Vandana Singh is a writer of speculative fiction and a professor of physics at a small and lively public university near Boston. Her critically acclaimed short stories have been reprinted in numerous best-of-year anthologies, and her most recent collection, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press and Zubaan, 2018) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award. A particle physicist by training, she has been working for a decade on a transdisciplinary, justice-based conceptualization of the climate crisis at the nexus of science, pedagogy, and society. She is a Fellow of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. She was born and raised in India, where she continues to have multiple entanglements, both personal and professional, and divides her time between New Delhi and the Boston area. She can be found on the web at http://vandana-writes.com/.
One of contemporary SF's most original and compelling voices, Vandana Singh is a professor of physics who weaves the ancient wisdom of her native India and the hard truths of quantum science into stories that speak to the complex wonders of today's world. This collection includes both her fiction and her report on the Utopian experiments that are finding new ways to save our unraveling dystopia.
"A most promising and original young writer."
– Ursula K. Le Guin"Vandana Singh's radiant protagonist is a planet unto herself."
– Village Voice"...individual sections illuminate and provide a rounded backdrop to the whole, until by the end of this finely layered novella I felt as though I had met a fully formed human being—not to mention a number of fascinating characters—and all with a mathematical conundrum of epic proportions with dire import for the cultures of two planets."
– Bob Blough, Tangent Online"Singh mixes mathematical, artistic, and sociocultural speculation in a way that feels holistic precisely because it is aware of where those different domains intersect and interact."
– Niall Harrison, host of Torque ControlLamentations in a Lost Tongue
I MET HIM IN a town in California. I had been wandering aimlessly, looking into shop windows, and found myself before an optician's. I was looking unseeingly at a tower of artificial tears in the window of the store, thinking about what to do next, and plagued by a faint sense of melancholy. Then the reflection of a man appeared next to my own and I turned to find beside me a thin, spare, older man about my height. He was dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and corduroy pants, and he was dark brown, with a fine, lined, handsome face. His black hair was streaked with gray. There was a subtle sense of his being out of place—in a very different way than the displaced feeling that was my own constant companion. He was staring at the display of artificial tears.
"Do you know what that is?" he asked, looking at me for the first time.
"Artificial tears?" I said, puzzled.
"Asombroso," he said softly, staring at the display. Then, louder, looking at me:
"Amazing! So much sorrow in the whole wide world that we have run out of tears and they must make more!"
He gave a short laugh that was half wonder, half something else I couldn't name, smiled politely at me, and turned and walked down the street. As he walked away I saw the burden of a heavy sorrow on his stooped shoulders; yet he walked with energy, with a spring in his step.
Urged by a sudden compulsion, I hurried after him.
"Please, I'd like to speak with you." I looked around a little wildly, and there, like a miracle, was a café with outdoor tables. "A cup of coffee?"
With the coffee before us, I tried to engage him in conversation. Between his fair English and my schoolgirl Spanish, we managed quite well. I had thought he was, perhaps, from the highlands of Mexico, somewhere remote. It turned out he was an insurance agent in a small town in Peru. He had grown up in a village up the mountain from the town, where his family had farmed with increasing difficulty, as the mountain springs dried up. His ancestry was mixed Spanish and Indigenous, he said. He was a widower, visiting his daughter and her family, his first trip away from the small town. He spoke of the awe he had felt arriving in Lima. And then to take a plane, to fly above the mountains, over the clouds to LA! It had been profoundly disorienting.
"I've seen it on TV," he said. "I know the world is full of marvels. But to walk in these streets—that's something else."
"Do you ever go back to your village?" I asked him.
"Not often," he said. A distant look came into his eyes—he saw, not the clamor of the street before us, but the high mountains of the village. I felt him slipping away from our conversation. I wanted to hold on to him, to tell him—look, in some way I don't understand, we're related. Not by blood but something more subtle. And I wanted to know the nature of the great sorrow he carried. It seemed to me that the shadows around him carried the weight and tears of something larger than one person's life. Fanciful thought! But that urgency compelled me to pull out the sketch of what I called the symbol and push it across the table to him.
"I'm wondering," I said, as I had so many times before, "whether you've seen anything like this before."
He came back from wherever he was and stared at the piece of paper. He started to shake his head. Then he stared at it again. Abruptly, his shoulders sagged. He covered his face with his hands. He looked at me.
"I have never seen such a thing," he said. "But—it reminds me. There's a place up over my village, where the spring was. The water used to come out from under a rock and circle down, something like this, this espiral … Spiral? Yes. And when you looked up from one place where I liked to sit, you would see the sun in the center of the two peaks. Of the mountain. Like in your picture, but it is not quite the same. Enough to remind me."
People have said different things about the symbol. To one person, it's a woman, arms flung out, dancing; they ignore the broken spiral. To another person the spiral reminds them of something they've seen, perhaps a pattern on a carpet, but the dot and the wings or arms are a peripheral add-on. This man was among the few to whom the symbol meant something in its entirety.
The symbol is my excuse for the aimless wanderings of my early retirement. Since there is no particular direction, no rudder in my life, I have clung to this fortuitous discovery, a rough sketch on a crumpled piece of paper that I found in a park in Delhi. Not having any compelling stories of my own in a life of unrelenting ordinariness, I have found that the symbol gives me access, for a while, to the far more interesting lives of others.
