Counterclockwise

7: On Fruit Cultivation in Ancient India

"Did you rethink your answer?" Lee asks, glittering eyes on Simon, immediately followed by a grimace.

"Can you feel it?" the doctor asks, her voice gentle. "Let me know if you can."

"It's not painful," Lee says, "but I can feel it."

"Rethink my answer to what?" Simon asks, eyebrow raised.

"Let's say," he says, and there's a wink in his words, even though his eyes stay open, still gazing at Simon. "That you can't go to the future. You have to go back. What time period do you go to then?"

"I barely understand why the future is removed from this hypothetical," Simon says with a playful tilt of his head. "But... hmm. Let me think."

His real answer: this moment. But he can't say that; he's got to pick some time before. "I can simply never know enough about a time to know if it's the best place to visit. I can study history, but will I ever learn enough to know it like I lived there?"

Lee rolls his eyes, interrupted by another grimace that he tries to hide from the doctor.

"Do you need more anaesthetic?" Simon asks, and the doctor looks up, raising her eyebrows at Lee.

"I'm fine," Lee argues, but the doctor shakes her head, goes to get another needle. Lee glares a bit at Simon, who simply crosses his arms, a little smile and a cocked eyebrow, waiting for him to continue.

"Anyway," he says, taking a deep breath through the needle. Is he afraid of needles, maybe? Simon feels a little bad considering that. "That's why you pick a place to find out about. Something's got to make you curious."

Simon wrote most of his essays on the Rift and its consequences. He spent a bit of time on 2010s-2020s America, wrote about the World Wars; it was mostly the past two centuries. So maybe he'd want to go back further than that, and learn something he'd never learned before.

He knew English history. He could name every monarch since William the First- including the two that, in this moment, had yet to reign. He'd seen documentaries and read accounts of what English life was like centuries, millenia ago; he read it in children's books when he was a child and he studied it in class. It might be good to visit. But he wasn't curious.

Both sides of his family were different long-gone diasporas. The only thing that had ever held Simon Kumar to any heritage but English was his surname.

When he was a child, he went to a cousin's wedding, when she'd married an Indian man and emigrated there. It was the first time Simon took a plane, the first time he met great-aunts and second cousins who didn't know his name. Aside from how little he wanted to spend time with his family, even at age eight, there were things he enjoyed about the experience, namely, one moment that stuck with him.

He stood on a balcony at night, looking out over the city streets, which were both fundamentally different and fundamentally the same as the ones at home; the light that fell from the setting sun was yellower, the heat waves visible against the skyline, but the windows were in the same style that was popular back home. Some people walked down the street in saris, and others walked down in suits. It was a mix of everything from everywhere, as was often the case at home; and Simon just wondered what was the influence his country had had, and what was here before. He could guess it, to some extent, but he wanted to see it, when he ran his hands along a metal handrail and wondered where it was made.

Especially as he turned around to see the bride in her beautiful sparkling gown of red and gold, jingling as she walked, and he wondered if this was some part of him he'd never truly understand. Lehengas were not genetic, but there was always something in moments like that, a knowing of where one comes from. Knowing that you don't know.