by Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty
[box]A multitude of ideas and characters from Jeevanjyoti’s earlier stories make an appearance in his special story for the anniversary issue. Read on to rediscover Bincuus (from “The Dream Bandit”, June 2010), the idea of characters telling authors their stories from a different world (from “Requesting an Extension”, July 2010), and Nuovo SPARK (from “‘Autumnal’, Heard of it?”, May 2010 and “Nuovo SPARK”, January 2012).[/box]“So you have finally returned! Where were you all these days? It’s been really long, you know.”
Ivan had come to their decade-old rendezvous point more out of sheer habit than through the impulsion of any hope of meeting the source of most of his stories, Bincuus. After all, he had not turned up in any of Ivan’s visits during the past three years. But Ivan had kept on visiting. Perhaps this habit had been his only concrete way of expressing his gratitude. Of course, he would not admit that, never! A “thank you” was one piece of fuel Ivan would never give to stoke Bincuus’ already irritating high-handedness. But boy, was he happy to see his source! After the Covenant had chosen him as a fiction-reporter more than ten years back, Bincuus was his first source. He didn’t know where exactly Bincuus came from. It was a different world, situated elsewhere – in another dimension (if you want to believe that sort of thing), not really parallel though, for the passage of time and the chronicle of happenings had a different pace altogether in the worlds of Ivan and Bincuus. More than once, Ivan had suspected that Bincuus was in touch with quite a few reporters centuries earlier than he had even been born. But maybe Bincuus was just throwing him fantastic decoys to chase. Ivan didn’t mind. For, if those decoys were fantastic, the real tales of the events of Bincuus’ world were truly mind-boggling. Bincuus would narrate them with his usual blasé voice – tales of a world where people’s activities were planned around dreams, of babies clutching at full moons, and of a civilization waning from its pinnacle of achievement with that moon. What spectacular fiction Ivan had spun out of them, and how the people of his world had grown to love them – love him!
“Yesh, I am back! You shtill haven’t losht your knack of shtating the obvioush, Mr. Big-Shhot-Author!” Ivan had grown accustomed to (he was even fond of) that unmistakable lisp with which Bincuus spoke. He had also grown accustomed to the disdain Bincuus had for his status as an author of stories among his people, one that Bincuus clearly marked by tracing two quotes in the air with his fingers when he said “author”. The words in which the adoring people read those stories, however, had always been Ivan’s. That was Ivan’s role: to create flesh-and-blood, living-breathing stories out of the Bincuus tales. Even the most stoic person would never have read those stories in Bincuus’ deadpan narrative.
“Big-shot? Yes, I guess you could call me that.” And all thanks to you dear Bincuus! “But why hadn’t you turned up in these three years? Anything wrong?”
“Hmph. Yesh. Wrong… very wrong! You have grown too big for your own good. You have not even written the lasht ‘shtory’ I gave you.”
“Oh come on! Aren’t you even a little happy that your name is the name of a hero among the lovers of fiction in my world? I made you that hero.”
“I am what I am in my world. I don’t need you to make anything of me. And I shertainly don’t need you pandering to thoshe big greedy publishhing houshesh.”
“Don’t forget that all of this fame – your fame – would not have been so if I had not stopped my dabbling with the open-source kind and attached myself to those big publishing houses…”
“Believe what you want to. I jusht came here to tell you that you have to shtop doing thish.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. Probably it doesn’t matter anymore. You see … I have kind of lost the spark of writing. I just cannot seem to write any more.”
“Exshactly. I told you you had grown too big even for yourshelf.”
“Maybe you are right …”
“You, Shir, have forgotten your bashic roots. You have forgotten how you began – how all theesh began! I will tell you one more shtory but only if you promish to shpark again!”
“What’s the point of keeping conditions on me when I don’t even want to write? I told you – I have lost the spark to write!”
“No, Shir! Shpark is the one thing that you have not losht.”
Ivan vaguely recognized a certain cryptic feel in those words of Bincuus. “What does that mean?”
“You shhall shoon figure it out! The day ish coming Shir!”
Whether he would write or not, Ivan knew that he had always loved hearing those amazing narratives of Bincuus, and he felt he really was interested in hearing one more of those crazy stories of Bincuus’ world. So with an unveiled lack of enthusiasm about his intentions of writing, he said: “All right, whatever, I promise! Now tell me.”
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Elsewhere, in the conference room of Spark, an air of dark despondence hung thick. The Big Crisis had not been kind to many of the employees. Some had lost more than one family member. But, all throughout those days, they had stuck together – their own version of a family, joined by their love of the written word. That crisis had created far greater havoc in other parts of the world. Entire nations had fallen. The governments of the barely surviving ones had chartered out a possible solution to that dystopian situation through what was being touted as the Great Transition. It would be of biblical proportions with an involvement of technology and manpower never before seen in human history. Expectedly, a massive pruning exercise of what would be allowed to make its way across that transition had also begun. The easiest targets on the cross-hairs of the Secretary of Transition (the man ultimately responsible for the pruning) were the cultural and artistic organizations. The argument was that these were not absolutely essential for the existence of human beings. Who would argue against that?
Spark’s editor had. His impassioned appeal to the Secretary to allow their magazine house to exist across the transition would later become a cornerstone document in the annals of world culture but for now it had just bought them a measly amount of time to prove that they indeed were necessary for human beings. Indeed, the nuts and bolts Secretary man had set a quantitative target for them. In a reply to that appeal, the Secretary had told them: Sell “this many” number of copies of the magazine in the next three months, and I will agree that you are necessary for human beings. End of argument.
The problem that the big kahuna man failed to see in that demand was that Spark was primarily an open source digital magazine. The physical copy version was just to encourage readership among those who still clung on to the ancient traditions of reading – and there were not many of them around anymore. And thus that despondence.
The editor voiced their collective thought once more after they had gone round and round in their long-drawn discussions: “So what do we do guys? We cannot force our physical copy sales up. I am not against advertising or anything. But in the 26th century who really buys physical copies? Even the proprietary publishing houses have their biggest business online.”
The lull among the staff continued. The associate editor could only add: “Those physical copies are darn pricey too. What was that Secretary man thinking? Physical copies are now more of a collectors’ item.”
That was the clue! “Collectors’ item!” – exclaimed the editor. “That’s it.”
“What do you mean, Sir?”
“Don’t you see it… well, I can’t guarantee this … but I think the only way we can make the sales go up is if we make Spark worth something to a collector…”
“… whether they are actually interested in reading it or not!” the associate editor completed with a wry smile, and then added: “But, how?”
“The only option I believe we have before us is to make an appeal to all those writers and poets who had started at the beginning of their careers with us but have now moved on to the greener pastures of proprietary publishing.”
“Are you kidding, Sir! Why would they return?”
Why indeed! But the way this new and strange idea had flickered on a spark of hope among the despondent faces sitting around the conference table was too much of an optimistic temptation for the editor not to succumb to. Everyone present there understood the implications of that suggestion. If somehow even one of those big names were to return to Spark, it would create a sensation in the collectors’ world. For these collectors were people who would give anything to get hold of something rare and unprecedented. To be sure, no proprietary author had ever gone open-source before – certainly not the big names. The sensation it would create in general and among the collectors, in particular, was a foregone conclusion. The tiny caveat being: Who would return? And why?
But the editor clung on to the happy thought. He would play this gamble! It wasn’t much of a gamble… for even otherwise, he – they – had everything to lose. Putting on that old, wise smile which those faces had not seen for quite a while, he said: “Let’s just do this. All right?”
“So how big are we targeting, Sir?”
“All the way, kid… all the way up to … well … Ivan.”
“Oh, Sir! So we are going full throttle on this, then?”
“Yes.”
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Six centuries later.
Vidya’s father looked on with amusement as his son-in-law fumbled his way among the retrievals from the Old Platform Stylers. The young man had been ransacking his brain on what to present his dear wife for their first wedding anniversary for about three weeks now – until the solution had presented itself to him. She had shown him a retrieval which her father had used to present a speech at her school years ago. That dossier with its majestic inscription of how it was the primary reason why her father’s centuries-old enterprise was allowed to make its way across the Great Transition, had a special place in Vidya’s heart. He knew just then that the best gift would be something – anything – that would be directly linked to this special dossier. So he had gone (not telling Vidya of course) to his father-in-law to allow him to retrieve some special dossier also. Vidya’s father, lovingly remembering the innumerable similar requests his daughter – ever so infatuated with ancient things – had made growing up, couldn’t turn down this sweet request of his son-in-law. Of course, this “kid” had none of Vidya’s expertise in handling the Stylers. He had already spent a couple of hours going in circles through the retrieval systems.
After struggling for another half an hour, he chanced upon a simple idea. Why not look at the very edition of Nuovo SPARK? That must surely contain some reference to that special dossier Vidya had shown him. And, surely, that would not be difficult to retrieve. And he was not disappointed.
Right there, smack in the first ever editorial of Nuovo SPARK, the new avatar of Spark after the Great Transition, he saw these words:
“… so while that appeal to the Secretary for Transition had given us time to stay afloat, we owe the success of our actual transition to the interest of those innumerable collectors who valued the physical printed copies of our magazine, and ensured that the cut specified by the Secretary would be safely met. But, what was it that made the last few editions of Spark, our mother enterprise, worthy of the collectors’ interest in the first place? To know the answer to that question, we welcome our cherished readers to read in this first edition a special story about a very special author. Yes, friends, this is the story of a writer. A story of how his tales came to be. And above all, a story of how, breaking all tradition, he became the first proprietary author to return to his roots. We give you the story of Ivan.”
As he pressed the dimly flashing ACCESS tab, he could almost see Vidya smiling when he would present her this – the beautiful smile which had first ignited that warm spark in his heart two years ago.
Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty is doing his PhD at IIT Kharagpur in Microfluidics and Nanofluidics, specifically theoretical Electrokinetics, after obtaining an Integrated Degree of B.Tech and M.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the same place in 2009. Jeevan believes that in science and technology, it takes a lifetime of effort and discipline to be really creative within the rules, and genius to bend those or form new ones. As a welcome break from that discipline, he finds that in literature, creativity comes with ease and with the immediate gratification of momentary inspiration. Even in this paradise of carefree thoughts, he loves the wacky and the improbable. He adores delightful twists, clever word-plays and ideas which turn conventional wisdom on its head.
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