The Remix of Orchid

 ---------------------------------------

This one is the eponymous story from my short-story collections, "The Remix of Orchids". All the stories in the collection have been set in Andaman and Nicobar Islands and they are from the genre fiction. Earlier, I had posted a few of them in this blog and they can be reached in its archive, in case you fancy reading them too. Happy reading!

----------------------------------------- 

The Remix of Orchid

 ****************

                        ‘Oh no! How on earth does the same idea occur to more than one writer? Don’t geography and time separate us?’ Vimal wondered after reading the story. He not only got utterly amazed but also felt bitterly disappointed.

                        It was about a short story by none less than the most eminent Mr H. G. Wells, under a straight and simple caption, ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’. Its publishing history said the story first came in print in Pearson’s Magazine, April 1905. Vimal chanced upon it on the Web, and since then, had been feeling badly let down.      

                        He got there so strangely that the whole thing appeared to him too weird. In particular, he marvelled at the speed and accuracy of the high-powered search engine that dug into the pores of the virtual terrain. He had invoked the browser and then the search engine, typed ‘short’, ‘story’, and ‘orchid’, the three match-words in its entry box, and hit the ever-compliant return key. That was all he did—and he did it pretty casually. It took less than ten seconds for the omniscient search engine to do the rest. The matches available on the Web for each of those three words and their entire permutations constituted a mind-boggling assortment of junks. Nevertheless, the result was far from being the proverbial ‘Gigo’—the ‘garbage in and garbage out’. The unbelieving astonishment came up when Mr H. G. Wells flashed out of the Gigo with his marvellous short story. Lo! A casual search could be so precise—Vimal had to wonder all the way, and in a state of excitement engendered by such an accurate landing in the virtual realm, he hit the hyperlink.

                        And then he read the story. Written a century ago, it had all the elements of a top-notch literary work. The freshness of the plot, its flowery language with delectable versatility, its no-meandering and linear unfolding of the storyline, and, above all, its measured pace—he liked them all. One day, a crazy orchid-lover tired of his insipid life went through a presentiment that something exciting would happen to him. He came to possess a unique genre of orchid from among the possessions of an orchid-collector who was dead just two short months ago in an accident in the jungles of the Andamans. Eager to see the plant in its exotic form and foliage, he planted its rhizome on a pot. And then he waited, not for days but just a few hours. It was his moment of excitement when he found the rhizome sprouting its magnificent shoot before his gardening gloves could even dry. Now it was time for him to dream—he was on the verge of making an original discovery! The orchid he would give to the world would be unique, and that alone would immortalise him in the annals of orchid taxonomy. And then the climax...he was about to be sucked to death by those strange aerial rootlets of the rhizome, but his housekeeper, ever suspicious of her master’s strange hobby called the orchid collection, came to his rescue. 

                        Now Vimal felt cheated, but who was to blame? Earlier, he had spent a whole fortnight thinking about and developing the plot, drafting and refining it almost word by word, and finally, after reading the web page, he found himself at a dead end. Now he would have to discard his entire work to save himself from a charge of plagiarism. Had he not burnt the midnight oil to impart a cliff-hanging effect to his story? Earnestly Vimal sought to prove the originality of his story to himself by such rhetoric questions, but to what result? His story remained one with a plot already known and a denouement so comically overused. How on earth did it happen? He had, never in the past, read a story like that. As a gentleman intellectual by disposition, he always respected others’ intellectual property rights and passionately hated any mercenary treatment of creativity. But who would accept his solemn avowal?

                        He was in two minds now. Should he contribute the story to the special edition of the Andaman Gazetteers for better visibility of his literary talent, or should he discard it altogether to avoid a charge of plagiarism? He could vividly see how he was poised to get a phenomenal lift as a serious fiction writer. Besides, he would receive an excellent remuneration, for a Japanese multinational company bent on improving its country of origin’s historical image would generously sponsor the anthology. Besides, his contribution stood a fair chance of acceptance as it did not have anything on Japanese wartime torture on the island. Therefore, Vimal would not like to throw away his story.

                        Strange things used to happen to Vimal, the storyteller. True, he was not a well-known figure in the literary circles; nevertheless, he had already experienced a few uncanny happenstances verging on mystery, thanks to something he felt acting in him like a daemon. The other day he was moving about the stacking bays of the Spencers’ of Chennai. A child of nearly three years old came from nowhere behind, held his finger in his tender grip, and started strolling along with him. The writer felt so tender by the warm touch of a kid that he wished the experience to linger. Then again, he also felt guilty of misleading the innocent kid taking advantage of his infantile mistake. So, he stooped and looked at the child, a cute boy in a fashionable outfit, and when the boy came to know that the person he was clinging on to was not his father, he cried. He cried—it was true—yet he did not leave him. Probably he trusted Vimal, or at least he trusted Vimal until his father came searching for him, and in any case, the child trusted him. It was a testimony to his avuncular appeal; even a nonplussed child had no hesitation to own him when he had none to trust. It was a strange feeling of satisfaction for Vimal.

                       And what is more, it visually translated a scene of his story he wrote a couple of years ago. So, in retrospect, he had written something genuine, and his daemon had not misguided him then. In this way, reality ever remained in a state of suspended animation in whatever he wrote; they were not just figments of his imagination! 

                        When Vimal wrote the story in question, he set it in the natural habitat of orchids of the Andamans. But, as was his wont, he did not shape the work as pure fiction, for he had some real-life experiences to mingle with it as the condiments of his narratives. Travelogue plus fiction—to use the lexicon of literary critics, it was to unfold as a cross-genre work.  

                       So, coming to the plot, Vimal and his team headed for Saddle Peak, the 731-meter summit of North Andaman hills. Earlier, his friends had stuffed Vimal with information, and to add to that, he had extensively read the hobby literature. A hiker would bump into a mind-boggling range of colourful orchids on his way to the peak; orchids of the Andaman provenance were not only fabulous; they were genuinely ethereal too; and so on. Vimal had not seen orchids in a sylvan setting. Ergo, he had craved to reach the source and see them for himself, not as an avid collector but as an inspired admirer. Then on, his imagination ran wild. He began to dream about the unseen grandeur of the place with flowers hanging from the trees. He even felt the soothing oceanic breeze with the staccato beats of the distant birds wafting across to him. Trees abloom with variegated flowers brought his childhood memory alive. How creatively would his friends act on the occasions of national festivals as they tied colourful festoons of water lilies to the trunks of the coconut trees! The forthcoming trek promised so much!

                        The imaginative soul in him felt as though he had seen them long before he came to be known as Vimal. That was his déjà vu. As far as he was concerned, he did not need to see a thing in real life to appreciate it; readily, he could import the imageries relevant to it from the forgotten temporal context. As such, the mental image of the ancient trees laden with orchids came naturally to him. In his real life, Vimal would feel at home near a jackfruit tree where he loved to stand for hours on end. Standing, he would feast his eyes on the funny scene of the jackfruits dangling from its trunks. Likewise, the hanging aerial roots of banyan trees that used to become the swings for adolescent Vimal and friends had always triggered nostalgia in him. Whenever he passed by a banyan tree, childlike tenderness would grip him. Similarly, the thin wire-like rootlets of nameless parasitic plants falling from the high boughs of mango trees would inspire him and his buddies to imagine like scientists. They would apply their precocious gift in knotting those adventitious roots in series and drawing mock telephone lines out of them. So, according to him, anything to be fascinating must descend from the sky, whether they were the jackfruits from the high boughs or the adventitious roots from atop big banyans. Perhaps, this time around, his déjà vu worked as he agreed to go on a trek to Saddle Peak. He was agog to see the hanging orchids shower a riot of colours from heaven and charge the surroundings with the vibes of mesmerism. Then he would import imageries from the bygone temporal context and match up with what he would get to see. Interesting!

                        Accompanied by three friends, he went to Diglipur and then to Kalipur sandy beach and started climbing uphill. It took them an hour and a half to reach the foothill. They had started quite early to come back by the evening, and for that, they must set foot on the peak before noon.

                        Vimal was not eager to scale the peak just by hurrying through the beaten trail; he was for enjoying every bit of what nature had bestowed on the landscape. So, he wandered off and passed under the thick shade and enjoyed its coolness. Sashi-koke-koo, Sashi-koke-koo—he heard the mellifluous songs of golden oriole that kindled his long-forgotten memories of adolescence. ‘What a perfect place for an escapade?’ He lamented that he had missed many exciting experiences by not being born in and around Diglipur. Now he had come a long way; he had become a prosaic adult, and adults could never compensate for everything not done in their adolescence. It was common sense, and, like all dictates of common sense, it was infallible!

                        He smelt the pungent flowers, the moist and decaying barks, the reeking turds of wild boars, and the fetid clump of dew-drenched leaves. He jumped over thorny shrubs and slipped down the scree slopes. He had to crawl and slither through the narrow openings of the dense undergrowth. But all those did not bother him because he had his rewards of cool breeze and the ocean view, the fragrance of flowers and barks, and he continued to gain height as he trekked ahead. He trailed afar, and his friends slowed down for him to catch up, but they did not do so consistently. Finally, he trailed and trailed and got separated from his friends. However, he continued to enjoy his trek amidst the abundance of peace and sensory pleasure.   

                        Aha! It was a feast for his eyes when he saw the trees he dreamt of. They were the ones laden with epiphytes, their flowers hanging from boughs. There were Vandas and Dendrobes and Phalaenopsis; some of them were probably Cymbidiums and Hetaerias and Oberonia, and there were many he could not name. But it was an unforgettable sight to see them in their natural setting as they looked neither wilted nor frail. On the contrary, they were fresh and appealing, and an orchid-lover would willingly trek a whole continent to have a glimpse of them.

                        Like any avid orchid-collector, Vimal wanted to take something with him, but he was aware it was illegal. He did not like to disturb the ones already abloom, for it was a consideration every orchid-lover must show to them, the mighty miniatures in the world of flowers. So, he settled for a rhizome of another epiphyte nearby without a flower that promised to bring them forth when groomed. True, he got it but could not take it to the mainland because everybody joined the chorus, urging him against it vehemently. None of his friends wanted Vimal to face the embarrassment of being frisked and caught red-handed carrying contraband orchids. So, he presented it to a friend there in Port Blair. And he ultimately took with him was a deep impression, formed by those fascinating memories of the epiphytes in bloom in a pristine setting.

                        So much for the experience. Vimal’s story was not a travelogue; it was a regular short story with a plot fully formed. He was bound by his unwritten commitment to the readers to make it a piece of readable fiction. So, he made the rhizome reach out to everything inside the room from where his friend kept it potted. It grew up very soon proliferating its rootlets and attacked its planter with its innumerable root-like tentacles. The poor chap was asleep, and he had no idea that the gift he had received from his bosom friend would prove so abominable! With the menacing tentacles in an attacking range, he could not get time to defend himself. He could not even utter a cry for help, and what he could give out was just an inaudible whimper. Escaping in an instant into the other room, he bolted himself desperately from inside. But little did he know that the door leading to the room in which he holed himself up had a narrow gap at its bottom. The tentacles followed him into the room through that terrifying gap, multiplied in minutes, and grew fatter and fatter, inhaling the entire air in the room. They were only inhaling with rumble and swish, and strangely enough, they had no occasion to exhale. Air from outside rushed in to fill the vacuum created by the inflated tentacles, but the more it swirled in, the more it got sucked. Now the luckless friend of Vimal fell short of oxygen and panted for breath. He rushed towards the door in a fit of asphyxia, unlatched it to escape, but the smart and robust tentacles took hold of his left leg and tugged. While they pulled, they sucked the blood. At long last, he managed to escape from his room and stepped out on the road. In the process, many of the tentacles were snapped and got scattered on the ground. The victim’s leg became thin and rickety, and he was hardly able to walk. However, it was dawn by then. The diabolical vegetation could not grow and multiply as quickly as it did at midnight, and the tentacles withdrew to the pot to wait for their next midnight prowl.

                        Finally, Vimal gave a denouement for the story. He did not kill his friend, for he feared that he would ultimately be without a friend if his daemon proved that real. After all, friends were not so numerous that Vimal could kill one in each of his stories. So, his daemon took charge of his pen, yet he just settled for a more endurable end.

                        The lucky fellow came back rehabilitated from the hospital. He had not, by then, told the real story to anybody, not even to the police who registered a case of an accident; as per the report, he was lying senseless on the road. So strange are the rules of the road—the taxi driver who did this work of selfless service was the first person to be questioned, and the person he rescued came to his rescuer’s rescue when he got his sense back. He narrated something ambiguously; however, the most understandable aspect of his narration went in favour of the taxi driver, certifying him as blameless. Indeed, he dodged everybody, saying that he could hardly remember how he came to be found senseless on the road. All he could recollect was that he slept early the previous night and went out of his room in the middle of the night feeling queasiness and asphyxia.         

                        Returning from the hospital, he found a bizarre scene in his house. The walls had no outer plaster on them, and the iron mesh was sticking out of their surface. One of the doors had been substantially gnawed, and not a grain of sand was on the floor as if somebody who did this weird act of vandalism had swept the floor clean after finishing the outrage. He went over to the pot where he planted the rhizome. But what did he see there? There were no tentacles, no rhizome, and the entire soil had vanished!

                        Vimal’s protagonist had no nerves of steel, yet they started to jangle badly. He was not sure if the same harrowing incident would not repeat. Fortunately for him, he could vacate the house any time as he occupied the same on rent. The only consideration was that he should willingly forgo the six months’ advance rent he had deposited. It was a paltry sum of fifteen thousand only. Paltry? Yes, the sympathetic writer in Vimal thought so as the life of a friend was so precious. His frightened friend just hurried to collect his belongings. While packing, his fear continued unabated, but he constantly encouraged himself, reminding himself that it was daytime. In a matter of half an hour, he packed everything and went to live in a hotel. It was a more expensive choice, but he welcomed it for the sake of his life. In the evening, he went to the proprietor to return the key of the house and finish his worry once for all. She received the key, and the relieved tenant moved out. Now, it was for the property owner to visit her house at night and get killed by the tentacular onslaughts.

                        All this and more—Vimal's friend reported as soon as he was out of danger. He also blamed Vimal for entrusting him with the dreadful rhizome. And, finally, he passed on a piece of friendly advice too. ‘For heaven’s sake, Vimal, forget those blessed orchids...life is far more valuable than a dangerous hobby.’

                        So, with this denouement, a story was composed. It was all but ready for its submission to the Andaman Literary Circle editorial board, but Vimal could not do so easily as he wrote it. The web page brought him the painful realisation that somebody as eminent as H. G. Wells had already penned a similar plot, almost one hundred years before he could have imagined it. He felt like Robert Scott, who found on reaching the South Pole that his competitor Roald Amundsen had already reached there thirty-three days before. Vimal knew of the consequences that had visited Scott after his spectacular failure—the explorer could not even reach home but perished on his way back to England. Crestfallen, Vimal tried to console himself, but it was not possible.

                        A sense of revolt swept him. ‘Has not the Ramayana been rewritten again and again for the last twelve hundred years? World literature would have been a lot impoverished had we taken such a narrow view of creativity. Even there is enough creativity in the act of imitation,’ Vimal began to feel self-assured. There was no patience left in him for writing another short story with the Andamans as its theme, at least not so soon. So instead, he tried to find out the honourable way to package his story so that it had a reasonable chance of acceptance.

                        Finally, he decided. He did not know if venerable Mr H. G. Wells had ever visited the Andamans, but Vimal had visited them, and he was proud of the fact. More than anything else, he was sure what he had produced was authentic, and readers would love a storyteller with first-hand exposure.

                        His story would click, and why not? ‘Nowadays remix is the in thing. Are not the songs of eighties getting remixed with more and more explicit video streams?’ Vimal tried to adopt a defiant stance. He would choose a catchy caption. If beauty is skin-deep, literature must thrive under the din of publication blurbs. Therefore, he would go for a contemporary title for his short story. In time, his daemon dictated; and as such, he chose a catchy caption: “The Remix of Orchid”.

 

A.N.Nanda

  Calicut / 05-07-2004