Chapter 3: Twice Shy

[Continued from here.]

Abject darkness, a violent jerk, and a cold riveting slap on her left cheek awoke her.

Déjà vu.

She knew where she was an instant before she opened her eyes; she could smell the perfumed air of the room. Her head throbbed like the last time.

Yes, the same mahogany wall, the same portraits of a man on a crucifix, the same angelic smiles, the same ‘Sherlocked’ t-shirt gracing her body. She stood up with great effort, hoisting her body up. Her head wheeled, both from the physical blow and mental befuddlement.

ये हो क्या रहा है!? कैसी जगह है ये?

She looked around herself, being doubly cautious of any sight of the woman and the man she had encountered the last time. Behind her stood the same contraption she had entered only a few seconds ago, to escape from her company. She entered the machine and examined it. It had what seemed like a metallic control panel, with wire endings, knobs and keys all over the surface. It was all very raw and unfinished; it lacked the general polish and completeness of the room. The ‘go’ button seemed to make the most sense to her, although she was apprehensive to the idea of pressing it again, in fear of falling to the floor once over.

She got out of the ‘cupboard’ and went over to the doorway, walking on tiptoe, making the least sound possible. She sneaked from the edge of the opening, trying to hear anything. A very faint conversation could be made out, with frequent interjections of laughter. It seemed to be a fairly one-sided conversation, made between a rather taciturn man (growling disinterested ‘hmm’s for the most of the part) and a rather too loquacious female with a high-pitched voice.

Judging the source of the voices to be distant enough for her to brave the hallway, she walked out of the room surreptitiously. Having walked only a few paces, to her immediate right there appeared another bedroom, a vacant and unfurnished one, apparently unoccupied. Two windows in the room opened into a dark outside view, darkened by the house’s shadow being cast across a large, secluded country road. It was, as the last time, an evening.

Suddenly, she heard the sounds of movement and footsteps from the end of the hallway. She swore under her breath and nimbly dived into the vacant room. She hid herself by placing her back to the bedroom wall, pressing her ear against it. The footsteps, marked with feminine fastidiousness, came closer. She pressed herself as far away from view of the hallway as possible, and dreaded her discovery like the last time. Holding her breath, she became as clandestine as a living human could hope to be.

The sound passed through the hallway, and into the room she had come out of. The footsteps paused at a spot, shuffled around and a sudden, stifled gasp was heard. The woman with the extremely high-pitched voice she had met only minutes ago, shouted again, “Onkel Elois! Komm hier doch, es ist etwas im Schlafzimmer!”

Once more, she couldn’t make out the language she spoke, but it did not sound Indian in origin. The ‘kh’s and ‘g’s were guttural and deep-throated.

मुझे कैसे मालुम की यह भाषा Indian नहीं? शायद मुझे partial memory loss है...

A masculine grunt responded to the woman’s callings from the other side of the house. A movement was heard, a chair creaked and the man audibly got up on his feet. There was another brief exchange between the two, after which the man started to make his way to the bedroom.

Listening to the conversation, she could not pick out the meanings of the words, but could grasp the sway of the dialogue by its tone. She could figure out that the woman had not taken well to the contraption kept in the room. Her mind began racing; for the second time that evening, she had an incomprehensible urge to stop them from inspecting the machine up close. Added to the perpetual feeling of being utterly lost in a foreign world and being caught up in a recurring time-warp nightmare, her state of mind was chaotic and numb. To top it all, she had no memory whatsoever…

दो options:

1. खिड़की से बाहर निकलूँ, अपने आस-पास की surroundings को जानूँ-परखूँ।

2. Room में जाऊं, उन लोगों से बात करूँ, समझने की कोशिश करूँ कि मैं हूँ कहाँ।

She had to act fast, for the man’s footsteps drew nearer to the room, slimming the window of time she had before she could act on the first option. Doing it any time after he had passed the room would mean risking discovery, since the overlooking window was in partial sight of the bedroom.She thought over it for the few seconds she had with her.

मैं जो भी हूँ, जहां भी हूँ, human हूँ। ये लोग भले ही मुझे पहचाने नहीं, मगर मेरी life के लिए कोई ख़तरा नहीं हैं। बेहतर यही होगा की मैं शान्तिपूर्वक अन्दर जाऊं, इनसे reason out करूँ, और अपनी इस गुमनामी की आवस्था से बाहर आऊँ…

The man was now in the corridor, and there was no going back. She waited him to pass and be with the woman, and stood up with intent. She paced into the room decidedly, and both its occupants turned around in utter surprise. It was the same young and short woman she had met before, accompanied by a burly, thick-bearded man who was scowling disapprovingly at her. They looked equally surprised like the last time, gaping wordlessly at her person, surveying her from head to toe. In contrast to her casual and ill-fitting tee and faded jeans, the couple wore elaborate overalls; the man sported a black tuxedo and a white shirt with winged collars and the woman, like last time, a simple evening gown of faint pink hue.

The man, having looked at her long enough to pass all limits of propriety, finally lowered his gaze and addressed her in his faltering yet robust voice.

“Wie heißen Sie, Fraulein? Woher kommen Sie? Dies ist privates Eigentum, wie haben Sie Ihren Weg in?”

“I don’t understand you, sir,” she said, trying to get across to the man in English, her second language. The man tried to make out her words, wrinkling his nose.

“Sie, English?” He asked, stammering.

“Yes! Yes, I speak English,” she said in delight.

“Gut, sehr gut! Ich – entschuldigung - I mean, I also understand English,” he replied, making a laborious effort to enunciate in English. “How you come in? Who is you,” he asked.

She gulped, unsure of what to say. She did not want to appear to be a tramp or a vagrant stumbling in on a happy household. She did not want to seem alien. She couldn’t possibly tell them she had no recollection whatsoever about how she had landed up in the house, falling out of the same machine, twice.

“I know not, sir,” she said in very small voice. “I fell out of that machine there,” she said, pointing to the box kept in the corner.

The man looked towards it, and asked, “You come from that? How?”

मुझे क्या घंटा मालूम होगा!

“I don’t know, sir. I just landed here, out of thin air,” she gestured at the carpeted floor.

The man looked perplexed, and growingly agitated. He exchanged a word with the woman, who seemed petrified and repulsed by the prospect of dealing with the strange woman.

The man said, “So you not knowing how you come…” He seemed to be engaged in deep thought, contemplating his next move.

गलत हो गया यहाँ आना, मुझे बाहर ही निकल लेना चाहिए था.

"I think you lie, Fraulein,” said the man at once, rising from his state of thought. “I think you black magic woman!”

She panicked at the accusation. The man walked a few paces away from her, holding the woman closer to himself. She implored, “No, I’m not a witch! I do not remember who I am or how I came here! Please, help me.” Her pleas, however, seemed to fall on deaf ears, as the man and woman exchanged hushed monosyllables to each other, never letting her out of side, constantly edging back.

The man whispered something like an order to the woman, to which she nodded nervously. The man man left the woman’s side, made a neat arc around where the stranger stood, and tried to get out of the room.

Despite her protests, the couple would hear none of what she had to say. The last resort, she thought, was to jump into the machine again and hope against hope that she won’t re-spawn again in the twisted timewarp. A strange fear gripped her as the man exited the room, and she turned around and dashed to the contraption. She heard the woman gasp shrilly at the sudden movement, but there was no stopping her now. She had made a bad decision and now was the time to rectify it.

She jumped inside the enclosure, and for the second time that evening, pressed the big red ‘go’ button with all her hope.

काश इस बार सब ठीक हो जाए, और मैं किसी normal सी दुनिया में किसी बुरे सपने से जागूँ…

*

Guruji’s slightly smug expression wore off, as the unfaltering lines of code dictating his upright character vetoed those constituting his ‘natural’ instincts. He turned around to face the back end of the stage, looking expectantly at the left wing, awaiting the guest of the day to arrive in all her glory. The entire school assembly followed his sight, awaiting the spectacle.

Sounds of approaching footsteps emanated from the backstage area; they were taut and evenly-paced. Many amongst the younger lot were baffled about how a person so long departed could join them to celebrate her own birthday, but the slightly older ones, who were acquainted with the miraculously infinite possibilities of virtual immersive simulation, had coolly suppressed any outward display of their initial shock. Of course, some of them murmured to their neighbors, it could be a personality emulation of the great scientist that would address them. Or, even better, it could be a grade-Z certified case of time travel, allowing her to come forth into her future and kick off her own birthday celebration, in the institution named after her.

It was Amrita Jamwal, after all, who had invented time travel; or, so to say, chalked out the intricacies and minute laws that governed the transportation of matter through space and time.

The woman, putting to end the fanciful chains of thoughts the students had conjectured, appeared nonchalantly on the left wing of the stage, beaming with amicability and what seemed to be genuine humility. Her appearance made certain, at once, the medium she had taken to be present in the midst on her 110^th birthday, despite her very obvious lack of physical existence: virtual personality reconstruction.

She was beautiful beyond human measure; a hyper-aestheticized caricature of what might once have been a human. Her rosy lips gleamed in the stage lights, her impeccably lined teeth shone uniformly, and a pallid, perfectly symmetrical face commanded gazes from all around. She wore a gold-bordered red sari with the élan of a 20^th Century Bollywood* heroine, topping it with unbridled hair and just about a dash of kohl around her eyes. Her ethereal looks had given many an adolescent sitting closer to the stage a resilient boner, making them hold their organs down with their hands, trying with all their effort to pass it off as a normal sitting position. A wave of mutual understanding ran off between the students, and their collective embarrassment became a motif for solidarity.

The fact remained that she was only a hyper-bloated vision of the real Amrita Jamwal. Her real-life personality had been minutely monitored, fed into and replicated by the labyrinthine pathways of the biggest and most powerful AI softwares in the world. As a crowning genius of the world’s greatest recreationists, her personality had been ‘time-tuned’ to perfection. It meant that additional information, in keeping with the subsequent technological advances of man had been fed to her personality and socialized accordingly. To top it off, she had been given a specially reserved appearance, that of the most beautiful and in-demand physical figures of the female gender. And hence, her reconstruction was ready to greet the world as if she had never been gone.

She walked in confident strides towards the microphone, and, tapping it superfluously in a jestful gesture of old-worldly re-enactment, started to speak in an impeccably smooth and uninhibited dainty voice.

“सुप्रभात, मेरे प्यारे छात्रों! मैं हूँ अमृता जमवाल, और आज मैं आपको, इस पाक सालगिरह के अवसर पर, अवगत कराऊंगी जीवन के एक अपरिहार्य सत्य से, जिसे हम कहते हैं…”

The students waited with bated breath for her to finish her sentence, as she radiated a smile, taking a long pause to up the anticipation.

“'असफ़लता' |"

(*Bollywood: An era of motion pictures, starting in the second half of 20^th Century and lasting till the mid-21^st Century, best remembered for its gaudy and garish aesthetic sensibilities, largely incoherent narrative and unoriginal, insipid craftsmanship. Came to an end with the decline of the motion pictures as an economic activity, and the inevitable rise of Cinema Gratis, or the ‘नि:शुल्क चित्रपट’.)

[To be continued…]