Dear Reader,
The phrase ‘change is the only constant’ lands very differently, depending on what the changes are. A graduation, a birth, a break up, a death. Then again, things are never only changing in one way. Depending on the part of the world that you are considering, your perspective and position, some things get better, some get worse.
Sometimes, things get apocalyptically worse. In Kuzhali Manickavel’s short story, the end of the world takes a century. Even as pieces of the sky literally fall and dissolve, people, like the metaphorical frog unaware of the slow rise in temperature, don’t quite realise that everything they know, and they themselves, will soon be gone. Here, at the end of the world, things are not just scary, but also ridiculous, funny, and proof that even apocalyptic events can become normalised.
But what is an end? When does something begin to end? When is ‘after’? Is your school career over on the day you last sit in class, or when you’ve written the last exam or when the results are declared? When do you stop being a child and start being an adult? When do you forget the memory that used to be your first?
There’s a popular myth that you will become an entirely new person, i.e. that every single cell in your body will have been replaced in cycles of seven years. It originated with a 2005 study that looked into the lifespan of various types of cells in the human body and found their average age to be seven to ten years. While the idea is fascinating, it’s also overly simplistic. Some cells in the intestine last just a few days, some muscle cells 16 years, and some, like your neurons, are the same ones that you were born with. More mindbogglingly, the egg that you were born from has existed since your mother was a four-month-old foetus in your grandmother’s womb.
In ‘thin spaces’, an idea from the legends of the Celtic region that Tasneem Khan introduces in the new instalment of the ‘Time and Tide’ series, decay and renewal are inextricably linked. The dead and living coexist, the veil between them porous. For example, a coral reef, which can only exist if the bodies of the dead and living merge. There are only so many molecules in the universe, being repurposed constantly. Only so much energy, continually transforming, from one form to the next, to the next. Much like the coral reef, which will one day be beach sand, and then flow back into the ocean.
Some changes are rapid and drastic. In the blink of an eye, the world is suddenly, radically, and unbearably different. Not a slow forgetting, but a slip, a burst, a crash, and suddenly lifetimes of memories, or a life, is just gone. At moments like these, it’s not just the fear of the unknown, and the risk it brings, that might keep one from moving into this new reality.
Sometimes, when a door closes, the search for the window can wait. The window may be too difficult to open, or out of reach, the light through it barely visible. All one wants to, or can, do is sit in the dark for a while. No time is ever just one thing, but there is a reason that ritual mourning periods are common across the world. Some ends need to be tended to.
Staying in darkness is not always a choice to go gently into that good night. Truth can be found in grief and heaviness, as poet Andrea Gibson, who passed recently, says in her poem every time I ever said I want to die. The hard times, the dark years, or even a lifetime of grief, can be just as worthy of being experienced as a joyful one.
“The world needs,” Gibson says, “those who […] could find a tunnel that has no light at the end of it, and hold it up like a telescope to know the darkness also contains truths that could bring the light to its knees.” Those who are hungry enough for life, that, “Every time I ever said, “I want to die”, I meant I was willing to do anything to live, even leave this world.”
Can we hold a full life—whole and flawed and wonderful, with all the shades of the rainbow, of light and dark, and appreciate the threads that each shade contributes to the whole tapestry? As Gibson asks, “What if we don’t have to be healed to be whole?”
Till Next Time,
Team Dark ‘n’ Light
Down the Rabbit Hole
MaraTime: Time as Decay & Renewal
In the fifth installment of the ‘Time and Tide’ series, Tasneem Khan invites us to look through the veil that separates birth and death, beginnings and ends, into the liminal and rich ‘thin places’ and ecotones.
The World Will End in Slow Motion
In Kuzhali Manickavel’s imagining of the apocalypse giants fall from the sky, monsters emerge from the depths, and humans start scrapbooking the end times. This short story explores what happens when the world ends in slow motion, with a whimper rather than a bang, forewarned, heralded and entirely expected.
Arcx, the only podcast that focuses purely on South Asian sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers, returns with host Anjali Alappat, for its fourth season. She talks to an exciting mix of debut and experienced authors.
Kicking off the season is an interview with Gigi Ganguly about her debut short story collection Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World (2024) which focuses on the relationship between the human and more-than-human in a fascinating, speculative way. They discuss the beauty of Steinbeck’s writing, the peculiar case of Elon Musk, K-dramas, rain songs, dinosaurs and robots.
In the next episode, Anjali talks to Gautam Bhatia, legal scholar and author, about his new book The Sentence (2024), Indian scifi, the trials and tribulations of editing a much-anticipated anthology, revolutions and architecture (French and otherwise), science fiction tropes, and much more.
Editor’s Pick
This month’s recommendation is Code of Silence (2025) from Winnu D.
Code of Silence is a rare crime show that goes beyond the puzzle, shows imperfections without putting anyone down, and challenges the viewer without becoming preachy. Alison works in a police canteen in Canterbury, England. It is a job she desperately needs, given that she and her mother (both of whom are deaf), who she lives with, keep getting fired from jobs (for being deaf). One day, detectives Francis and Marsh, who are investigating a jewellery heist, ask Alison to lip read as all the other lip readers are unavailable. What follows is a funny, serious, and emotional rollercoaster, as Alison gets more and more involved with the investigation, not always with the detectives in the loop.
Alison is a whole person, funny, sexy, capable, sneaky, and more than a little careless about her own safety. While the investigation remains at the centre of the series, we also see Alison’s life, her relationships with her ex and her mother, her struggles with money and employment, and the inaccessibility of the world. The soundscape moves effortlessly between sound and being muted. The unravelling of the case itself takes enough twists and turns, with Alison putting herself in danger in new ways every episode, to keep you on the edge of your seat.