Joker Moon Read online

  Aarti lived through her days in a daze, prompted by the servants to wash and dress and feed her pain-wracked body. They kept trying to get her to go out and about, at least to walk in the garden.

  Aarti snapped at Manju: “Don’t you understand—I’m tired! I have to rest, you stupid woman.”

  “Yes, Aartibai. But the doctor said—”

  “I don’t give a damn what the doctor said. Get out of here, and shut the damned door. Leave the bottle. Let me sleep!”

  Manju was old enough to be her mother, and deserved more respect. In the old days, Aarti would have been appalled by anyone who treated a servant so poorly, but the constant pain had worn away at her patience, turning her into a darker, more bitter version of herself. Her father would be shocked by how her language had degraded, which gave Aarti a certain sour pleasure.

  Her parents had come to visit, a few days after they’d moved out. When Aarti’s father didn’t embrace her, didn’t kiss both cheeks as he normally would, Aarti felt the rejection like blows to her face. He kept his eyes down, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of his daughter now, and muttered, “Cover up! Why aren’t you properly covered?” Aarti pulled the dopatta more carefully over her bald scalp, as if the thin chiffon could somehow disguise her head’s massive size.

  Her mother didn’t even come into the room, too terrified of contagion. She spoke to Aarti from the veranda, through the wood latticework window, and had nothing but lectures for her. “You must go to temple and pray. Minita Aunty says that she knows a girl who was cured of this affliction after spreading turmeric paste on her stomach for a full year and bathing in the waters of the Ganges. Of course, now the rules are stricter, and they wouldn’t let you bathe there, but I think the turmeric was the real thing. Maybe if you mixed it with ginger, and drank some, too—very healthy, you know!”

  It was torture, listening to them. What was worse was when they stopped coming. The last thing they told her was that her little brother, Kish, was married now, to a girl Aarti had gone to school with. Niru had a cow-face, Aarti had always thought, which went along nicely with her cowlike placidity. Kish must love Niru’s dull and tranquil nature, though it undoubtedly also pricked his pride that his wife was barely passable to look at.

  Aarti had been more beautiful than Niru. Was more beautiful still, on the Moon, when she wanted to be. It had taken time, to learn how to change her own form. At first, Aarti had had to fight for it. She’d started with a mirror, tall and freestanding—she couldn’t paint what she couldn’t see. Then she worked, standing in front of it, painting new features on her face over and over again with an effort that exhausted her, dropped her to her shaking knees. It took hours to make the smallest of changes—to adjust the curve of cheek, or shape of lip. Worse, when she left the Moon and then returned, it all had to be done over again. Her body seemed more resistant to conscious change than anything she painted in the air. It took months, in fact. But eventually, Aarti fought through, learned how to change her Moon body to suit her desire. She had no shortage of time, after all.

  Aarti reshaped herself to a face and form that would have stopped Raj in the street. Voluptuous as the heroine of one of the films from the cinema halls; Yaj brought back posters and plastered them up in the kitchen with Manju’s approval. Her mother had always said Aarti didn’t have enough backside to wear a sari properly, that the fabric looked like it was about to fall off. Well, not anymore. Aarti boasted kohl-darkened eyes, a symmetrical face, glowing brown skin, diaphanous clothes that clung to heavily rounded breasts and hips—hips that swung with every barefoot step. Aarti had no need for sandals on her Moon; her steps glided through the dust, never turning on a stone or stumbling on a pebble. The Moon would never hurt her.

  Her second year on the Moon, Aarti lived in that Raj-envied form, exploring her glorious isolation as a goddess of the Moon. She crisscrossed the landscape, exploring every feature she had heard of, and so many that she hadn’t. Mostly she walked, though eventually Aarti learned that if she focused her attention on a part of the geography she knew well, she would soon find herself there. Her sense of body would dissolve around her, and the Moon’s body, which was already always superimposed on her own, took its place. Then her body re-formed in the new location, as if it had always been there, as if no time had passed at all. Not that Aarti could tell for certain—no watch she wore ever worked on the Moon.

  The third year, Aarti turned to other faces, other figures. She let her skin go pale and white, lightened her hair to a sunny blonde, and reshaped her figure to that of a tall, Nordic Amazon. Amusing enough, but light skin would win her no privilege on the Moon, and soon enough, Aarti abandoned it. She went darker instead, a glorious dark brown that would have set her mother screeching, demanding to know why Aarti had dared to leave the house without her protective parasol. Back when her mother had cared what happened to her.

  Once, Aarti tried walking the Moon as a man, but that felt so foreign, so wrong, so offensive, that she abandoned it almost immediately. She could, perhaps, have been a man on Earth. An astronomer, a professor at Oxford, a famous artist—the world would have opened up to her. But the Moon was female, a woman’s domain—it always had been, in all the old stories, its tides defining a woman’s flow. Aarti felt sure that she would never have been allowed to visit as a man—men were simply not welcome on the Moon. So Aarti went back to a woman’s form, to her own form, more or less. A better version of her former self.

  Over time, some of the details slipped away. There was no Raj here to taunt with her unavailable beauty, no men at all to perform for. It had grown easy now, to reshape her face and body, but why bother? There were much more interesting things to do on the Moon. A decade slid by, almost without notice.

  Sometimes Aarti couldn’t believe that ten years had passed; the time had disappeared in the blink of an eye. Earth was growing ever more cruel to jokers. At times, Yaj did manage to chivvy her into going outside. Aarti wrapped herself thoroughly in the robes the Indian government required, affixed jangling bells to her ankles proclaiming “plague carrier.” They walked, slowly, through the streets surrounding her home; Yaj ignored her hobbling steps, yet was always ready with an arm to brace her, should she stumble. He wanted to take her to the city gardens, the market. Yaj wanted her to join the crowds celebrating Holi in the streets, throwing vast clouds of colored powder before retiring to nap, minds thick and heavy with intoxicants. Are you mad, Yajnadar? To be surrounded by so many people—what if something happens? I refuse, I utterly refuse! Even thinking about it made the breath tight in Aarti’s chest; she had grown accustomed to her solitude.

  Then Yaj developed a passion for the new cinema halls—one would soon open that was even air-conditioned, a “grade-A establishment,” the glorious Liberty Cinema! He was always talking about the latest movies—there was a vast array now. South Indian cinema at Matunga-Chembur, Marathi cinema in Dadar-Parel, Gujarati cinema at the sea near Juhu–Vile Parle. Though apparently, Yaj primarily went to lower-rent halls along Falkland Road, the sort of place “not suitable for a lady like you, not suitable at all.” If Manju overheard him talking about those, she’d snatch his ear for going to such a place, muttering something about prostitutes.

  Still, Yaj was indefatigable. “You must see Madhumati, Aartibai. I’ve seen it seven times; it is so romantic! A love through time, reincarnated generation after generation…”

  “What is romance to me?” Aarti barked in response, and Yaj fell silent, abashed. But the man was relentless; eventually she gave in to his prodding and agreed to go.

  “One movie—that’s it. Then you have to shut up.” In truth, her heart beat a little faster at the thought.

  He smiled broadly, and the little lines at the corners of his eyes creased in that charming way she found hard to say no to. “Yes, Aartibai. You won’t be sorry.”

  Yaj drove the car as far as he could, but the last few blocks were impassably crowded; they had to walk. Past street vendors selling cinema m
emorabilia: booklets of songs, posters of matinée idols. Past fashion accessories, photo studios with cutouts of the stars, tea and street food stalls. Past mothers who drew their children aside with whispered curses. She had bought out the entire hall for this showing, so that she might watch the movie in peace. If Aarti tried to simply enter the cinema hall and sit among the unafflicted, she didn’t know what would happen. Should her arm brush against another’s, might they turn to her with violence? There had been more than a few jokers attacked in the streets of Bombay—one poor soul had been beaten to death, and another, soaked in petrol and lit on fire. As if the virus weren’t curse enough.

  Right outside the cinema doors, it happened—pain flared, a current running from her heels to her spine, sending her back into spasm. Aarti stumbled, and though Yaj was there to brace her, her sudden stop blocked the flow of human traffic in the busy street. A rock thrown into a steady stream. A bicycling man cursed at Aarti, swerving to avoid her, narrowly missing a street vendor hawking pav bhaji and coconut water. Tichayla disat nahi ka? She wanted to swear back at him, but dared not raise her voice. In her head, though, she was shouting furiously.

  A gaggle of poor children laughed and ran around her, their bare feet slapping the dirt, their hands reaching out to grab at her robes—had they dared one another to touch her? More cursing now—a child’s mother, furious that Aarti had allowed it, though how could she have prevented it? The noise of the street was rising, the tone growing ugly. Go home, cursed one! Stay away from decent people.

  In the old days, Aarti would have screamed right back at them. She wanted to fight! But it was just her and Yaj in a street full of hundreds of angry faces, and now a child had grabbed a clot of mud and dared to throw it at her, staining her pristine white robes. They were almost to the cinema doors; she could duck inside to safety, to lose herself for a few hours in cool bliss and a big-screen black-and-white romance—but no. A bucket of dirty water was dumped on her from a balcony above, drenching her clothes. The smell of shit surrounded her, and Aarti knew herself defeated.

  “Take me home, Yaj.”

  Silently, he complied.

  Aarti did worry—was she only dreaming? Sometimes she told Yaj what she had done the night before, couching it as a dream—it was too difficult to keep the wonders of the Moon entirely to herself. But it felt so real, more real sometimes than this battered body of hers, this prison of a house.

  Aarti was thirty-two when the Russians first attempted to send a man into space. His name was Konstantin Feoktistov, and they called him a “cosmonaut,” but his rocket exploded as it left its launchpad. Feoktistov parachuted to safety, lucky to escape with his life. She had Yajnadar bring her English-language newspapers; she listened to the shortwave, trying to pick up British broadcasts that might mention it. She was glad the Russians had failed. If their cosmonauts had achieved orbit, they might have tried to send one to her Moon. Aarti’s heart sat in her throat at the very thought. How impossible, that her Moon might be despoiled by men like these. They would not care for Her, they would only want what they could steal away. They would rape and loot Her, leaving only Her carcass behind.

  And then the Americans started in. Those smug white men, undoubtedly just as arrogant as her Oxford professors. Probably worse. If she could, Aarti would have reached down from the Moon and smashed their little ships into a thousand pieces. She would hurl asteroids from the sky down onto their heads. She prayed for their missions to fail … and for once, her prayers were answered. The spaceship the Americans called the X-11A blew up, killing two ace astronauts.

  But now she had to know—was she really there, up on the Moon, every night? There was only one way she could think of to tell—she had to mark the Moon somehow, so that they might see it. A giant X dragged through Tycho Crater—how the world would shriek in wonderment! But Aarti would not mar her beloved so. No, instead of digging into the surface, she would build up. Construct a structure tall enough to be visible from the Earth.

  It went up fast. The Moon was watched all the time—humans loved to gaze at Her face. Aarti stood, hands outspread, color flowing from them in a steady stream. She chose red, the color of blood, a uniquely female color. Aarti started with vermilion, but changed to carmine for a deeper, darker shade. It would be simplest to build a solid block, a huge rectangular projectile pointing at the sky. That’s what a man would do, she suspected; they couldn’t seem to help reproducing phallic symbols wherever they went. And she did want it to be visible, of course—but couldn’t it be beautiful, too?

  Aarti poured carmine out of her brush-tip fingers, and it coalesced into a fantasy of bends and twists, girders that rose from the Moon’s surface, crossing against one another. She realized early on that she would also need to be high if she was to build the structure tall enough to be seen, so Aarti stood in the center as she worked. As her masterpiece grew, she shifted her body ever upward, finding purchase on flat surfaces. She sent the beams swooping and curling around her, above her head. She was as high as a cinema hall, as high as a Christian cathedral, as high as the Taj Mahal. Now she was higher than any building she had ever seen, high enough to grow dizzy if she looked down. Her structure was so beautiful—as striking as any building on Earth, more graceful and lovely than any of her paintings.

  When the structure was finally over a quarter-mile high, when she knew she’d be able to see the long shadow of it from the telescope Yajnadar had installed on the roof of her home—a six-inch Unitron refractor—Aarti allowed herself to stop. She had never worked so hard in her life. Aarti was trembling with exhaustion, drenched; she could feel the sweat dripping down her spine. It was almost dawn in Bombay, but elsewhere in the world, astronomers were watching the night sky. Aarti waited for the world to notice.

  The next morning, Bombay newspaper headlines blazoned the news: NEW FEATURE ON THE MOON! Some were more sensational: moon men really exist! we are not alone! Many were frightened: moon invasion imminent! will the aces be able to save us??? Aarti exulted to know finally, for certain, that her time on the Moon was no virus-driven fever dream. It was entirely real.

  She could only imagine how frenzied the conversations must be in astronomy departments the world over, how the Russians and Americans must be frantically scrambling in the wake of their failed launches. She was briefly, wickedly gleeful, imagining the panic of all those supposedly brilliant men. And then, her heart breaking a little, Aarti pulled her masterpiece down.

  It was the best work she had ever made, but she couldn’t let the structure stay up forever—it could spur a space race, send the countries of the world scrambling to reach her beloved Moon. Aarti was briefly bewildered as to exactly how to get rid of it. She hadn’t thought about that. She had no corrosive that would eat away at its bones, no wrecking ball big enough to knock it down. Finally, Aarti painted a crevice in the Moon’s surface, grieving for even the brief wound; she let her beautiful structure tumble down into the depths, and then closed it up again.

  The humans would forget—it would be a seven-days’ wonder. They’d assume it was just a glitch in the tech and nothing more, a transient lunar phenomenon; that’s what they’d be telling themselves, all those so-clever men. The Moon was Aarti’s now, finally and forever.

  The Moon Maid

  PART III

  1970

  GRACEFUL CURVES ARCED OVER the dusty lunar surface, silvery towers around a central dome. Aarti had painted herself a mini Taj Mahal, just one story tall, holding a single large room. She’d painted the image over and over, each time it had started to fade, until eventually it had achieved permanence. Would it outlast her death? Aarti had no idea, but it hardly seemed to matter here on the Moon, where she was the sole inhabitant. Aarti had built it in the Tsiolkovsky Crater, on the far side of the Moon, as far from Earth view as possible; even the Moon’s librations would not reveal it. The Russians had sent a probe in 1959, had even published an atlas detailing a host of small craters on the far side, but their maps were woefull
y inadequate, and her little palace was safely hidden. Aarti didn’t need protection from the elements, per se—her Moon body required none. But spending several hours a night there, she’d discovered that she sometimes wanted the comfort of a home, an enclosed space in which to rest, relax, and, eventually, work.

  Aarti painted the fundamentals first—a drafting table and easel, canvases and walls to hang them on. Mostly she worked standing up, but sometimes she perched on a stool. She painted great glowing lights, so she might better see her work. Eventually, Aarti even painted herself a sofa and a bed, that she might lie there gazing at her paintings, considering their next iteration, or simply gazing out a window at the Earth.

  Her paintings had started out realistic enough—moonscapes and spinning Earths. Over time they morphed as she began populating her solitary landscape. Small, strange creatures filled the rocky craters, slithery things and furry hopping beasts. Winged beings, as tall as coconut palms, stalking across the landscapes.

  Aarti wondered, if she wanted it badly enough, if her creatures might come to life, keep her company. But so far, they never had—they stayed firmly on the canvas. Which probably meant that she was happier having the Moon entirely to herself.

  Yaj pulled the curtains open, sending afternoon sunlight streaming into the room. “Time to wake up, Aartibai.”

  Aarti groaned. The servants had gotten used to the fact that their mistress slept until midafternoon, but they didn’t know that she was awake all night, and by around three o’clock, they inevitably became impatient.