Of Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh

Author:Vandana Singh
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Aliens, Indian Science Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-933500-78-2
Publisher: Aqueduct Press
Published: 2011-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

I resigned from my job, telling my colleagues I had found work in Florida. I withdrew my savings from my bank and rented a room in a ramshackle apartment complex in Cambridge. I requested an unlisted phone number and obtained a post office box under a different name.

If it had not been for Sankaran, I would have fled to the ends of the earth. I don’t think Moghe understood that. I believe that my subterfuge paid off because he expected me to leave Boston, to run before him as I had done before. I would no longer run.

Within a few days, I found a job working with a medical company as a lowly computer technician. It paid enough to keep me alive, and to maintain my car. Now assured of a livelihood and a roof over my head, I could no longer avoid thinking about my ordeal with Rahul Moghe and what it implied about my past. Janani’s last parcel, which had arrived the day before I moved to my new apartment, confirmed that I had not dreamed up the events in that hotel room. Beset by an apprehension that it would tell me more than I wanted to know, I had not opened it for some days. But now that my new life, such as it was, had begun and the immediate fear of Rahul Moghe was gone, I had no excuses. I opened it.

The parcel contained the usual junk that Janani had sent me over the years, bits of broken metal and shards of ceramic, some with drawings and etchings on them. There was also a letter.

I read it. I looked at the contents of the parcel that I had piled on the bed. I read the letter again. I remembered Rahul Moghe whispering impossible things into my ear.

Alien, alien, alien, he had said. You and I owe our allegiance to a different star.

I looked at the strange objects on the bed. Whether I wanted them to or not, they began to make sense. The ceramic pieces, burnt black on one side, red on the other. The strange etchings, the pointillist ones in particular, one of them showing me a pattern I had seen before, not only on Sankaran’s computer but also in my fevered dreams: the constellation Sapt-Rishi as seen from Earth. Then the pictures Janani had taken, of the boys so like me—they were all me, I realized, at various stages of formation.

I could no longer avoid the truth of my origin. I sat on my bed, watching night fall, shadows moving out from the corners of the room to fill it with darkness. Headlight beams swept across the curtained window, and through the thin walls I could hear my neighbors having an argument about laundry.

I laughed hysterically. After a while I started to cough, so I got up, turned on the light, and got a drink of water. Looking out of the grimy window at the busy street in front of my apartment complex, I had an impulse to cry.

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