Ayush is a writer of low-key romances and slice-of-life fiction. A speculative theorist at heart, he can often be spotted at conventional nooks of isolation around the city—atop library shelves and behind coffee spoons.
~~~
Arahi was reincarnated in a marketplace. Her existence startled her until the busy bodies whistling past in straitjackets reminded her of ink that had dried on page, and she realised that she was inside her own oeuvre. She was in the shoes of a character among characters of her own creation. It had been her favoured dream, this, to exist thus between bookends and spaces where one volume ended and the next had not yet begun, to discover herself in idle conversation and fish for words that she had not written. In essence, hers was a strange familiarity, the broad contours of this city and its people known intimately to her: their secrets, their desires, their destinies composed by her though from now on she would have to live the particulars, asking them questions, forewarning them. Others in her place would have called this a dream.
The city she had identified as Pirhaat, a yellow expanse in the immense desert kingdom under the Sultan of Aafan at the time of her death. A city of recluses, of rejects, a prison town, though from her rigorous notes, Arahi knew that there was scarcely a town in this kingdom which did not have its own share of prisoners, recluses, rejects. The Sultan was not the problem; the seat of power was. This much was clear to Arahi from her living world, and she had traced the minutiae of power on a drawing board taking care not to resolve the web of relationships into identifiable characters. Yes, there were nodes in this web where the relationships burgeoned, where the combined mass of relationships shouted out a desire to be named, and to these nodes she gave titles: the Sultan of Aafan, Arhaan of Karaat, Fedel of Trinia, Ligoa of Shefeq, but they were names no more significant than numbers or barcodes. What was important was the deluge of bodies at every corner, mouths gagged, hands tied in grey straitjackets and numbered according to a prisoner record that who knows who maintained. A pliant mob, their paths charted by royal decree, even that of the Sultan’s, for royalty was yet another pulse in the fabric of the universe, not a defined creature with a robe over a body. The world was an infinite mirror of the repeated foldings, reworkings, reconfigurations of power. It was a helpless sort of literature that she had written; it was true nevertheless.
Even if there were characters of importance in this city, though there were none in her stories, Arahi did not feel herself to be one of them. She was definitely the chief architect of this place, though to see it in flesh and stone was to also recognise that it had been laid down in a history far before her arrival. She felt that strange feeling that most storytellers have often felt, that the language they speak has been spoken through them by some mystical force, by some hand of the divine, that an architect is but a projection. And Arahi knew, for instance, that Pirhaat had been raised in the times of the epics from the three tributaries of the river Aat under a lavender moon, inherited as a succession of sprawling cityscapes, but was shifting, like all major cities do, as dunes on a desert topography, one grain, one brick, one person at a time in an endless voyage across the plains. And what hand had forced her to draw circles then, as the city cycled through its status as a myth, a deity, once a capital, somewhere a trading post, a healing place, somewhere a war frontier and somewhere a ghost town, a census headquarter, a forgotten village, a paper town, a stronghold, a mining town, a fishery, a commercial hub, an artifice to an underground lair, the site of an alien attack or the signing of an extraterrestrial space treaty, but never, Arahi noted, the centre of the world. Pirhaat was always peripheral like leaves in a fountain that are drawn in by the circulating water, tracing larger or smaller circles around the point of ejection, around the central spout that creates not water but movement. That ejection had sunk her to the depths as she wrote Pirhaat, supposedly a place of her own creation, and regurgitated her into this world that was no more her own than she of it.
The marketplace was a repeated occurrence, the way lives are arranged by rituals. Here, she had noted in the second chapter of the first volume in the Histories of Pirhaat, goods could not change hands, so promises were made of their delivery. The traders and the buyers nodded agreements and argued dissensions. Pirhaat had a minimally beautiful architecture, a stroke of genius indeed, a sale with the middleman cut off — no money, no hands, only pure exchange. Here, Arahi noted, her hands were bound too, and she too had been dressed in a hueless grey straitjacket, and her mouth too was gagged and her gestures encumbered, and she too must be wearing a number emblazoned on her back. Arahi too was a prisoner, affected by the same laws of power that governed the world. And she learnt that without a guiding hand who wrote individual lives, she knew little of her own thoughts, her own desires, her own destiny.
What would it have taken to write not history but biography? Who were Arhaan or Fedel or Ligoa up close — names that now propelled her toward people she could see stationed along the ramparts — and how were their lives revealed in the broad sweeps she had made of the land? Was Arhaan not a cattle trader, the father of six children, the son of an unnamed mother and an unnamed father, whose generic genetic relations were faceless, nameless, mere statistics of the kind that posited here an uncle, there a niece, he father, she daughter? Could not Fedel be a prisoner of war whose broken, twisted arms were hidden under a straitjacket but the straitjacket itself was sewn in reverse to accommodate the arms, so that everyone who saw her on the streets knew at once that her arms must be the other way round? Might not Ligoa be a mad child, rambling at night for an aunt who abandoned her at Pirhaat on the outskirts of the caravanserai, from where she was picked up by prisoners of her own ilk? But what wars or faces or names could she attach to them beyond these ridiculous stories? True, it was all fiction, but fiction too needs basis. To theirs, she must add another name now: Arahi of Ahmednagar, long-time fantasy writer, renowned author of multiple bestselling books, a life filled with shows and talks and readings of a largely fantastical world that had come to occupy her afterlife. Arahi of Ahmednagar, dead at thirty, imprisoned upon her death.
But Arahi knew a lot beyond her own life. She knew of the great histories of Pirhaat, a city that had known only change. Here, a great rupture was imminent. It would arrive precisely on the night of the resurgence of the lavender moon, taking the city under where it would become a bunker for many eons to come. It would be populated nevertheless, first by the bones of its ancestors, then successively by vermin and rodents, then perhaps the trickling water from a flooding river until on another occasion, under a perfect conjunction, another wandering people would raise the city under a different name. This much she had written with the flair of someone adept at creating cosmologies with the stroke of a pen. Sheer genius, hers, and an imagination that never allowed the same prisoner twice, the same rupture twice. Pirhaat went through cycles of birth and destruction, but it was never born the same way twice in a row. And each death touched differently. Arahi believed now, with a shimmering certainty that seemed just out of grasp, that she would like to know something about this rupture, something that transcended its passing mention in the fifth chapter of the fourth volume of the Histories of Pirhaat, something which smelled and tasted and felt more solid, livelier. First, though, she would have to ascertain her own place in the Histories; she would have to position herself within her books.
A trader, stationed just below the guard’s perch at the ramparts, had settled a sale. She walked over to him and gestured, with economic precision, “What year and cycle are we in right now?”
The trader looked at her for a while, suspicious. Arahi felt the stirrings of doubt. Perhaps her gestures were insufficient, their mechanics shrouded in the same mystery as the affairs of individual lives: unwritten, therefore unknown. Perhaps there were otherwise unwritten norms that operated in their lives: perhaps of the many things that she had not written, a taboo of discussing place and date was one.
“In the third cycle, the year after one of the flood in the Northeast.” The gestures appeared to her incontrovertible.
Her time, then, or the time of her writing, the exact point till where she had written the Histories. Of course, she reasoned, disquieted as she realised that any other time, any other place, would have required its own justification. Of course, this Pirhaat and of course, the Sultan of Aafan, and of course (and here she brought to bear the story as yet unwritten, an upcoming volume whose latest draft was being edited by her agent) a rupture by pestilence. Widespread disease and a general lack of will to live. Pirhaat would be among the last of the cities to fall, given its relation with the capital. The delays in provision would keep the disease at bay until one day, upon the arrival of a stranger…
Arahi gasped. The trader glanced at her, his slight emotion heeding her, and then he drowned himself in storekeeping. Surely, this was not the intended effect of her arrival. Surely a different fate was at hand. Surely, from among the millions of people who were not special, she could not be the one delivering the city to its death. Yet her written words returned to her with prophetic clarity.
“Pirhaat,” she had written, “slept that night under an absent moon to wake up and find half of itself dead, as if a person had come to see with his left eye the right side of them paralysed. A stranger had arrived the previous evening, and they had come following death, for they already carried the disease and were therefore already dead. The only thing for them to do after death was to spread it. And so the Sultan’s kingdom would be lost to a power beyond and under Man, with the confluence of the smallest of incidents that held the seeds of the cosmic resurgences that the Sultan’s priests had claimed to have transcended. Pirhaat had fallen, the empire too.”
Not once had Arahi considered that the death of the stranger was anything but a metaphor. The details were foggy. She remembered dying. A passage between realms had been fractured, like the simultaneous act of remembering something and reliving its forgetting. How long would the occlusion of her death last? Perhaps no one knows because it is difficult to remember before an occlusion, before death. Arahi remembered death only as an awakening, and had never yet believed she had survived it. She had believed, however, that death had thrown her somewhere far away, like an ocean that claims a corpse only to return it to land, only to disown it from itself, only to remove what is foreign in a current. She could taste the salinity of her own body, the myriad ways that death had survived within her, seeking transit, seeking effusion. And Arahi felt her body completely, its peculiar corners and angles and the immersion in the confines of her straitjacket. With death, she had fallen into the affairs of power that pervaded the world as one of its pawns. As one who would be moved endlessly without respite.
Not a lot was left to do, but one must be forgiven for trying. Arahi excused herself and followed the dirt road outwards. The hand of fate aside, it is still the duty of persons, even authors, to actively recreate some semblance of control, some way of acting that could be read as defiance if one were looking from up close, if one were reading biography. Much later, it would be of little importance to question why Arahi took to the road, why she chose to leave and to what past one might attribute the moment of choice. It would be fair to note that she immersed herself in the desert, looked past the city gates to the dunes and decided that there was place for her in the infinite expanse and walked, and therefore trace the story further.
In her reverie, Arahi had left the city far behind. The distance also lent her perspective. It was a safe distance, the city on the horizon merely an arrangement, a trend that she could not measure and explain:
“Even in the worst throes of the disease, the prisoners knew no respite from their shackles. The saving grace, if one was sought, was that the entirety of their bodies was protected from the filth that spewed from their face: the coughing, the bleeding of the ears and the eyes, the retching and sweating, the constant loss of hair. Everywhere you could see, it seemed a million dead bodies were strewn about, mathematically impossible in a city of a few thousand. But where one’s own parts were distributed in fifty-odd directions, one counted fifty beings. And so it progressed: the disease that knew no distinction between animal and human, between child and adult, woman and man, between those imprisoned by command and those by demand, between the blood that boasted the Straits of Reis or the thickets of Leya Forests or the other infinite races whose thrumming had, not long ago, pervaded the city. Only death remained. In the wake of the disease, the city had replaced part by part from the ramparts inward. The last person to die was the gravedigger who had lain in a hole one night and cried his way to the heavens.”
But this too was an illusion, Arahi knew, for no distance is enough from things of this world. Even the most distant stars are related by their own pulls of gravity; not even the mind escapes. There, in the middle of the infinitely rolling dunes, Arahi looked up at the sky that pulled on her, sunk to her knees and wept.
#
Of course, the disease came to the town. Pirhaat had known outbreaks, the festering pustules of its sentries that had the off-chance of bleeding on a child, cohabiting households afflicted with the same burns of the heart and the gut, a temple fair that descended into dysentery. But this was something else.
Physicians, apothecaries, priests hybridised cures and blessings. The herb was blessed with water and treated with a concoction, consumed on the third hour of the moon with thick goatmilk followed by walking, at which time the priest, for good measure, prescribed prayers to the Benevolent One. In seven days, all had died.
The city fell to pestilence, but it ruptured many moons later when under disrepair, the walls were buried under the dunes, surfacing only on odd occasions when the wind blew harder than usual. Pirhaat too, like all other great cities before it, died by sinking.
#
When she had put the city aside, Arahi’s thoughts returned to the questions about her arrival. Only now did she wonder about the body she had felt not so long ago. She wondered if under the straitjacket, she still had her clipped nails and fingers, her tattooed arms and torso. She wondered if the sensations everywhere — the fabric of the jacket touched her in a million places — could lend her relief from this intimate suspicion. She wondered if being irritated all over constituted being alive, or if one could be so sensually aware even in a dream.
“Water,” she thought, aware both of her desire to see herself reflected and her growing thirst.
The desert was not yet cold, though she had spotted a few stars overhead. “That will change,” she thought, her eyes roving across the horizon searching for a hint of vegetation or rocky shelter. Her shadow showed her the way, lengthening along the ground, urging her on. Reach the tip of your head, it whispered, then you will have arrived. On occasion, Arahi glanced above her, the dome of the firmament pricked by lit stars, the cosmos careening slowly in a wide arc. And Arahi felt that the desert extended as far as humankind did and perhaps even beyond it. Perhaps the entire planet, the spaces between the planets too, was overflowing with sand. Perhaps invisible columns of sand extended skywards unto the farthest stars, and she was no more than a sandfish looking up from the bed of a transparent sea. Breathe, the shadow whispered, and Arahi drew spurts of rarefied air.
What visions might she have seen? The desert had served no purpose in Pirhaat except as an immensity, a void within which a city had appeared out of nothing. Here the shackles were looser, the mouth freer, the confines of the straitjacket eroding thread by thread as Arahi’s strides measured the land. Far away to the left, she could see something shimmering. The first rupture: a city inundated by water. A city flooded by unforeseen rainfall that had quenched the land thirty times over. Its broken stucco walls, here a bedroom, there a kitchen, its tallest citizens lapped up, disappearing even with outstretched hands and then, just as suddenly, the city itself tumbling upon itself to fall through the spaces among the sands. Arahi felt the wetness. She heard a slow gurgling as water dripped into the sand over a thousand years, until the millennial sand cracked the land open again. She felt her toes lifting the silt, uncovering, excavating, revealing the designs of ages until she looked around and could see the desert again.
This time to her right, the second rupture: a fireshower. Distant meteors that burned through the sky and fell in huge heaps on the horizon. It is a lie that light travels the fastest, thought Arahi, as she smelled a distant burning before the distinguishing line between desert and sky diffused in smoke and fire. Before the light became so bright against the night sky that her eyes hurt and she saw her skin peeling away in dregs, melting away from her bones. The air was now a thick orange, the colour boring into the crevices of her jacket, scorching it, until the only way out was to dig oneself into the sand, at least knee deep, then to the hips, and then realising that this too was desert trickery.
Right before her, the third rupture. Though she had never turned her feet back, she saw little black pools that smoked into children’s faces until they became pockmarked. The scabs took eyes and burst at the edges. A green pus oozed from each pore. Bodies were heaped in the town square, and doors cordoned off the death outside from the life beating inside. Arahi coughed out until her dead, sickly blood had killed the men and the women and the children, the sweet small children she had never seen, whose faces were now beyond recognition. She tore away the last traces of the straitjacket now and cried over her parting gift to Pirhaat, sinking with her arms into the sand, allowing it to embrace her. And with her cloth, the vision too was gone.
Strangely, she felt heavy. The universe had elevated itself on a shelf at the distance. In her twenty years of writing, she had done nothing more than doom Pirhaat in hundreds of ways. For what? An aesthetics of misery, a perfect cog, a conceit? A discourse on power: absolute, unforgiving? Crushed by your own hand, her now stout shadow whispered. What next, author?
Nothing any more, thought Arahi. She felt the sand rippling around her body, suddenly fluid, rising against her. It was now up to her neck, now up to her chin and inching closer to her mouth.
“Oi! Body in the sandpit,” a voice echoed in the distance.
Arahi could not turn but she imagined many hooves galloping across the sand, their sound muffled by packed sand. The ripples were threatened; they touched against her less, though they had not yet loosened their grip on her. What beasts, she thought, that can threaten the very basis of the desert? What beast indeed who can command the atoms of the universe to its own bidding, who can leave an imprint in nothingness?
She felt the sand draining slowly past her, now her chest, now her waist. She felt two immense hooks yanking at her until she lay horizontally, face up, looking at the highest fixed star.
She was being dragged across the surface, her body snaking along the land, the coarse sand screeching, resisting, until she thought the sand would eat away her back.
Then she felt being lifted and lain on something sturdy. Then a rhythmic movement, almost a trot, until she fell asleep.
When Arahi awoke, she was parched. She felt the bristles of her arms twitching, a faint heat torching them from a distance. Then a blur, clear blue, until she blinked rapidly and adjusted to the daylight. Moving her neck proved difficult, so she rolled her eyes as far as she could.
“She is awake,” a voice said and Arahi was teased with a forgotten dream. “Better tie up the desert snake now, or else…”
Then a deeper voice: “She will be quite alright.” A face, not old but not young either looked down at her. Hardened but with the softness of full cheeks. Not yet bearded. “Are you thirsty?”
She mumbled, sounds breaking at her lips.
He conjured a waterskin. “Deep, slow gulps. Remember, not too fast.” But the water tasted like life. Arahi had tasted life in diminishing volumes recently, so forgive her if she lapped up the water as fast as it flowed, coughing and spurting. The man moved the waterskin and repeated, “Deep and slow.” The second time was easier, and she sucked at the skin in time with her breathing, gulp-breath, gulp-breath, deeply, slowly, distending her belly as she did her lungs, water and air mixing in a strange concoction within her.
Sated, she tried to rise. A thin hand strapped her to the ground immediately. “You are not strong enough right now.”
“Where am I?” she asked.
The man looked at her and Arahi was reminded again of the trader. Perhaps the question had given her away, had told them that she was not from the kingdom. Surely, a citizen did not go about asking such obvious questions. Then again, a citizen did not die and wake up in a different place each time. And Arahi quickly asked, “Am I dead?”
“The desert snake taunts us,” said the voice nearby. The man chuckled. “No,” he said at length, “but not for lack of trying. Who goes wading into quicksand?”
Not dead then, just trapped. That was little relief. Arahi was increasingly certain that all her fates were synonymous. But what was the business about the snake? The man eyed her with suspicion, waiting for her next response. Perhaps it was best to avoid asking him about any superstitions he might hold.
“What place is this?” she asked instead.
“This is the heart of the desert, lady,” the other voice said, now coming into view. A leaner man whose ragged look made him seem all the more formidable. Clearly not someone who trusted her non-intentions. “I am surprised you do not know this — this is the only place in the desert for thousands of miles.”
“That cannot be. I am coming from Pirhaat.” Surely she had not walked a thousand miles over the course of a single night, Arahi thought. That would be unthinkable, even in this part-fantasy, part-abject-reality that she found herself within.
This time, her first host laughed out heartily. When she registered no realisation, he laughed some more and said, “Then you have been walking in circles all night. This place is Pirhaat.”
Arahi heard a goat bleat in the distance and she recognised the immense trickery that the universe had pulled off. A mere witness in someone else’s work, she realised that her life was subjected to workings beyond her. Someone else was writing the Histories, far into the forseeable distance, or the Histories were already written and her hands were mere instruments. Or perhaps there was no writing. Perhaps, after all this time, she misremembered the life before her original death. “What cycle, what year?” she asked, knowing the answer already.
Their lips moved in answer and Arahi looked up to the absent writer in the skies. “My Lord,” she shouted silently, “Deliver us from a fourth rupture.”
#
The citizens often flocked to Arahi’s two-room haunt to hear stories of a past, stories from a time that preceded their own. There were stories of when stars fell on the earth and waters covered the desert floor. Magical stories, stories weaved of the umpteen desires and fantasies that they held. Arahi recalled these visions before them vividly, partly because the images from the night had persisted in her waking moments after she was rescued, and partly because her retellings were not codified into verse and rhythm, repeated before those who sought an inheritance beyond their world.
She spoke with them who came from deep within the city, from the temples of the goddess and the recesses of the palace. They came to ask her of their own descent, to know the vast depths that extended in the sands below their feet, to know the fickleness of the desert that housed them firmly. She spoke with them who came from the margins of this new Pirhaat too, the railroad workers who lay tracks at night every which way in the hope that they would reach another city in the empire that they knew only by name. They came to settle their own debates about which direction to bear toward, which way the possibility of a city was the most pronounced. To all, she was something of a metaphysician, perhaps an oracle, an all-seeing one who promised them mythical lands beyond — if only she could give them some trinkets for a pedigree, or the approximate distance to compute the volume of cast iron and stone, they would make her a queen. But as to her importance, there was no doubt. No more proof of her peculiar insight was required beyond the facts of her arrival: naked woman, speaking strange tongues, doing strange things. She was the gilded snake so rare in the desert that it had been vested with powers deserving of a God, though its slithering nature allowed it to rise no more than two inches from the sand.
Arahi was careful. Pirhaat had a splendid history and one could, as she had once, write its histories in ever-unfolding volumes. One could write about the countless meanders that the ghostly Aat made in its journey through desert-land, springing cities, creating life. But such knowledge breeds disaster; no one should know their own position in the cosmology of the universe lest they should learn of their own death. Worse, she thought, she could perhaps doom them all by sharing knowledge, perhaps by triggering a war, perhaps by encouraging a maniac who would prefer the certainty in a massacre than the uncertainty of life. Arahi kept her tone ironic, the truth of Pirhaat’s three pasts hidden beneath layers of jest, beneath the tidal push and pull of playful storytelling.
Of course, when a person is reduced to a position in the world, they pay more attention to the lives of others. Arahi too found herself in the company of people she had come to know through social enterprise. Talking, now that her mouth was unsealed, and walking freely among them, now that her arms were freed, made her one of them, the traces of imprisonment seeming distant. Not that she had forgotten the demands made upon her by history, the swaths that power traces on the lives of people, but such concerns seemed orders of magnitude removed from the affairs of daily living, mere subsisting. There were goats to tend to, wood to carry for the fire, and people to entertain with stories in dull moments.
Such a person also pays more attention to their own lives. If by the day, Arahi was embroiled in living for the city, at night she returned to assume the life of an author centred within the world. Arahi had noted, on the slips of parchment in an ever-increasing web that she built on her wall, the lives of the people she met each day. This was her lived authorship, her attempt to know the people who she knew would die one day, who she knew she would die with. At one corner of this mesh was her own name, written unassumingly, and this she surrounded with the names of her few neighbours and regular acquaintances, and from them to others and so on, until the entire world became a map of the city, reflecting its complexities. This too is Pirhaat, she thought, seen along an angle vertical from the flow of history.
At night too, she could hear the ground giving way beneath her slightly, calling out to her from under her feet. Someone told her that this was an after-effect of sinking in the desert, the memory of an event that did not let go that easily. Someone else told her that the desert was calling out to her because like the sea, it came to collect what it thought was rightfully its own. And Arahi slept at higher and higher elevations each day, raising her cot on dowels that were bunted each night. The movement was persistent, though imperceptible. The more she paid attention, the more she realised that it was constant, occupying each minute of each day, each day of the year. She added the movement to the calculus of her own life, arguing that it was important though she did not yet see how.
There was also Gawan: the man who had offered her water, returned her to life.
A goatherd, like his father and his father’s father, Gawan had roamed the desert till as far as a day could carry him, admitting the other half for return. He had gone around the entirety of the city in his youth and claimed that the year he turned twenty, the city had finally outgrown the limits of one man’s one-day travel. That now, to circle the city, one needed not one but two patrollers, not a traveller but a caravan. Gawan, who had also raced with his unwilling friend to the distant quicksand because he was certain he had heard a cry of despair, or felt something in the breeze that did not sit quite alright with him.
She knew that Gawan had never known a father, and that he had come across stray goats and a stray trade. Or perhaps (and the neighbours hinted this), Gawan had killed for his station in the city. But he was still her benefactor, and he had not yet posed a threat to her. Perhaps, she thought, people settled like cities into stability until other stirrings made them come undone. And for a reason she could not quite fathom, she feared the undoing of Gawan more than she feared the undoing of this Pirhaat. A rupture in a man is a dangerous thing.
And there was Heri, the lean man who had called her a desert snake. Heri, who had lost two of his fingers when laying the cross-beams for a railway track, and who made it a point of boasting to Arahi about his quick wit in the distribution of his misfortune. “Better to lose one finger per hand than two on one.” Arahi had seen the wisdom in this too, a foretelling of the risks that people may take. Through many conversations such as these, she had uncovered the basal substratum of human behaviour, its idiosyncrasies abstracted away. Now she just needed a proportionate disaster that would fit this behaviour, that might in some distant future propel the city to its climax, its fourth rupture that brought the lives of its characters to a head.
Who can tell when a map becomes more than a representation, when it suggests its own unmaking? We might call it a moment of revelation, four hundred and seventy days from when Arahi was found, that she woke up with a jolt in the middle of the night and screamed at her wall.
Gawan, who lived nearest, came crashing through the door.
“We are moving from the horizon inwards,” she said, feeling as if she had finally woken up.
“What are you talking about?”
“The horizon inwards. Oh, the horizon inwards! The horizon is the future. The future is being pulled inwards.” And she ran out of the house shouting this toward the edge of the city, toward the walls beyond which there were nothing but barren railway tracks that had furrowed the sands for barely a mile before stopping. Gawan had waited, abruptly threatened, and then, when her rapid departure had shocked him completely, he joined her in hot pursuit.
He found Arahi at the dry well at the opening in the city walls. She had planted herself firmly on the edge and was pointing due east. “There, there,” she said. “The land there is coming here. Do you see it? Do you feel it?”
“There is nothing moving, Arahi.”
“Hush. Hear.”
And Gawan stopped, silent, watching a distant moon in the east rise above the horizon, its reflection on the sand shimmering. For a moment, the sand seemed alive, gushing toward him as if with intent, but no sooner did the moon shimmer again than it was gone. Everything lay as still as before.
Arahi spoke again, “There is another Pirhaat there.”
“What do you mean?”
“The fifth Pirhaat on the horizon. And when this city is dead, the desert will sink it within itself and pull the other Pirhaat. A great city this,” Arahi held her lips, bent and began laughing out loud. “A great city indeed, that can pull its own horizons to itself.” In that moment, she could believe that Pirhaat was the centre of all gravity, the focus where the universe converged, where all matter condensed, a singularity where everything was itself and nothing else. And then her mind wandered to other cities in the Nation of the Saints in the first rupture, and sectors under Bol’io, the Chosen One in the second rupture, and under the Sultan of Aafan in the third rupture and now, in the godforsaken world of which she knew nothing, she could still sense the presence of other fictional cities seeking to be united by steam locomotives, each trying to push outward, each a centre of gravity that pulled everything else inward. The world was conjoined not by power but by the pull of its own parts. Rotten, rotten, rotten: all of this, for there was no escape. There was no Pirhaat that did not already know its own death; there was no Pirhaat that had not already imprisoned itself.
Gawan pulled her by her hand. “Will you stop it?” he said, through grit teeth.
Arahi looked up at him, the particulars of his face so obvious to her. Oh, how could she have missed this, the implicit threat in the way he looked at her. The utter contempt for the machinery that subjected him, a man imprisoned in the mechanism of the world but fooled into thinking himself free. A dangerous man, therefore, without the guilt of causing death. And what of her? Arahi too had caused death, not of another person or family but of an entire city; perhaps with it that of an entire civilisation. How did being privy to the mechanism of the universe make her any better? What rid her of her own burden? And if she could see her own eyes reflected in his, would she deem herself any better?
It was perhaps the silvery sheen that reflected off Gawan that alerted her to the conclusions of her own thoughts. Till now, she had thought of death as an affliction, as something that occurred to her and others, or to cities and civilisations. But the universe shimmered with a constant hum not unlike that of the moon. Its sands trickled in a constant stream. It pulsed with constant motion. The hooves of horses beat with a constant rhythm. The moon that had lit Gawan’s face rose and fell, and rose and fell, and rose and fell, and while it had risen you could call it risen, and while it had fallen you could call it fallen, but that did not arrest its circular motion. Pirhaat too, like the encircled nodes in her designs, was just another encirclement, just another boundary built around shifting sands, its fortifications rising up to meet the sky at the exact location where a historian had chosen to stop and look for things and nowhere else. But the flow of time was constant. Pirhaat was not here and there, beneath her feet and on the horizon, but everywhere between as well: the roads she had taken was Pirhaat, the quicksand was Pirhaat and so were the many vertical cities, the cities sideways, the cities pulverised that existed in the ever-moving vortex at the singularity of its location.
So beautiful was this truth that she reached out and kissed Gawan.
Later, Gawan would reveal to his other companions what he had seen in Arahi’s eyes. “Finally,” he would begin, “the woman seemed certain of one thing in her life. And that one thing promised to be the secret to the universe.”
“Ah-ha-ha. Gawan is too much in love. Listen to this bastard speaking poetry for the desert snake.”
“Make of it what you will Heri, but I am telling you what I saw. She was dreadfully silent then, almost as if she was standing dead in front of me, and when she looked at me, it seemed that she saw through me and beyond, much beyond me.”
“And then she kissed you too in this story?”
“Yes, she did.”
“There he goes again.”
And Gawan shut up. What he did not want to reveal any more was how in that moment, he had felt the sand moving as well. That Arahi’s gaze was so steadfast, it had anchored him to a spot from where he felt the ground slither, the walls, the houses, the goats and cows and wells and the water underneath and the skies above move due west, and the horizon on the east approach. And he remembered being scared that the horizon would come too soon, that he would be eaten up, that if he did not do something about it…
And at that moment, Arahi had kissed him.
And then she had left. She had come home, had tied her meagre belongings and had bidden him farewell. “You are all dying,” she had said, and had stormed off toward the east. He had not believed so he had not followed her, though he had sensed she was right. He had also found little point in seeking a horizon because it was common sense that the horizon moves with you. No one outruns a horizon, just like no one outruns a city, just like no one outruns life, just like no one outruns death.
#
Arahi did not stay to see the fourth rupture but it arrived. Thirteen weeks after her leaving, the railway tracks buckled in their place and their fishplates flew off under pressure. Heri saved his hands in the nick of time, before the rivets shot out of their holes and the iron tracks swayed loose. He heard a deep rumbling, first at a distance, then suddenly below him as the ground opened up a cavernous mouth and sucked Pirhaat in.
The seismic shock lasted twelve minutes. Gawan was dead in the second minute, trapped under falling rubble and pressed flat against the sand. It is difficult to know for certain whether he was killed by the blow or he suffocated but when the house went under, he was long dead, only his body hurtling through space down into the depths. There were no after-shocks, but the dunes were razed flat and a storm was kicked up. When it ebbed, only a lip remained, and the sand poured in steadily through. After three weeks, no one could make out that here, at this point, a city had stood long ago, and one before that, and one before that, and one before that.
#
I like to think that Arahi walked for thirteen weeks toward the horizon and when her legs gave way, she found herself at the edge of a city decked with large keeps that rose to the sky. And signages told her that this was Pirhaat, population thirteen million, and that she could seek boarding and lodging nearby. She might have waited there for a week, enamoured by the height of its residences, the speed of its mechanised vehicles, the facilities of its people. And then she might have taken leave and walked due east under appeal to stay back because “there is nowhere else in this desert to go to.”
I like to think that Arahi saw the horizon too many times. And she reached another Pirhaat which glowed with the lights of a hundred different suns with some device that the citizens kept in a central temple. Then a Pirhaat where no one slept, and then a Pirhaat that was at the bottom of a huge mountain and whose inroads had the fiercest of animals slouching in the shadows. And a Pirhaat that had been bought and managed entirely by a businessman and then a Pirhaat the size of a nation run as a democracy and then a Pirhaat the size of a pinhead teeming with microscopic people.
And here my imagination runs loose. I think of many conceivable Pirhaats and all the links between them, and on some days I order them one way and on some days, I allow a different order to emerge. One day, on a whim, I chose to believe that the first Pirhaat was not the first but the three-hundredth, the number appealing to me as the most symmetric and the most perfect number of all. But most days, the initial city stays, and Arahi dies in the third iteration, so that is the story I end up telling people.
People usually want to know how the story ends. But that is like asking if Pirhaat ends. I can offer a few answers. The first is where I claim that I have looked at one horizon, then another, then another, and I have found traces of Arahi in all my histories of Pirhaat as a recurring character across my works, sometimes as an explorer, sometimes as a lover, sometimes in her true vocation as a historian who had discovered that to live is to walk. But there may well be a future horizon that I cannot cross so that must also be the horizon that she cannot cross, and I like to think of it as a huge wall of sand at the edge of the world that falls on the earth and causes the land to move inward.
The second is where I claim that the planet is round and that many revolutions around it, Arahi appears, one day, back where she began. Or perhaps the world is growing as she moves and neither she alone nor I alone can hope to traverse around it in a lifetime but very many of us who write the histories of Pirhaat will one day exhaust it all.
The third is where there is one Pirhaat and it never dies, that only the people who live in it grow old and pass away and are replaced by others, younger, newer, who choose to die in different ways.
The last one, and of this I feel most certain today, a writer or a historian simply decides to stop then and there, where they have witnessed their last Pirhaat, they select to die just like long ago, they had chosen to begin their story at one place and at no other.
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