Storyteller welcomes the Listener

Welcome, Stranger! This is a story for you, you who wait for my words to fall into your ear, so that we can share being and become more than we are alone. The tales I have to tell today are woven into this fabric that unrolls before you as I work my Loom. As to who or what I am, you have the right to ask, but I won’t tell you as yet. To be honest, I am not quite sure, myself. In any case, while I am telling stories, I am not I-alone—instead I am I-we, myself and Loom.

Hidden among these stories, like gems sewn into the weave, are secrets for you to find.

Now here’s a thread—turquoise blue, rippled with green, like the sea under certain lights—and I trace it with my finger to see better the pattern . . . a man is running . . .

A man, running

There was nothing for it but to run. He couldn’t run away, but he could retreat for some time from the stuffy apartment, the weight of sorrows and dissatisfactions, his mother’s grief. He remembered what the man at the convenience store had told him: around the corner there was a jogging trail through the woods. The guy at the store was thin and elderly, from somewhere in Asia, and he had been friendly—an immigrant granted veteran status from his thirty years of exile, willing to give advice to the family that had only been here for two months. Two of the strangest months in my life, the young man thought, as he went around the corner in search of the woods and the trail. He was very fit—his biceps were clearly defined under the thin t-shirt, and the old man must have thought it right to point out the existence of the jogging trail. The gym at the community college was free, and pretty good, but he had never jogged through woods. He had run on the crowded streets of his home nearly four thousand miles away, where baobab trees thrust their vast canopies above the cityscape, and colorful pirogues lay like sleek fish against the shore. Before the ocean came rampaging through the homes of his family’s fishing community, he had loved running along the expanse of sky and sea, with the buildings a mere footnote to the grandeur of the vista, where he had felt that anything, almost anything was possible in the world. He had been born close to where the Senegal river met the ocean.

For a moment his mind took him back to his lost childhood—the path on which he had walked to school, knowing his mother peered anxiously after him from the front window, as though a mother’s gaze could ward off the dangers of traffic, kidnappers or bad company; the sparse ground on which his friends and he had played ball, skinned knees, formed friendships, quarreled and made up; the endless shoreline with the constant, insistent presence of the sea. Before the sea rose and shattered homes, lives, and futures, there had been only two imperatives in his life—the pull of the ocean, the fishing trips with his father and uncles, when the fish were still plentiful—and, in the opposite direction, the university, where he hoped to realize his dream of becoming a teacher of mathematics. The sudden abandonment of these dreams, the selling of everything they owned to get away to America had not obscured from his memory the vivid images of home and all that had been left behind.

He swallowed, balled his fists, then released them. He thought desperately of an equation—Euler’s Identity—mathematics soothed him—and his breath came back into his body.

And there was the wood. A narrow green strip shaggy with trees—firs and pines, and the odd oak or elm, between the housing blocks and strip malls and roads, and there was the path, dirt and gravel, leading into it between bushes and weeds. There were a couple of people, a white man and woman, jogging out from there; they smiled vaguely at him as they ran past. He went into the green dark, feeling his feet spring back from the dirt; the earth propelled him forward, telling him he had wings and springs, he could fly. A slow elation began to displace the melancholy that had afflicted him for so many days. No other humans were around, such a strange thing after the ubiquity of crowds in his native land—but he could hear birds, and there were squirrels scolding in the underbrush. The wood was theirs, and his.

His arms pumped back and forth, blood coursed through him, and he felt the kinship with the earth and its inhabitants with a pleased surprise. Never mind that in this temperate land there were fewer birds and beasts, and they were utterly unfamiliar, as were the trees—the fact was, they were here. It came to him that in their presence it didn’t matter who he was—race or skin color or language all became irrelevant. He let these things slip away from him—they were clothes he would have to put back on later, but for now he needn’t even be a man, a young black man, an immigrant black man. He needn’t remember the argument, or the look in his mother’s eyes, the way she had looked out of the window of her exile as though from a prison cell. At this moment the usual labels and identifiers had no meaning—he was reduced to the most basic thing: just another living being running through the woods for the joy of it, seeing around him the corrugated brown cylinders of the tree trunks, the flash of a squirrel’s eye.

In that profound clarity he felt the equations returning to him: a homework problem he had been struggling with—abstractions that seemed curiously relevant to his current surroundings—how odd, he thought, and the symbols slipped into place as naturally as his feet hitting the ground with the rhythm of his breath. He knew how to solve the problem now; he would do it at his leisure later on. He let the equations go in his mind like fish slipping through water; he was a fish slipping through water, flying through air, through this strange wood that was becoming increasingly familiar as he traversed it. All that was real was the smell of pine needles and the rush of the breeze his body made as it parted the air, and the silent solidarity of the trees. The patterns of sunlight and shadow rippled over him as he ran, and he thought, suddenly and absurdly, of the black and yellow stripes of a tiger . . . an animal alien to him, seen only in books about Asia, but as he ran, the sensation became stronger and stronger that he was not alone. The sunlight and shadow seemed to resolve into the shape of a tiger running with him, on a parallel track a little way to his left, but he had no sense of danger, only a kind of incredulous wonder. He almost didn’t notice that the forest ended and the trail stopped suddenly, on a sidewalk.

In that moment before his feet hit the sidewalk, he saw—and he would swear to this later—the wood continuing gently downhill, an unbroken sea of ragged green. He looked around for the tiger, but the tiger had disappeared, and looming ahead of him was a great, dark animal that rose at his arrival: what he’d later identify as a black bear. He had the distinct sense that the bear was solid, real, belonging in this landscape, as much as the ephemeral tiger didn’t; that the tiger—Tyger, his mind spelled—had been there only as seer, as guide. Just as their gaze met, bear and forest faded and disappeared, and there was the sidewalk, and there he was, almost running into the traffic. He stopped himself with a suddenness that made his knees hurt, and stood there for a moment, panting, staring around him at the buildings and the cars and trucks. Gradually he remembered where he was, and remembered that he was a man, and a black man, a young, immigrant black man who had homework to do and a mother to comfort, and that he must not look like he was loitering, in case a police car came by—this was America after all.

He began to jog slowly along the sidewalk, looking for a familiar street crossing, and after a while he found it. He took the right turn and saw that this road would take him to the back of the apartment complex—and it occurred to him that he should be able to see, from his window, a part of the wood. He remembered the view. What he had thought was a cluster of trees marooned in the middle of town surely was a part of the wood. As for the mystery of the unbroken forest, the Tyger, and the great bear, it was too much to make sense of right at this moment—he would hold it and ponder it in the treasured moments of solitary contemplation in the dark before sleep. The thought was comforting. Before bedtime he would put his desk near that window, if his younger brother would let him move the other bed. He thought of the homework problems waiting for him, like woods through which he would discover new pathways, and on the heels of that thought came the words he would say to his mother to soothe, a little, the pain in her eyes. A surge of energy coursed through him—he ran up the stairs of his building, and as he did so he saw just for a moment the baobab tree in bloom, its white flowers like exploding stars, and felt the sea surge against the shore with the same rhythm as the beating of his heart—and, as he burst through the door, where the smell of cooking greeted him—fish, and tomatoes, and pumpkin, and rice—he thought he carried within the ocean of himself the subtle new fragrance of the wood, the dusty verdure of the trees, the comradeship, despite everything, of the beings of the world.

Storyteller speaks of Traveling

There are worlds, universes, even, that lie off the time-axis that we know. If you think of time as a straight line running from past through present to the future, you are likely to miss these worlds. If you think of time, instead, like a meandering river, then these worlds are channels and distributaries that form along the edges. The most important thing about them is the possibility that the main time axis—the one we’re caught in—can be moved closer to this world or that one. There are those who travel between these worlds of possibility and don’t even know it. They see these other worlds in dreams, and forget them in their waking hours. There are those who travel between these worlds and know quite well where and when they are. These are the Travelers, and these are some of their stories. You don’t have to believe them. Traveler’s tales, after all.

The Loom speaks again. Here’s a thread in the weave—black, striped with gray-blue and red. The loom maintains a polyrhythm that is mesmerizing—the thread seems to slip between thicker braids like a tiger moving through a field of tall grasses—now why did I think of a tiger? There are no tigers here. There is a pattern emerging, a black-and-red weave. A woman, dying in a ditch . . .

A woman, dying in a ditch

In the great coal fields of a certain region of North India, the coal mines are permanently on fire. So much so that the ground is, in places, too hot to walk upon. The sleeping carbon of millions of years ago wakes slowly under the assault of the miner’s weapon, releasing flatus that burns long, devastating fires. Here the coal mafia rules—the coal companies depend on and live by its existence. The mafia indentures the laborers who dig the tunnels and cut and haul the coal, and die in the fires and tunnel collapses. And some of the workers are women, married to the mines through a web of relationships: fathers, brothers, husbands, sons.

A woman lay dying.

She had left her husband, slept with a manager, risen to power as a coal equipment operator. She was proud of her association with coal, which had bought her freedom. It was her gift to herself, the source of her newfound affluence, her gift to the world that made lights turn on and cars run in the distant, unimaginable big cities. But she had gone too far, and a killer’s knife had left her lying in a ditch, staring at a smudged sky dotted here and there with stars.

Why shouldn’t she dream too?

She dreamt of the way it could have been. If she hadn’t done this, or chosen that, what future could she have had? That firstborn son, the one she’d lost before he was a year old to malnourishment . . .

She dreamed of the little shrine at the entrance to the mine, where an image of goddess Kali guarded the miners from harm. She dreamed she was with the child, walking through the black tunnels, walking into and through the fire, unharmed, and the small boy laughed and ran ahead of her . . . And here, in the subterranean darkness she heard the river, the captured, poisoned river thundering not far away. The sound of the water reminded her, oddly enough, of a green childhood, of sal trees rising majestically, the smell of home-brewed mahua, being held in her grandmother’s lap.

Then, a terrifying interruption: she saw, for a split second, the river, or an errant distributary, bursting through the weakened walls of the tunnels, flooding, drowning the miners working there. It was near, very near the ditch where she lay; the ground trembled. Sometime later—minutes? hours?—she heard the distant wail of sirens, and on the road above the ditch an emergency vehicle went by, flashing red beams—the waves of red and black passed over her like the stripes of a running tiger seen at sunset . . . She said to herself, this is real, and I am dead, and I never got to go home. And, as the water rose through the tunnels and found ways that only water can find, she spoke through chapped, bleeding lips a phrase she had learned from her grandmother, and the river water met her body lying in the ditch, and claimed her.

How can we explain what happened next? You can say that the woman she was once died right there, and that would be true. But then, how do you account for the fact that someone rose up from the ditch, a woman with the same features, her skin the color of earth after rain, river water pouring from mouth and eyes and ears, her loosened hair streaming down her shoulders? That a moment later a man stepped out of an invisible door in the darkness and took her hand, and led her out of our world into another one? What a seasoned Traveler will tell you is that the moment she spoke the words in the half-forgotten tongue of her grandmother, that very moment happened to coincide with the river itself taking matters into its own hands. The willful Damodar, long called the River of Sorrows for its moods and furies, its blatant disregard for boundaries and embankments, until humans tamed it to their needs, or so they thought—how long had the river itself simmered in resentment and outrage? And it was in this coincidence of death and watery desire that the boundary between our world and another world of possibility suddenly narrowed, and a path appeared between the two.

This is why the woman they call Queen, only one of her many names—now a seasoned traveler between the realms of possibility—is part river. She has seen much in her travels, both in this world and the other ones, and has acquired a bewilderingly cosmopolitan identity. Part human, part river, part leopard.

Storyteller explains the ruhene concept

Leopard, you say skeptically. You ask: how can a human be part leopard, part river? But your confusion is only because no word exists in any major human language to explain what the Travelers call the ruhene. No analogy is quite valid, but you can think of the ruhene as a supercategory of the genome, or you can dispense with any pretensions to the scientific and call it, simply, a kind of innate kinship, a blurring of identities across peoples, species, and macrobeings like rivers or forests that results in an affinity unique to an individual. The ruhene is not fixed, but grows. Those who have been Traveling the longest have the largest and most complex ruhenes.

Now you might want to know how Queen got to be part leopard, but it’s the loom that decides what story comes next. Or rather, it is I-we, the fusion of the storyteller and Loom that enables the next tale to emerge, and we’ll tell you another thing. Looms and storytellers don’t always go with the perceived flow of time. Linear timekeeping is a tool of control wielded by the powerful. For us, who work in the dark, in small, secret gatherings such as this one, we who dream of better worlds, we braid time, weave time, defy time, grant ourselves freedom from chronology. So be warned that whatever comes up next may not exactly be in order . . . Be ready for surprises.

There may even be a tiger, leaping between stories.

Tyger, Dreaming

Tigers also dream. As the mangroves are destroyed and the sea rises, as humans push deeper into their old territories, driven at times by despair, at times by the lure of plunder and profit—the tigers find themselves homeless in their ancestral homes. So they, too, dream. And Tyger wanders the worlds of possibility, seeking the one where—

The leaping deer. The careful stalking, the final spring, the tender throat. The great, dark eyes, just before death, terror receding until there’s only the final peace, offering life itself, the ultimate bond. The sweet salt of warm blood, the tender flesh between the teeth. The great, hungry pit of the stomach quiet at last, the heavy, delicious languor following, the deep stretch of the limbs in the sun. Sleep; only the tip of the tail twitching, the waves beating gently against the shore like a mother’s heartbeat. And, awake, the land stretching before him, the green world, the watery depths, everything trembling with life, from the tiny ripples of insects on the water to the great shapes calling from the open ocean; the deep intake of breath, inviting into his body the fragrance of greenery and salt marsh and ocean. The ways he makes in the forest determine where and how long the deer stay, and therefore, which plants grow in what profusion. He is a shaper of the landscape itself. He moves through the forest, a ripple of black and gold, slips into the water, becomes one with land and sea, becomes breath, becomes death, becomes Tyger.

Storyteller pleads with Listener

You say you want to know how Tyger comes into this story, but really, I-alone don’t know. In this sort of story, the storyteller (singular) only has limited control; it is only by working the Loom (I-we) that the story, the answer, might come to us. It’s time, listener, that you realized that I am not just here to tell you a tale, to weave for you a story from the ocean of streams of stories. No, you are also part of the weave. So come, be a thread in this tapestry. Sit by me—don’t leave yet! How can any storyteller survive the listener walking away? You know, like the old song goes—aaj jaane ki zid na karo. Walk into this tapestry, sit with me. Don’t ask me about Tyger. The loom is still going. The next story is—oh look, two threads coming together, a confluence.

King, Queen, Cops

The cops held up King and Queen as the two walked through a department store. Their three-year-old had grabbed something—a fountain pen gift set—as they walked past a stack of them, and neither of the parents had noticed. The big cop got a gun in King’s face and when King—with great calmness—raised both arms, the cop slammed him onto his stomach and handcuffed him. The three-year-old was screaming when the other cop pulled her out of the mother’s arms. Queen drew herself up and said, very calmly—Baby, nobody’s going to hurt you—even though the cop was waving the gun in his free hand and clamping the kid to his barrel chest with the other. Queen raised her arms and said something in another language to King—her voice was lovely and resonant—and at the same time the weedy store clerk, a white high school kid, began filming the whole thing on his phone and using the sync he’d developed himself. The scene started to play in all the TVs on the other side of the aisle and everything anyone said was magnified into a chorus. The shoppers who weren’t watching the real drama unfold stopped to stare at the screens, thinking it was a show. Managers began to converge on the scene, and there were urgent, angry confabulations, with Queen’s voice washing over them like a river. A crowd gathered, cell phones in hand. The cops saw themselves surrounded, filmed, and multiplied on the screens around them. That may be the only reason they put their guns back in their holsters and the kid on the floor, and one of them got the cuffs off King, scowling the whole while. The three-year-old was in the stage of shock beyond fear, beyond tears and screaming, and calmly the Queen retrieved her, and some people came up to them and helped King to his feet. In ten minutes, they were out in the parking lot with the sun beating down on the rows and rows of cars.

“We need to get back,” Queen said. King had the three-year-old in his arms—she was asleep, the limp, spent exhaustion following an incomprehensible ordeal. On his comm there were messages coming in from all over the subtlenet, responding to the incident. They looked at each other, and King put his arm around Queen. Two blinks and a half and reality flickered and they were in the forest, the forest that had stood here before it was razed two centuries ago for agricultural land, giving way to a suburban plaza where the temperature could go up to a hundred and twenty Fahrenheit in the summers. But the forest that drenched them in its cool green darkness was possibly also the forest of the future, the forest that lives off the time-axis, and what you have to do, if you are a Traveler, is to nudge the time-axis just enough so that it winds its way through the forest again. Here you can breathe, really and truly, and see yourself in the curious eyes of a creature up on the tree branch taking its afternoon nap. Here there is exactly what’s been missing from your life—coolness, belonging, sustenance, a deep peacefulness that pervades your very bones, and yes, also death. But here, death is a brother, and life feels alive.

So, King and Queen lasted barely a few minutes in the Now of the department store before they had to find their way back to the forest.

She said to him: “I think it will take a while.”

“Sometimes, I wonder if there’s any point,” he said, rubbing his arms. His muscles were sore from the cop’s rough handling. There was a banked fury in his dark eyes.

“There was that boy, the store clerk,” she said. “And the people who helped you up. We have to keep coming back, you know, for the shift to happen. And we need the practice.”

“Yes, I know. I almost lost it, right there, right then,” he said, in a low, angry voice.

“But you didn’t,” she said. “Mathematics?” They smiled at each other.

Neither of them said anything after that for a long time. The forest enveloped them, and they shifted to other shapes.

Only, the weedy store clerk, the white high school kid who wrote bad science fiction in his spare time, newly fired from his job, ears singing with righteous fury, thinking I did the right thing, down with the pigs, and following that, I’ll have to work for Dad at the gas station now—that kid walking across the parking lot to the bus-stop on the other side of the hopeless stretch of burning concrete—that kid felt for a moment, a forest surround him—a coolness like being immersed in a lime-green ice soda, and there were shapes on the branches above, and lions—lions? Mountain lions or leopards or panthers or something, and maybe a bear—melting away between the trees, and he felt his body shift its boundaries, as though there was something within him struggling to get out, a great, brown bird trying to stretch cramped wings, remembering an ocean he had never seen—then there was nothing but the sun beating down on him and the wonder of it all breaking up like sea foam against the porthole of a surging ship, leaving him with a dull, familiar fear of his father’s anger, as he walked toward the bus-stop, toward his asphalt-and-concrete life, feeling as though he had glimpsed some utterly different possibility and had to settle for this one, this world of all worlds, this devastation of lives and livelihoods, this gritty particularity of suburban dust on his lips, this smoke, this exhaust, this exhaustion.

Storyteller speaks of King and Queen

Those names. King and Queen. They rule no kingdoms. Their names are mostly a joke, nicknames within a community. Queen is a translation of a word that, variously, means beloved when spoken by a mother to her daughter. There are no static hierarchies among the Travelers—even the most experienced ones know that they have things to learn from the novices.

As for King, you’ve already met him twice before this: once as a young man, running, and the second time, when he initiated Queen into the art of Traveling.

It looks like we are about to meet him again.

The Man Who Would Be King

The man who will be King is in a boat, in a swamp, with a bunch of excited, sweaty college students, and his colleague, a white woman in a bright Indian cotton skirt. It’s part of an immersion experience for American college students—a two-day trip out of the month in India to visit the largest mangrove swamp in the world, and they are hoping to see tigers. He has no intimation of what is to come, only a sense, stronger than ever, that his destiny is coming to meet him. His years in mathematics, two high schools, and now a four-year college, have heightened his awareness that there are patterns and regularities in the world beyond the immediate clamor of the senses.

The boat is broad, sitting in the water like an overweight duck, painted white and pink. It squeaks rhythmically with the swells; the deck appears to move independent of the railing, which is a little unsettling, as is the lack of the promised life-vests. They should have made the boat turn around and go back when they discovered that, but the students had protested—they are all good swimmers, eager for adventure. So, they are here: midmorning, and air is hot, humid, smelling salt, with pungent, somewhat putrid vegetative overtones. The muddy, watery lanes between the ragged green canopies of the mangrove islands form a maze. The tide is coming in. A bird is calling, repeatedly, urgently.

“Tiger about,” says the boatman. There is a frisson of excitement; phones and cameras at the ready.

Just then, a section of the frail railing gives way. A thin, high scream; a student is in the water, one of King’s, blond hair flying out. A great swell rocks the boat, and the girl goes under, an arm raised. The boatman shouts, there are horrified exclamations from the others, but before anyone else can do anything, King has jumped in. The muddy, tepid water embraces him. There’s no sign of the student; he dives, trying to see in the turbid water, feeling with his hands on the shallow sea bed; he touches branches, twigs, plastic rubbish, unidentifiable shapes. Comes up, sees an arm flung up ahead—much further than he had imagined—and swims strongly toward her. She’s close to one of the muddy islands, arms flailing, he can see the top of her head, mud-darkened—why isn’t she coming up, out of the water? He dives again. Sees that the girl’s feet are tangled in the undergrowth, and he has a frightening time freeing her—some kind of plastic twine has looped over an ankle and won’t let go—but at last he’s done it. The swell of the tide pushes them both shoreward. He helps her on to the muddy bank under a clump of mangroves; she’s gasping and coughing and crying, and he’s telling her she’s fine, and shouting to the people on the boat that he’s got her, they’ll swim back as soon as she’s caught her breath. She’s lying on her side, half-sitting up now, with his arm supporting her shoulders; they are both caked in gray-brown mud, unrecognizable. As he waits for her, he looks around at the mangrove cluster and sees, between the branches, the tiger.

The beast is on a narrow strip of mud on the other side of the mangroves. The great, handsome, striped visage, the sleepy green-gold eyes, watching him. The man and the tiger are eye-to-eye, not two meters apart from each other, and the man feels something shift within him: he is filled with an immense, shaggy strength; he can smell the strong, musky tiger-smell, braided with the scent of wild honey from somewhere in the mangroves. The world is vivid, alive, speaking to him with a thousand tongues.

“Tyger,” he whispers.

The tiger makes a short chuffing sound, a breathy syllable, followed by a throaty suffix, something like burr, and a shiver runs through the man as though he’s been touched with electricity. But the people on the boat are shouting at him; they’ve seen the tiger, and two of them look ready to jump into the muddy sea. His student is looking around, puzzled—she hasn’t seen the tiger. The man comes back to himself, waves reassurance at the boat, eases the girl into the water, swimming a strong side stroke, pulling the girl with him, helping her on to the boat, where his colleague, hysterics and fury barely under control, is getting out her medical kit.

There are three days of worry while both the man and his student suffer doses of strong antibiotics and medical observation, and he has to field anxious calls from the student’s mother, a single parent on a budget, as well as college administrators all the way up to the president. But the girl recovers, the mother is not going to sue, and the seedy hotel attendant who inveigled upon them to accept the offer of the boat trip has lost his job. So, finally, all is well, although the student with the literal immersion experience is upset that she never saw the tiger.

“And I was so close!” she tells her fellows.

The encounter must have marked our man in a subtle way, because much later, when they are all home, he is approached in a café by a thin, elderly white man with graying hair, who leaves a pamphlet on his table on top of his graded college algebra papers, gives him a grin and a thumbs up sign before walking away. The pamphlet says: Traveling: A Beginner’s Guide. The only reason he doesn’t put it in the recycling bin is that it seems rude to do it in front of other people. So, instead, he puts it in his backpack and finds it two days later.

It sounds ridiculous, but he goes to the meeting anyway, because the idea of traveling between worlds of possibility appeals to him. And he meets the people who will be his other family for the rest of his life.

“You must have a Traveling name,” his new friends tell him. They are a motley group.

“Something that’s easier to pronounce would be good,” says one of the women, laughing at him. She has large, teasing brown eyes and curly hair. “Tell us again what the tiger said.”

“Hard to render in English,” he says, smiling a little. “It sounded like burr. A word in my language.”

“I don’t think you look like a burr,” she says. “What does it mean?”

“King, it means King.”

“Then that’s your name,” she says decisively. She grins. “Suits you, the way you hold your head. Regal-like. Just don’t get any ideas. We’re an anti-hierarchical group, you know.”

He wants to know how they knew him, how they recognized him. The old man who gave him the pamphlet says they have another member, an itinerant, shy, possibly crazy foreign woman who seems to be a deaf-mute, who pointed out King to him. She comes and goes as she pleases, sometimes dressed in rags, other times in elegant, if mismatched evening-wear. Nobody knows anything about her, except that she’s one of them. Later, King will unravel that mystery, among others.

Storyteller explains why this story is a failure

Now we know all about King.

Or do we? King’s story is so tangled up with the stories of others that to fully tell his tale, we must tell the story of the entire universe. Because, if you want to tell the whole story, you cannot ignore even one thread. Which is why no story can be complete, although some are more complete than others. Which is why all stories are failures, and especially this one.

But listen—the loom speaks—dha-gi-na-ti-na-ka-dhi-na—the beat changes, shifts to something slower, more somber. Why do I feel a crushing weight on my chest, the weight of an entire world?

Talking of failures. Queen’s first failure as a Traveler. I have to find her.

“I have to find her”

Queen’s first failure as a Traveler, when she was still unskilled at it, had unexpected consequences. She heard a faint cry of anguish that made her bones shiver as though it was she, back in that other life, dying in a ditch, and without thinking she slipped through the streams between worlds to where the boy lay.

He lay dying in this world, yours and mine, in a field that was inundated by the sea. Around the world, millions of people drove their cars to and from work; millions laughed and talked in restaurants while the waiters rushed about with loaded trays, millions turned their light switches on or off, or sat in their cars idling with the AC on while their spouses shopped in grocery stores. The billionaires who made all this possible—only a few tens of them—went off to the golf course, held board meetings, zipped across the world in private jets, and contemplated the world machine they had wrought for their gain as giant numbers flickered across their screens. What price fuel? What price forest? What price planet?

And the boy lay dying in a drowned field.

Queen sensed, through the resonance that existed briefly between their ruhenes like the reverberation of a struck bell, that the boy was good at gulli-danda, loved running wild in the fields, wanted to be a film star, and could eat like a horse. He was looking for his sister after the cyclone blew in and devastated the coast. The sea was already higher than it had ever been in living memory when the storm came, and when the worst of it was over, they found that the little sister was missing. So, the boy went out into the wind and rain to look for her because he could swim like a fish. And met a wall of water like stone.

Queen found him in two feet of muddy water. She tried to raise him, felt him respond to her touch. His body stood up in the water, and he stared at her with blank eyes, and she indicated the portal behind her. And he shook his head, and said No.

“I have to find her,” he said. And he lay down in the water and died.

Her failure was a bitter taste in her mouth. She stood looking at the drowned land, the vast sky still pregnant with rain. People moved on the far horizon against the broken ruins of their homes. The air smelt of salt. An electric pylon was leaning down, as though eager to sip the water. On the breached levee, there were muddy tracks—human, cattle, the pugmarks of a tiger. A seagull flew above; a thin, high call cut the air.

There was something about the boy, the way he had lain down here, in the field that did not belong to his father but to the landlord. The field that his father and mother tended, where he had helped gather the harvest since he was five years old, where he had learned the calls of the wild birds, where he had learned who he was, the field that was not his. He had gone to school intermittently and had some sense of the world.

All this she knew, because when the ruhene goes free, the ripple of its passing gives a sense of the person. But the boy’s ruhene did not go free. Instead she felt it expand, blur, merge with the water and mud, grow large beneath her feet until her toes tingled. The boy who was no longer a boy stretched toward the horizon, where the sea lay raging.

I have to find her.

The land cannot speak with any human tongue. But a human who is no longer confined to a frail body can put in words the ancient speech of the land.

Storyteller, wondering

So many stories. I’m sometimes afraid I’ll lose myself in the weave, and never find me again.

I’ll tell you a secret, though, while the loom is silent and I can, for a moment, be I-alone. I’m already lost. Long before I became Storyteller. That’s why I’m here with the loom, in the hope that I will find . . . some hint of myself.

Now the loom starts up again—look! Something familiar, yet different. That gold and brown weave, interlaced with blue and green. A woman, a man—and tigers.

A Woman, Escaping

She was a woman, a human, but to the man she was escaping from, she was more of one and less of the other. She cradled the baby in the cloth sling she had made from a torn piece of her sari, and spoke to him, as she waded hurriedly through the knee-deep water between the mangroves, her feet squelching in the wet mud. She knew the labyrinth of waterways between the mangrove islands better than anyone, better than the man who was after her with rape and murder on his mind. Her breath came in ragged spasms, but she kept talking to the child, willing him to live—he had never been strong, in his two months of life, and how would he survive if she had to strike out for open water and swim? The child solved this dilemma for her by taking his last breath, preceded by a kind of whimpering sigh that turned her blood cold. She paused, loosened the sling, and looked at him, and the world darkened before her eyes. She wanted to scream and wail, but there was the sound of the man’s voice, calling her name, not far behind her, and she found herself possessed by a murderous rage. She made a promise to the dead child, and, leaving the shelter of the shore forest, struck out toward the open sea.

She wasn’t sure the man could swim—she had only seen him on land or in one of the sleek boats of the aquaculture farm, where they grew shrimp for the fastidious palates of city folk. But she knew that there were little islands all along the coast, some sandy and bare, others ringed with mangroves, and still others large enough to host wild grasses where a small woman could hide. The light was fading now, and the man would be a fool to try to find her in the gathering darkness on foot. This was tiger country after all.

So she swam, feeling the child’s body against her breasts, trying to keep his head above the water even though he was no longer breathing, would never breathe again. Mother, mother, she wept in rage and sorrow. Perhaps the ocean heard her, because a great swell came up to raise her body, loosening the sling, so the child slipped away from her as easily has he had slipped from her womb. She cried out, thrashing about in the water, diving down to the shallow sea-bed, fresh tears mingling with the salt of the sea. But although above her head the world was dark blue with orange stripes to the west, under the sea a murky night had descended. And so she could see nothing but shadows, fountains of disturbed sand. She understood then that Mother Ocean herself had heard her cry and taken her child back from her, and she wept as she swam, taking in water and coughing and spluttering. Somehow, she reached the island.

It was a small island. There was a gently sloping muddy beach, and atop were tall, thick wild grasses, their tussocks waving in the sea wind. Half crazed with grief and anger, she didn’t think about the dangers that might lie within. She crawled into the shelter of the grasses, made herself a hollow, wiped her face with the tattered end of her sari, and lay there in a stupor, too exhausted to weep anymore. Her arms hurt, her legs were stiff with exertion; her breasts, heavy with milk, ached. She opened her sodden blouse and squeezed them, but only a few drops spilled out, and she had no strength left in her fingers. Mother, she whispered, and oblivion took her.

The man came in the early dawn, in a boat. He was determined to destroy the woman. She was the ring leader, no doubt about it. The villagers who had opposed the shrimp farm would surely give up if they saw her dead, mutilated body. Who would have thought the woman would have the power of speech that would stir those fools into blockading the farm?

He saw her footprints on the beach of the nameless island. Wishing to take her by surprise, he edged the boat along the shore to the sea side. He pulled the boat up the beach, and began to walk carefully toward the tall grasses. Then he saw:

The pug marks of a tiger.

He stopped short. The tiger had come up from the water a little further from where he had put in his boat; the pug marks dragged, as though the tiger was injured or pulling a heavy weight. The marks went all the way into the forest of tall grasses and disappeared.

He could hear his own heart thumping, louder and more urgent than the rhythm of the waves lapping against the beach. A wind ruffled the grasses, and he sprang back. Maybe his job would be done—the tiger would get the woman. But the idea was to make a lesson of her to the villagers. He hadn’t thought to bring a gun, and besides, no ordinary gun would do for a tiger.

He was just turning away when the tigress emerged from the grass, and—with her last strength, because she was fatally injured—sprang.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much to kill a man. A bite to the throat, that’s quite enough. But for the tigress, it was the last thing she did.

And what happened to the woman who lay sleeping in the grasses on the other side of the island? Later that morning she heard a keening in her sleep, and in the thrall of dream, called to her baby to nurse him. In the dream she was utterly relieved that he was not dead after all. She held him and cradled him, and he pulled so hard on her breast that she woke up. And there, in the bright daylight, with the grasses rustling around her like her sisters whispering, she lay with her grief, and the strangeness of it all, the tiger cub alternately suckling and keening, a warm, furry bundle against her mud-caked body. For one split second she knew horror and fear, and a terrible rage, for her own father had been mauled by a tiger and died slowly over the course of a year, one side of his body paralyzed. But she saw in the eyes of the tiger cub her own child’s eyes in their primordial innocence, wide with fear and need, and she knew that the mother was dead. And later, she would find the body of the tigress, and the man dead, also, and the abandoned boat.

Later the villagers would prevail against the shrimp farm, and she and others among her people would find ways to adapt to the rising sea. They say that as the sea rose, the ancient, careful relationship between tigers and humans changed, as they came into inevitable conflict, except in one region of that coast, where it is rumored that the women leave breast milk in bowls for the tigresses when they are birthing, so that they may know that they are, despite everything, sisters and relatives. They say of these people that the women can turn into tigresses and tigers can shape-shift into humans; be that as it may, the big agribusinesses have never been able to set up their aqua-farms and industries along this wild coast; always, such ventures are met with disaster. The villagers have planted mangrove saplings where the land had been cleared for the proposed shrimp farm, and the coast remains wild, serene, and dangerous.

Storyteller ponders Tyger

Well, now we know.

Did you think all Travelers are human? I thought so, once. I thought human, spoke human, saw human until I couldn’t see Bird, or Tree, or Tiger. I was in a prison made of human bones, human thoughts, human voices. But I escaped, and here I am, telling you absurd stories. Now we know about Tyger, a tiger raised as a newborn cub on human milk. He wanders through the realms that are other worlds, and sometimes, they say, he takes on human form. When he does so, he always appears as a woman, a woman with wild, burning eyes in her earth-dark face, lithe and strong, unable to speak any human tongue, possessed of a marvelous appetite.

Look, another pattern is emerging, a shimmering iridescence dotted with points of light—nothing like I’ve ever seen before—

I have to find her.

Who just spoke?

The sea, the land, the moon

The sea rose, and overwhelmed the embankments around my heart. And the water came in, salt, and stinging. And sank into the soil of my being and changed me.

The sea rose, and overwhelmed my embankments, and the moon rose over the sea. The drowned land was silver in the moonlight, and the water surged, as though to say—do not deny me. I am here to stay.

But in the way of water, it sank into the ground, slowly, over days, leaving salt crystals in the interstices of clay and soil and gravel, saying to the humans: you can no longer cultivate here.

I have to find her.

Who was it that spoke?

The water stirred the mud, blurred boundaries, dissolved bone and blood and sinew.

I was an exile in my own land, my soul.

I lay, a vast expanse ringed by broken embankments, drowned by the hungry sea, each cranny filled with salt water and bewildered, wriggling ocean fish. I lay, and in the shawl of water covering me, I held the light of the moon and that of the stars.

Here, far from the cities, the lights of human habitation were dimmed in the great deluge. So at last I could see the universe, resume the long conversation I had been having with the Milky Way. And it was a banner in the sky above, all those other worlds, other suns.

The water will sink into my body, soak through the tattered remnants of mangroves that once protected this land from the sea’s appetite. The humans will have to tend to the salt in the soil, so that they can restore their modest gardens, and live. I feel their tender fingers planting mangrove saplings, trying to restore my ravaged body. But the sea is rising.

The sea is rising as the world burns. The madmen are burning the compressed remains of ancient life to keep living their profligate lives, but they don’t know that they are already dead. In their luxurious shelters where they fatten on the destruction of the world, they are already dead.

But not dead enough.

Storyteller has a suggestion for Listener

Tat tvam asi. That thou art. I remember my Indian Philosophy professor in college explaining the ancient phrase. It’s a concept large enough that it meets its opposite, and melds with it. Neti, neti, not this, not this, says Bulleh Shah, says Rumi, says the Buddha, and it means the same thing as the ancient Rgveda said—this thou art. That thou art. And that, and this, and that. A radical expansion of consciousness doesn’t mean losing oneself but transcending separation.

It’s close to the end of my telling. The loom is settling down for the night. But you, who’ve stayed so long to hear, deserve the next story. It’s not the end of the tale, no. The end of the tale is up to you, listener, what you decide to do with these stories. I hope you will read these stories aloud, so your bones can hear them. Better yet, read them aloud to others, those who share the yearning. Let these stories reverberate in the bones, and then take them into the world. All the worlds. The worlds of possibility. And make some of your own.

I don’t know what’s coming. Tell me why I keep hearing someone say: I have to find her.

Meanwhile, Queen seems to be looking for a cleaning woman.

Queen, King, Tyger, Sea

At that moment, Queen was looking for the cleaning woman. The international conference was as frustrating as she expected it to be—more so, even. The power brokers of the world were gathered to figure out how to save the world, to identify the source of the problems, and it had not occurred to them to look in the mirror. King and Queen were attending as observers through a non-governmental organization. In the middle of some negotiation or other, Queen had noticed, from the corner of her eye, the woman with the broom. Someone had come into the closed-door session, and just before he closed the door, she saw the woman in the corridor outside, with the broom, and instantly recognized her.

But he doesn’t know how to behave among such humans! So thought Queen, in horror, jerked from semi-somnolence to wakefulness. Tyger in human form—at an international conference! What if he mauled someone and got thrown in jail? He couldn’t speak human languages. As Tyger he could slip between worlds, but in his secondary form those powers were limited—

The conference was being held somewhere in northern Europe, in a massive building on a spit of land reclaimed from the sea. Great feats of engineering had raised the enormous levees, and provided the building with waterproof basement doors. The people in the conference were from all over the world: government representatives, corporate leaders, men and women, white and black and brown. They were not, most of them, people of ill-intent, Queen had realized. Some were sincere, but they talked like aliens from another planet. She had tried to listen, to understand, but her attention was slowly drowning in waves of sleep, interrupted by moments of half-bewildered wakefulness. The conversation surged around her.

Carbon tax; carbon trading; net zero; poverty alleviation; cryptocurrency; NFT; EV; moon mines; climate justice; sustainability; sustainable growth; sustainable oil-and-gas; inclusivity; GDP; DGP; GGP; jabber-pee; badger-pee; jabber-jabber-badger-badger-

Waves of words and phrases broke over her head; she thought, sleepily, don’t they hear the sea outside the windows? But the windows were sealed tight, weather-resistant. On the dais, there was an empty chair marked “Delegate,” and she kept staring at it in an effort to prevent her eyes from closing. She wondered who the missing delegate was. She blinked hard to wake herself and thought: don’t they see the people in the back row, the people who are drowning, the people who are burning, the people who are dying, the human people, the tree people, the tiger people? And then the door opened and she saw Tyger.

Queen got up, weaved her way through rows and rows of seats and slipped into the corridor. There was no sign of Tyger. King, who had been attending a parallel session in another room, sensed her distress and joined her. They went from room to room, hallway to hallway, upstairs and downstairs, finding traces of Tyger’s presence—claw-marks on a paneled wooden door, a long room with food set out for delegates, completely trashed: plates and cutlery all over the floor, food flung about, caviar on the walls, and most of the serving dishes licked clean. A frightened hubbub from the kitchens beyond, the deep voices of the security staff issuing orders. A pile of shit steaming gently on a white carpet in an empty chamber. After that, the trail—crushed potato chips and other food debris, inexpertly swept into corners and against the wall—led to the basement of the building.

“What is he doing here? We have to stop him before he hurts someone!”

King said, “I doubt we can stop him. But he won’t hurt anyone, he’s eaten gourmet food and potato chips. He’s not interested in the people here. Don’t you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“The sea.”

“Of course.”

She remembered rivering. Water knew water, fresh or salt. The levee around the building was high and reinforced, but water always found a way. She sensed the cracks in the structure, the sea water straining to widen the gaps. An exultant wildness rose in her. She called, water to water.

In the basement, Tyger-woman had opened the waterproof doors at the back, the ones in the loading bay. She turned around and gave King and Queen a wide, feral grin. She made an obscene gesture with the finger of one hand, but that was just her way of telling them—go upstairs.

From the open doors there entered a gray, windy day, the smell of the cold sea, the sting of sea spray. A ripple of light and dark played across the basement room as clouds passed in serried ranks across the sun, as woman became Tyger, as Tyger—still grinning—disappeared.

Someone in the conference room upstairs, a bored junior aide, glanced out of the window and saw the gray water, silver in the cloudy light, enter through cracks in the sea wall, and the sea wall shuddered hugely, like a serpent awakening, and the sound was like thunder as the ocean came in. The young man leaped up, shouting and pointing, but the delegates kept talking jabber-jabber, bladder-pee, ji-di-pee until the waves burst against the building and the walls shook, and windows broke, letting in the gray air, and the cold spray, and the world. A great tongue of salt water drenched the empty chair marked “Delegate.” Then there was shouting and confusion—the lights went out, and there was a confused mass exodus to the stairs—not the elevators, do not use elevators at this time—there were security people shouting orders. King and Queen helped the frightened people up the stairs, carrying the old and weak in their strong arms. There was no more of the incomprehensible babble, only frightened cries and calls for this person or that one and mobile phones being punched to call those they loved. But the signal was weak. Now, at the end of days, you remember love, thought Queen.

On the rooftop, the most important people left within the hour by helicopter, and the less important ones had to wait for a day and a half. And King and Queen stayed with them, although they could have melted away between worlds. But they stayed, trying to console an old woman who, despite being important enough to be airlifted by helicopter, had chosen not to because her daughter was missing. A group of volunteers did a thorough search, but found nobody, and so it was known that one young woman was lost. The old mother wept. “Found in the sea, and lost in the sea,” she said.

“Tell us,” King said, gently.

The old woman said that while she and her husband—an oil king, he was—were sailing their yacht in the Bay of Bengal, about twenty years ago, they noticed a pod of dolphins playing with something in the water. Going closer, they saw that the dolphins were clustered around a floating wooden box, in which there lay a little brown girl. The day before, a great storm had hit the coast far north of them, but that was too far away to be of relevance. The couple were childless, and they decided—quite illegally, but then, laws aren’t written for oil kings—to adopt her.

“I never told her about her true origins,” the old woman said, weeping. “She always loved water, though, never for a moment afraid of it. And drawn to her origins, although we never told her. We brought her up as best we could, put her in college, encouraged her interest in South Asian studies. In her last year she dropped out, wouldn’t speak to her father, left home. A very troubled child, but I love her, and she loves me. I persuaded her to give her father one more chance, seeing as he was trying to undo the damage done to the world—she agreed to come; she’s been combative and disruptive throughout the negotiations, and now she’s gone . . .”

The next day, the rescue ship came and sent a boat out to bring the people aboard. Before that, King and Queen did another search. They came back empty-handed, and tried to comfort the old lady as she wept. She left with the ship.

King and Queen had politely refused passage, to the consternation of the ship’s captain. It was only when they told him that a helicopter was coming for them that the captain nodded and let them be. They went up to the roof and watched the ship recede over the horizon. Then they heard footsteps behind them.

The young woman was walking toward them.

“You missed the ship—your mother—”

“I’ll call her later,” the young woman said. “I heard every word. I was just under the place on the roof where my mother was telling me my story. In a bathroom. When the searchers came, I hid in a cupboard. The window was broken, so I heard what she said. She never told me where I really come from. I need to think. Take me with you, wherever you are going.”

King and Queen had planned to leave in their usual way, as Travelers do. Now how could they take a human who was not a Traveler away from this sea-washed spit of land?

But this young woman had some glimpses already, of the other worlds. And Queen saw her, and knew her.

“We’ll take you,” Queen said.

Storyteller’s homecoming

I heard every word.

I did call my mother later. My father is one of the oil kings; he has tried to be a good father, but he never looks in the mirror, and jabbers nonsense spells while he burns the world.

I went back. I went back to the drowned land of my birth, to my brother, my brother who died for me, for the land.

And I walked over the muddy incline of the beach, where my people were planting mangroves. I saw the drowned land, the brown patches where the water had receded. I saw the people bending in the fields, trying to heal them, and familiar shapes of trees, beckoning to me, saying come home, come home. I breathed the land, the moist smell of brine and soil, and rotting fish, and the bones of my ancestors. I found my way to where the village used to be. There was nothing there but water and piles of mud and debris. I tripped on something in the water—a small child’s loom—I dragged it out and put it on the mud. My tears were as salt as the sea. I sank to my knees in the water. I laid my head on the mound of mud where a hut had once been. I felt the shifting shape of the land beneath, the ribs of my father, the limbs of my mother. I closed my eyes and saw my brother running ahead of me in the fields, looking back to make sure I was there, I was safe. I heard him then, through a trembling in the ground, the land sighing, settling. My brother, whispering—welcome home, my sister.

Epilogue, or, a wildflower grows through the asphalt

In Storyteller’s absence, I, her assistant, must pick up the tale. When one storyteller leaves the Loom to fully enter the weave, another must take on the responsibility of working it. So, I will do my part and then leave it to another.

Listener, I am here at the shopping mall—yes, that same shopping mall where King and Queen had visited with their child. At this moment a group of young people are presenting a proposal to turn the mall into a food tower to feed the city. The opposition is the old establishment: set in their ways, blind to the destruction of the world, trapped by their own wealth and privilege. Who knows who will prevail? But King can see, in the youth, and a couple of grandmothers, the look in the eyes that any Traveler will recognize. He has initiated some of them, and they have initiated others in the art of Traveling. This is his twenty-fourth visit, and many things are still the same. But in the parking lot, he has noticed wildflowers growing in the cracks in the asphalt. On the frothy pink blossoms of milkweed he has seen one monarch butterfly, wings a-tremble, orange and black, like Tyger. The effrontery of the flower and the butterfly before the might of the powerful moves him more than anything. From the window he sees a lone bird wheeling its way toward the building—a brown pelican, far inland—and feels a frisson of excitement, of recognition.

We will leave him there, at the start of something new. Like an infinite series, this story has no ending. Like Euler’s Identity (King’s favorite equation), it reminds us that things we thought were separate are connected across space and time. And, as the Storyteller said some moments ago, no story that attempts to tell the truth of the world can ever be complete. There is not a single thread you can afford to ignore. Which means that every story—finite and limited as it is—is an attempt at the impossible, a guarantee of failure. No single story can displace the billionaires’ wet dream, which is the world’s nightmare. By itself, each story is small, insignificant. But together, they add up to make something larger than anyone has as yet imagined.

So, Listener, if you, too, can see beyond the prison bars of consensus reality to other worlds more just, more free, more loving, more whole than this shattered one, if you, too are willing to give yourself to this dream, then be ready. Sometime when you least expect it, while you are riding the subway or walking through the mall, or working in a café, someone might thrust a pamphlet into your hand, entitled Traveling: A Beginner’s Guide. Or you might discover, in the gaze of a stranger, human or nonhuman, the key that opens the door to all your possible selves. Then, perhaps, you will make your way here again, as Storyteller, Traveler, weaving the threads of that as-yet-unwritten story, the story of you, the story of us, the myriad possible worlds that are yet to come.