“Oh yes. The museums then.”
I wanted to try on the glasses. To see what the world would look like through a pair of emeralds, but I was too shy to ask. George gingerly put them back in their pouch and turned to me.
“Well, congratulations are in order, my dear,” he said. “Few are let into the fold, you know.”
“Thank you. I’m excited to learn more. Shiba told me the four of you came up with the idea for the Centre at university?” I asked.
“That’s exactly right.”
“You must have been so young. Still in your twenties.”
“In many ways, the mind is at its ripest then, don’t you find?” David said.
“Does that mean it’s all downhill for me?” I joked.
“Not at all, honey,” Eric said. “I mean, you’re here, aren’t you? That could only mean you’re on your way up.”
“We’ve heard you’ve already made great strides,” Arjun said. “Shiba was telling us about your translations.”
“Oh, yeah. Thank you. It’s not a big deal.”
“We’re actually writing a book ourselves,” David said. “That’s one of the things we’re working on this week. Collating our research and experiences to make a kind of testimony, or maybe a guide.”
“I thought it was all meant to be secret.”
“Of course,” he said. “But it is important to think about what we leave behind.”
“One must always consider legacy,” Arjun added.
“Absolutely,” David said. “A comprehensive account, for posterity.”
“To contextualize. Historicize,” George added, and the other three nodded.
They seemed to me a kind of four-limbed being occupying one central brain. How wonderful it must be, I thought. To have such a brilliant mind and then join forces with others on your level. It must make you feel fairly invincible.
“It’s important,” Arjun continued, “for people to know one day where it all began. For them to know what is possible if you dare to imagine it.”
“And for the children,” George said. “Let’s not forget the children. This will all be in your hands one day, won’t it, when we’re ashes and dust?”
“Yep,” Shiba said, taking a bite of her fish and smirking slightly. “That’s true.”
“But like, how secret is it, exactly? Shiba mentioned that only the handful of employees at the Centre know,” I probed. This idea, I have to admit, flattered me somewhat. “But your families must know what you do, right?”
“George’s family knows,” Eric said, winking at George and waving a fork in his direction.
“My wife does, yes. She is … intimately familiar.” George chuckled.
“You see, George married one of the Storytellers,” Eric said.
“Jessica,” George said. “That’s her English name.”
“Oh … wow.”
“It’s quite wonderful. It also means, you see, that we’ll be able to remain together, in a sense—”
“George,” Arjun interrupted. “We’re not quite there yet.”
“Oh yes. I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said eagerly. “Please, continue. What were you going to say?”
“I think they want to give you the grand tour first, isn’t that right?” George said.
“Yes,” Arjun confirmed. “Anisa, how would you like to see where it all began?”
“I’d love that.”
And so, after dessert of fruit and rasmalai over conversations about art and literature and the “state of India today,” Shiba, Arjun, and I left the others chatting around the dinner table and walked past the kitchen—where Kumar was now bent over the countertop next to the stove, eating his own dinner—and through the creaking back door. There, between the main house and the servants’ quarters, we came to a cottage.
“We had this built specially as our workspace,” Arjun said, leading us in.
The cottage was made up of three or four rooms. The first was an office space, most of which was occupied by a large wooden table with two cane chairs on either side. The surface of the table was covered with files and folders, along with an archaic-looking desktop computer. Other smaller tables dotted the room. There were piles of papers on most of the surfaces, and filing cabinets covered two of the walls. The other two walls were lined with bookshelves that held row upon row of technical-looking volumes, similar to the ones I’d seen in the Centre’s library. I grazed my fingers over their spines. Some of their titles verged on indecipherable: Advanced Anatomical Gradations in Universe 25, The Pacification of the Gnostic Mind, A Practical Guide for the Worldly Quixotic.
“So this is where it began,” I said.
“That’s right. The four of us launched the project from this very room, before Shiba was even born,” Arjun replied, pointing to a nearby picture frame. “That’s us at the time.”
The photo was of a very young and handsome-looking Arjun dressed in a blazer and flared jeans standing next to three equally young and dapper white men. The four of them, with their broad chests and languid demeanors, stood tall in front of a large medieval-looking building, as if they had the world at their feet.
“That was our college,” he said.
“It’s beautiful,” I replied.
We moved on to the second room, which was small and consisted only of a large, dark-green leather armchair, a desk, a microphone, and a pair of headphones. A set of simple buttons was embedded into the table itself, the kind you would find on a music player: Rewind, Fast-Forward, Stop, Play, Record. Except for the microphone, the space looked like an upscale version of the language booth at the Centre.
“This is where we do our recordings,” Shiba said.
“We?”
“Yeah, Papa and me. And the other three, when they’re here. George, Eric, David.”
“You guys are Storytellers?”
“Of course,” Arjun said. “We wouldn’t put other people through a process we didn’t believe in ourselves, would we?”
“What do you talk about in your recordings?” I asked Shiba.
“I tell my story,” she replied. “Just like the others do. It’s basically just hours and hours of me recounting my day-to-day life.”
“That sounds cool,” I said, my fingers grazing over the buttons on the desk.
“In fact, our very first Storytellers recorded from this room. Did Shiba mention that our first facility was right here in India?”
“Yeah, I think she did. Teaching Hindi?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“How did you find the Storytellers?”
“Oh, it wasn’t difficult. We reached out to indentured laborers, people who didn’t want to pass on debt to their families. We took care of their debts, and in return, they came in every day to record their stories. Sometime after that, we booked out a luxury spa hotel and marketed it—to Westerners, obviously—like a yogic, Ayurvedic, Hindi learning retreat. We told them it was based on ancient Vedic philosophy. They love that kind of thing.”