Migrations, Volume I : Don't Forget to Breathe Read online



  m i g r a t i o n s

  Volume I: Don’t Forget to Breathe

  a s h i m

  s h a n k e r

  MIGRATIONS, VOLUME I: DON'T FORGET TO BREATHE

  Copyright © 2008 by Ashim Shanker

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-1-4523-1580-5

  Library of Congress Control Number:  2009901592

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  To Maki

  Contents

  Part One : Winter

  The Karakaze

  Raju and Yuri

  Dinner

  The Field at Night

  Back at the Inn

  On Acquaintanceship

  In the Protozoan Quarter

  Ottoman’s Story

  Half Daughters, Quarter Sisters

  Didi

  The Legal Non-Entity

  His Friend, Motiwala

  His Friend, Coronado

  At the House of Diogenes

  On the Relevance of Principles

  Prophecies from the Outlander

  The Snow Globe

  Part Two : Spring

  On the Banks of Placenta-C

  Echoes

  Nectar-13

  On the Perceptions of Mole Flies

  The Way of Things

  Sunset

  The Streets at Night

  Approaching the Station

  Detained

  The Design of the Facility

  Courtship Hour

  Figments, Fabrications

  The Many Natures of Dust

  Three Years Later (or “A Brief History of Asoka Plains”)

  Every Good Boy

  Cessation at the Follicle

  The Gentleman Caller

  The Warden

  Akihito the Prophet of the Outlands

  Duty

  Ways Out

  To Separation

  Part One

  W I N T E R

  The Karakaze

  I.

  It was only a matter of hours before Bunnu was to be imprisoned and it would take several more years before he was able to marshal the resources for his daring escape, the first in a series of which would eventually propel him to notoriety within the Republic as one of the greatest escape artists of all time. Yet, at the moment, his immediate concerns were of a different nature.

  Now, he stood frozen in place, listening to a sound that usually wouldn’t otherwise capture his attention; an insignificant, everyday sound that, for some reason, brought the past back to him with a renewed clarity.

  As he cocked his head, his eyes slowly rolled back to the sink in front of him. It was more like a washbasin than a sink, really. Above it, penetrating the darkness of the water closet was not truly a light, but more precisely a candle. It’d been years since he’d been in a place like this. But where exactly was this anyway?

  He was far away from his home. That much was certain.

  Far away…and in a foreign land.

  Far from civilization in a town too primitive a condition for its people to understand truly and fundamentally why and from what perspective they might be referred to as primitive. Or, maybe it was just the lack of electricity and running water that made it all seem that way. Admittedly, these facilities were relatively rustic even for this area of the world. Other inns at least had indoor plumbing and electricity. Most even had radios. But not this one.

  Perhaps it had something to do with the part of town he was in. It was known to the locals as the Nostalgia District, though no one really knew how the area had gotten its name. Did it come about through the feeling that it evoked in its residents and visitors? Or was it due to a lack of modern conveniences? The former certainly seemed less likely than the latter as it seemed doubtful that its long-time residents could continually, over the course of years, manage to be subject to a sense of nostalgia. After all, wouldn’t the perpetual absence of a modern context, eventually, defeat the purpose of evoking such a feeling? In fact, it would seem more appropriate to assume that visitors who spent enough time within the confines of this area were unwittingly apt to live in the past and become nostalgic for the modern day… or even the future.

  Regardless, at a younger age—that is, in his childhood— this sort of setting would have seemed normal and everyday to Bunnu. The washbasin. The candle. Even the draft coming in from the window. And maybe at that time, his surroundings may have seemed primitive to someone else. But who might that someone else have been? Perhaps his future Self: the very same future Self that now stands frozen in the washroom reminiscing about the past because of some unexceptional, everyday sound.

  That sound: Maybe it was seeking him out from somewhere in his past. That didn’t seem very possible, but then again, this was the Nostalgia District. The sound may well have created a rift in the fabric of Space-Time, thereby allowing elements of some previous event to leak in and prevail themselves upon the constructs of the immediate reality. It seemed improbable, however, that events in time and space should reoccur in such a manner as to correspond exactly with one’s memories.

  No, perhaps, it wasn’t as complex as all that. It was just a sound, after all. In fact, it seemed likely that its source was simply the whistle of a tea kettle in the next room and nothing more. A high-pitched whistle that served the function that the kettle had been designed to perform: to signal when the water had started to boil.

  Presumably, beyond that, it had no inherent significance. It certainly couldn’t conjure up a latent event in Space-Time. Yet, it seemed to remind Bunnu vaguely of something that happened many, many years ago. And with each passing moment, the whistle penetrated the volumes and chapters of his life, boring a hole further and further back through fleshy gray layers of archived existence into the distant past; reversing and spiraling into the depths of hindsight until, finally, Bunnu found himself reflecting with clarity upon the day his parents found and adopted his younger brother, O.

  Truth be told, it had been years since he’d so much as thought of, much less corresponded with O., which is not to say, however, that it was entirely Bunnu who was to blame. O. had come into his own: or so it was said. Nonetheless, in what respect and to what degree O. had done this was something about which Bunnu didn’t have the slightest bit of information. Not for a lack of wanting to know, but more conceivably because O. didn’t seem particularly interested in making that information available to him.

  The kettle was still whistling, which caused Bunnu to wonder for a moment, as he soaked up the blood under his swollen lip with a wet cloth, if it wasn’t, in fact, all happening in his mind. Hasn’t anyone noticed the damn thing yet?

  He looked in the mirror, rinsing the cloth in the washbasin. In the flickering water-reflected light of the candle, his face was awash in bands of light and dark rippling over his features in tandem. At one moment, his eyes sparkled in the light and in the next they were enshrouded in shadow. What connected those bands of light and dark? Could they indeed have been distinct entities?

  He closed his eyes and listened to the noise beyond the door. Amidst the whistling were the sounds of the other patrons: chatting and laughing and muttering away, seemingly unaffected by the piercingly loud noise. Why isn’t anyone complaining to the innkeeper about the sound? In stark contrast to the complaining or collective uproar any rational person might expect to hear in this situation, Bunnu could hear a fair bit of laughing and good-natured r
evelry.

  There had been a group of 3 men in broad-collared overcoats who were sitting at a table in the corner, enjoying a good laugh, when he’d walked in. A glance in his direction had silenced them for scarcely a moment, presumably because he’d been covered in bruises, which was certainly enough to arouse anyone’s attention. But when the moment passed, they continued on in tones of mutual familiarity. Bunnu had, in a way, been impressed by the manner with which they shared that sense of camaraderie. Be it in the laughter, or in their gestures, or even in their choice of words—that may very well have been a kind of in-group vernacular—he couldn’t help but feel a bit envious, as that was once the sort of relationship he’d had with his friends in the Greater Kaiiba-8 Football Association. Before things soured, that is.

  The pitch of the whistling now began to waver as he realized that the sound was not, in fact, that of a kettle, but rather of the wind outside. He went to the window and peered out at the city streets. Branches from trees in the tiny courtyard in front of the Algorithmist Temple flailed violently in the fury of the wind. People in the streets started running for cover as this could only mean a storm was on its way.

  There was a knock at the door. Bunnu ignored it.

  The wind. Maybe that’s what it was. He leaned against the wall, still looking out, watching the sky slowly darken, and thought about the Karakaze back home, which he now remembered used to cut through him, body and soul, at a similar pitch—frigid and mystifying and naked in its essence as it swept through town to signal the arrival of the winter season.

  The person knocked again. This time louder. “Mr. Bunnu!”

  Bunnu looked back at the door, but hesitated to respond. “That must be what it was,” he said to himself, recalling a day, years and years ago, when he was a little boy.

  II.

  It had been a particularly windy day: the first of the season.

  He had been outside picking ants up with a twig and placing them into a tiny wooden boat of his own design. His intention was to have them set sail through the narrow canals of a nearby rice field. A field that he had taken it upon himself to assign the name: 011235.

  This boat was the latest in a series of attempts to circumnavigate the Field, and perhaps, his best design to date. He had whittled the wood down himself with a sharp knife, bound each piece together with a strong adhesive that his father otherwise used to mend his work boots, sealed the exterior with wax, created sails from the thin fabric of his bed sheets, and stamped the hulls ceremoniously in red ink with his own name. And now that it was ready for its maiden voyage, he loaded the ants into the boat, pledging to each of them in whispers that all would be well and that they would be perfectly safe throughout their journey. Naturally, he couldn’t be sure that his words would provide much reassurance for them, so he had designed the boat in such a way that it had a latch on its compartment door, so as to prevent any of them from abandoning ship mid-voyage. He didn’t truly seek to force them into this situation, but, at the same time, knew that there could be no effective way of persuading them to partake voluntarily with the means at his disposal. Yet, this was no matter to approach lightly, for if he was to fail again in this attempt and passengers were to perish, it was him who would be held responsible and there would be no mistake in assuming that the brethren ants, or their posterity, would, one day, have their revenge.

  This was, of course, a chance he was willing to take as it was for the sake of exploration: an undertaking worthy of any sacrifice. In any case, he was confident that, this time, his hard work would pay off.

  The boat would sail. Glory would be had.

  His father had helped him build his first boat. This crude, top-heavy vessel, however, had capsized the moment it touched the water. And so, the boy, thereupon mistrustful of his father’s input, endeavored to devise his own fleet of seaworthy creations: toy galleys, merchant boats, pirate ships. Vessels with hollow compartments for the purposes of transport. To him, something about these objects inspired him with a sense of wonder he could scarcely put into words. The ships were, to him, sentient receptacles that carried their passengers and cargo to and from the shores, insensible to what had transpired on land prior to the voyage and unaware of what would unfold upon arrival. They simply served the purpose for which they were designed. And thus, to have a function that served ends beyond the scale of one’s own understanding: something about it filled him with an urgent need to explore the possibilities. The ships were, thus, not just a means of play, but also of experimentation for workings that pervaded on a larger—and perhaps, even a smaller— scale.

  As he slid the compartment door shut and fastened the latch, his mother called to him from the kitchen. “Bun-bun! Put your toys away and come in! It’s getting…” Her words were swallowed up by a strong gust of wind. Not swallowed, exactly, but intercepted. The Karakaze had intercepted them! Bunnu imagined the words’ syllables like beads on a thread, held together in array and swept away with the wind. And along with his mother’s words, he presumed that there must have been numerous strings of other people’s messages being carried about in a similar fashion. The beads of all the strings collided at once in mid-air: intertwining here and tangling there into one fused consonance (or cacophony, as the case may be) of sound. The Karakaze captured all these threads and weaved them in with its own. What it wanted to say in its new message was something Bunnu didn’t know, but was determined to find out.

  Bunnu ignored his mother’s calls as he walked along the dirt path in the direction of the rice fields. “Bun-bun!” he could hear faintly behind him. The wind pierced through him, ruffling his hair, until a chill shot down through his body. He tried to rub his nose only to find that both his face and his hands had already gone numb.

  The Karakaze swept down from the snow-covered mountains far in the distance, through the valley, whisking through trees in a series of howls and high-pitched squeals. It scattered smoke and parted dust as it made its way through the nearby village of Bahlia, swooped down through the dancing spider-tree orchards, ricocheted between the vast overhangs and solitary plateaus of the Coral Canyons, now and again puckering inward to create something like a vacuum among the caverns that tunneled inward to, as legend told, the distant past. The wind seemed to swirl through the fields as though it were a tornado’s eye scanning over the land, scrutinizing it.

  Bunnu’s father had once told him that the Karakaze didn’t swirl, but that it had an unswervingly straight course for the port towns to the Southeast. Yet, he could see it in the movement of the tall grass stalks and weeds along the path: an invisible swirling pattern it drew over the landscape. He allowed a certain levity to fill him as his pace along the path quickened. His feet suddenly felt lighter.

  Yet, despite his good spirits, he was slowly beginning to feel the chill of the wind reach his head. A dull headache spread from the back to the front as grains of dust blew into his face, causing his eyes to sting and nose to itch, in spite of the numbness. He coughed as he rubbed his eyes with a dull, frozen palm. The boat, which he’d meanwhile been keeping lodged at the mast between the middle and ring fingers of his other hand started to wriggle as its sail undulated violently. If he wasn’t careful, the mast would give, rendering the boat unfit to sail.

  With his eyes still closed and a hand cupped over the sail, Bunnu ran a short way down the path. He opened his eyes again and, in the distance, could make out two small figures right next to field 011235: an adult and a child, but it was difficult to judge from this proximity who exactly they were and what they were doing.

  The two stood stationary, fixedly staring at the field.

  As Bunnu got closer, both turned to look in his direction and he realized that they were people of Mumtaz, a faraway village separated by the mountains about a day’s journey away. He’d never encountered a real Mumta before, but had heard stories about them from the Outlander that boarded with his family: an old friend of h
is maternal grandfather’s who called himself Rakesh-7. “The Mumta,” the Outlander once told him, “are really from a place far away from here, across the sea, but if you told any of them that, they would likely stare at you in disbelief, since all of their historical records have been purposefully altered by the elders of their tribe. If only they knew that their ancestors had been the envy of other civilizations as theirs was a well-developed and intricate culture, unsurpassed in their pursuits of the arts, the sciences and philosophical doctrine. Their mother civilization, with whom they’ve since lost all contact and historical connection, were also pioneers, one might say. Pioneers of the high seas!

  “But somewhere in their history, in a way yet unknown to any modern scholar, there was some kind of schism in their society after some of their dissidents decided to migrate to this continent. It’s possible that some of the pioneers saw more opportunities here than back home. It’s hard to say what the real reason was and I’m sure each one of the dissidents had his own reasons for leaving. But if you asked any of the Mumta about it, now, they probably wouldn’t understand the question. The descendants of those who’d left don’t know their true roots. ..and most certainly wouldn’t know why their ancestors had left. And their ancestors weren’t inclined—and perhaps, still aren’t inclined to have them find out.”

  He took a puff of his pipe and blew out a cloud of vanilla tobacco as he sat back in his armchair, “Which is to say, as far as they understand, they are people of this land. And when the historical record of your civilization gets wiped clean, you come to think you’re native, regardless of your true lineage. And even though their so-called ‘native’ culture is still on the whole quite derivative of their ancestors, there are also some marked differences between their New World culture and the ways of their Old World ancestors. At least, as far as I know and, truth be told, I don’t know that much about them. Truly, the ways of the Mumta are not well-known, as they had been nomadic for hundreds of years before settling beyond those mountains. And even now that they are here, they don’t associate much with outsiders. “As a society, they seem to have chronicled extensively the past hundreds of years of history living as nomads with no ties. They are very proud of their achievements in the New World. And any one of them would know their history as a collective in elaborate detail: right down to the names and positions of all the people in their society, prominent or otherwise, whether in recent history or 150 years ago.

  “And apparently, over the course of time, the linguistic structure of their language has come to abandon the past tense, as it has become their intuitive assumption that the past and present exist at once and as one entity—and as such, the usage of past tense has become superfluous in their speech. Meaning that, to them, there exists only everything that has happened up until and including now and everything that will happen from the here on out. No distinctions are necessary beyond that. And everything that has happened until now is still, in effect, continuing infinitely onward to the here on out. The spirits of the dead are said to commune with the people who fill the roles they’d previously occupied. For example, legal counsel in their criminal cases is given by one lawyer and any number of his dead predecessors. The matter can sometimes get confusing when there is a disagreement among the predecessors as to the appropriate course of legal action. This, of course, being further complicated by the existence of recent precedents, which, as I’m sure you can imagine, tend to be overlooked by the deceased. Especially the elders.

  “Of course, for a society like this to function successfully, there needs to be a self-imposed code of social conduct, highly specialized and more austere than the ways of their brethren in the Homeland. And maybe that’s what they had been looking for when they left in the first place. Who knows? Who knows why they migrated here? They certainly don’t. Your culture calls them Mumta, but where I’m from, we call them Drawans, which in my language means lost children.”

  The Outlander often had stories about people from places far away. Places Bunnu had never heard of that sounded so distant from his own reality that it felt as though one may require a lifetime just to reach these places. And yet, they seemed to occupy special territories of his imagination that he often visited at night when he closed his eyes just before going to sleep. In calling upon these places at bedtime, his hope was to dream of and actually visit them, so that he could meet the people that the Outlander had told him about. Of course, he could never manage to do this, but he never gave up trying.

  It excited him to think about those areas out there beyond his reach. It gave him a certain special comfort, specifically that of knowing that the world had more to offer him than the rice fields and the distant mountains, to which he’d long since grown so accustomed that one could have even called them extensions of him: the fields, the sky, the tall stalks of grass, the weeds, the dirt path and the mountains were all attached to his senses by invisible threads from which he wished to break free, if only for a moment.

  He, unlike his parents, was fated to venture out into the world. To hit the high seas: he would be a captain in the Royal Navy and lead the fleet of his Lordship Bunnu-5, the patriarch whom his parents had chosen as his namesake, to cities of gold and sunken chests from pirate ships containing jewel-encrusted ornaments and antiques of incalculable value.

  The old man’s stories gave a depth and a sense of detail to these dreams as he talked of his travels and adventures. In his stories, the Outlander always managed to depict himself as some witless observer, dragged into a situation by circumstances beyond his control, causing him to become embroiled in some tangled web of loyalty and betrayal, honor and deceit, generosity and greed. His stories always revolved around unlikely protagonists: Ghosts of Dead Cobblers, Mercenary Guardian Angels, Swordsmen who tamed wild beasts by way of the magnetic forces generated by their blades; Jungle shaman who, by communicating with wood spirits, could recite the living history of every tree down to the hour and minute; a society of deposed Kings, hailing from many a land, being made to spend their remaining years in exile living together on a far-off island, as they waged petty wars on each other for the small gains achieved only through the swarms of moths which served in their legions and which attacked their political opponents by feeding off the old fabric of their once luxurious gowns; Shadow Parasites that passed from host-to-host through the convergence of their shadows, allowing them to feed off of and slay whole villages almost instantaneously; a Carnival Freak Show Attraction composed of a complex of connected whiny green bubbles, known famously to the carnies as the Ethereal Scapegoat: a despicable and blameworthy being that had the ability to inconvenience anyone and everyone by the necessity of its mere existence.

  The Outlander’s protagonists all lived in this world that just didn’t seem to be made for them. That was perhaps what Bunnu liked most about his stories. In the winters, they would sit together in the tiny attic space that the old man had been occupying in the house for the past 25 years and drink hot ocha as Rakesh-7 wove together seemingly simple threads into complex and detailed narrations that Bunnu could listen to tirelessly for hours on end, only to, upon hearing the finish, unleash a whole new barrage of questions about what could have happened to this character and why on earth did that character decide to be evil, and how come the guardian angel was so interested in money if he couldn’t use it in Heaven without God catching on, and so on. Bunnu’s questions were so persistent, in fact, that the Outlander often found himself remarking half-jokingly that Bunnu’s curious nature would not only be his greatest asset, but also his undoing.

  And now, Bunnu wanted to speak with the Outlander more than ever. He had so many questions he couldn’t bear not to have someone around to ask. He was absolutely sure Rakesh-7 would be able to explain why the Mumta were here at field 011235. Why they had journeyed so far over mountainous terrain. Why they didn’t come more often. Bunnu had a flurry of questions running through his head, spiraling, perhaps, at roughly th
e same speed as that of the Karakaze, but no one was there to answer them. Anyway, to expect Rakesh-7 to be there with him would have been fruitless, as he hadn’t left that small space in the attic for going on 10 years.

  The adult Mumta was a tall slender man with an olive complexion and an overall gentle demeanor. He had shoulder-length wavy hair, which the Karakaze blew back into his face occasionally. His features were sharp, one might even say watchful. If Bunnu hadn’t known better, he might have mistaken him for a guard or a ranger of some kind as the man’s entire face seemed to focus in completely on anything that his senses deemed worthy of further inquiry. As he viewed Bunnu, there seemed to be this strange sensation in the air, as though every sense were acutely aware, not only of the boy himself, but also of his specific condition in that moment.

  Could this man, in fact, taste the apprehension in the air molecules that separated them? Could he smell the aromatic vapors of the young boy’s curiosity as it bubbled inside, escaping, perhaps, through pores in the skin or even through the ears like sizzling bacon fat having been laid upon the white hot foundations of his imagination? Could he feel the charge that Bunnu radiated in anticipation—an electricity that ran anxiously through his spine, down through his arms, legs, fingers, and toes?

  Regardless of whether he could or couldn’t, after a short period of silent observation, the man cocked his head back abruptly and his son, who had, all this time, been staring at Bunnu in frozen silence, seemed to be yanked to attention, as though by an invisible thread connecting the two of them, and he awakened from his trance. He glanced casually up at his father, who, now, appeared to be digging in his heels, arching his back and, with his head cocked back, teeth clenching, veins now popping out of his neck, was struggling to maintain influence over his son’s attention, like a fisherman grappling with a stubbornly spirited fish just slightly beyond his control. After a moment’s hesitation, the boy turned effortlessly back to glance once more at Bunnu with an expression of amusement before gazing back out at field 011235. Bunnu followed his lead and looked out in the same direction only to find nothing of interest in the field. At least, nothing peculiar enough to arouse one’s curiosity, as he saw it. What are they looking at? He wondered. His eyes scanned fields that spanned outward from him to the horizon. Nothing at all worth staring at.

  Except for…

  He quickly turned back to them to find that they were already slowly walking in the other direction. He watched their footsteps from behind: they were slow and graceful. Careful as if they were tip-toeing. Surely, it would take at least 2 days for them to return at such a pace. Bunnu plodded after them in faster, louder, clumsier steps.

  “Wait!” he heard himself call out. The sound echoed as though he were in a tunnel.

  Both Mumta tensed up suddenly, presumably taken by surprise. They both turned around with expressions of disbelief. Bunnu stopped dead in his tracks. He could still hear the reverberations of the echo. His voice repeatedly saying Wait…wait…wai-…reminded him of the echoes in the caverns that tunneled underneath Coral Canyons. It looked like he’d startled them. But how could that be?

  And suddenly, Bunnu noticed that he could no longer feel the wind ruffling through his hair. Not the slightest breeze could be felt, which is not to say, however, that the wind had stopped. In fact, it gained intensity all around him and the two Mumta. The Mumta stood motionless before him at a distance of maybe 5 meters, but the wind seemed to be swirling about the 3 of them as though they were being scrutinized by the Karakaze Itself. Silence resounded in the wind to the effect that Bunnu could only assume that the Karakaze had somehow formed a sound-proof barrier that encircled them. The Mumta, now visibly calmer than moments earlier, looked at him expectantly, perhaps wondering what the boy was going to do next, or more conceivably, why he had called upon them. “You are…um… That is, are you from…Mumtaz?” was all he could manage to say.

  The words came out loud and abrupt to the point that even Bunnu jumped at the gruffness and invasiveness of his own words. The Mumta didn’t respond or even show the slightest bit of surprise or annoyance at the disruptive nature of his words, this time. Had I not been heard? Bunnu wondered. The wind still remained strong, yet he could hear his own voice loud and clear. In fact, it was rare that his words had such resonance. It was fair to say that this barrier created by the Karakaze even served to amplify them. He could not just feel their echo, but also their impact as they created ripples through his consciousness like pebbles in water. He could feel inside of him the depth of their meaning—and, beyond even the intrinsic meaning itself, he could sense the intuitive curiosity that seemed to underlie the words. In fact, he was so dumbstruck by their power that it would seem that these were not the same words that had left his own mouth.

  The eye of the Karakaze passed over them and resumed its presumably unwavering course for the port towns to the Southeast and once again Bunnu felt the wind begin to ruffle his hair and the chill run down through his body.

  The Mumta still stood before him, their expressions hidden by their long hair which blew wildly across the fronts of their faces. They stood there, not resisting the wind: trance-like with arms at their sides. They, too, must have been quite cold, as they were only clothed in thin-cotton sarongs which they kept draped around their waists. This sort of attire, while beautifully ornate, was certainly no protection against the wind and thus must have left their arms, legs, heads, and chests vulnerable to the elements.

  Bunnu watched the fabric of their sarongs flutter in the wind and, thinking that it must certainly be too cold for them to make the journey back in this weather, did something that perhaps any boy his age might have done in this situation.

  He invited them to dinner.

  Raju and Yuri