Mithila Review 15: The Journal of International Science Fiction & Fantasy

CONTENTS

Masthead

Editorial: Aliens from the New World

Ishita Singh

FICTION

Arisudan

Rimi B. Chatterjee

Of Castles and Oceans

Nicole Tanquary

Children Between Lines

Soham Guha

Different Shores

David Heckman

Our Bodies Sing the Stars

Carlos Norcia

The Knowing

Neelu Singh

POETRY

Packing Tips For Time Travelers

Michael Janairo

Colonial

Sonya Taffe

Harvest

Sandi Leibowitz

We’re Refugees Who Found Love Searching for Atlantis

Holly Lyn Walrath, Marco Raimondo

The Echo Chamber

David Memmott

Ceramics

Anne Carly Abad

REVIEWS

The monstrous invading the ordinary: Reading The Best of Richard Matheson in a time of Coronavirus

Prashanth Gopalan

The Wall of the Worlds

Sami Ahmad Khan

INTERVIEWS

Sculptural Painter and Visual Storyteller, Cathleen Klibanoff discusses her process and style

Cathleen Klibanoff, Ishita Singh

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad in conversation with Sami Ahmad Khan

Sami Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

About Mithila Review

The Journal of International Science Fiction & Fantasy 

Issue 15, March 2021

Founding Editor & Publisher

Salik Shah

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Website: MithilaReview.com

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Mithila Review © 2017-21. Copyright to poetry, fiction and non-fiction belongs to their respective authors.

EDITORIAL

Aliens from the New World

In 2015, Mithila Review began its critically significant publishing journey with a belief that SFF could be a fluid and powerful language of protest in the new era of demagogues. Six years later, we find ourselves with a new team but with the same mission and spirit: to publish the best of speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, poetry, reviews, excerpts, and articles from award-winning and emerging writers around the world. Now with a larger team in place, we’re gradually moving towards a monthly publication schedule; to bring out more special-themed issues; and a more regular schedule for non-fiction, i.e. articles, essays, features, news, reviews and interviews.

We want SFF stories to be accessible to everyone, and do not have plans of going behind the paywall. It is a rarity in Indian publishing to have submissions open to not just private circles of friends and acquaintances but to all from this world and others. And this is how we want to continue to be. One of the biggest challenges for semi-professional magazines is the low subscription rates that prevents the staff, writers and artists from being paid fairly. This also becomes a hindrance for many from participating at all. Please support semi-pro magazines like Mithila Review by paying for subscriptions, if you can, to enable and amplify the work we’re doing here. 

At Mithila, we continue to seek well-crafted stories and poetry and in extraordinary ideas, visions and worlds; worlds that excavate the experience of being human, non-human, animal and alien, here and far beyond the here and now; stories that shift the paradigm of human thought and give insight into our relationship with alterity, planetarity and temporality; and stories that locate the experience of the universe outside the limits of binaries, in a bright and bold spectrum of consciousnesses. 

2020 was the year of global crisis that will shape our healthcare, economy, politics, and culture for years to come. It was the year that fast-forwarded certain historical processes, and derailed and rewinded several others. Immature technologies and biometric surveillance were introduced as emergency measures to track and monitor people. It was the year when we all became guinea-pigs in social experiments conducted on a large-scale. 

In India, tens of thousands of residents suddenly found themselves lawfully made non-citizens and aliens to be banished to detention centres following the amendments to the Citizenship Act in 2019. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, millions were inhumanely dispossessed and estranged, forced to walk, often barefoot, hundreds of kilometres to return to the villages they had migrated from.

In normal times, we all live dissimilar realities, but these are not normal times. The gaps in our access to resources, technologies and rights have further cleaved our disparities flinging us into starkly different futures. We may inhabit the same planet (not for long perhaps) but we certainly do not inhabit the same realities; we inhabit dissimilar worlds and times. And we will thus inhabit different futures. 2020 was the year that revealed to us that despite our shared humanity, the pandemic did not inspire in us a global solidarity but rather it made aliens out of some of us and monsters out of some others. 

I am writing this editorial from a city that is now a fortress, that seeks to protect itself from its own citizens. I began writing this editorial on the eve of India’s 72nd Republic Day; in the background the TV ran visuals from the Farmers Protest. Between then and now, the news cycle in India has reached an all-time low reaching at the point and pitch of being absurd and surreal fantasies of an authoritarian government. There is a lot that has been said and that remains to be said about politics and governance today but just as important as it is to speak truth to power is it to listen to those speaking truth to power. 

And for this reason, I am very honoured to present to you this issue featuring writers from across the globe. It would not have been possible without the guidance of Salik, the support of the team, and the patience of our excellent contributors. I want to thank each one of you for publishing with us. Special thanks is due to Cathleen Klibanoff for providing the artwork for the cover, and Anju Shah for designing it. 

I will not preface the stories and poems and let you get on with your reading for the day but I will say this: in all these stories and poems you will encounter aliens and outsiders just like you encountered Othello the quintessential alien of the western world, on the cover itself. 

We bring to you this issue so we may confront what Shakespeare described as our mountainish inhumanity as we come face-to-face with aliens and strangers in the stories and poems that are to follow. I bring this to you in the hope that you may seek solace in the company of the aliens in this issue as you recognise your own wretched strangeness.

Without further ado, I present to you the 15th issue of Mithila Review. 

Ishita Singh

Managing Editor,

Mithila Review

New Delhi  

19 February, 2021 

FICTION

Arisudan

Rimi B. Chatterjee

Rimi B. Chatterjee has published three novels and a number of prose and graphic shorts and is currently working on a science fiction hexalogy called Antisense Universe while running to stay ahead of the apocalypse. This story is set in the Antisense Universe and features many of the characters of Bitch Wars, the first novel in the series. Rimi also teaches English at Jadavpur University in India.

The sky above Mumbai harbour lit up.

Parzan Merchant, nine years old, craned his neck out of his bedroom window. He’d been practicing the song for the Independence Day celebrations at school tomorrow, which was why he was still out of bed so late at night. He’d heard the boom and rushed to see. As he watched, another fireball seared the horizon behind the close-packed buildings. 

‘Parzan! Hey!’ His fourteen-year-old brother Kersi came in. Parzan’s bedroom was the highest in the old and crumbling house. It was suffocatingly hot in summer, drafty in winter, and right now in the monsoon it smelt of mould, but you could see the harbour from the window if you leaned out really hard. ‘Shove up,’ said Kersi, and jack-knifed his lanky body over the windowsill. Parzan sulkily gave way. ‘What do you think is happening, Kersi?’ he asked. ‘Is it terrorists, like in 2008?’ He’d been too small to see much of anything when the Taj Hotel had been attacked.

Kersi snorted. ‘Nah. That’s just your future going up in flames.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you remember? That was INS Sindhurakshak. The submarine that exploded in Mumbai harbour in 2013. You sat up all night watching, little brother. Then you insisted I go out and buy the newspapers even though I said you could read them all on the net. You wanted to make a scrapbook, you moron.’ Water began to flood the room. ‘I told you it was a bad idea. The sea eats people.’

‘No!’ But the word wouldn’t come out. Instead of his bedroom window, Parzan’s thrashing hands touched the worn metal sides of the training tank in submarine school, buzzing with the absorbed terror of generations of first-time submariners. Kersi’s drowned face opened in a mindless grin. ‘You’re no hero, Parzan. You fed us all to your beloved ocean, didn’t you? Your whole family. You bastard.’ Fish nibbled at the ribbons of rotting flesh on Kersi’s cheeks. ‘You deserve this. You couldn’t even stop your crew from deserting. You loser. Loser! Loser!’ 

‘Kersi...’ The sounds bubbled in his throat. Kersi’s clawed hands reached for him. Parzan screamed.

He woke up. For a second he thought he really was drowning, then he realised it was just his hair. It was wet.

‘I’m sorry,’ said a female voice. ‘Your heart-rate was elevated and you were vocalising in your sleep. I deployed the sprinkler system to wake you.’

‘Uh,’ Parzan took a towel from the bar and wiped his neck. He was in the officers’ lounge of Arisudan, the state-of-the-art nuclear submarine of which he was commanding officer. Or had been. He wasn’t sure what he was now. A survivor, perhaps. ‘I was having a nightmare. People do, you know.’

‘I will tag the symptoms for future reference. I hope you are not too damp?’ 

He rubbed his head ruefully. ‘When did I fall asleep? I was reviewing the inventory, and...’ He fingered his left cheek. There was a dent in it from the edge of his tablet. 

‘You stopped moving and your breathing slowed three minutes and forty six seconds ago.’

‘Damn. Wake me up if you see me doing it again. But don’t use the sprinklers. Just keep saying my name really loud.’ He thought a bit. ‘And don’t wake me when I’m in my bunk. Unless I ask you to. Or something happens. Do you understand?’

‘Yes sir. I have modified my protocols.’

He put the towel on the back of a chair to dry. ‘I suppose I should turn in. Monitor all wavelengths while I’m sleeping, Arisudan. Anything moves out there, I want to know.’

‘But sir, it is four hours till the end of watch. You cannot…’

Parzan’s patience snapped. ‘Damn right it is. Do you see anyone here who can relieve me? No? Oh that’s right, you in your infinite wisdom let the crew leave! So now I’m doing the work of 95 men all by myself. Pardon me if I don’t follow the rulebook on this.’

There was a pause. Then Arisudan said, ‘You are angry, sir. Have I disappointed you?’

Parzan held his head. ‘Why did you let them go?’

‘I believed that Executive Officer Carlton Caron was telling the truth when he said he was leading a sortie to bring back essential food and medicines. He said you had been temporarily unhinged by the tragedy of the Helios Fail. I saw that you were screaming and banging on the door of your cabin. Hence I concurred that your behaviour was unbefitting a commanding officer, and that I should—’

He nearly shouted, but stopped himself in time. ‘Look, I admit I was kicking the damn door, but that was because they’d locked me in! They didn’t want me to stop them from leaving. But it’s hell out there! All coastal cities have been obliterated. One third of the Indosphere’s landmass is under water. Our home port of Vishakhapatnam has been wiped off the face of the earth. Our VLF radio station at INS Kattabomman has been destroyed, so we can’t contact anyone without surfacing, which would mean our immediate destruction. So we’re stuck here on the bottom of the sea in the Singapore Straits, hiding from an enemy 35,790 kilometres above our heads!’

‘I am aware of the situation, sir. When XO Caron put me in survival mode before exiting the ship he updated my databases.’

‘Well then you know that a week ago, Delhi gave us orders to watch and wait. That was before Ramdhun’s space hotel opened fire on us, but I don’t care what anyone says, we don’t take orders from them. If Ramdhun has turned hostile, Delhi will deal with it.’

‘Yes sir. But Delhi has not communicated with us since then.’

‘I know! Look, I’m trying to do this right, okay? And I seem to be the only one.’ He got up and began pacing. ‘Whatever they may think, the men can’t help their families. I should know. I’ve known since 2032 when Mumbai sank into the sea. Once you become a climate refugee, there’s nothing left. Not even the ground under your feet...’ 

‘I am sorry, sir. What are your orders?’

He pushed his knuckles hard into his eyes for a moment. You can’t lose it now, Zany. Pull yourself together in front of the talking machine. ‘Take stock of the food we have left. Calculate how long it will last me. Our Supply Officer said we were down to three months’ emergency stock, but that was when we still had 95 people on board.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘And now I’m going to get some rack time. Wake me up if the world ends. Again.’

‘Understood, sir.’

Of course, once he was in his bunk, sleep deserted him. 

—

The Helios Fail. Stupid name for the end of civilisation. All those doomsday movies about comets hitting the earth and nuclear wars. Hah. If the moviemakers were still alive, he reflected, they ought to be feeling ashamed of themselves. 

Just over a week ago, Arisudan had surfaced off the Andaman and Nicobar islands after almost nine months of pre-launch sea trials, and Parzan had tried to raise Vishakhapatnam to give them the news of her excellent performance in every test and to request permission to return to base for refitting and handover. The last trial had involved diving to just above crush depth for her titanium hull, more than a kilometre below the surface. Arisudan had performed impeccably, but a sudden deep-ocean acoustic storm had led him to bring her up two days ahead of schedule. That had caused his first moment of disquiet: what kind of event could produce such a hurricane of sound so deep under the sea? The disquiet deepened into worry when he failed to raise Kattabomman, but Arisudan was in the Bay of Bengal where VLF reception was notoriously bad. Once on the surface, his communications officer tried every band and channel, even the civilian ones, and