Stories for Chip (8 page)

Berger, Albert I.
The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology
. San Bernardino: Borgo, 1993. Print.

Bould, Mark. “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF.”
Science Fiction Studies
34.2 (2007): 177-86. Print.

Delany, Samuel R. “Aye, and Gomorrah…”. 1967.
Aye, and Gomorrah: and Other Stories
. New York: Vintage, 2003. 91-101. Print.

---.
Babel-17
. 1966. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print.

---.
Dhalgren
. 1975. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1996. Print.

---.
The Einstein Intersection
. New York: Ace, 1967. Print.

---.
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
. 1977. Revised Edition. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2009. Print.

---.
Longer Views: Extended Essays
. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1996. Print.

---.
Nova
. 1968. New York: Vintage, 2002. Print.

---.
Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & The Politics of the Paraliterary
. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1999. Print.

---.
Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics
. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994. Print.

---.
Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
. Pleasantville: Dragon Press, 1984. Print.

---.
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
. New York: Bantam, 1984. Print.

---.
Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
. 1976. Hannover: Wesleyan UP, 1996. Print

Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” 1993.
Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture
. Ed. Mark Dery. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 179-222. Print.

Douglass, Frederick.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
. 1845. New York: Signet Classic, 1997. Print.

Dreiser, Theodore.
An American Tragedy
. 1925. New York: Signet Classic, 2000. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. S.
The Great Gatsby
. 1925. New York: Scribner, 1995. Print.

Freedman, Carl, ed. Conversations with Samuel R. Delany. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. Print.

---.
Critical Theory and Science Fiction
. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 2000. Print.

Gibson, William.
Neuromancer
. New York: Ace, 1984. Print.

Govan, Sandra Y. “The Insistent Presence of Black Folk in the Novels of Samuel R. Delany.”
Black American Literature Forum
18.2 (1984): 43-8.

Kilgore, De Witt D. “Afrofuturism.”
The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction
. Ed. Rob Latham. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. 561-572. Print.

Lavender, Isiah, III. “Black Grit: or, Why I Study Race and Racism in Science Fiction.”
Deletion: The Open Access Online Forum in Science Fiction Studies
7 (2014): n. pag. Web. 6 October 2014.

---. “A Century of Black SF” review of
Dark Matter
.
Science Fiction Studies
28.2 (2001): 140-3. Print.

---. “Coloring Science Fiction.”
Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction
. Ed. Isiah Lavender, III. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014. 3-11. Print.

---.
Race in American Science Fiction
. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011. Print.

Nelson, Alondra. “AfroFuturism: Past-Future Visions.”
Color Lines
(Spring 2000): 34-37. Print.

Pfeiffer, John. “Black American Speculative Literature: A Checklist.”
Extrapolation
17.1 (1975): 35-43.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. “The Decomposition of Rock and Roll: Samuel Delany's
The Einstein Intersection
.”
Extrapolation
28.3 (1987): 269-80.

Thomas, Sheree R.
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
. New York: Warner, 2000. Print.

Tucker, Jeffrey A. “The Necesity of Models, of Alternatives: Samuel R. Delany's
Stars in My Pockets like Grains of Sand
.” South Atlantic Quarterly 109.2 (2010): 249-78. Print.

Weedman, Jane B.
Samuel R. Delany
. Mercer Island, Washington: Starmont House, 1982. Print.

Westfahl, Gary. “‘Dictatorial, Authoritarian, Uncooperative': The Case Against John W. Campbell, Jr.”
Foundation
56 (1992): 36-61. Print.

Wright, Richard.
Black Boy
. 1945. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Print.

---.
Native Son
. 1940. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Print.

Yaszek, Lisa. “An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.”
Rethinking History
9.2/3 (2005): 297-313. Print.

---. “Race in Science Fiction: The Case of Afrofuturism and New Hollywood.”
A Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction
. Ed. Lars Schmeink. Web. 2013. 1-11.

Anil Menon

After the untimely death of his wife, elder-brother sold his apartment, gave me the proceeds, handed his eleven-year-old Chandini to our safekeeping, and took off for Kampala, where he owned a modest sports store. He hadn't been able to find a buyer for the glass desk and so that too had moved into our home, or rather, my bedroom, since it was too big for anywhere else. Three months passed and elder-brother hanged himself, may God rest his soul. It was only some six months hence, after Chandini had slowly but surely begun to count herself sister to my other two darling girls, Lakshmi and Parvati, that I let myself worry about trivialities such as an unwanted glass desk.

I will be blunt. There is something unpleasant about being able to see one's lower limbs as one works. There is such a thing as too much clarity. My missus had found this claim amusing but had to admit I was right after trying it for herself. Strangely enough, I enjoyed watching her work at the glass desk.

This amorous detail is an instance of the desk's inauspiciousness. That morning, had I not been thinking about the missus, missing her, looking forward to picking her up at the airport in the evening and the long chit-chat we would have thereafter, had I been paying attention to detaching the laptop's cord from the power socket, I would not have knocked the back of my head sharply against the desk's glass edge.

I must have cried out because Chandini came running into the room. What is it, younger-father, she cried, what is it? Her fright brought me to my senses. Does it hurt badly, she asked, and I said jovially: No, no, I just banged my head and finally calculus makes sense.

“You should get rid of the desk,” she said, smiling. “It's a useless burden.”

“Yes, first chance I get.”

I bit my tongue only later. She had been seeking reassurance, and fool that I was, I'd flubbed the opportunity. I fired off a worried email to the missus who responded almost immediately. Single line, all caps: RE LAX, CHANDINI KNOWS SHE IS NOT A WRITING DESK.

I was less sanguine. A life can change in a look, a word, a gesture. Later, after making sure my girls were safely on the school bus, I set off for Somaiya College. Each day I take the harbor line from Dadar to Vidyavihar, and this morning, as with other mornings, the platform was crowded with the same set of familiar faces. Everyone had their favorite positions on the platform. Mine was to stand under the large railway clock. When the train reaches the platform, some of the younger, less-experienced office-goers lose their nerve and begin darting up and down the platform, trying to spot a relatively empty compartment. This makes professionals like me smile. Our friends are already holding places for us inside the train, just as we'll hold places for others further down the line. The secret to a comfortable journey, in commuter trains as well as in life, is having people look out for you. In any case, I enjoy the few minutes' wait.

As a mathematics professor, it hadn't escaped my attention that there were many nice mathematical problems waiting to be solved in this act of rearrangement, but it also hadn't escaped my attention I wasn't going to be the one cracking them. For instance, everyone knows it isn't surprising to spot a familiar face in a crowd of mostly familiar faces. But how do we spot a particular familiar face in a crowd of familiar faces? That is what happened. In the crowd of faces milling to catch the morning train, I spotted Martin-sir, my wife's old mentor and former Honorable Justice of the Bombay High court, now a resident of Nagpur. Martin-sir had made time in his very busy schedule to officiate at our civil marriage, a gracious act for which I will be eternally grateful.

The old gentleman had seen me as well, because a smile lit up his noble face. It had been several years since we'd last met, but he seemed to be exactly the same. We exchanged pleasantries and when I inquired about his well-being and that of his family, he told me that families, like gardens, were always in a state of becoming. His ghostly tone left me nonplussed. Was Nagpur very cold this time of the year, I queried. Martin-sir laughed, punched my shoulder jovially and said, Damn it lad, it's a wonder you managed to lasso that wife of yours. He promised to come for dinner, his mobile number hadn't changed, we would catch up at leisure, et cetera.

At the math department, I found the staff room in a hubbub. Ramki-sir, our probability guru, had been asked to be an expert witness for the defense in the Zohrab rape case. The actor was accused of assaulting his mother's nurse; the hospital had collected DNA evidence from the victim, but apparently hadn't handled it properly. Ramki-sir's articles in the Indian Express on the contamination of DNA evidence and the misuse of DNA matching had led to the present honor. He would have to shave his beard; he always shaved before a court appearance.

“But it's an open-and-shut case,” said Mrs. Patwardhan, Statistics. “Zohrab confessed. He was drunk he says, but he remembers raping the nurse. He confessed. The police released the tapes.”

“The police!” snorted Ramki-sir. “You'd trust
our
bloody police. It's a frame-up, I'm telling you. What you're seeing and hearing is all an illusion.”

“Come on, Ramki-sir, she has a point,” said Mrs. Balamurali, Linear Algebra. “The man did confess. Don't you feel the least bit guilty? You have a daughter.”

That struck home. Ramki-sir slammed his hand on the table.

“It is because I have a daughter,” he said dramatically. “I want the right man punished, not some poor idiot roped in by the police to satisfy the public's blood-lust. Rape and murder? No sir! Seduction and suicide. It doesn't matter Zohrab confessed. We can be made to remember anything.

“Take the case of Bradley Page, nineteen years old, accused of murdering his girlfriend. Not a shred of evidence, no motive. Nonetheless, the police lied to him, told him he'd been seen near the body, that he'd failed the lie-detector test, that his fingerprints had been found on the murder weapon. Sixteen hours of interrogation. Young Bradley begins to wonder if he could have killed his girlfriend and somehow ‘forgotten it'. The detective interrogating him tells him ‘It happens all the time,' and together they recover his lost memory. Imprisoned for nine years before the real murderer is caught. The bloody police—”

“But he confessed!” insisted Mrs. Patwardhan, looking around piteously for support.

“Yes!” echoed Mrs. Balamurali.

“I rest my case,” said Ramki-sir. “You have just confessed to being idiots. Are you?”

Hubbub and
halla
.

“Confession or not, he will go scot-free,” said Rajan-sir, Discrete Maths. “The entire system is rigged. Ramki-sir will do his
chamatkar
, the slut nurse will withdraw her complaint, the hospital will admit it mishandled the evidence, and we middle-class fools will continue to believe there is law and order in the universe. Why should we fight over what has already been settled?”

“It's all an illusion,” repeated Ramki-sir, finger-combing his beard.

Noticing my silence, one of the teachers tried to draw me in.

“What do you think? Is Zohrab guilty or not? Or is it just an illusion, as Ramki-sir says?”

“Everything can't be an illusion if some things are to be an illusion. Even in a story, at least some things have to be facts. The Fixed-Point theorem says—”

“
Please
do not teach me the Fixed-Point theorem, sir!” begged Ramki-sir.

“The Fixed-Point theorem says—”

“Sir Isaac Newton to the rescue,” crowed Mrs. Patwardhan.

“Actually, it's Jan Brouwer,” I corrected her, “The Fixed-Point theorem says—”

“Please do
not
teach me the Fixed-Point theorem. I can prove you're biased, I'm warning you; I have a Brahmaastra and am prepared to unleash it.”

“Ramki-sir, I wasn't aware we were locked in combat. All I'm trying to clarify—”

“Here's my clarification,” said Ramki-sir. “Who is prosecuting the Zohrab case?”

I remember the silence in the room, the triumphant expression on Ramki-sir's highly punchable face, the puzzled expressions of the others slowly turning to surprise then excitement.

“His missus!” shrieked Mrs. Balamurali. “Really? Is that true?”

I had to admit it was true. I was almost as surprised as they were. To be honest, I had put it out of my mind. It is not the sort of thing I like to think about. These are the times I wish the missus were an LIC agent or some such thing. How such a decent Brahmin woman, devoted mother and loving wife, could also be a bloodthirsty piranha of a prosecutor is beyond logic.

My wife had only been gone for two weeks, but for all that, it had taken a toll. When I met her at Arrivals, I was very glad but strangely unable to show it. Perhaps she felt that way too, because we talked in a rather stiff way, as if the two parts of a whole had become enjambed. How was the flight? Did I have a cold? Was it still raining in the evenings? However, my daughters had no such reservations. They made a scene. They clung to their amma, loudly complaining of all my misdeeds. I was pleased to see the missus pay some extra attention to Chandini.