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      The rushing stream spilled over the cliff to the rock shelf below. The spot was known to no one but Fara and she had never been there. Her vantage was near the base of the falls; she looked up at the sky without eyes and listened to the impact without ears. Fara had too little education to guess that the rock shelf was radioactive pitchblende, the stream subzero liquid methane pulled down by gravity a dozen times the terrestrial standard. She knew only that this place was novel, beautiful and private.
      Fara moved closer to the bottom of the falls, risking the loss of that connection lately grown so tenuous. The sound from the methane’s impact was like no musical instrument she had heard or ever would. Sheer cliffs last a short time in such immense gravity, this one having formed from an earthquake along a thrust fault. Accelerated erosion in the stream bed had enlarged many fine grooves along its length, scalloping its cross-section where it opened into the waterfall. Rivulets of methane thrust straight down to the surface slab of pitchblende below; in geological time, it took only a moment for hemispherical divots to erode. Ever full with liquid replenished in a constant drill rather than a cascade, the erosion-polished bowls of dense stone released a low, pure chord through the gaseous atmosphere. It had the majesty of a choir of organs and would last only one more tick of geological time before erosion wore the stream flow into a single channel or wore through the pitchblende to the porous stratum below. The high gravity didn’t prevent a fine mist from wafting up a few meters above the base of the waterfall and Fara looked up through it to a bright sky pocked with pink-edged turbans of vaporous methane. The prismatic gauze from twin sources of sunlight treated her to an amalgam of vision and sound unique to that planet or any other in the galaxy.
      At first she thought it was a nuance of sound from the falls she had missed before. Then it came through, forcing out everything else: a motorcycle horn outside her window. Contact was sundered and the alien landscape replaced by her own bedroom in the muggy pre-dawn. Like the character in A Tale of Two Cities, Fara was recalled to life.
      Fara turned back the sheet, got up from her pallet and looked down at the street below her second-story window. There were no lamps and she could barely make out the cause of the commotion—a stray dog was sprinting from a rickshaw driver who couldn’t spare any time getting to the lucrative fares downtown. For this, Fara had been ousted from her wondrous retreat. According to the alarm clock, she had to begin her day in another six minutes, but Fara valued every second she could snatch away.
Eleven-year-old Hasina was sleeping undisturbed on her side of the room. As stealthily as possible, Fara performed ablutions with the bowl and cloth on her bureau, brushed her hair and doffed her cotton nightshirt for her usual day wear. When she had finished winding her yellow and green sari, she saw there was exactly one minute left before six. Fara flicked off the alarm button and kissed Hasina on the forehead.
      “Good morning, sister.”
      One after the other, Hasina opened her eyes. Fara retired to her side of the room quickly, knowing how bad Hasina’s morning breath was when she yawned herself awake. At the same time Fara got done winding the clock, a mechanical clanking sounded in the other bedroom—Father and Mujib were awake. Fara went downstairs while the others dressed.
      Fara took good advantage of her unwanted head start on the morning’s chores. By the time everyone finished their sunrise prayers, the kitchen stove was burning and breakfast—tea, sweetened rice with raisins, fresh orange and mango sections—was ready to serve. Fara and Hasina set everything on the bamboo breakfast mat under Father’s approving eye and he gently squeezed their proffered hands before the family sat down to eat. He couldn’t have squeezed harder had he wanted to. The tuberculosis that killed Fara’s mother had scarred Father’s spine and permanently weakened his arms.
      They sat two to each side of the mat, a one-time farm family living in a Dhaka row house. Fara was surrogate mother to Hasina, soon to take her place as manager of the household, and eight-year-old Mujib, the only boy in the family and Father’s hope for the future. As in Western homes, breakfast on weekdays was a purely functional meal and everyone ate quietly, Father with fastidious care to protect his long waxed mustache; it was all that remained to him for natural adornment now that his black hair was falling out.
      Fara left the house by the front door, preceded by Hasina and Mujib. Father had already moved the rickshaw out onto the uncurbed street and relocked the steel accordion gate to its storage port. The passenger seat enclosure was covered on back and sides with a pattern of aggressively colorful forms. They served two economic functions: drawing the attention of potential fares and bringing in revenue from a publicity-seeking artist a few doors down.
      “Don’t expect me home till around eight,” Father told Fara. “Tikka said something about a late job interview.”
      Hasina and Mujib put their school books into the rear of the rickshaw; Father would drive them to school before taking on paying customers. As for Fara, she would ride the bus to work. Fara disliked the four-minute walk to the bus stop, not because of any proneness to sore feet. The wind of Fara’s sari had nothing suggestive about it and she avoided makeup like other women of the Bangladeshi working class. This didn’t preserve her, however, from getting overly admiring looks from strange men she passed on the street. Fara was pretty, tall and had broad, heavy hips that swiveled too much when she walked. To male bystanders, Fara in motion was a living cartoon of female fertility.
      Like Father’s rickshaw, the bus was tricked out with adornments paid for by the people who put them there, but the effect was less pleasing. The blame lay partly with their extreme motliness, everything from Pepsi logos to pictures of Bangladeshi film stars, and partly with their failure to fully cover the bus’s fading paint and patches of rust. Fara took a window seat, strictly to avoid unwanted eye contact with other passengers; there was nothing in the street scene to rivet her interest. Fara’s origin, route and destination were not in the neatly upholstered fraction of Dhaka occupied by tourists and the city’s small middle class. Two-thirds of the population lived in a vast warren of unlined blacktop and paving brick, abutted by mostly one and two-story structures, each of which might have been built to code, below code or by squatters with shack-making skills. The bus crept along its route, quicker than pedestrians and the older bicycle-driven rickshaws, a little slower than motor vehicles of a more agile species. A few times, open-air markets on either side of the street, illegal and unpunished, created a temporary bottleneck. In the streets, there were repeated assertions of individuality amid the mass of unplanned human life: lush scalp and facial hair, cheap jewelry, clothing too gaudy or scanty for strict tastes, slogans and ornamental trappings on the vehicles and jerry-built housing. HERE I AM, MY EXISTENCE MATTERS was a refrain trying to be heard above ten million close-packed, deafening heartbeats.
      It never occurred to Fara to mention her out-of-body experiences to anyone else. Even if they believed her (she thought it much likelier she would be considered crazy and therefore unweddable), Fara enjoyed having a great secret, the only one she’d ever had. Otherwise her life was so intertwined with her family that, when she was living on the farm, they could all tell she was last to go to the outdoor privy from the color of her stool. What troubled her now was that her flights from the Dhaka slums were becoming less frequent and harder to maintain. Three or four times a week, a visitor bearing sights and sounds from strange places had called on her, waiting until freedom from routine let her answer. Almost always she had no chance to do so until bedtime. The contact ended spontaneously after a few hours but no outside reaction could disrupt it; Fara’s parents and siblings marveled at what a sound sleeper she was. Now she counted herself lucky if the visitor came once a week, and any loud noise or other stimulus could intrude itself and sever the contact.
      Fara got off right outside her workplace, a jute mill that was one of the few large buildings near her home. Entering by the women’s door, she joined eighty other women in cutting, sewing and labeling sacks from bolts of burlap produced by the mill’s male employees. Most of Fara’s coworkers were younger women supporting families, not unlike herself, and they shared an easy comradeship devoid of intimacy. Fara was due to leave in a few more weeks and expected she would actually miss the place. The rotating work assignments were never that demanding and left her time for her own thoughts. Fara knew it was much easier work than harvesting the jute. Mujib was too young to assist when the family owned their four-acre lot in the village and Father was too proud to let the women help him. He did it all himself, standing in muddy water, hacking through the tough jute fibers and letting them steep in the paddies until the horribly sticky resin dissolved.
      Fara’s shift ended at four and she went straight home. After checking to see that Hasina and Mujib were safely accounted for, Fara did her afternoon housework. Halfway through the monthly chore of beating the drapes and mats, she sensed the faraway pull, too familiar to mistake. Twice in twenty-four hours was unusual in the past and a near-miracle now. Fara knew, of course, that she couldn’t respond until she put in a long evening. Father always brought home groceries and jute sticks for the stove, and tonight he also brought Tikka, Fara’s intended husband.
      Fara: “Clear away, sister. I’ll bring out the shemai.”
      Father: “You know Tikka doesn’t care for sweets.”
      Tikka: “Who told you that? Don’t take the dinner mat. Fara, hurry back!”
      Every Thursday evening saw the same tug of war in Fara’s house -- Father wanted dinner to end quickly so Tikka could join him in the men-only area of the downstairs common room, and Tikka wanted to linger in the company of Fara. Fara and Tikka had been neighbors in the old village and Tikka’s family moved voluntarily to the city, as Fara’s did by compulsion a few months later. Tikka was meant to get the best education possible and certainly rose to the opportunity, earning top grades in his high school science courses. Soon to graduate college as a civil engineer, he had already secured promises of full-time work, that being the main conversational topic of the evening. Fara thought he would be an easy man to live with and long ago lost her aversion to the queer double depression in his jaw, made years earlier by the hoof of an ill-tempered ox. Tikka, for his part, didn’t mind what another man might have considered a financially disadvantageous marriage. He loved Fara in a romanticized Western fashion; marrying her was on his mind long before their parents broached the subject.
      After dinner, Father turned on the radio -- the only electrical appliance in the house apart from the lamps -- and tuned in a soccer match. Fara surrendered Tikka and joined the children at prayers before sending them to bed. She wanted to be in bed too. She felt bone-weary and long overdue to answer the visitor’s call. Instead she spent two full hours puttering around the house till Tikka’s departure. Father and Tikka took their soccer seriously and Fara wouldn’t chance having contact broken by the cheers and groans coming from the common room. At last, the house quiet, Fara settled into bed. It took twenty, thirty, forty seconds of hard mental effort, but the visitor had waited patiently.
      There was no audio element this time; Fara was becalmed in total vacuum. A moment later she resolved a black sky with thousands of stars undimmed by any planetary atmosphere. In the figurative near ground, a brilliant object grew steadily nearer. Fara had searched for them with her own eyes while standing on the soil of Earth, so she knew perfectly what a comet looked like. This one was multinucleate, its disparate clumps of metal, rock, water and organic compounds held together by the feeblest gravitational attraction. The tail radiated from the coma in broadly angled streaks like the spikes of a foxtail burr, each one dispersing a spoonful of solid matter into a hundred thousand kilometers of luminescent glory. Were it to impact on an Earth-like planet, the water and organics borne on the comet could help spark the start of life. Fara rotated her vision to see where the comet was going and saw it was fated otherwise.
      Looming in front of the comet was the sunlit disk of a giant planet, girdled with green and violet striations. The planet lacked the mass needed to become a star, but its gravity was great enough to have pulled countless smaller bodies into collision orbits during its life. The comet had swung around its sun fifteen thousand times before an accident of celestial mechanics dictated its capture by the gas giant. Fara moved her vantage point so she was right next to the comet’s coma and traveling in exact parallel. The collision was only minutes away and the comet seemed to be emitting a faint, unaccountable ticking sound -- no, not the alarm clock! Fara redoubled her concentration and the vision in space didn’t fade away; the alarm clock did.
      The comet’s tail was pushed by solar pressure straight toward the planet. When the tail streamers began to brush the planet’s surface, Fara halted where she was, respective to the planet—it was the perfect spot to observe the collision. Several times she had witnessed comets and asteroids hitting a planet like this, always on the night side. Every time there was a localized glow at the point of impact, visible without solar illumination. At most, the only other reaction was a barely perceptible band of color working around the dayside like gentle rippling on water far from a dropped stone. This time Fara would miss nothing.
      The coma drew closer to the planet; the planet’s surface was still undisturbed. As the coma edged into the outer atmosphere, a kernel of canary yellow appeared in the center of the coma’s diaphanous whiteness, caused by combustion of the nuclear material. Fara thought she could see the kernel start to break up, and then the nuclei reached the denser inner atmosphere. The planet’s green and violet covering began to part, peeling back to reveal a bright crimson underlayer...and that was the last thing Fara saw. She was yanked back to her bedroom by an uncontrollable fit of shivering.
      Fara knew now why she felt so tired before getting into bed. It was an attack of the flu, for which Fara hadn’t received an inoculation in her entire life. She got up and got the two winter blankets out of the bureau. Despite the darkness and her trembling, she managed to align the blankets edge-to-edge and lay them neatly over her pallet. She slipped in under the sheet and readied herself for a very cheerless night.
      The loss of a weekend to illness wasn’t the calamity to Fara that it would have been to a woman in a developed nation, or for that matter, a man in her own nation. The absence of labor-saving devices forced an accumulation of housework during the week; the practical result was that Fara had a work schedule just as crowded on Friday and Saturday, though she logged all that time at home without earning a single taka. Hasina filled in for her the next two days, quite rightly in Fara’s opinion, since the passing of a few more weeks would see Hasina doing this labor every day. Fara never got so well rested as when she was sick and she smiled inwardly through her fever and chills, thinking that anytime a vagrant germ wanted to single her out was acceptable to her.
      Fara woke Sunday morning with a lingering headache and decided that wouldn’t stop her from putting in a day at the jute mill. The cataract visible through her window was bad news—the monsoon season had come early. Fara flung on some clothes and hurried downstairs to the backyard kitchen garden. It was the only one immediately near because the buildings around Fara’s house fully occupied their lots or because the city-bred residents put their yards to other use. Fara drew plastic sheeting over the strawberry plants in their clay tubs. The other produce would have to cope.
      Father assured Fara last night that Hasina had managed the house perfectly in her absence. When Fara went to the kitchen, she found Father was mistaken in at least one particular: Hasina hadn’t cleaned the stove of ash all weekend. Breakfast was delayed and everyone got off to a late start, made worse by the necessity of donning slickers and galoshes before leaving the house.
Fara’s paycheck was cropped twice that day, once when she came to work on a late bus and again when the electric sewing machines all stopped chattering at once. Fara and twenty other women ate their ramen early while the problem was repaired. It took forty-seven minutes more than the duration of a lunch break and the mill paid nothing for work not done, no matter what the cause.
Fara’s bad luck continued after work. Standing in line to board the bus, she saw that the driver was an oversexed fiftyish man who gave her nothing but trouble in the past. She couldn’t take the next bus; the rain was still pouring down and the mill owners wouldn’t let her wait inside.
      “Well, it’s been a long time since I saw you last.”
Fara dodged his pawing and paid the toll box at the same time. She took a seat well back in the bus, expecting no further outrages during the ride home. Wrong; the driver, a patronage employee who would keep his job regardless of any misconduct, made sport of Fara’s sinuous walk by slinking the bus from one side of the street to the other. Diminished traffic in the heavy rain allowed him to do this without killing anyone, but people all along the route were drenched with water thrown up by the bus. This was too much for Fara to take and she got off one stop early, using the side exit. From there it was a whole kilometer of sloshing through shin-deep water to her house.
      Once safely home, Fara went directly to the garden, still in her rain gear. The current crop of staple vegetables was submerged, with the harvest date two weeks away. Fara waded into the vegetable plots, cut the tomatoes and pulled up the onions. She would try canning a big batch of green tomato and spring onion chutney tomorrow, lacking a better idea. The potatoes and yams might come through if the water level dropped soon, so Fara left them alone.
      Fara was sewing a button on one of Mujib’s shirts when Father’s motorcycle pulled in. It wasn’t even six o’clock.
      “You’re back early.”
      “Too much water; it might throttle the engine. I’ll unlash our boat in the morning. It could be the only way to get around if the streets get any higher.”
      Fara noted with pleasure that the nightly bag of groceries included shrimp, an infrequent luxury item. She got dinner underway, and right after stirring the shrimp into a stovetop pilaf, she left the kitchen to investigate raised voices in the dining area. Mujib had been scolded for coming to school late and waited until now to shower invective on the nominal cause, Hasina. Normally his sister was a family peacekeeper willing to accept due criticism, but not tonight. After much refereeing, Fara returned to the kitchen to find the rice had a tough bottom crust and the shrimp were badly overdone. Father ate the ruined dinner without complaining. The children refocused their anger on Fara.
      “What did you do to these shrimp, Fara? They taste like tire shavings!”
      “Whatever cookbook gave you the recipe for this, don’t let me read it, alright?”
      Fara chose to say something in her defense...and the visitor returned, entreating, desperate for her attention. Fara swallowed her last bite of the scorched rice and said:
      “Go to bed, you two. Go now.”
      After a short, poisonous silence, Hasina and Mujib mounted the stairs to their bedrooms. Father said nothing; he had never second-guessed his wife when she disciplined the children and he elected to show the same courtesy to his grown daughter. Fara took the uneaten food to the backyard fertilizer tub, grateful for the undiscriminating tastes of stalks and tubers.
      Father retired early. Paying no attention to her sister’s scornfully presented back on the other pallet, Fara changed into her nightshirt, slid under the sheet and let the visitor’s offering sweep over her.
Again there was no audio component and Fara didn’t care at all, not when there was so much to see. Her vantage point was a few light-minutes from the perimeter of a huge billowing cloud of straw-colored gas—a nebula. Facing into it, she noticed it was receding from her and concluded this was the effect of reverse chronology, something she was no stranger to. Fara wasn’t always treated to visions of otherwhere happening in real time; often she saw events taking thousands or millions of terrestrial years, squashed into hours; twice time was halted completely so she could survey the generation of celestial bodies with the rapt passion of someone present at a privileged moment. Fara guessed it was not an act of creation she was watching now.
      She moved forward very quickly, plunging in almost to the heart of the coalescing cloud. Glowing wisps of stellar gas, in a profusion of geometric and organic forms, were all around Fara. She rotated her vision in place, trying to follow the continually dissolving tracery of crescents, forks, spirals, arrows, hoops, leaves, all created from the mass of a giant star and interacting in a riot of ever-changing visual associations that would trivialize the lifetime effort of a hundred Alexander Calders.
      The gases were getting denser, packing in too thickly to let Fara keep watching the monumental show of mobile sculpture. A distant rumble, like a conch shell held to the ear, began in the compacting medium. A few seconds later, the trailing edge of a supernova’s wave front leaped in upon Fara. She threw her right arm up to protect her eyes, out of reflex; the part of Fara that mattered, thousands of parsecs distant, knew this and stayed where it was, contact still firm and unendangered. Fara turned her vantage in the dazzling white surround toward what she imagined was the center of its volume and inched forward. A few subjective minutes of progress ended in an abrupt halt; she came to the edge of a rapidly contracting black sphere and had no time to ponder her next move before the singularity, regressed into nonexistence, spewed out a colossal red-orange gout of superheated hydrogen. Fara couldn’t help being terrified for all her knowledge she would come to no harm. It wasn’t the scrumptious fear that brought her back to the world her body occupied, or the dragon roar of the reversed implosion. It was the sound of tapping on glass, on her own bedroom window.
      Fara heard her sister scream and opened her eyes. There in the window was a face, shining, misshapen, and after the initial shock, wholly familiar. Tikka had somehow gotten a ladder or something else to stand on and was pointing a flashlight at himself. What he needed at this hour was a mystery to Fara. His apparition at the window brought on Hasina’s screaming and Fara wanted to scream as well—not from fear. When the vision fled, there was a horrid feeling of finality about it. Fara couldn’t have said how she knew this. It was as though the visitor, in departing, had angrily slammed a door behind him. The immediate, teeming world where she ate and slept and toiled to get through each day was the only one Fara would ever know again, and even her mother’s death hadn’t affected her so. Fara surprised herself with her own strength; not allowing a moment’s pause, she got out of bed for a civil exchange with the person responsible for her loss.
      “It’s Tikka. Don’t be frightened, sister. Go back to sleep.”
      Fara opened the window, fortunately a sliding window or Tikka would have been knocked into the flooded street. He shone the flashlight on Fara.
      “Fara, the house was dark. I had to see you.”
      “Have you seen enough?” Fara knew how sheer her nightshirt was.
      “I just got word you were sick. I had to see how you were, and besides that...Fara, they’re sending me away for a whole month. It’s a requirement for engineering majors. I’ll be with a field crew, inspecting foundations, fixing earthworks, anything else they want me to do. We’ll be apart all that time.”
      It would be by far Tikka’s longest absence since Fara’s family moved to Dhaka and she could easily imagine how loathsome it was to Tikka. To have Fara always near was his dream, one that drove his schoolwork and every major decision of his life.
      “You’ll really miss me that much?”
      “You know I will.”
      The mood of urgency had waned enough for Fara to do something about the flashlight blazing in her face.
      “Give me that.”
      Fara took the light out of Tikka’s hand and turned it off. Tikka was glad to relinquish it; now he could grip the tottering ladder with both hands.
      “Just one month, Fara. I get my diploma right after that and we can be married.”
      Married. Fara knew she would live better as the wife of a gainfully employed engineer, even after feeding the numerous mouths Tikka would expect her to bring into the world. What else was there? Tikka was content to pass his allotted days in a continuation of his present existence, the one he’d always known. Fara had known something else, larger and more entrancing than Tikka, Father or anyone else had imagined. There was no substitute for it, none at all.
      Unless...
      “Fara, what are you doing?”
      Fara had turned the flashlight back on and held it to one side of Tikka’s head. For thousands of hours she had seen Tikka and should have had nothing new to appreciate in his malformed face, now beaded with rain. Instead she was looking at him intensely, moving the source of the beam to bring fresh shadow and highlight patterns into relief. Seeking outward was denied to Fara; desperation moved her to find the beauty and savor of strange vistas where she had never thought to look before.

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