A student of multiversal time travel slips from one version of New York to another, discovering that love may transcend timelines, but so too can heartbreak…
Krishna is quite unsettled when he bumps into a woman’s corpse during his morning bath in Kolkata’s Hooghly River, yet declines to do anything about it—after all, why should he take responsibility for a stranger? But when the dead start coming back to life en masse, he rethinks his position and the debate around how to treat these newly risen corpses gets a lot more complicated.
In this story from Indrapramit Das—originally published in February 2016—a journalist strives to understand Krishna’s actions and what they say about the rest of society and how we treat our dead.
This article originally appeared on the Kickstarter page for People of Color Destroy Science Fiction!, a special issue of the Hugo-winning magazine Lightspeed, 100% written—and edited—by POC creators.
The first sci-fi short story I ever wrote—an overwrought love-child of tattered 2000 AD comics, William Gibson, repeat listens of Erasure and Europe (not ashamed) MP3s, and an adolescent confusion of bloodlust and anti-war sentiment—took place in an irradiated, war-torn North America. Its protagonist was a white man, a soldier trying to escape The Man’s telepathic control. The first novel I wrote, also in my late teens, had at its epic fantasy center a strapping white lad with, ahem, braids, unconsciously modeled on the features of Christopher Lambert’s stoic Highlander Connor McLeod. While I was writing these white boys on my Windows 98 PC, I never left Kolkata, India, where I’d spent every year of my life. The fingers dancing on that chunky yellow-gray keyboard were and are brown as (light) toast.
Why the white boys? I’d say living in the aftermath of centuries of invasive European colonialism might’ve had something to do with it. Hence my typing these words in English, instead of my native Bengali. Hence the often white writers and protagonists I grew up reading, watching, emulating, and ultimately recreating, when I decided to insert my obtrusively brown self into the life cycle of pop art.
Krishna is quite unsettled when he bumps into a woman’s corpse during his morning bath in Kolkata’s Hooghly River, yet declines to do anything about it–after all, why should he take responsibility for a stranger? But when the dead start coming back to life en masse, he rethinks his position and the debate around how to treat these newly risen corpses gets a lot more complicated. In this story from Indrapramit Das, a journalist strives to understand Krishna’s actions and what they say about the rest of society and how we treat our dead.
