Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities
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Synopsis
Rebellious cellphones. Lustful holograms. A tourist vampire with a taste for spicy Indian blood. A conference of galactic gods.
In twenty-five exhilarating stories, Manjula Padmanabhan brings her trademark twist to familiar reality, dreaming up inventive futures and capturing today's world with equal flair.
From bejewelled party guests suddenly stripped naked to a teenager who steals time, from mosquitoes that infect people with Gandhian pacifism to a dystopia where everyone breathes canned air, this remarkable collection poses urgent questions: what does it mean to live in a society, and this one in particular? Where are we headed, and do we even want to get there?
At once funny, provocative and profound, Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities is science fiction served up with a dab of ghee and a sprinkling of dark matter that will hold you captive till the very last page.
Release date: August 21, 2023
Publisher: Hachette India
Print pages: 288
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Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities
Manjula Padmanabhan
While deciding the order in which to present these stories, I originally wanted to organize them in chronological sequence. But I also wanted to cushion the super-grim tales between those that are merely weird or even a bit funny. Accordingly, most of the stories are in descending order, starting with the most recently published (2021) and ending with the earliest (1984), with some repositioning between first to last.
Four stories have never been published before: ‘Talkers’, ‘The Empty Glass’, ‘A Cline’s View’ and ‘Octobaby’. The rest have either appeared in magazines or anthologies.
A number are mildly metaphysical rather than ‘hard’ science fiction. In ‘The Empty Glass’, for instance, an atheist attends a conference of gods from all across the cosmos. ‘Feast’ is about a European vampire visiting India as a tourist. ‘The Girl Who Could Make People Naked’ is about a young woman with supernatural powers. ‘Exile’ and ‘The Other Woman’ are both connected to the Ramayana. ‘The Annexe’ is about a dimensionless meeting place between minds. ‘A Government of India Undertaking’ is about stepping into the Bureau of Reincarnation and Transmigration of Souls in search of an existence-upgrade.
When I’m asked to explain why I write SF, I say that it’s because I grew up in different countries. By the time I returned to India as a teenager, I had become a naturalized outsider, a foreigner to everywhere. Being a misfit wasn’t always fun, but as time went on I realized it was the only way I wanted to be.
Writing SF is a way of celebrating the ‘other-ing’ that I experienced as a young person. Instead of travelling to other countries, I can explore alternate states of consciousness, timelines, body types, species, genders, dimensions. Curiosity is my guide but also sometimes my saboteur: adventures in otherness can just as easily end with a snap of unfriendly jaws and an alien burp, as with a shower of stars and a flight of glittering hummingbirds. The uncertainty is what makes SF fun or scary, irritating or entertaining.
This collection represents all my SF stories – so far! There are always a couple twitching in the void, waiting to break in uninvited: ‘Octobaby’, for instance, was written just one week ago.
By the time this book comes out in print, there may be a couple more.
Or not.
Manjula Padmanabhan
18 May 2023
Newport (RI)
THE PAIN MERCHANT
‘There was a time,’ said Masterji, ‘when every household had plenty of pain to sell.’
We were sitting by the rocks at the very edge of my village. In the distance behind us, the high mountains scratched the heavens with their snowy peaks. Right in front of us, the bare hillside plunged down at rakish angles. The plains spread away far below. ‘No longer true. People have forgotten that pain was once commonplace.’
‘Won’t you show me just a bit?’ I asked, using my most wheedling voice. I was eight years old and the only boy in a house full of sisters and mothers. At home, I got whatever I wanted when I used that voice. ‘Just once?’
But the pain merchant was immune.
He intrigued me: I had never met someone who did not instantly give in to my demands. Plus, he looked so strange. Everyone I knew wore wool and embroidered felt slippers on their feet or leather boots. My mothers and sisters wore tunics, and the men wore mirrored caps and turbans. The merchant, by contrast, was dressed in layers of greasy leather held together with lengths of string. His shoes were tied on with strips of leather. He wore a dark brown hood that partially obscured his face. Countless small pouches hung from his shoulders and down his back. Like bunches of grapes.
I could see that he wanted to please me, yet he shook his head. ‘I’ve explained before. My wares are perishable,’ he said. According to him, recorded pain was like perfume. It got depleted with each use. ‘I can’t afford to show you anything unless you can pay.’
‘I can pay today, Masterji,’ I said. ‘I found something to trade.’
He looked at me sideways, his face a mass of wrinkles. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or frowning. ‘Trade, eh?’ he remarked, his nose lifting and twitching. ‘Come on then. Show me what you’ve got.’
I knelt, my right knee on the ground and my left foot stuck forward. I lifted the cuff of my pants to reveal my ankle. There was the beginning of an old scar there. ‘You see this?’ I said, squinting up at the merchant. Then I removed my shoe and pulled off the sock, so that he could see the whole foot, naked. ‘That’s the kind of thing you’re interested in, isn’t it?’ My mothers had told me I’d had an accident when I was a baby. It had been fixed. No trace now remained of the wound, except for the scar.
Masterji knelt, reaching for my foot with both hands. I hadn’t noticed earlier that he wore leather gloves, with the tips cut off. He traced the contours of the scar carefully with his forefinger. Glancing up, he asked, ‘What caused this injury? Did your mothers tell you? Do you know how long ago it happened?’
‘Yes, they told me,’ I said. ‘It was when I was a baby. I don’t remember what happened.’
A shadow slid over us. A vulture. It wouldn’t bother us, of course. We were moving our arms and talking. Obviously alive. Even so, I tugged the ward-off out of my pocket and held it up, cocked and ready to send out a pulse.
‘Ah, don’t bother,’ said the merchant. ‘It’s got plenty to eat.’
In the few seconds during which I glanced up at the vulture, the merchant had reached into his clothes and pulled something out. An instrument, it looked like. It was shiny and metallic but also stretchy. Before I could object, he had placed it around my ankle and was deftly moulding it into place.
I had been told not to let strangers do anything to me without explaining their actions. ‘You should ask my permission before doing that,’ I said.
He glanced up and said, ‘Do you feel it? Is it touching you?’ I shook my head. It had completely surrounded my ankle and my foot up to the arch, but I felt no sensation. ‘Fine then. You held your foot out to me, and I placed my scanner around it without making contact. That is all. No harm done. Look now. It’s reading…’
The shiny surface of the gadget had vanished. In its place was a kind of magnified picture of everything under the skin of my ankle. I could see the cord-like vessels of blood pulsing busily. The merchant was touching the surface of the gadget in such a way as to reveal different views of the internal structure of my foot. He zoomed in.
‘We have gone below the muscles and soft tissue,’ he said. ‘We can now see the bone.’ It looked surprisingly white to me. He was peering around the ligaments to find exactly what he wanted. ‘Do you notice these seams?’ Silver-grey lines. ‘Surgery. It does not look like an accident. More likely a medical procedure. Perhaps you had a birth defect, eh? Your people told you that it was an accident? Easier that way, I suppose. Makes no difference. Pain is pain.’
He tapped the surface of the gadget once again and the visual faded off. The surface reverted to its metallic appearance. He waited until he heard a faint beep, then peeled the thing away.
‘What is that?’ I asked. I felt as if I hadn’t been breathing or swallowing for the entire time that the gadget had been on my foot.
‘A dolcache,’ said Masterji, as if the name was a common one. ‘An instrument for reading and recording pain.’ He glanced at me once more, his face seizing up with wrinkles. Smiling. ‘Had you forgotten? You asked if I would accept this scar of yours as a trade. Not the scar of course, but the pain within. The memory remains in the bones, you see. My answer is yes – I got a strong signal. The question now: what sort of pain will you accept in exchange for what I took?’
He saw my confusion. I was a child, after all. What would I know of the worth of these things? Or maybe he heard the sound of distant voices. I had heard them too but hadn’t said anything for fear that he’d hurry away. As he had twice before. I never knew when or how I would next meet him.
He nodded with a bird-like twitch, as if making up his mind for both of us. ‘All right,’ he said, as he got to his feet. ‘You cannot assess the worth of what you have. Nor can we remain out in the open any longer. You’ll need to come with me. How much time do you have?’
The answer, of course, was ‘None’. I wasn’t allowed to spend any time alone with strangers. But if I said that, he may not take me. So I lied and said, ‘I don’t know.’
He told me we wouldn’t have to go far. Which was true.
What he didn’t mention was that the place was well hidden. No one would find me, not even the dogs. It was underground, the entrance tucked under a smelly heap of some sort. Probably the remains of a body. There were so many around, lying in the open, rotting. That’s why the dogs wouldn’t find me. They were trained to ignore the bodies.
Inside, underground, the merchant had a few lights strung up. They were connected to a large battery, humming softly in the corner. The place must have been a basement at one time. There was some old furniture. He asked me to sit on a high chair. Then he drew up a stool and placed it in front of me, for himself. ‘Let me see,’ he said, as he began to unwrap the many little bags that were slung around his body. ‘What shall I start you off with?’
The pouches were connected to the cords tied around him. As he unwrapped the strings and the pouches, he became thinner and thinner. The sheets of leather that I had thought were clothes were merely separators: beneath each layer were yet more pouches.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s a lot of pouches.’
‘They’re not heavy,’ said the merchant. ‘Pain has no weight.’
He was now down to his actual clothes. He looked very different. Diminished. A thin old man in a dirty black sweater and loose black pants. His feet remained bound in cords. His hair was white. He had arranged the strings of pouches and the leather separators neatly on the floor. He looked carefully at the array before making a selection.
He sat down now, facing me. ‘Because you’re a child and this is your first time, I will give you three separate doses, each one very brief.’ He opened the pouch in his hand. Inside it was a slender object, like a bracelet, except it was made of glass. FlexiGlass. He flipped an invisible clasp and asked me to put out a hand. ‘It doesn’t matter which one,’ he said.
I was starting to feel afraid. Of being underground. Of knowing that I could not be found. My mothers would be furious. The men would be raging and pounding their fists. I did not say any of this to him. My curiosity was far greater than my fear.
‘What will I feel?’ I asked Masterji. ‘Will it happen all at once? Or slowly?’ Everything I was doing was wrong. I should never have followed the merchant. I didn’t even know his name. My family would be mad with worry by now. ‘Maybe I should go home.’
The wrinkles sprang into view again. Just a twitch. ‘Okay, only one dose then. And I’ll owe you two more. You’ve already paid me, don’t you see? I’ll have to meet you again at least until I’ve paid you back. Hold out a wrist?’
I extended my right hand towards him, palm up, fingers curled.
He placed the bracelet around the wrist. It felt cool against my skin but without weight. ‘You see this small red dot?’ he asked, pointing to the surface of the bracelet. I nodded mutely.
‘I’m going to press it three times. That means, you’ll have three seconds before the dose begins. It’ll last for 10 seconds. Then it’ll stop on its own.’
He was looking at me and must have seen the fat tears spilling down my cheeks now. Tears of fear and guilt. He asked, ‘Shall I go ahead?’
I nodded again, unable to speak.
He pressed the button three times. The red light turned green.
A brightness pierced my wrist. I can’t find any other words to describe it: a needle made of lightning was stitching sensations onto my wrist where the bracelet clasped it. I gasped aloud. My teeth jumped in my mouth. The sides of my nose rose up. My hair stood on end. Then it was over. The bracelet sprang open, and he caught it before it fell.
‘Ahh!’ I said, panting. ‘Aaaah! AHH!’
Masterji was wrinkle-wreathed again. Gazing at me, fondness in his eyes. ‘Your first experience of pain,’ he whispered softly. ‘A sweet thing to see.’
I sucked in my breath. My mind was whirling. I couldn’t form words.
He read the question in my eyes. ‘That was from a young girl. She had been cut by a glass bangle. Her sensations were absolutely pure, untouched by sorrow or premonition. And freshly caught. I was there when the wound occurred, though I recorded it years later.’
‘I must go,’ I blurted out. ‘Or else they’ll find me. Us.’ Which would be terrible. Not for me, but for him. ‘But please – I want to know more!’
He took me outside without responding to my demand. He did not even bother to wear his layers. Up we went, via a different exit and thence towards the rocks. The voices calling for me were louder now. I could hear the dogs. ‘Pant loudly and pretend to be more tired than you are,’ he said, before hurrying away. ‘Let them think you got lost and have been frantic for some time. Tell them anything but where you’ve been and with whom.’
My mothers had become increasingly protective. Perhaps they could sense the tide pulling me away. My sisters were industrious and dutiful, but I had ants under my skin. I was always being told to hush.
‘You don’t need to know such things,’ said my mothers when I asked questions about the so-called Event. ‘Your ears will hurt with that kind of knowledge.’
‘But pain has been banished from our world,’ I would say. ‘So how can I be hurt?’
They would purse their lips and turn their faces aside, saying, ‘Only someone who has no knowledge of pain would utter something so ridiculous!’
I didn’t dare tell them that I did have knowledge of pain. I had met Masterji many times after that first time underground. I had taught myself different ways to escape my home by stealth, leaving at night and returning before dawn.
Since I had no more scars to trade with the merchant, I paid him by writing labels for his pouches. He had trouble forming his letters, though he could read. He found my labels very useful. Until that time, he had kept track by memorizing each pouch and its contents by its place on his strings.
He chose what type of pain to expose me to, based on what he thought was appropriate for my age. He showed me the harsh twang of hair pulled out by the roots. The tooth-rattling crunch of a broken nose. The deafening thump of a ruptured eardrum. Even the scratchy, whining ache of an infected throat. Each pain was more rich and intense than the one before. The more I sampled, the more I wanted to sample. The delivery method was always the same, a bracelet on the wrist. The pain was experienced in the part of the body to which it belonged.
The day I told Masterji I wanted to follow his path, he looked at me sadly and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ It was never easy to read his expression, but from what I could tell, he was genuinely sad. ‘Some types of pain cannot be recorded,’ he said. ‘You will come to know all of them if you leave your birth home.’
But I would not be dissuaded.
Two years after my first experience of pain, on a moonless night, I stole away from home. Masterji was waiting for me by the rocks. He knew that the ravines and streams would make it difficult for the dogs to track me. Once we reached the plains there was no chance of being followed.
He had told me there were more clients for his wares on the plains. That they paid in metal coins. That they sought him out. All of it was true. He was moderately well known for the variety of his wares and their smooth, clean quality. Some people asked for menstrual cramps. Some looked for a kick in the groin. Some longed for the dull hammering of a headache. Some wanted to feel the vicious scream of a bullet ripping through the gut.
The more serious the wound, the higher the price, all calculated by the second.
His most valuable item was from a man who had blown out his brains in front of the merchant. ‘He did it for me,’ said the merchant. ‘So that I could collect that greatest and harshest of all pains in the instant it occurred.’
We were sitting in a quiet spot beside a great river when he told me this. We were some distance from the city in which we had spent almost an entire month. We had eaten well that day and were taking our ease.
‘Really!’ I said, feeling a shiver run down my spine. A shiver of desire. ‘How is it I’ve not seen that pouch?’
Masterji was looking away from me. ‘He was my brother,’ he said. ‘He wanted me to have the benefit of his death.’
‘Oh!’ I cried out. ‘And how much did you sell it for?’
He turned and looked at me, his expression unfathomable. ‘Nothing. I’ve never offered it for sale. Not even a half-second of it.’
I couldn’t suppress my disappointment. ‘Wah,’ I said. ‘If you don’t use it, your brother died in vain!’
But he would say no more about the matter. We moved on soon after.
In the years that followed, Masterji taught me everything he knew of his trade. I learned to record pain, to clean it, to play it back. The fact that fewer and fewer people had memories of pain meant that there was competition amongst those who sought it and sold it. People with prosthetic limbs or obvious surgeries were usually tapped out. Either their memories had been drained dry or they no longer wanted to cooperate. The easiest to locate were those who had tattoos. The hardest were those who had had plastic surgery. We met others like ourselves on the dusty roads and rutted highways.
We travelled mostly on foot but accepted rides when we were offered them. Sometimes, we bought ourselves donkeys. Once, we even owned a camel.
I was the youngest person in any group of pain traders. They belonged to the earlier world, with their own memories to draw upon. I was the only one amongst them who had been born after the Event. I was always desperate to know more about it, why it happened and how. Their answers were always vague, as if the speakers were embarrassed by the memory.
‘It happened suddenly,’ they would say, ‘or maybe over a month. It happened by accident. Or perhaps by design. One day, the scientists had found a way to record pain. The next day, the world’s leaders were talking about deleting it from existence. The day after that, there was an explosion…a leak…something to do with the water. Or was it the rain? The air?’
The one thing everyone agreed upon was the effect: there was no longer any sensation of pain anywhere on the Earth. ‘You could fall on your face or step on a nail or swallow poison or poke out someone’s eye. But you felt no physical pain.’
There were consequences, of course.
Terrible accidents began to occur. Babies, in particular, died from being crushed or smothered or choked, because they couldn’t complain in time. A ruptured appendix was a death sentence. Thousands of women died in labour, unable to feel their own contractions. Mass murders and group suicides increased a hundredfold. No one could have predicted that a world free of pain would unleash such a flood of violence. It was broken, gripped by a madness that nothing could contain.
People began living in tiny isolated homogeneous communities, clinging tight to those they knew, distrusting all strangers, outsiders.
Meanwhile, the technology for recording pain became freely available. ‘A friend sold the machine to me,’ said Masterji, ‘after buying it from someone who didn’t like it, who learnt how to use it from someone else. We didn’t ask questions any more. If something worked, it was good. If it didn’t, we threw it away. In the beginning, I lied about what the machine could do. I said that it would cure internal wounds. That childbirth would be safe for mothers once I had recorded the memory of the pain of contractions. That burns would clear up miraculously if the pain that they could no longer feel was sucked away. All untrue. But I got amazing recordings. Then, when I played them back for clients, they fell over with amazement. They screamed, they cried. The moment it was over, they asked for more.’
I had seen it myself: the expressions of ecstatic agony, the open mouths, the eyes filled with tears. I had felt it myself: the explosion of violent sensation when acid met skin, the searing, silvery shriek of tearing flesh. Followed by the most divine relief, wave after wave of trembling heat and warmth.
This was especially true when the source of pain was a grievous injury or life-threatening illness. I had seen clients who experienced physical reactions from the agony they were exposed to, such as sweating and even bleeding. I had known it myself. Once, when I wore a bracelet recorded from a woman experiencing a miscarriage, I found myself crying uncontrollably after ten seconds of extraordinary pressure deep within my groin. It was as if a volcanic, primordial force was moving through my body. The pain was huge and brassy, a great boom of raw life energy, pounding its way out, towards death.
In Masterji’s waning years, the technology underwent a transformation that made it possible for recordings to be preserved indefinitely. Now at last, we could create a library of physical sensations. We opened a clinic alongside the library, where we could administer pain in easily controlled doses. Soon, we became reasonably prosperous. We bought a small house that we shared together, Masterji living downstairs and me, above. We could afford a couple of domestic helpers to run errands and do chores.
One day, he called for a pot of tea to be made, then asked me to accompany him to the little garden in the back of the house. When we were settled, he said, ‘My young friend, in all these years that we have been dealing in pain, there’s a question that I’ve been waiting to hear from you. Yet you have never asked it.’
Age had slowed the merchant down considerably. His eyesight had dimmed with time, his movements were enfeebled. But his expression was as sharp as ever. I really did not know what he expected of me. I felt deeply uncomfortable. He paused before continuing, staring at me all the while, ‘How is it that you have never once expressed the least interest in that other sensation? The one that some have called the Siamese twin of pain?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
Masterji nodded, the wrinkles on his face seizing up with mirth, so that he looked like a dried-up walnut. He gurgled deep in his chest and for a moment I thought he was coughing or choking, before realizing it was the sound of his laughter. There was a sobbing quality to it too.
‘Ah, my poor boy,’ he said, when he had found his voice. ‘It is as I thought. You truly have no knowledge of pleasure, do you?’
I frowned. I knew the word, of course. ‘Gladness. Joy. That’s what it means, yes?’
He looked away, sighing and went silent again, all laughter draining out of him. For a while, I wondered if he had dozed off, as he was wont to do of late. He stirred at last. In a sombre voice he said, ‘Those who stripped the world of physical agony stripped it of physical pleasure too.’ There was a pause. ‘But you wouldn’t know that, would you?’ He turned to look at me. ‘Because who would be so cruel as to tell you of a joy you can never know?’
No one, it turned out. I honestly did not know what he meant.
Still gazing at me, the old man reached under the neck of the thin sweater, which was still his favourite style of clothing. He drew out a slender chain. At the end of it was a tiny pouch, made of leather and embroidered with gold thread.
The moment I saw it, I knew what it must be.
I was filled with foreboding and began to shiver.
‘You have been so trusting, my friend,’ said Masterji. ‘For the most part I have not betrayed your trust. I have never lied to you. What I’ve done, however, is keep some truths from you. Here is the first of them: while pain can be recorded, pleasure cannot. So even though my body remembers physical pleasure, neither I nor anyone else can share it with you. It is a glory, a fathomless bliss, that neither you nor anyone of your entire generation can ever know.’
I continued to shiver.
‘Here is a second truth that I withheld: certain types of pain result in the actual injury that caused the pain. You have seen that, I think? Physical reactions that mirror the pain? Such as bleeding? Well. When it comes to death…’
I guessed what he was about to say and tried to forestall him. ‘Masterji, please!’ I cut in. ‘You don’t have to do this. Your time has not yet come.’
He gurgled slightly, which I took to be a chuckle. ‘Huh. I disagree! Meanwhile, there’s a final truth that I have withheld. Instead of telling you, I’ll demonstrate it.’
He opened out the tiny pouch. Inside was a pain bracelet, just like all the others. He placed it around his own wrist, then urged me to draw my seat close to his.
‘I will press the red button several times,’ he said. ‘When I’m done, I’ll give you my free hand to hold. That will allow you to feel an echo of whatever I feel. Without experiencing the injury.’ He looked me straight in the eyes and smiled. ‘You will accompany me into the great silence, my friend! But, unlike me, you will return.’
A few moments later, I took his hand. I held it to my face. I felt the force of his brother’s death blasting through him. I felt his spirit splinter into glittering shards.
Then scatter, scatter, scatter.
Until all that was left was an immense shimmering void. And no pain.
No pain at all.
TALKERS
It’s late afternoon in the tropics as we glide into the atmosphere of the small blue planet we visited millennia ago. But the vista that unfolds beneath us, as we approach the surface, is unrecognizable. Where once there were lush jungles, forests and grasslands, now there are cancerous outgrowths of concrete and tar.
Folding our wings, we perch atop a high tower. Shocked and saddened.
‘Things have changed, huh,’ whispers Dza.
‘I fear it is our fault,’ I say. ‘We meddled without assessing the consequences.’
Just then, a bird flaps down beside us. Black with grey accents. It greets us in its own harsh voice. ‘Caw,’ it says. ‘Caw-caw!’
‘Hello,’ I reply. Then I reach out with my hand to stroke the bird’s throat.
‘What’re you doing!’ Dza exclaims, alarmed.
‘Meddling again,’ I say, as the bird springs into the air, clacking its beak in surprise.
Then it returns, settling onto the parapet where Dza and I sit. ‘My name is Crow! And I can talk!’ it says, cocking its head. ‘Why?’
Instead of answering, I lean forward into the grimy air and take flight once more.
Dza follows. ‘Lead us to a hominid dwelling,’ I say to the bird, now flying beside us. ‘As we continue to meddle, you’ll understand what we’re doing.’
Crow takes us to another tall building. Glass panes make this one easy to look inside. We fly past a window with an orange feline gazing out at us. When we shimmer in through the glass to sit beside it, the creature arches its back, hisses, strikes out with its claws.
But Dza reaches forward, unharmed. And strokes its throat.
I open the glass to permit Crow to enter. He caws loudly in his own language. A moment later, . . .
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