Discovering Telenapota

During the conjunction of Saturn and Mars—yes, Mars, most likely—you, too, might discover Telenapota. In other words, when you have unexpectedly been granted a two-day break from the suffocating pressure of work, if someone comes and tempts you, saying that somewhere there is a magic pool filled with the most incredibly simple-minded fish anxiously waiting to swallow any bait, and you have often spent unsuccessful hours angling without a catch, you may suddenly find yourself on your way to discovering Telenapota.

To discover Telenapota you will have to catch a bus packed with countless people late in the afternoon, and suffer the crowds, the jolting, the heat till, by the time you get off an hour or two later, you are drenched in sweat and covered with dust. You will be quite unprepared for the stop when it comes. Before you know where you are, the bus will have disappeared into the distance, over a bridge across the low swampland. In that dense, dark forest, night arrives even before the sun has set. A strange wind blows through the eerie silence. You won’t see a soul anywhere; even the birds, it seems, have flown away, perhaps in fright. You will feel a strange dread slowly rearing its head out of the lonely marsh.

You will leave the main road and stand near the swampland. There appears to be something like a storm drain cut into the undergrowth but this gets lost in thick groves of bamboo in the distance.

To discover Telenapota you should have a couple of friends with you. Perhaps they are not as keen on fishing as you are, but they accompany you, nevertheless, for God knows what reason.

The three of you will stand, staring anxiously, in front of the storm drain, trying to brush off the mosquitoes, occasionally glancing at one another.

In a while your faces will become indistinct in the gathering gloom. The steady drone of the mosquitoes will become even more insistent. And just as you are contemplating returning to the road, perhaps for a last bus, you will be startled by a strange, haunting sound coming from where the muddy drain loses itself in the jungle. A sound like an unearthly weeping, rising from the heart of the forest.

But this sound will only serve to fill your waiting with eager expectation. And your waiting will not be in vain. First, a faint light will be seen in the distance, swaying in the darkness; and then slowly, a bullock cart will come trundling out of the forest.

The cart and animals will be of a piece—dwarfed versions from some underworld of gnomes.

Without wasting any time on words you will climb on board and then try to solve the conundrum of how to arrange three heads and three sets of limbs in a manner which distributes the maximum volume in the minimum space.

The cart will return the way it came. The dark, impenetrable forest will yield a narrow tunnel for the cart to enter. The bullocks will move forward, unhurried, as if creating with each step the path they slowly tread.

For some time you will feel terribly irritable and cramped in the dark. But slowly you will begin to feel in the depths of the blackness around you. You will feel that from your own familiar world you have entered another. An unknown, mist-clad universe, bereft of all feeling. Time has stopped dead in its tracks here. And since time has come to a stop you will not know how long you had dozed off for. You will be woken suddenly horrid cacophony. You will look around to find the skies full of countless stars, and the driver furiously beating on a drum.

Your curiosity aroused, you will ask him what the din is about; the driver will answer blandly, ‘Oh, it’s to drive the tigers away, sir.’

After you have properly digested this bit of information, and just as you are about to ask in a tremulous voice whether tigers can be scared away just by beating drums, the cart driver will attempt to reassure you by saying that these are only leopards. And unless they are very hungry indeed, beating a drum is sufficient to keep them away.

Leopards! Within thirty miles of the metropolis! Before you can register surprise, the cart will begin to cross a wide open space lit by a late moon. Ruins of deserted palaces will gleam in the wan moonlight. Lone colonnades, broken arches, the debris of courtyard walls. A ruined temple somewhere further down. They will stand like litigants, waiting, in futile hope, to record evidence in the court of time.

You will try to sit up. A strange sensation will once again make you feel as if you have left behind the world of the living and entered a misty realm peopled only by memories. The night will be far gone. It will seem an endless dark in which everything lies stilled like extinct animals preserved in museums.

A few turnings later the cart will stop. You will gather together your tired limbs and climb down, one by one, like wooden puppets. There will be a strong smell in the air: the stench of leaves rotting in the pool just in front of you. Beside the pool will stand the remains of a huge mansion, its roof fallen in, its walls crumbling, the windows broken—like the battlements of a fort, guarding against the phantom moonlight.

Premendra Mitra A Bengali poet-novelist and filmmaker, he pioneered Bengali science fiction and created the beloved raconteur character Ghanada. His wide-ranging œuvre made him a towering figure of 20th-century Bengali literature

This article appeared as "Discovering Telenapota” in Outlook’s 30th anniversary double issue ‘Party is Elsewhere’ dated January 21st, 2025, which explores the subject of imagined spaces as tools of resistance and politics.