Orbital. A book I lived with for many days and nights. And then for periods I couldn’t make sense of – between rush runs and garrulous concalls, between silent dreams and chaotic honks, between pressured cabins and blinding night-lights. But I held it tight under all circumstances.
Because it had become a friend.
Across its 136 pages, Samantha Harvey chronicles a day in the lives of 6 astronauts from their spacecraft. What they see can easily dazzle even the most stoic of hearts. An expanse so mesmerizing that it can only be explained as an act of irreplicable magic.
The hundred-cymbal clang of sudden daylight. A few minutes later they come in off the ocean where the Maldives, Sri Lanka, the tip of India are ripe with morning. The shallow shoals and sandbanks of the Gulf of Mannar. Off to starboard are the shores of Malaysia and Indonesia where the sand, algae, coral and phytoplankton make the water luminous with a spectrum of greens – except now there’s tumbled broken-up storm cloud and the usually tranquil view is weary and troubled. As they ascend India’s east coast the clouds are thinning; morning strengthens, is briefly stark, and then a haze moves in at the Bay of Bengal, the clouds wispy and numerous and the Ganges silt estuary opens into Bangladesh. The umber plains and ochre rivers, burgundy valley of a thousand-mile ridge. The Himalayas are a creeping hoar frost; Everest an indiscernible blip. Everything beyond them, which caps the earth, is the rich fresh brown of the Tibetan Plateau, glacial, river-run and studded with sapphire frozen lakes.
Sights like these inevitably stir emotions hitherto unexperienced in them and I witnessed them embracing the enormity of space, and the insignificance of everything it shed light on. Because how else can one explain one’s existence as material and in the grand scheme of things, immaterial? The dichotomy of existence makes our routine bickering so futile, our tiffs, so lacklustre. When Chie hears the news of her mother passing away, she slips into nostalgia but tears don’t find an outlet in her space vessel. They remain suspended, perhaps, like memory – there, yet out of complete reach.
Except of course the universe doesn’t end at the stroke of mid-night. Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living.
As they go about their job – measuring their vitals, feeding the mice, capturing the rising whirlpool, observing a moon-bound spacecraft, feeling the weather among others, and recording them for scientific research purposes back home – they float through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, mindful of both its beauty and the ravages it brings to fore. What we have plundered already and how far (or close) we are from laying our toxic hands on space. I wonder if we shall turn so ugly one day that we won’t be able to become beautiful again? I hope not. Or atleast, Harvey seems to offer a ray of hope. A shining, uplifting ray of hope.
With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them.
Orbital has jewels and scars, and I want something exactly like this. Because that is life, won’t you say?
SEEMITA DAS 