Read The Decommission mission statement here.
Two months ago we received a letter from a Mrs Elwin, of Bristol, England. Embossed upon the envelope was an insignia displaying two hands, one held upwards, one downwards, and both open to each-other in the attitude of sea and sky. Between the two hands hovered a stone or jewel, encircled by lines of implied radiance. A small and richly fragrant sprig was placed in the envelope, and the paper retained its scent.
Mrs Elwin claims to be the last surviving member of a now dissolved group of geological wiccans, active in Wales and the south-west of England in the 1950s and 60s. This group, she informs us, concocted medicines from rock sediments and herbs, and was founded around the belief that geological time is a mirrored process, believing also that the period of their activity coincided with the point of reversal at which the rocks of the earth commenced the retracing of their steps.
She goes on to say that she has in her possession a box of paraphernalia belonging to the group, and though she does not wish to part with it, she is also in possession of an exact replica of the box that she would be willing to send in its place. The box that we received, we must assume, is that replica, though there is no detail that would betray its unoriginality. The documents appear appropriately aged based on the dates that they were written, and all of the items seem to be of the correct materials, not to mention the box itself is of rich and heavy wood.
The document we wish to share with you in this third instalment of The Decommission, counterfeit or not, was written by one of Elwin’s fellow wiccans, Sarika Cherian in 1958. We found it bound in string and rolled up, with a small, round, unusually grooved stone held inside of the scroll. This stone, Elwin says, is the one genuine item in the box, and was once an object of significant intrigue.
It was discovered in 1957, near to the site of a correctional facility for women in Mumbai (then Bombay), and was immediately noted to resemble in its markings a human fingerprint – though one stretched to encircle the entire stone. When the markings were flattened out by a sketch artist and analysed against the database of the Kolkata Fingerprint Bureau (which is, in fact, the oldest of its kind in the world) it was found to be a perfect match to the prints of an old inmate of the facility, a woman named Kshitija Bhavsar. Bhavsar, it transpired, was still alive, and living near a small village in the Kullu Valley.
Cherian was, at the time, in the habit of travelling back and forth between England and India, owing to her dual citizenship. When she heard about the stone, which had fallen into the possession of a monastery to which a distant cousin belonged, she decided to go to the Kullu Valley in the hopes of arranging a meeting with Kshitija Bhavsar. This document is her account of that visit.
April 22nd, 1958
A rainy afternoon in India. Have I finally integrated into my adopted home enough to have acquired that most English of curses – bringing the weather with me? Though it is a comfort, I must say, to sit behind the glass of my hotel overlooking the valley, and see it through the drapery of grey drizzle to which I am now well accustomed. It tethers this “Valley of the Gods” to the earth. How prosaic of me to want such a thing! too long staring at the ground, my mother would say. But I am nervous about my visit to Miss Bhavsar’s house tomorrow; the few local people I have asked about her have not led me to expect much hospitality, so I will take whatever comfort I can get from this unseasonal day while it lasts.
The colour that the grass and the leaves take on through the rain is very pleasant on the eye – deep and emeraldine. This is a country of fine jewels. There is a tree below my window to which my gaze is repeatedly drawn in the breaks between sentences. I feel in conversation with it. It is rare that this happens with the plantlife in England. I love England for its rocks, for its mud, for its greys. A pre-occupational bias, no doubt, but I can’t help but imagine that if England has its gods then they must be marshy, burdened things, more prone to hibernation than revelation. This tree outside my window, though, is proud, and the angle at which is grows upwards from the steep incline that plunges into the valley is positively arrogant – I feel that its face is turned upwards to luxuriate in the downpour.
I am turning the stone over in my left hand as I write. Its markings invite the touch of skin, being an unmistakable human imprint, and there is a satisfaction to holding it that seems to calm me, to still me within myself. And what Ellen suspected I believe to be true – the pattern is marbled all the way through the body of the stone. It cannot be worn away. Really, there could not be a more perfect totem to represent our practice.
Despite my nerves, I’m under no doubt that I have been called to Miss Bhavsar. I am told that she speaks a dialect unknown even to the locals, different but somewhat co-intelligible with Tamil. The old woman must not be wholly unintelligible or inhospitable, however, as she has already prepared a translator for my visit. Perhaps her welcome will not be as cold as I fear.
April 23rd, 1958
I met my translator at the head of a mud-path beyond which the small village abruptly came to an end. The sun was sharp and low in the east behind his head, and I squinted and addressed the shadows of his face when we exchanged greetings (mine a good morning, his merely a nod). He led me along the path, walking a little in front of me, hands clasped behind his back and saying nothing. The tree canopy thickened above us as the path curved out of sight of the village. Eventually we came to a wooden house with a thatched roof. The house was larger than the ones in the village, but its garden was so rife with strange plants – none of which I could have attached a name to – and trees that towered above its roof that it seemed small. As I was following my guide through the door I noted that the boards of the house were blackened as if by fire, though there was no apparent structural damage.
In the middle of the living room Kshitija Bhavsar slept, so it appeared, sitting upright in a wooden chair with a patchwork blanket concealing her legs. She looked much younger than I had expected. By all accounts she was supposed to be eighty-three years old, but had I not been privy to those accounts I would have estimated sixty at most. The translator pulled down the window blind and in the gloom Miss Bhavsar opened her eyes. She mumbled something and the translator conveyed her words to me in a heavily accented monotone: ‘Tell her I am sorry about the light.’ I nodded and said that I didn’t mind, ignoring the oddly verbatim relaying of the message.
I was glad to finally be able to fix my sight on Miss Bhavsar. I had not yet managed to get a clear look at the translator’s face, and in fact the cynic in me would say that he had been careful to conceal it. But the glimpses I had gotten left me disconcerted. I thought that I had seen deep wrinkles or heavy scarring or something of the sort. The impression of his face that offered itself to me was something like the whorl of a tree, though I knew that this was my ever-fanciful imagination filling in the blank. Still, I was not compelled to correct this with a closer look, and, once seated on the chair offered to me in front of Miss Bhavsar, I kept my attention on her. The translator stayed standing in shadow to my left. From there, he conducted between the two of us the following conversation (which I give here my approximation of, though so singular was the encounter that I believe my recollection of it to be faithful and mostly complete):
I – Hello, Miss Bhavsar. My name is Sarika. Thank you for allowing me into your home.
B – Hello, Sarika. There is good water in this valley. I am happy to have roots here.
I – It is a very pleasant valley. I was much enjoying the trees near the hotel where I was staying.
B – I can tell by her words that she speaks a dead language.
(In my peripheral vision I saw the translator turn his head towards me at this accusation, but I continued to address myself to the old woman).
I – The language I am speaking is English. I apologise if it is confusing for you or your translator.
B – Of the English I know a little. They speak of many things, but they know few. This is why their greed is never satisfied. But you are here. I will help you. Begin with what you are here to ask. Your language fails, but I will help you.
I – Okay, Miss Bhavsar. I will try to choose my words carefully. I assume you have been told that a stone was discovered – I have it here with me – whose pattern was found to match your fingerprints?
(She seemed to flinch at the mention of the stone. She shook her head a little.)
B – The word for stone is kull. The root of kull means still. With the correct names all things open and multiply. The English strip and halve things. They do not know. I would like to hold it.
(She held out her left hand and I placed the stone into it. I had noticed her hands shaking during our conversation thus far – I feared she might have been ill, or that my presence frightened her – but once she held the stone she became remarkably still.)
I – Do you recognise it?
B – I know it. It interests you?
I – It interests me greatly. I belong to a group of women who have given a lot of thought to stone. We have worked with all kinds of stones, but we have never seen anything like this.
B – Tell me what you know about stone, and I will tell you what I know.
I – About this stone?
B – Kull. Stone. Kull.
(This she said directly to me, gesturing impatiently. As soon as I had placed the stone in her hand her fingers had closed around it, and she was holding onto it with possessive tightness. I felt mysteriously admonished.)
I – Kull. Stone… or rock. All of the earth’s stone. All of it together… is that what you are asking me about?
B – You are confusing. But continue. I will help you.
I – I am not sure if I can explain without confusing you further.
B – He will listen. He will understand.
(I remembered the translator. He had not shifted from his spot since we began speaking, but he seemed to move in and out of shadow. I did not feel in control of the conversation, and I wasn’t sure how we had arrived at this point. But I spoke as clearly as I could, trying to forget my audience – for though I was compelled to try, how could I adequately communicate to them what I thought that I was being asked to?)
I – We – the group that I belong to, that is – believe that the mass of rock, or stone, on the earth is animated as one body, and that over very long stretches of time this collective body advances and recedes like the waves of the sea. We think of this as the earth breathing, and we believe that when the earth has heaved as many breaths as the breaths of a human life, then it will die. Until then, the stone will continue to advance and recede. At different points in the span of each breath the stone possesses different qualities invisible to the eye. So we are very deliberate with the stones that we harvest, because if we estimate their age incorrectly then they may be useless or damaging to our aims. Also, each of the earth’s breaths is slightly different from the one before, so the qualities of stone are changeable with the timespan of every breath. Many breaths ago the uses of stone would not have been the same as the uses we find for it now, and in the future we cannot predict what qualities stone might come to possess. We also treat words with great significance, as you do, Miss Bhavsar. We use stones and our words to make spells and medicines. We believe that every one of our own human breaths is a little different from the last, so that when we speak a spell at the age of twenty, that same spell would carry a different weight and texture at the age of fifty and may produce a different result. Therefore the words that we use in our incantations are not fixed. English may be a dead language, as you say, I can’t be sure, but when I make use of it to speak a spell, then it is a living language, because I must consider the constant changing of meaning, and the progression of my life.
(I waited a long time while the translator conveyed what I had said, apparently without fault and remembering every word. Nevertheless, I felt foolish for having spoken at such length and with such technicality to a woman who did not share my language. I worried what kind of understanding she would come away with. She sat for a while before responding.)
B – Kull is still. The still heart. Your heart is not still. You do not know kull.
I – The still heart? Kull means stone, yes? But… stone is not still. It moves slowly, but it does move.
B – Kull is the still heart. There are other hearts.
I – Other hearts belonging to the earth?
(She bristled when the translator told her this, as if she found what I had said unpleasant.)
B – The word for world is kaluum. The root of kaluum is many. The world has many hearts.
I – And kull is the still heart?
B – Kull is the still heart.
I – When a heart is still, does than not mean it is dead?
B – The word for death is aanyaar. The root of aanyaar means past. It is past. It does not beat.
I – But it is still there, still a heart?
B – It is still there, but it is past.
I – So you believe that stone was alive, but it is not alive now?
B – It does not beat. It remembers. You have a map with you? A map to help you find your way?
I – Yes, I have a map.
(I reached into my bag, but the woman held up her hand and made a sound to stop me.)
B – I do not need to see it. Kull is like the map. It is not alive. It remembers. Perhaps it remembers correctly, perhaps not. It can answer some questions and not others.
(I tried to wrap my head around her words.)
I – I am not sure that I understand, but I’m grateful that you are trying to explain. So kull remembers… it seems like the stone that I brought remembers you.
B – Yes. It remembers. The word for memory is vakim. The root of vakim is kull. The root of kull is aanyaar. The name of memory is death. The name of death is memory. We are speaking of the still heart, we must use the right names when we speak of the still heart. There are other hearts, and there are other names. But we are speaking of kull. This stone is kull. But I spoke to it another name. It remembers that name. That is what you see when you look at the stone. It is like a child. Every child wears heavy their name until they grow into others.
I – What name did you speak to it?
(For the first time in our conversation, she smiled.)
B – You would not know it.
I – How many names does the stone have?
B – I do not know. Yesterday I discovered a new name. Tomorrow I may discover another. One name of yesterday is kull. The root of kull is aanyaar. One name of yesterday is death. One name of tomorrow is ill-vakim. In tomorrow new things will be remembered, and new things will be forgotten.
(By this point I was so engrossed that I had forgotten all about the translator, as one forgets that one is reading words on a page in a particularly engaging book. It was as if I was now communing directly with Miss Bhavsar. Excitingly, I thought I could detect something in her confusing logic that chimed with my own convictions. And she seemed to have become playful – her gestures were becoming more inclusive of my presence in the room.)
I – So tomorrow stone will be stone, but it will not be the same stone. Yesterday it was not the same stone.
B – There are names to bring it back. One root of death is kaati. Kaati means mirror. There is no one root. There are many roots. [I did not detect the obvious correlation here until reading over my notes afterwards, but I am now convinced that our principles are not alien to Miss Bhavsar’s. Death means mirror. Of course. The life of each breath mirrors the death of the last, as we say. Perhaps we are both right. There is no one heart. There are many hearts. I regret that I did not engage her more fully at the time.]
I – If you spoke a different name to the stone in your hand, would the markings disappear?
B – I am not sure the stone would be clever enough to listen. It is wearing the name I gave to it very proudly. And it is not wise to confuse a thing with too many names. Not unless you know the names very well. Then you can learn how many a thing can bear.
I – How many names do you have for yourself?
(I could tell immediately that I had crossed a boundary in asking this question. I had been swept up by my intrigue and had allowed myself to be inadvertently disrespectful. I could detect the change in Miss Bhavsar’s voice when she spoke to the translator what he was to convey to me.)
B – Now, I have the name that I gave to the stone. That is the name that I am giving to things. I will not remove the name from myself because there are many things I have given it to. But I will not speak of them, because it is not a name I wish to share.
It was here that our conversation ended. Miss Bhavsar’s displeasure was apparent, and it was obvious that we were done. I was surprised, however, when she handed the stone back to me, and doubly surprised that she did so with her right hand. I was certain that the stone had been in her left the whole time. Perhaps my attention had faltered more than I thought. I was quite unsettled by the whole affair, after all. I tried to speak a polite farewell to the woman, but it seemed that the translator, too, had stopped indulging my presence. He showed me to the door in silence, standing away from the light as he held it open, and I gladly left the house.
April 24th, 1958
I am back at my hotel window, watching the afternoon pass through the branches of my consul the tree. I cannot make my feelings about my visit to Miss Bhavsar stay still. In one breath I am hurt that I could not ingratiate myself to her, and was made to leave so abruptly. But in another I know that I will be turning our conversation over in my mind for a long time. I have communed with a woman whose speech leaves a very evident mark upon the world – something we have aspired to but never accomplished – for that I should count myself lucky.
It has taken some sleep for me to arrive at this appreciative perspective, however, and even now the scales of my intuition will not allow me to ignore the weight of apprehension. On leaving Miss Bhavsar’s house yesterday, a stubbornness kept me from fleeing the property right away like some banished maid, and I decided to examine the plantlife that I had noticed on my way in. There was no fence to the garden; what marked it out as territory belonging to the house was a return to floral normality beyond the irregular perimeter of unnameable plants, as if the char-blackened abode had roots and the incongruous overgrowth marked the radius of its influence.
Bending down to examine a flower that looked like a dandelion’s dream of a weeping willow – a small cottony geyser of cypselae it was, and I wish I had brought my camera with me from the hotel – my attention was caught by a leaf fallen from the tree in whose shadow I had knelt. I took it between my thumb and forefinger and – yes, there was no mistaking it, I knew it more by touch than sight – instead of the typical stick-tree miniature sketched by the veins of a regular leaf, it was instead lined with the same swirling pattern as the stone.
I held my breath and moved at a crouch to examine the leaves of a nearby flower. The print was there too, and I found it on more or less every leaf within that bizarre garden, though only weakly discernible on the ones at the very perimeter. It showed, too, on the bark of the trees. I crept as close to the house as I dared – I was fearful now, though awed – and the darkened boards of its walls were engrained too with the rustic, labyrinthine coil of Kshitija Bhavsar’s fingerprints. Suddenly an image of the translator flashed through my mind, much clearer that I had actually seen him, as if he was looking at me from the window, though he was not, and a shiver ran up my spine. Now I did flee the garden, at more than a hasty trot.
Once out of sight of the house I followed the mud-path dizzily to the village. It was quite a hike up the slope of the valley to the hotel, and I slept dreamlessly through most of the afternoon and evening, and then fitfully through the night, waking always with the same feverish certainty that I had wronged Kshitija Bhavsar in some unforgiveable way.
A hand-shaped cloud has been advancing slowly from the east, distending its vaporous fingers as it crawls across the blue, and it is just now passing over the sun. I will be happy to leave this valley in the morning.
April 28th, 1958
I do not travel well. I am particularly susceptible to becoming ill on aeroplanes, and when flying I have to stop myself from dwelling on the ill health of the air that I invite into my lungs with every breath. I have hardly left my bed since returning home. I have been in and out of dreams, or, I should say, in and out of the same dream.
In the dream I am tumbling down the rings of a great whorl – like the concentric rings found on the stump of a tree, though raised like stairs – tumbling and toppling closer and closer to the centre – the end, the eye. Kshitija Bhavsar’s fingerprints are of the whorl type. Before now I have not had much occasion to examine my own fingerprints, but I have discovered, with some dismay, that mine are too.
So in and out of sleep have I been that my weary thoughts seem to come dragging their unconscious cousins from the depths. Things that would seem innocuous to my healthy and wakeful mind have become as portentous as death cards in a deck of tarot (the deck, in this case, comprising every object visible to me from my bed). My squat stacks of books seem fallible and treacherous, the mirror on the far wall reflects only a corner of damp on the ceiling, and the fingers of my own hands seem embedded now with tiny eyes – envoys of Kshitija Bhavsar. I know that I am prone to exaggeration and ill-humour when I am unwell, but I would love tonight just to dream some other dream.
However, I visited Kshitija Bhavsar to learn, and I have not been too ill-humoured to give thought to my initial impression that her beliefs are akin to our own (though belief seems too soft a word – after all, the evidence of her influence is there on the stone which I still have at my bedside). What I have concluded is that within our system we foreground the stone – stone is what it is, its changes are outside of our control, and to adapt to its changes we make our words changeable around it. Kshitija Bhavsar foregrounds the words, and for her the stone is the malleable factor.
As we well know, we are living through a time of reversal. The stone is turning. We must change too, and is it coincidence that I have stumbled across a system so neatly inverted to our own at such a time? Perhaps I should return to the Kullu Valley, and learn what I can from Miss Bhavsar. But I fear it would be a wasted trip, I can’t help but think that these dreams are the ongoing echo of my dismissal from her house. I worry that the very door we may need to open has been barred to us due to my impudence.
I am ill and dreamy and should stop writing soon, I know, but one last thing occurs to me. Miss Bhavsar impresses herself upon the stone (and leaves and wood too, but let us stick with what we know) – when we work with stone we make use of the properties inherent in it, but she is capable of transferring at least one property (her fingerprint) into the stone. Even if we cannot replicate her practice without seeing this transfer in action, it could be that the crux of what we must learn to do is to call upon ourselves as we have for so long called upon the stone. To make ourselves the dominant integer in the equation. Think of the alchemists. What materialised in their workings was not gold, but a mirror of themselves. But the question remains – how?
Language seems to be the key. I keep remembering Miss Bhavsar’s etymologies – “One root of death is kaati. Kaati means mirror. There is no one root. There are many roots.” If there are many roots, there are many mirrors. Maybe one root of root is mirror. Maybe it is mirrors all the way down. The mirror image of life is death. The mirror image of death is life. Ah, trying to speak like the old woman just makes me dizzy. I am always so impatient to understand.
I am not sure how I have written so much. The inertia of activity fills the pages of the world’s books. I will put the pen down and sleep. Maybe tonight I will finally reach the eye of the whorl.
“[...] if England has its gods then they must be marshy, burdened things, more prone to hibernation than revelation.” What an image. This Decommission series is touching some of the same inner chords as Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, and I’m quite enjoying it.