Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [1]
It will look like a cheap set, he fears. He watches “Star Trek,” both the old and new series, and remarks on the nakedness of the old sets, like studio sets of New York in 1940s movies. The past presents itself to us, always, somehow simplified. He wants to avoid that fatal unclutteredness, but knows he can’t.
Finally, a use for sensory and informational overload.
Every time-traveler will create a different reality—just as we all do now. No two travelers will be able to retrieve the same reality, or even a fraction of the available realities. History’s a big savings bank, says Venn, we can all make infinite reality withdrawals. But we’ll be able to compare our disparate experience in the same reality, and won’t that be fun? Jack and Jill’s twenty-second visit to 3:00 p.m. on the twenty-ninth of October, 1989.
Every time-traveler will punch in the answers to a thousand personal questions—the team is working on the thousand most relevant facts, the thousand things that make me me, you you—to construct a kind of personality genome. Each of us has her own fingerprint, her DNA, but she has a thousand other unique identifiers as well. From that profile X-2989 will construct a version of you. By changing even one of the thousand answers, you can create a different personality and therefore elicit a different experience. Saying you’re brown-eyed instead of blue will alter the withdrawal. Do blonds really have more fun? Stay tuned. Because of information overload, a five-minute American reality will be denser, more “lifelike,” than five minutes in Africa. But the African reality may be more elemental, dreamlike, mythic.
With a thousand possible answers we can each create an infinity of possible characters. And so we contain a thousand variables, and history is a billion separate information bytes. Mathematically, the permutations do begin to resemble the randomness of life. Time will become as famous as place. There will be time-tourists sitting around saying, “Yeah, but have you ever been to April fourth? Man!”
My life has gotten just a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it’s just discontinuous overload.
My project is a little more complicated.
2
THE RUBY RESTS on a square of sun-faded green velvet under a dusty case in a maritime museum in an old fishing village many branches off a spur of the interstate between Peabody and Salem. Flies have perished inside the case. On a note card affixed to the glass by yellowed tape, in a slanted, spidery hand over the faded blue lines, an amateur curator has ballpointed the stone’s length (4 cm) and weight (137 carats), its date and provenance (late 17c., Mughal). The pendant is of spinel ruby, unpolished and uncut, etched with names in an arabized script. A fanciful translation of the names is squeezed underneath:
Jehangir, The World-Seizer
Shah Jahan, The World-Ruler
Aurangzeb, The World-Taker
Precious-as-Pearl, The World-Healer
In adjoining cases are cups of translucent jade fitted with handles of silver and gold; bowls studded with garnets and sapphires, pearls and emeralds; jewel-encrusted thumb rings; jewel-studded headbands for harem women; armlets and anklets, necklaces and bangles for self-indulgent Mughal men; scimitars rust dappled with ancient blood, push-daggers with double blades and slip-on tiger claws of hollow-ground animal horns.
How they yearned for beauty, these nomads of central Asia perched on Delhi