PROLOGUE TO A NOVEL - SAYANTINI DASGUPTA

Prologue
By Sayantini

What was the use of fetching the girl of one’s dream the sun when she was going to leave you anyway?
He sat on an empty crate, alone, as dust settled down for the day amongst the digs. The dying sunlight made his melancholia more pronounced. None of this helped the sudden deluge of loneliness swamping him from all corners. The shadows lengthened along the narrow corridors, and the birds had stopped chirping. The quiet was almost unnatural. The colours that surrounded him transformed into the demons of his mind, and he almost shuddered. The busy day did not allow for illogical fancies, with the noise of two hundred workers chipping and dusting their way down into whatever came next. The mind could not handle excitement and trepidation at the same time, contrary to popular belief. But as the day ended, the demons came out, to play with the ghosts of the past, disturbed before their time, as they wandered aimlessly looking for facets of lives lived and dead.
It didn’t matter anymore, he decided. It only made it easier to take the decision, with one factor under consideration, actually the main factor under consideration, being eliminated. He wasn’t juvenile enough to go into a rant about how he shouldn’t have paid attention to a girl in the first place, mostly for the simple reason that somehow he couldn’t bring himself to regret the love that he had felt. It surpassed everything that he had known, be it the glory of holding the jewellery of a lady from some ages past, imagining it against her actual skin as she dressed for the evening, or discovering a complex of caves where some long forgotten monarch lay in slumber forever, his peace kept by the lapse of the memory of men.
He remembered the day he had walked, absent minded, into a section of the digs he did not remember being documented, and discovering the curious bronze pillars, seemingly in perfect condition. They had runes on them, unlike the pictographic script that covered other artefacts discovered. And they glowed as he had approached, his absentmindedness shaken off by the inherent curiosity he was endowed with. There were shadows here, he had noticed, moving shadows, flitting between the bare walls and the pillars, though none save him seemed to be there. It seemed like he had stepped into a separate dimension, one where his own civilisation had ceased to exist.
Something between the pillars arrested his attention as he circled around them, examining the runes, the likes of which he had never encountered before. He thought the air between the pillars rippled. Yet he had dismissed the thought as an aberration of a hyperactive mind. But it did ripple. And it proceeded to do so, until there formed a transparent wall of something which looked like glass. As he walked up to the sheet of rippling yet tangible air, his hair moved with some invisible wind. It glowed now in a soft and ethereal fashion, and as he had reached up to touch the surface, an almost spiritual awe came over him.
It had felt slippery to his touch, though his hand did not get wet. It was made of a substance he couldn’t name, and yet his curiosity and amazement forced him to push further in. He kept moving, like he was compelled to, by some unseen force, until he discovered that his face had permeated through the membrane. But he did not find himself staring at old and crumbling mud brick walls, but at brick walls coloured a vivid earth red and bordered with chalk designs, and looking almost freshly painted. Sacks of grain stood leaning against them, and instead of the musty smell of the damp dereliction of the past, it smelt of a store room, with a faint whiff of sandalwood and rose. His body stood bathed in the dirty white light of a cold day, but his face was in a place where golden sunlight filtered through reed blinds. And he had walked into that comforting scent, determined to prove to himself that he was not going mad.
He shook himself out of his blind reverie, and stood up with a sudden movement that bordered on jerkiness which spoke of sudden resolve. The letter he held in his hand he folded again neatly, with infinite care and placed it above his heart. And with equally sudden movements he left the dig site where he had been lost in brooding, and moved to his car parked fifty feet away from the excavation.¬¬ He pulled out a silver cellular phone from the car dashboard and dialled a number which seemed to be programmed into his speed dial.

“Susan.” He greeted. “You can tell David he’s got himself a volunteer. A permanent one.”
And he drove off, the girl who had made him sit and brood in the shadows of the ruins already slipping out of his mind, making space for thoughts of the preparations that were needed for what lay in front of him.

******

The Indian Museum, Calcutta. April 22nd 2002.

“Sir, the heads seem to have a tendency to roll.” Said Ramanuj Aich.
“Ram, its only common sense to give triple wrappings before packing artefacts in Styrofoam! I don’t know what they teach at the course at the University! Why do I seem to get assistants who don’t even know this!” said an irate Subhash Ranjan Chakravarty in reply. “A basic wrapping is necessary before anything is moved! It always takes care of these problems!”
They moved down the isle on the second floor of the museum, passing rows and rows of wooden cabinets and crates packed with straw. If there was a chart of what makes for a museum store room, this would be a fine example indeed, he thought. The dust was everywhere. He remembered someone saying that it lent the artefacts and the museum character. What a bloody nincompoop! But unfortunately, government grants didn’t seem to be enough for the curator to hire specialised cleaning crews to maintain the vast collections of artefacts.
The Indian Museum had the largest inventory of historical artefacts, collected first by the British and then by Indian successors who had confiscated larger quantities from the departing colonists. It followed that whatever was on display in the huge colonial museum building, that dated back to more than a century, was only a fraction of what remained in the store; some of it forgotten because of the lack of documentation and the general incompetency of the Indian bureaucracy.
“Yes sir, sorry sir, I had forgotten.” apologised the chastised Ram. “ Sir, I don’t think Harish and Subodh are coming today.” Harish and Subodh were the curator’s other assistants, and in this case very necessary manual labour for the task ahead.
“What’s new about that?” said the curator, his voice now tired in defeat. “Alright, Ram. Let’s get started. Just because most of the country cannot be efficient, doesn’t mean we cannot be either.”
They set up sheets of tarp and Styrofoam and laid open industrial size wooden crates lined with straw, and opened cabinet number 1062/A. A cloud of dust escaped revealing that it had been quite a few years since someone had bothered the ignored slumber of the heads of Gautama Buddha that lay within. The irritation that previously seemed to have been bothering the curator seemed to visibly disappear in an instant. It did not matter how many times he saw these things, the awe and the excitement remained the same over the years, in spite of being involved with too many expeditions and digs. This, he knew, was true love. He gingerly touched the first head, feeling the cold stone, slightly slippery because of the damp that stone sculpture inevitably yielded to over the passage of time, and slowly brought it out, holding it like a baby or a ticking time bomb.
Ram realised that this would be one of those rare days that the curator might launch into one of his impromptu lectures; talks which any PhD student would kill to attend, and thanked his stars that he worked where he did. Ram wasn’t as incompetent as the others. He was just younger. Also unlike the others, he was actually interested in history.
“Look at the sculpting,” Subhash whispered, as he traced the eyebrows of the head of the Buddha, “the Gandhara were famous for it, the mix of Greco-Roman techniques mixed with unique Indian sensibilities. No modern machinery can ever hope to achieve this depth and the perfect balance achieved by a simple chisel. If we try today, it will be obvious it was machine made. That’s why modern sculpture is such rubbish. They don’t resemble anything at all. Because somewhere in the subconscious of every artist is the knowledge that they can never hope to reach the level of the expertise and craftsmanship of these long dead artists.”
The work continued, with the curator describing where each stylised head of Buddha had come from. They wrapped the heads in three layers of bubble wrap before wrapping each again in multiple layers of Styrofoam and finally packing them amongst the hay in the crates, no more than four heads per crate. Gradually the inventory of the cupboard depleted, and soon there was only five more heads to go.
Ram stopped with a startled gasp.
“Sir, I think there is something behind them” he said.
“Of course there is,” replied the curator irritably, busy packing a bundle with Styrofoam.
“No sir, it’s not a sculpture.” He said, peering between the objects, “I think it’s a box.”
The curator was slightly curious in spite of himself. He kept the bundle in his hands aside and peered in beside Ram.
“Hmm. Yes, that is curious.” He muttered now. “There isn’t supposed to be boxes here. I wonder which fool took upon himself to be so disorganised….” He trailed off, as he carefully removed the heads obstructing the box. He pulled out the box. It was roughly one foot across in size and made of wood which glowed with the amber used to polish it. There were stylised floral designs carved into the surface, perfect whorls and leaves, and the box’s brass latch was fixed with crimson lacquer, petrified with age.
“Late Mughal period,” he noted, now completely oblivious of his assistant. “1690 to 1710 AD. I wonder why it wasn’t opened…”
He reached into his pocket for his ever present pocket knife and in one smooth stroke broke the seal. The cover fell open scattering dust along with pieces of rusted metal, revealing a journal, cover made of what seemed like aged leather. He reached in and touched the surface, and nearly jumped away in shock.
“That’s not leather! Touch it.” He commanded.
Ram reached in and touched, and replied, “Its rexine, sir!”
“I thought so too.” And now he boldly reached into the box and brought the journal out and with a greater sense of urgency, opened the cover, to read the first line, which after two seconds he realised was written in modern English.
There, right at the centre of the first page, in discoloured sepia ink, lay the words:

THE OZYMANDIAS PROJECT: project documentation One.

He turned the page to the main text and read:


July 10th 1702
Arrived at predestined time. The wormhole portal held. The need for timed clothing is very strong. I seem to be sticking out like a sore thumb. It’s so easy to forget jeans had yet to be discovered in America. They are still working like cows under the British regime. Levi Strauss hasn’t been born yet……


“Is this some kind of a joke?” he whispered. His eyes told him something and his logic formed at looking at the other elements said something else.

“Send this in for carbon testing. And I want the results in two days.”

****
Agra 1702, July 12th.

I didn’t expect to come so close to achieving my objective as early as this. It came as an exhilarating but annoyingly scary surprise to be caught unawares. And I was absolutely unprepared. The surprise was more acutely felt because I had thought that it would take more time to be able to see the Emperor, especially since my cover here is that I am a noble man fallen on hard times and being in all express purpose, a part of the bourgeoisie, my elaborate background only a cover up for the shortcoming of the University only to teach the pure aristocratic dialects of Persian and Urdu rather than the more local ones.
But I have seen Aurangzeb.
He is everything that I imagined him to be and more. He is approaching his eighty second year, and yet he still exudes the raw power of a man of a different breed from his now gaunt frame; his face having sunk in to his cheeks and his eyes slightly protruding, as prone to in his family. This I had got from Hakim Kabir Mastani, a local of the area where I had taken my one room quarters. He had apparently been around for some of Jahangir and some of Shah Jahan’s reigns. Something to do with the rotting Chengis genes, he said.
The Aurangzeb I first saw came out of nowhere. I was wandering in the bazaars of Agra proper, right beside the fort. It’s an Agra fort which sparkled. The red sandstone set off with lapis, an unusual combination at any given time, but amazing on ones eye as the sun glinted off it. The market surrounding the fort is a mixture of jute awnings and smells of rich spices from kebabs which aren’t made anymore where I hail from. It made me wonder if there is such a thing as the quality of meat being purer here, at this time. The constant bustle, though, hasn’t changed much. I believe that is what makes for the agelessness of India. All that remains to show for the passage of time is the intricacies of language and the clothes one wears. The basic nature remains the same.
As it is, it didn’t show that the empire was in deep debt from the market. That Aurangzeb had at that point gone on his mad rampage to drain his Imperial Treasury of its very last resources to finance his seemingly unending thirst for conquests, wasn’t something that was too deeply thought about by the people, it seems. Or maybe true damage was only done to the Indian money making enterprise with the advent of the British, and that is yet to happen. Until then, nothing was irreversible.
I had been wandering in the market for some time now, absorbing, observing. I think after half an hour into my random wanderings, the word had spread around that there was a spaced out mystic type on the loose, harmless, but not completely in control of his faculties. I believe the general consensus was to humour me. Also, my constant scribbling in a notebook did not help. To them, I looked like a madman trying to write with a short rod of metal. It occurred to me only lately that these people had never seen a ballpoint pen. I had understood the need to not get a camera, but I had misunderstood the importance of an insignificant thing like a ballpoint pen to this time.
All of a sudden there was a hush, and then a general rush towards the end of the market, which opened towards the fort. I followed the direction of the crowds, and found myself lodged between two uncomfortably well built men in Pathani costume, which by the way, also hasn’t changed as the ages passed. Some thing about the isolation of the mountains maybe.
There was a party of about a hundred making their way from the gates. There seemed to be a clear hierarchy. First came the men soldiers. They weren’t garbed in battle gear, but their tall and weighty build and the naked swords in their cummerbunds gave it away, as it was meant to. These numbered about twenty five, and ten of them were tailing behind at the end. This, then, was the front and rear guard. The body of the party consisted mainly of men, dressed gloriously in various shades of white and cream linen and cotton. Nobles, then. And in the centre of it all, borne on a palanquin shouldered by seven men of impossible heights, rode a man, shrunken to look at from afar, so clear was his age. He had no sign of nobility at all. His clothes were simple, and his bony and carcass like fingers held a simple string of wooden rosary beads. Yet there was no mistaking the light in his eyes or the expression on his face. His eyes would bore into whatever it looked at, and his face held an expression a complex mixture of hauteur and imperious character, yet, defined by something which I couldn’t put a finger on. I believe it will take more time to understand what that is, if it is anything other than the burden of age.
So, this was Alamgir.
The man beside me had noticed something by way of the expression on my face, and told me in a hushed whisper that this was new for the emperor. When he was younger, his mind had been only set on land and murder was in his heart. He never had time to roam the city as he did now. The only time people got to see him, was either at the other side of the battle field, as the enemy, or as he and his procession of soldiers went of to battle. These days, it was said, his mind had turned, and he begged his son not to do as he had done, and yes, he took turns out of the fort at approaching dusk.
I had a sudden revelation about how I would send back my reports of investigating the wormhole in the Gujarat digs back into our time……

(To be continued)