Wormhole is a tunnel between two points in spacetime, one of the possible outcomes of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Wormholes lend scientific credence to time travel and interstellar travel within the relatively short life span of humans, or even shorter spans of a dramatic event. Widely adopted by science fiction writers everywhere, wormholes have never been discovered. They’re looking in the wrong place, if you ask me. If they looked for wormholes in India, instead of in space, they’d easily find them. I found a few during this recent visit to India.
Wormholes in Places
Before we returned to the US from our two year sojourn in India, back in 2006, Shanthala and I visited Rajasthan. We had yearned to visit the place for just about as long as we’ve known each other. The visit was the swan song of our stay. We visited the famous forts and palaces, probably the best preserved monuments in India (which may explain why Rajasthan is India’s numero uno tourist destination with foreigners). Something stirred deep inside me when I saw the armour worn by Rana Pratap, a famous Rajput king who loomed large in my history classes, the ancient mechanisms of measuring time, the movements of the planets, the chairs on which Nehru and Sardar Patel sat as the king of Rajasthan signed the agreement to integrate Rajasthan into India. In fort after fort, I saw the gilded rooms they lived in, the well preserved beds of the kings and queens slept in, the cradles their babies slept in. In Jaipur, I saw enormous jugs used to store holy water for one of the king’s journey to England and back and an intricate yet simple scheme by which they kept the interiors cool even in the summers of the arid desert they lived in.
Mehrangarh Fort, Early Morning, Jodhpur
During the tour of the beautiful fort in Jodhpur, I asked our guide, “What about the ordinary people ? Is there a tour I can take to see what their lives were like ?”.
“Just look outside”, he replied, gesturing to the blue houses outside the window, “Visit any of the poorer sections of the city today and the way they live now is not very different from how their ancestors lived hundreds of years ago”.
Blue City, Jodhpur
Wormholes. That’s what he was saying. A small step to the left instead of the right and you’re back in time, centuries ago, the narrow lane bypassed by most of the modernity the middle class take for granted. I heard echoes of that answer during this visit. Stuck on a congested arterial road, the driver took a turn into one of the many alleys to get past the jam. As we moved through the alleys, I saw houses that seemed to have not felt the effects of the economic boom that Bangalore is an epicenter of, houses that probably ran to ancient rhythms, where electricity and running water were as miraculous today as they were, say three-quarters of a century ago. Yes, the people living there probably own a TV, running off pirated cables and electricity, but are their lives vastly different from that of people long ago, I wondered. Maybe the people in urban settings receive a little more of the benefits of modern life compared to those who live in rural areas.
As I traveled by train to my in-laws place, the pastoral vistas combined with the rocking of the train, lulling my senses. I wondered if the scene outside looked vastly different from what I had seen as a child. At one of the stations, the train stopped for a while, waiting to let a train in the opposite direction pass. As I looked outside, I saw a group of people, working on the tracks, with shovels and picks, hauling the earth away in little containers balanced on their head. No heavy machinery in sight. Did their ancestors work any differently, I wondered.
A Railway Station Platform, Somewhere, India
Wormholes in Practice
A solar eclipse fell on one of the days we were in India. Unaware of the ramifications that an eternal dance between the moon and the sun would have on my ephemeral stomach, I sauntered down to lunch at the usual time. I was living with my in-laws at the time.
“Lunch”, I demanded, “Maya is hungry too, by the way”, I said.
“According to traditional Brahmin custom, we’re not supposed to cook until the eclipse is over”, my mother-in-law replied, “You’ll just have to wait till 3 pm or so”.
I was flabbergasted. Not cook ? Worse still, they had to bathe before they cooked. Surely this was some strange custom that only my in-laws followed. No. My parents were in the same boat as were some restaurants in town and most people. I later found out that some colleagues at work had followed a similar rule, not eating till the eclipse was over. Customs millenia old hang around the houses, the primordial, demon-haunted world reaching through the wormholes of custom to extract their sacrifices from the present.
I slipped into a wormhole again whenever I walked into any high end restaurant. The music that played softly overhead was the music that I had listened to during my college days, the music of the late 80s: “The Final Countdown” by Europe, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits, “Lady in Red” by Chris De Burgh, “I Just Called To Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder, “Hello” by Lionel Richie and on and on, even the same muzak: piano pieces by Richard Clayderman. When I met friends from my first job, back in 1990, I could easily imagine that we were the same, stuck in 1990. I was Rip Van Winkle, except that I awoke twenty years in the past.
A Personal Wormhole
Another day, the driver took a different route on the way to meet a friend, and I went down a personal wormhole. The street had changed a lot, was almost unrecognizable from the one I had haunted as a child, but I knew the lay of the land. We were on the street my grandparents had lived on. As we reached the corner that their house was on, I asked him to stop. I got out and took a few pictures.
The house has changed. Where the garage is, there used to be Sampige tree. My mother and her sister, my cousin and I, my sister and I, we all at different times, spent hot summer afternoons under the shade of that tree. The upstairs construction now has upstaged the terrace my cousin and I would play on. But the main door downstairs and the windows had not changed. I longed to go in and peep in through them, to relive the happy days I spent there.
We inevitably arrived when school was in full swing, my father’s work and his inability to let us go there by ourselves making the summer vacation to slide past. My cousin’s school was nearby. I would rush to his school and inform the teacher that my cousin had to leave for a family emergency, that his mother had asked me to inform the teacher and take my cousin home. I was so cocky and the times were so innocent that my cousin would be allowed to go. He would be half-thrilled to see me and half-scared that if his father found out, he’d be in for a beating.
My mother’s sister’s only son, he was my closest cousin and I treasured our times together. He lived with our grandparents during the week and went home to his parents, who lived in another part of the town, over the weekend. With him home from school, our days were just packed. We’d eat together, bathe together, play together and not sleep in the afternoon together. My father was busy at work all day and so there was no one to force me to slumber the hot afternoons away. We played all kinds of games together, but my favorite was cops and robbers. The robbers usually came in for a thrashing and inevitably, I was the good cop and my cousin, younger to me by a few years, was the villain. I was Rajkumar, the Kannada matinee idol and he was Vajramuni, the Kannada matinee villain. “Ajji, save me”, my cousin would yelp from behind the closed door where I was delivering poetic justice.
Someone else owns the house now, it is not even in our family. I never had a sense of a place as home while I was growing up, thanks to my father’s nomadic work life. But this place. This place was as close to home as I could ever be in those days. I wondered as I stood in front of the house that day, snapping this picture, would I consider buying back this house, if I could. Empty the place of its inhabitants, restore it to its old days, put my grandfather’s books back, his bed back, restore the wood fired heater in the bathroom. Walk with ghosts and bathe in my memories.
I got back in the car and the driver said that he had to stop for gas. When he stopped at a gas station, another wormhole appeared. We were smack opposite the hospital I was born in. That hospital hasn’t changed its appearance from when my mother first showed it to me. I wonder now why I had not shown any interest in it. What floor was I born on ? What ward ? What color were the sheets ? Am I getting sentimental, I wondered.
My parents have preserved the original letter that my grandfather sent to my father announcing my arrival. Typewritten, addressed to my father in another town, it says “Mother and child are quite safe, absolutely no cause for even the least anxiety.” I was still unnamed, as was the custom then.
This wormhole is fading though. There are signs of construction, of the hospital expanding, maybe the facade will change. The next time I pass by, maybe it will no longer remind me of where I came from.
Each visit to Bangalore is a renewal of memories, memories that are over four decades old. As a child, Bangalore was the only steady rock I could anchor myself to as I was tossed around in a sea of small towns. As I age, I’ve anchored myself to a different rock, a rock far, far away from Bangalore. We’re not salmons or penguins, journeying against daunting odds to the place of our birth, to spawn and die. But we evolved from them. An echo of that dream maybe lives on in us, especially we emigres.
At times now from some margin of the day
I can hear birds of another country
not the whole song but a brief phrase of it
out of a music that I may have heard
once in a moment I appear to have
forgotten for the most part that full day
no sight of which I can remember now
though it must have been where my eyes were then
that knew it as the present while I thought
of somewhere else without noticing that
singing when it was there and still went on
whether or not I noticed now it falls
silent when I listen and leaves the day
and flies before it to be heard again
somewhere ahead when I have forgotten – Far Company by W.S. Merwin
