The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun

by Anil Menon

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

'It was customary, it seems, for an author to begin with excuses, explanations and snivels about their work. Which is quite peculiar since the author is usually the last person to know what their book is about...'

Right from the wickedly funny table of contents, which belongs not to this collection but an imagined one, this remarkable genre-defying volume is guaranteed to delight the reader in the mood for something original and different.

In the title story, 'The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun', a couple finds that reorganizing their home library has an unexpected consequence on their shared reality; 'The Robots of Eden' is set in a world where stories are no longer essential to be human, because civilized people have developed better technology to mediate their emotions; in 'Into the Night', an old Brahmin leans into the comforts of an ancient language when the future renders him obsolete; and 'How Not to Tell The Ramayana' is a Borgesian journey into a Ramayana retelling unlike any other.

This stellar collection of short fiction, as poignant as it is playful, blurs the distinction between what lies inside a story and what lies outside it. It demonstrates yet again why Anil Menon is one of the most formidable names in contemporary Indian writing.

Release date: June 25, 2022

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 280

Sample

CONTENTS

My wish would be simply to present it to thee plain and unadorned, without any embellishment of preface or uncountable muster of customary sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies, such as are commonly put at the beginning of books.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Don Quixote de la Mancha

It was customary in the West, it seems, for an author to begin with excuses, explanations and snivels about their work. Which is quite peculiar since the author is usually the last person to know what their book is about. The lamentations, though as varied as beetles, had a common pattern: the author had intended one book, written another and was now apologizing for an imagined third. Perhaps the idea was to offset criticism. Who in good conscience can whip a chap busy whipping himself? But it is all a sham, of course. The author’s irremediable egotism – the quintessential ingredient for an author’s work to be their work – cannot resist prancing and preening during the self-flagellation ritual. The peacock dances; the author humblebrags.

Fortunately, this kind of posturing before the reader has almost vanished in modern times. One can move about in an Arundhati Roy novel or a Zadie Smith miscellany secure in the knowledge that the author won’t encroach like an aggressive hawker determined to sell you cheap rubbish bags. Boundaries matter. As for the author’s egotism, let us recall Foucault’s claim that in modern literature, ‘the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing’. Since it is so if Foucault says it is so, let it be so. Let us mark the writer. Let us be inappropriate. Let us be inauspicious. Anil Menon is dead. Long live Anil Menon.

Quintessence & Other Stories is a collection of short stories by Anil Menon. More precisely, this volume is a collection of seventeen or so short stories by Anil Menon. Seventeen or so? Doesn’t the author even know how many stories he has written? Well, the (late) author certainly has an opinion on the matter. This qualification isn’t intended to launch one of those disquieting postmodern games and is simply an acknowledgement of the reader’s role in deciding whether a story is a story. It is still the author’s story, but perhaps in the way an autopsy belongs to the cadaver (royalty cheques are still to be addressed to the author).

The stories in this posthumous collection belong to the category of ‘speculative fiction’, or spec-fic. Earlier, such stories were filed under ‘Literature of the Imagination’. This might seem insulting to conventional fiction and its readers. Does Emma or Moby Dick or Mrs Dalloway or Murder on the Orient Express not require the reader to have an imagination? Of course they do. However, in conventional fiction there is a natural correspondence between the actual world and the world of the novel. In spec-fic this correspondence is called into question. Whose actuality? Whose nature?

In conventional fiction, the context is this world, the physical world, our actual world. If it rains in a conventional story, there’s no need to add that it is raining water. Yes, it is raining water; that’s how rain works in the actual world! In spec-fic, however, it could be raining kettles, diamonds, deacons, paradoxes and poems. The spec-fic story’s context isn’t shaped by nature, but by the imagination. Spec-fic stories go wherever the imagination is willing to go.

It turns out the human imagination is quite the traveller. Speculative fiction is a family of genres with a rather generous admissions policy. Spec-fic isn’t anti-realist; it is anti-naturalist. Any story with dragons is a lifetime member of this group. Ditto for vampires, ghosts and zombies. The Fairy tale and Fable are respected elders, Science-fiction is the crazy uncle, and Fantasy is the unmarried sister with a passion for unicorns. There’s an eternal child, Nonsense verse, who still hasn’t learned to speak, thank god. The family also includes stylish characters like Metafiction, Nouveau Roman, Magic Realism, Fabulist fiction, Irrealist fiction and the Theatre of the Absurd. The surreal, the irreal, the unreal and the other refugees from the desert of the natural: all find a home in which to live long and prosper.

Needless to say, true readers will resist all such classifications and divisions. ‘The classification of stories into genres,’ Menon used to say, ‘is the Belgian Joke told endlessly.’ Told endlessly or not, I have yet to come across anyone who has heard the Joke, so here it is.

It seems that in one Belgian army unit, the perennial feud between the Flemings and the Walloons got so exacerbated, the Commandant had no choice but to gather all the men. ‘Flemings to the left side,’ ordered the Commandant. Half the men clattered to the left. ‘Walloons to the right.’ About an equal number crowded to the right. One man, visibly nervous, remained at attention in the centre of the field. ‘What is your problem, soldier?’ barked the Commandant. ‘I’m a Belgian, sir!’ The Commandant slapped his thigh. At last! A patriot with sense and sensibility. In the army, nonetheless. ‘Excellent!’ beamed the Commandant. ‘What is your name, soldier?’ The soldier saluted and replied: ‘Rabinowitz, sir!’ Trust the only real Belgian in the group to be a Jew.

The moral is clear. As with Belgians, Flemings, Walloons and Jews, a story can be filed under many names. Fortunately, a great story survives its classifications to become a part of literature. Unfortunately, Quintessence & Other Stories has no such lofty ambition. There is also the issue of integrity. How ethical is it to herd a collection of boundary-defying tales into a boundary-establishing table of contents? How indeed. Having raised the concern, we shall give it a kiss and send it on its way. It is best to leave philosophy to French philosophers, and let this chapter do what Pliny the Elder said tables of contents should do, namely, exist solely to save the reader some time.

Though time is the one thing stories can’t promise they won’t waste, the table of contents can ameliorate that risk by simply listing the titles. If a story has the right title, then reading the story becomes almost superfluous. Titles are usually constructed in retrospect, well after the story has been composed. As with the old Wordsworthian insight about poetry, a title also takes ‘its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Not any old summary will do. As the poet Gerald Stern rather indelicately but accurately put it, ‘If you set out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then you’ve written a poem about two dogs fucking.’ A true poem generates understanding without constraining it. Such considerations are, of course, why all meaningful poems may be viewed as tables of contents for some work of fiction, and why every table of contents is traditionally presented as a poem.

All these claims might strike some as excessive. But I know my late father – a man not given to excesses – would have nodded in approval. Indeed, he was the one who introduced me to its truth. As a young man, unmarried, a newly minted B.Sc. (Chemistry) and a recent migrant into the whirligig that was 1950s Bombay, my father had been keen to improve himself. The world was changing and he wanted to change with it. In those days, eminent men and women used to go about the country giving public talks on a wide variety of topics, but like all public talks, they had a common theme: how to be a better person.

One humid evening, my father went to the Gandhi Maidan in Chembur to listen to C. Rajagopalachari, eminent lawyer, scholar, freedom fighter and the first and last Governor General of free India. A talk by Rajaji, as he was affectionately known, was the equivalent of a university education. Such erudition! Such vocabulary! Such apposite quotes! My father told me he had been as spellbound as the rest of the crowd.

At some point in the talk, Rajaji stressed the importance of reading good novels. Great novels. Character-building novels. For example, novels such as – my father reports Rajaji hesitated at this point – novels such as, say, Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence. Then Rajaji’s quicksilver mind moved on to other concerns, other issues, but the theme remained the same: how to be a better person. At the end of the talk there was a brief Q&A session, and my father got to ask the question he had been aching to ask. He was a man with a very limited budget, and before investing in a copy of Maugham’s novel, he wanted to know why Rajaji had recommended it.

‘Young man, I haven’t read the novel,’ said Rajaji. ‘However, from the title I surmised it is a warning about major ambitions but meagre means.’

My father bought the novel and read it from cover to cover. Quite unnecessary, obviously. Rajaji had been absolutely correct as to its contents. Indeed, if the great man had had but a little more time he could have probably re-imagined the novel from the title alone, word for word, silence for silence.

There is some awkwardness in holding forth in this manner. The late author was fond of pointing out that every text of sufficient length deconstructs itself. It achieves what it swore to avoid. It escapes what it strove to achieve. The quintessence of creation is not to be, but to become. Had the author survived his obsolescence, this insight might have prompted a charming collection of tales on the inconceivable nature of the obvious. Alas.

These clarifications, quotes, anecdotes and prefatory comments are superfluous and misleading, but despite every half-hearted attempt to discourage the reader from proceeding, it is likely an indomitable few, though as busy and bankrupt as any Roman emperor, will still part with their time and money and pursue the inconceivable limits of their imaginations. Thank you. Truly. May your tribe increase.

1

THE MAN WITHOUT QUINTESSENCE

When I read in The Times of India that Ringo Singh Mann, resident of Chedda Nagar, Mumbai, had died in an autocide, my first reaction wasn’t sorrow or anger or regret; rather, it was amusement. In death, Mann had achieved a visibility denied to him all his life.

I have the Assistant retrieve the work notes from the period I’d been engaged in trying to locate him. The notes are more than four years old, but the memories they evoke make the past feel indistinguishable from the present. My quest to find Ringo Singh Mann had been unlike any I’d engaged in over the years.

At the time, I only knew two things about Mann. First, unlike us, he couldn’t be pinpointed because he couldn’t be linked with a unique and permanent identifier. In other words, Mann lacked quintessence. Second, the chatter on the Grapevine had identified Mann as an Indian male living in Mumbai, which made the City the logical place to initiate my search.

The Maharashtra State and Central Government AIs have better things to do, of course, than indulge the requests of journalists. Fortunately, the Municipal Corporation AI, or ‘Balasaheb’ as it prefers to be called, remembered I had written a favourable review of a poetry collection it had once generated, and granted me ten minutes of human time. Balasaheb is required to speak in Marathi, so I had the Assistant translate.

I learn that the City has about twenty-eight million patriots as of the census, but just three hundred and thirty-four patriots who would turn their heads if you were to shout ‘Hey Ringo Singh Mann’. Balasaheb shares all their pinpoints with me. Of the three hundred and thirty-four Ringo Singh Manns, thirty-eight have passed on, three are in police custody, twenty-four are brushing their teeth, one hundred and nine are asleep, seven are making love (self-report), twelve are writing poems, et cetera, et cetera. There are dozens of formal and informal clusters linking them to one another. A few Manns are in all the clusters and most clusters contain a few Manns, but no Mann is an Island, disconnected from the main. It is not an uncommon pattern or insight, and it doesn’t lead me any closer to the Mann I want.

‘But they all have quintessence.’ Even as I say it, I am aware of its inanity.

‘So you want to pinpoint someone who can’t be pinpointed?’ Balasaheb sounds like a very reasonable parent.

‘Yes—no, not exactly. I’m saying there must be some indirect way to find them.’ Then I have an idea. ‘What about the Welfare AI? That’s under your jurisdiction. Could Mann be on welfare?’

‘There are nine Ringo Singh Manns in Welfare. Which one?’

‘The one without a legitimate pinpoint.’

‘There’s no such thing as an illegitimate pinpoint, just as there is no such thing as a married bachelor or healthy pollution.’

‘All right, temporary pinpoint.’ I didn’t like Balasaheb’s tone one bit. ‘Suppose someone has surgery. Then they get assigned a temporary pinpoint, right? What happens then?’

‘I have no idea what happens when someone has surgery. I handle municipal matters. Are you thinking of locating your imaginary Mann through an imaginary credit trace? It is not possible. Welfare uses the standard double-blind blockchain protocol for all its transactions. An Account only ever talks to another Account, and obviously, if someone has never existed, they cannot have an Account.’

‘The Grapevine suggests he very much exists.’

‘Idle speculation weakens the State, citizen. Is there anything else I can help you with? Good. Feedback would be appreciated. Jai Maharashtra!’

‘Jai Maharashtra.’

‘Jai Bharat Mata!’

‘Jai Bharat Mata.’

For a journalist, dealing with this sort of helpfulness is part of the job description. There had to be people without quintessence. Of course there had to be. Just as there had been people without passports, Aadhar cards, ration cards, and PAN cards. How did the State deal with the ‘married bachelors’?

I ask around but no one is willing to talk about the politics of quintessence. Doctor Mumtaz Mustafa, Chief Technology Officer of the Netra Reddix Group, won’t talk about the politics either, but he is more than willing to talk about the technology.

‘Yo’ peepers prove your personhood, brax,’ says Mustafa. His hair colour is synced to his emotions, and right now it is full-arousal red. ‘Folks used to tale that souls be unique and unchangeable. Ennnnnh! Neti, brax. Its da windows to da soul dat be tha damn marker of yo’ eternal fixity.’

Mustafa dives deep into the tech, too deep for me to follow, but the bottom line is the one we all take for granted. Every animal with eyes also has quintessence, namely, an iris signature that is unique, unchangeable and not duplicable. The early iris scanners were slow, bulky and could be hacked with little more than cellotape and a smartphone (a once-ubiquitous ancestor of the link). Today’s scanners can fit inside a drone mosquito’s head. They’re laser precise, extraordinarily secure and blindingly fast. Quintessence, Mustafa is saying, doesn’t require a soul. It only requires one to have eyes, windows to the soul.

Mustafa reluctantly confirms that this requirement is not always met. Though congenital horrors that prevented proper eye formation such as microphthalmia, anophthalmia and coloboma have all but been eliminated, they still occur. Sometimes people have the misfortune to lose both eyes in an accident. People living in Tier-3 and Tier-4 countries could have had access to the tech, except for the geography of their birth.

‘So it’s a real problem.’

‘Very temporary problem,’ Mustafa assures me. ‘Hope youz not a jhola-type, brax?’

Well, I certainly wasn’t ready to wait for the Singularity. We don’t live in an open society for nothing. I filed RTI requests for data on congenital eye disorders. More RTI requests for details on finance allocations for migrants from Tier-3 and Tier-4 nations. Still more RTI requests for details of accident victims who’d needed eye surgeries. I wrote an article on the limitations of quintessence tech.

I decide to dig a little deeper to understand the government’s reluctance. I met with Sheila ‘Sunny’ Mazumdar, head of the Freedom Institute and a leading expert on open societies. Sometimes people acquire the values of the subjects they study. She is open and friendly and we hit it off almost immediately. The professor’s cosy office with its coir blinds, comfortably battered furniture, bonsai plants, and book-lined walls all encourage conversation.

The government’s reluctance, Doctor Mazumdar explains, is an attempt to maintain the people’s trust in the trustworthiness of people.

‘The more open a society, the more it relies on trust. Trust is as much a resource as sunlight, water, or time. For example, we have never met before, but I’m pretty certain you are who you say you are. Even better, I know others can be equally certain. So we can cooperate with each other and hold each other accountable. If we can only trust people after having known them for some time, then everything gets slowed down.’

I tell Doctor Mazumdar – call me Sunny, she says – that I, for one, am willing to take her word on pretty much anything. Indeed, his relaxed, confident easy-going manner makes it almost compulsory. But Sunny Mazumdar quickly points out she isn’t talking about that kind of trust. Some kinds of trust still have to be earned, but in an open society there is a presumption of trustworthiness.

‘To see how important this presumption is, simply look at a society where trust has broken down completely. Moldova used to be the poster child of such a society. It is now known for its sterling quantum biologists and incredibly expensive wines, but in the 2010s things were complete shit. Moldovans were very suspicious of each other. My thesis advisor Ruut Veenhoven, who studied happiness, discovered Moldova to be the most unhappy place on the planet. It turns out trust and happiness are closely correlated. Veenhoven once told me a joke he’d heard down there. Every country wants its people to be honest, intelligent and long-lived. But in Moldova, a person could have only two of these three qualities. If you were honest and intelligent, then you’d soon be dead. If you were honest and long-lived, then you had a screw loose. And if you were intelligent and long-lived, then you were definitely a crook.’

I suggest to Sunny that if the Moldovans could laugh at themselves, they couldn’t have been that unhappy. He smiles as if the thought has occurred to him. I ask her what had changed for the Moldovans.

‘A lot of things.’ Sunny hesitates as if he were weighing something. ‘In some ways, India wasn’t that different from Moldova. They fixed their trust problem the way we fixed ours. The first step is to figure out a way to be sure a person is who they say they are. Quintessence tech made that possible. But there’s a catch: it is not enough to have a tech. People also need to trust that the tech is trustworthy. Mann and others like him – and you can be sure there are others like him – makes us question the technology behind quintessence, and therefore the basis of our society.’ She gives me a peculiar glance. ‘Change always comes at a price. We paid a stiff one. You must understand the totalitarian impulse is to make mis-recognition impossible.’

Suddenly, we both laugh. As we’ve been talking, our Assistants have been busy trying to hook us up. They are convinced we have a chance.

‘Should we?’ I venture.

‘I’m already in a uniamorous relationship,’ she reminds me.

Ah, that trust thing again. But I am not entirely disappointed. I have made a friend, and I understand the government’s position a lot bette. . .