Woman who thought She was a Planet by Vandana Singh

Author:Vandana Singh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2020-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Conservation Laws

I MET GYANENDRA SAHAI for the first time in the bowels of the Lunar Geological Institute, in front of a display case containing an old-fashioned, heavy-built moonsuit. There was a large crack along one side of the suit and a rust-coloured discolouration along the opening. I was thinking about the pre-colonization days of moon exploration and the dangers that had beset the early explorers, and wondering what the story was behind this particular specimen (there was no label) when a mournful cough interrupted my musings. The man standing near me was gaunt, not tall, but with a presence that suggested height. His bald head was a baked brown dome, fringed with hair of a startling silvery grey; his eyebrows were of the same colour above heavy-lidded, lugubrious dark eyes.

“Ah yes, the ill-fated expedition of 2031,” he said, shaking his head. I was delighted to recognize in his heavily accented English the speech mannerisms of Bihar, the state in India where I am from. Biharis are not very common on the moon. But before I could say anything about my origins, he launched into the story behind the space-suit.

He had been there. He had been part of the 2031 expedition, along with an international crew of explorers. They had been mapping water resources on the moon, an essential requirement for the future settlement.

While investigating the half-caved-in edge of a crater, they had found the entrance to a large cavern, such as had never been seen on the moon, and within it a body, possibly from some earlier mission, although the moon-suit was strangely constructed. The story involved the ultimate, mysterious disappearance of the corpse and the subsequent unravelling of the friendship between two of the team members, one of whom eventually took a hatchet to the other. What was perhaps worse, the databots containing the map of the water resources (and therefore of the location of the cavern) were destroyed in the melée. The expedition was called off, and only this tragic reminder remained.

My new friend peered at the suit in the cabinet.

“Poor Harrison!” he whispered. “Well, goodbye, old friend.”

He looked at me as though seeing me for the first time.

“You’re from India, yes?”

His joy in finding a fellow Indian and Bihari was touching. He confided to me that having retired from exploration work, he had become a part-time consultant, and that he was weary of his present life.

“Where I stay, it is too busy. People keep on coming to me, wanting things — information about this and that. I am looking for a quieter place to live…”

That is how Gyanendra Sahai came to live in Sinha Auntie’s boardinghouse, one of the oldest structures in Luna City. It is in the area known informally as the Ghetto of Selene, where, among the quaintly derelict remains of what was once the first human habitation outside Earth, the unfortunates, ne’er-do-wells and poor university students of Luna City live. It is not really a ghetto, but the modern city, which rises just south

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