Announcing a new story from Somewhere!
Our latest game, In the Pause Between the Ringing will be playable at the Design Play Disrupt exhibition, at V&A on Friday the 25th January.
https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/play-videogame-commissions
The telephone rings in many languages. [Or a brief note on the translation of unspoken words.]
The whole of Agra smelt of cheap adhesive gum, for the ancient walls of its Katras had been plastered over with posters and declarations in anticipation of a protest march. No surface remained bare and no wall untended by splatterings of glue and newsprint flyers that leaked saffron ink onto the surfaces they were stuck to.
This bleeding and oozing spectacle of leaflets was the signal for shopkeepers and guides, trinket sellers and merchants to wind their wares and storefronts, and find refuge in barricaded shops and houses. A signal of their exit from stage leaving the streets momentarily empty, in deference to the impending violence.
I stood outside Mehran Kitab Ghar, bewildered by the sudden evacuation of the lane. A liquid fear curling in my belly. And here deep within the heart of Sikandar Lodi's capital, where the air was stretched taut with the promise of a riot, I discovered the writings of Mir UmarHassan.
Left besides a runnel abutting the bookshop, along with broken tubelights, sheets of tarpaulin and old periodicals, was a stack of thin freshly printed books. Perhaps it was the crisp lettering and careful print in defiance of the shoddy posters that decorated the walls around me; or perhaps it was simply an irrational lunge at whatever lay at hand amidst my blinding fear. But I scooped up the books in my arms and hammered at the door of the bookstore begging them to let me in. 'Let me in I am carrying books you forgot outside, books of great value.' I shrieked 'You will rue the day you discarded such precious fare' I cried not knowing what I was holding in my hand, simply convinced of its inherent value.
'Chodo usee Sahib raddi hai (Leave them be Sahib they are worthless) cried someone from inside before hauling me bodily into a narrow doorway. I let the books fall in a cascade and slumped on the floor. By now I could hear the strident drumming of footsteps and the forerunners of the mob on motorcycles.
As I lay awake listening to the sounds of the riot that day, I read the book I had rescued from the street,
A collection of historical essays, by Mir UmarHassan. And it began with a remarkable passage. that even as I read, in a desperate attempt to keep the desolation of the riot at bay, echoed longer and more plaintively than any wailing that emanated from the door besides which I crouched in fear that night.
To be complete is to be enclosed. To find yourself contained within the margins of your own body and the boundaries of collective reason. To be complete is to be able to see an edge to history.
Mir UmarHassan sought completion and it defied him. His search for the territorial boundary of time so polluted his ability to tell stories that they all remained mere fragments, some long, some short and some just shards of text hastily written to subsist.
Broken essays in tawdry paperbacks and patrikas. Incomplete novels which his exasperated editors, wrote various endings to. Newspaper articles and radio plays, dialogues in scripts for disreputable films and slogans for street plays and advertisements. Such is the oeuvre of UmarHassan. A legacy of fragments in defiance of the unifying mandate of his time, or perhaps a reflection of the fissures beneath this mandate.
The project therefore of reclaiming his works for consumption by people confident in their own boundaries, and satisfied by the definite shape of their bodies and their countries - has inevitably proven difficult.
Scattered across languages, translated and polluted, copied and reprinted the various writings impose such a burden of discovery on the intrepid researcher or translator, let alone a pair of videogame authors - that we have only been able to piece together a minor handful of essays in the time we have spent collecting his writings.
Moreover, of these restorations, much is invented.
Details that were lost to time or circumstance have had to be recreated. Authors for languages we are not proficient in have had to be entrusted with conveying to us, (like a strange continent spanning game of telephone), what a particular passage means. Alternate texts have had to be ruthlessly discarded and often an arbitrarily assigned original copy must be assembled from material that has evidently lost any flavor of authenticity.
Until we are almost certain that we have inevitably created a Mir UmarHassan of our own.
A coherent author who nonetheless so differs from the actual that he has become a character subject to his own writings. In many ways it is this fictitious UmarHassan that we have come to regard as the original author of the works we are translating, whose writings we find meaning in and whose history we plumb for profundities.
It is also perhaps this UmarHassan, this artificial interlocutor, that we are adapting here.
A phantom text written by the memory of an author who does not exist.
For it is always in the act of such hauntings that the enterprise of retrieval and translation is conducted.
Like an an illegal crossing of body and language across territories and time. A process that often leaves us porous and susceptible to the various histories of our lives.
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