WAVES OF TRANSPARENCY

Part II

Sreekumar K

Sliding onto her plate four pieces of boiled tender corns and smearing a dab of honey on them, Patricia went over to an unoccupied table and at it. Even the nearest table was far away from her and no matter how one strained, the discussions from another table stayed away like a chill on the other side of a glass door. You know it is there. Nothing more. To her left, around an oval table sat Emily, Michael and July and to her right was seated, at a differently laid table, Janet, Avanthika and Cheng Li. Yufi, Georges and Jean were sitting at a table facing her though their table was the farthest. Who knows how these cliques came to order. She remembered what Janet, the anthropologist once said to her. The word companion meant the one with whom you shared your food. Patricia, however, detested how anthropology looked at everything from a materialistic point of view.
Emily, sitting at a table closest to her, stole a glance on her without Michael of July noticing it. If Pat were a Greek goddess, who would she be? Adonais or Diana. She was the head of this project. It was a secret known to herself that Patricia was also one of the mysterious sponsors of that project. She had often thought of sharing that secret at least with her soulmate, her lesbo partner, July. However, her bitter experiences of having divulged some official secrets to her now estranged husband prevented her from doing so.
As money lost its position as the chief motivation to love or kill, gang wars mushroomed only in fields of knowledge. Knowledge was power had new meaning now. In the new idiom, it also meant that knowledge is a mankiller, a sinister sobriquet money once enjoyed. At the launching of Edward Whitley’s book Empires of the Mind, her husband had expressed his overwhelming hope that humanity had reached the threshold of heaven. Days when chunks of information replaced bundles of currencies as if the return of the barter system with a vengeance were to be expected soon. Intellectual property rights would become fairy tales when ways to protect such rights became long-forgotten myths. But the world started rotating the other way. Where the governments failed to protect such rights, mafias and gangs saw a huge opportunity. The uneducated thus became the knights guarding knowledge.
Patricia would have killed to have an inkling of what they were discussing at the table right to hers. Cheng Li was there. He was the star of the whole project. An astrophysicist with a Chinese name and the face of a Buddhist monk. His ancestors came from Burma, now Myanmar. They became Christians to survive in the town they landed up. Cheng Li met Dalai Lama on one of his visits to India and was initiated back to Buddhism by the Lama himself. The sponsors had already made some smutty comments on how Patricia had a soft corner for Cheng Li. On several occasions she had almost laid her heart bare before Cheng Li, desiring to elope to Sri Lanka or China with him. But she knew, more than anyone else in the world, that there was really no place to run to and hide.
At the table facing her, Yufi, Jean and Georges were into a serious discussion. It was no concern of theirs who else was listening to their vociferous discussions. Among the three Jean was the only one who had any bit of scientific temper. Yufi was of South African origin, finding from Chinu Achebe's The Arrow of God that the Indian and African mythologies have a lot in common, and wanting to spend some time in India, he found a job at the African Consulate in Mumbai. It was part of his scheme to study the Vedas in depth. After all how much diplomacy can a country like his own boast of? Life was easy but money wasn't. That was when this project came up and he got lured into it by Patricia. He was in it only for the huge amount it offered. Living on a strict vegetarian diet and metaphysics, he hated the western world and considered meat-eating and science as part of a larger conspiracy. In fact, he knew everyone in the project considered him as the only misfit among them. The sentiment was mutual since all he did and was supposed to do was to find out the fault of everyone else. And he was good at it. 

"Frankly speaking, I feel that I am kept in the dark by everyone else, including the two of you. You see, I was the last one to join this project and I don't blame you at all for anything," he mumbled, finally mustering up enough courage to say so.

"Coming in late is no issue. I was here from the start but I too feel like I don't know event what the doorman at the times knows. I did what I was asked to do and never asked a question. Money was that good," responded Georges without taking eyes off Jean's face. He was sure that Jean knew everything about the project in and out.

Jean did not look at either of them but carefully ate his meal. After what seemed like an hour of silence, he decided to speak. Still, he was not looking at either of them.

"I too feel the same though I have a better idea about the project. Not only I knew what this is all about but I expressed my dissent from the very beginning. Now they don't even let me see all the new documents, only a few are sent to me. But it makes my work easy. I procure all their documents through my own channel and now it is easy for me to see what is important and what isn't. Now I don't read what they send me at all. But, make sure that I don't miss a word of what they don't want me  to see."

Jean spoke less loudly that the other two. He seemed to be scared of Patricia in spite of his pretension that he had no fear in him. Patricia, his boss, was at the very next table. She used to be his sweetheart once.

"Then tell us what you understood. It might be of much help to us. Babel, the name, comes from the Old Testament, from a story about people, all the people trying to build a tower to reach God. According to the story, God cursed them. Each of them was cursed to speak a different language and thus their plan was sabotaged. That is how all the language in the world originated, says the Old Testament."

"Really? There are 1900 languages in India, the country where I live now. Not counting the dialects of course. But I came across this story only now and at least now I know what the name of the project means. Hallelujah!"

 

(to be continued)