement of oil in the weft and warp of the two layers. Very often sunlight falling in this area heats up the oil stored in the stitched pocket even further, which in turn causes a further rise in the temperature of the curtain, significant enough so as to produce cold, static flames of a blush pink.
16
Unenjambed lines on a static curtain:
Are they from a poem writ in water?
So they appear to be.
Look as closely
At their frozen dance, immaterial
To throws of dice,
As you will, you won’t hear
The thrashing of waves, or the rending
Of veils, only
The mute contrapuncti
Of transparency and opaqueness
Whose score the sun has petrified
In shadow and light.
17
In the lowermost part of the curtain, aligned rivers stretch from one end to the other. An aerial view transforms them into molten velvety silver or mercury making its way through the uneven terrain of the netting towards the sea on the right, which heaves with torpor and inspires metallic whale song during the annual flood. Migratory birds will notice the redistribution of minerals caused by this event and will make necessary adjustments in their flight path, inspiring airplanes to recalibrate their compass. By night, the rivers glow with a fiery yellow, burning with the passion of streetlamps as the late home-comer hears it. At daytime and from ground level, they are the snaking streets; from above, trickling lava that hisses when it meets the sea, sighs on reaching home to raise its feet onto the footstool, honey sprouting from ores mined in the dusking sun.
19
When one enters the house of the Lesca people and looks at the curtain customarily drawn over the window, one does not read, in its bottom-most part, the legend, “Climb a mountain to find an onion at its peak; deep-sea-dive to find a fish on the bed of the ocean,” simply because no such thing is written there or, for that matter, anywhere else, whose possible source or target could be the Lesca themselves. The Lesca live in the marshlands of Borneo; they have no script and communicate entirely through gestures performed on an object, which in their case is unerringly a food ingredient with whose possible culinary uses a solitarily wandering individual would have become extremely familiar and which will eventually end up in a large communal meal. From the earliest days of childhood, the baby will be exposed to the gestures of its parents, repeated and improved upon if it shows signs of understanding, which try to communicate to it the purpose of the task it will soon be obliged to undertake. On “coming of age,” which for a Lescan can be anywhere between 12-35 (and exceptionally never), the child will have “divined” this message, leaving its home and parents in search of ingredients with which it will be able to express itself. Plainly, there can neither be the possibility nor a need to communicate between two Lescans unless they have found such an ingredient. When it is found, the finder stops wandering and builds a little hut in dry, open land. There he or she will wait until at least one Lescan, having found his or her own ingredient, now finds the first one in the hut. There, memories of meals from childhood will invade their dreams; the “words” of their parents will become more and more clear in them. Most Lescans die waiting in isolation, in huts far apart even for a lifetime of walking. Many others are unable to survive on the water and fruit diet during the period of the hunt. The occasional vegetable or fish they will eat raw will only more bitterly teach them (how, it can only be speculated) that it cannot be used in this manner. In the case that two Lescans find each other in that hut, they will “talk,” and from the ensuing meals will decide whether they wish to go in search of more or, content for the time being, wait to be found by others. It is true that this pair will never part each other’s company, a fact which explains why a considerable population of the Lesca is bisexual. At a communal meal, Lescans will prove to be unbearably talkative, so much so that they will perform gestures without using the ingredients required for the performance. As is evident – and as many sociolinguistic studies have failed to disprove – the sign in their linguistic system is a process. This observation has needlessly deterred or complicated research on their modes of communication, through perhaps revealing the frightening complexity in the manner in which their recipes can make meaning. These complexities, however, usually arise due to misconstruing two basic facts regarding their mode of communication, which must be stated once and for all. Firstly, the ingredient contributed by each individual to the communal meal is unique, differing in shape, size, colour, texture, or taste regardless of belonging to the same kind. This is necessarily so because of the difference in the regions of their origin, which, as Maeterlinck and others have shown, can be extremely varied within the bogs of Borneo. This amounts to saying that in a communal meal, there will not be more than one onion among the ingredients, even though onions in general may exceed a dozen. In either case, and this is the second clarification to be noted, an individual will be allowed to chop no more than one onion. Both avoidance of redundancy and an emphasis on style is achieved by imposing this strict rule. Below, I present a translation of a recipe, taken from the diary of the Swiss anthropologist Stanislaw Ducret, that takes the foregoing into account with the hope that future studies will be able to avoid the trap of culinary historiography, towards which all linguistic research on the Lesca has to some extent always been fatefully lured.
26
In the part of the curtain closest to the sill and below the triple line of stitching, random, concentric shapes and bands have appeared, suggesting that this region is made of polythene on which such marks have been caused by a match or incense stick touched haphazardly and for undetermined time periods. Their concentricity can be explicated by supposing a peculiar kind of persistence of vision which these patterns – perhaps due to the chemical reaction between the heat source and the plastic, neither of which is ascertainable – provoke, thereby privileging the observer to see their development in time, as though flicking through the pages of a flicker-book. It might be concluded from the observation that no smell of burning comes from the curtain that these marks, and their subsequent unfolding, have been caused some time ago. Another feature of these burns reveals itself on closer examination: not only can their development in time be studied (by conventionally moving to the right) but also it is possible to literally reverse the expansion of the burnt plastic surface by moving to the left. However, motion in this latter direction will not make visible an unblemished surface but merely expose marks present at that moment in time corresponding to a specific position in space toward the left. It is true that after having exploited this reversibility of the burns to the extent permissible by the dimensions of the room and the width of the curtain (factors which eventually determine the angles from which they can be observed), we come to a wall which is impregnable even to thoughts. If, on the other hand, and after bracing oneself with sufficient proof as to the real existence of these patterns being nothing less that alternating and separated cloud layers, the degree of freedom increases (by one dimension) as does the sample space available. Perhaps, then, the source of heat or fire originally assumed to be a match can be confirmed as the sun, but a sheet of uniform grey condensation makes the utterance of this proclamation seem rash.
27
May it please Your Majesty to learn about the rapidly improving health of Princess Alibi whom Your Highness entrusted to my care and supervision so that I may, with my knowledge in the Physical Sciences, discover means and methods to contain her concupiscence which not only Your Esteemed Self but the entire court had judged excessive for her age. In presenting my successful discovery and application of said means, I yearn not for any other reward except that of right and dutiful conduct in Your service. From the very first day, I failed not to record in minute details the various, and often devious, manners in which the Princess’ need to gratify the base desires manifested itself. From these notes, I assembled a catalogue of their characteristics, thereby being able to interpret her actions with scientific reasoning rather than the crude logic of human emotions, which Princess Alibi had mastered so well to operate upon for her benefit. In those first weeks, she would call Said, the Negro whom Your Majesty placed at her disposal, and start complaining about the appearance of some mysterious patterns on her mosquito netting which would not allow her to sleep. Said, as he confessed to me later on, never could see these patterns. Nonetheless, Princess Alibi demanded – blackmailing Said with manhandling charges – a precise description of these patterns, believing, in her innocence, that the charm would dissolve once an accurate account of it was made. Said strived hard with his poor imagination to satisfy the Princess, and after each attempt would ask her, “Now, Princess, are they gone?” to which he would always be met with the reply, “No, you dumb creature. You’ve only made them more apparent. Try harder this time or else I shall ask the guard to cut you into the smallest possible pieces and feed them to the lions.” With this subterfuge, the Princess forced the defenceless negro to her bed and eventually (under constant threats) into her. After Said had informed me about his plight, I situated myself in her room at 8 o’clock in the evening, which is when the mysterious patterns on her mosquito netting appeared. My preparation for facing similar threats could only be based on the descriptions Said had furnished of these patterns which he never beheld, and which he duly dictated to me afterwards. I have appended them to this letter for Your Majesty’s keen examination. Having made myself present at the said hour in Princess Alibi’s chamber, I awaited her usual call to Said. To keep her in ignorance about Said’s absence (and my presence) was crucial to the research I intended to conduct on the patterns. At precisely 8, she called out for Said. On hearing no answer she called out twice more. “Your Highness, Said has been sent on an errand to thy father and will only return on the morrow. I will consider it an honour to serve the Princess on his behalf.”
“Come in, Abdul-al-Kasim, my father’s most loyal servant, and tell me if you can see those patterns on my mosquito netting, for they distract me so from sleep.”
“As You wish, Excellency,” saying which I went towards her bed and, from the angle at which she directed me to look at the netting, at once saw the patterns which Said had never seen. They appeared to be moving, but in truth were static. They were water, and were but only a silhouette of water. There were near and yet seemed to have journeyed from afar and so grown faint. I concentrated on these shapes and wondered about their possible source. Suddenly, and quite without any wish to do so, I ran across the room and flung open the window opposite the Princess’ bed. Below, in the pool of the fountain, the moon was being reflected, casting shadows of the brimming and frothing water at the window and, as I was now standing there with it open, upon my beard. I shouted, not able to contain my joy, that Princess Alibi will now on sleep peacefully, for I had found the source of the devilish images. The same evening, a velvet curtain, having the most exquisite craftsmanship on it, was hung over that window and the Princess stopped calling for Said from the very next day. In the above report, I hope I have satisfied Your Majesty’s curiosity regarding the Princess’ well-being, which I have done my best to convey is far from suffering any illness, hoping only to prove that in doing so I have acted as Your faithful and humble servant.
28
On the LCD part of the curtain, which is below the criss-cross stitches, designs caused by the light movement of blunt fingernails on its surface can be seen. It has to be said that the screen itself does not have a very high resolution, for black and white pixels are, along with golden, iridescent ones, quite evident on it. These are the very pixels which have arranged themselves in patterns that are the traces of the fingernails. Why someone has indulged in this activity can only be conjectured and one possible interpretation could be that the emotion of walking on thin ice was sought to be replicated, with dangers minimised, though not compensating on the curiosity to learn the outcome if the surface cracked or tore. But if our attention is shifted towards the white pixel bands, the possibility that these are indeed contrails blown by stratospheric winds, which can perhaps help meteorologists predict local weather changes, becomes more and more palpable. The golden pixels can then be straightaway explained as those points at the frayed edges of a cloud which is behind the sun. The blinding intensity of the latter, as seen from the window, may just allow such a guess to be valid and accurate.
29
Birds with flagellating wings that are silken billows of smoke expanding without disintegrating rather like vibrating elastic cords fine enough to be taken for silver vapours seen alternately reflected and refracted by a multi-faceted mirror which more than suggests a composition of several partially reflective objects bobbing up and down in a mixture of at least two immiscible fluids of which the lighter one is inflammable and in fact is burning in those areas in which the lower fluid brought to the surface and spilled there by the bouncing objects does not spread even as the objects themselves get ignited and melt into thick glossy blobs that remain floating on the surface or drown if they exceed a certain radius causing the appearance of submerged fireballs which on crossing the diffused boundary between the two fluids go off and rekindle unpredictably and disintegrate further or rejoin to form those parts of the bobbing vessel they once were creating fluctuations in the total volume of the fluid which throbs at these regenerative and destructive moments and produces vaporous waves on its surface that begin to percolate the facets of the container making it appear rather like a succession of mirages in crescendo or silken billows of smoke flagellating before flight.
Snehal Vadher studied Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at universities in the U.K. He teaches literature at school level and conducts creative writing workshops in Bombay. Some of his short short fiction can be found online at nthposition and his poems have appeared in issues of Nether magazine. He maintains a blog at wordpress where he writes about poetry and other literary things.