The Visitor- Part 2

I stared blankly back at it. The sound seemed to be coming from the creature, but in a very human-like voice. I managed to sit straight.

Sensing that I was too shocked to reply, it spoke again “I heard you from outside. Why on earth were you talking to yourself?”

“Uhh…” I just sat there motionless frozen to sub-zero.

“Because you cannot go to Mars and then talk to yourself, that’s why” it said and fell on my bed laughing.

I looked in disbelief at the thing rolling on my bed. Was that a genuine laughter? It sounded so. It got up and looked at me. Maybe I should call it a ‘him’ seeing that he introduced himself as Paul and sounded like a male.

“Get it? ‘Why on earth’… ‘Mars’…  I’m taking a jibe at your astronautic capabilities. Get it? Oh come on!” he genuinely looked disappointed, and looked at me apprehensively.

“Oh! I forgot” something seemed to have occurred to him, “I’m in India. Do… you… speak… Engliiiishh?” he said slowly.

“Uhh?” even my mind-voice was awestruck.

“How do I make a connection with you if you don’t understand me” he said it more to himself than to me, “Oh wai-wai-wait I know an Indian song. I hope that’ll ease you up”

As I prayed against any “yo-yo Honey Sing” he started singing “Why this kolaavery kolaavery kolaavery dee”

“Oh please kill me already” my mind-voice shut its ears.

“See? I’m friendly. Don’t be afraid.” he, the thing, said to me now stopping the song.

“What are you?” I managed to speak at last. He stared at me as if offended.

“I mean, who are you?” I corrected myself.

“So you do speak English. Man, you made me show off my singing skills” He said.

‘Really?? Singing skills?’ I shushed my mind-voice trying to think straight, “You didn’t answer me”

“Boy, you’re demanding.” He snickered “Okay take a guess. Look at me and tell me you haven’t seen me before.”

“No I haven’t. I don’t know who you are” I lied. I had indeed seen something like ‘him’ before. But only in the movies.

“Oh, I’m sure you know” he wasn’t giving up.

“You’re an alien” I guessed. That must be it. The other guesses in my list were Yeti, Chupacabra and Loc Ness monster but I didn’t think those would be smart guesses.

“No YOU’RE an alien” he hissed, his smile fading for a few second and then he recovered, “I’m sorry. Don’t say the A-word. I find it disturbing.”

“But you are an alien right? You’re not from this world” I asked.

“And you’re an alien to me. How does that feel huh?” he spat back. Honestly I didn’t feel as offended as he did, but then people have their preferences of offensive words.

“Okay okay sorry. No A-word” I apologized feeling a little confident now and I got up from the floor. He was hardly up to my shoulder height. But there was still something daunting about him, perhaps the balloon head.

He looked up to meet my eyes, “That’s good” and then he sat on my bed, “I’m hungry. Do you have something to eat?”

“You still haven’t told me what you are” I pressed. He raised the skin above one of his big eyes where people usually have eyebrows and I corrected myself “… who you are”

“Well I’m an inhabitant of &^%#$%*@”

“Um… what?” I felt lost because he had just made some strange noise, a throaty gargle mixed with a nasal sound and just hearing it made my head heavy.

“Never mind. I don’t know how to say it in English. It’s how we call our planet. It’s in a galaxy far far away.”

“Did you just quote Star Wars?”

“Yep” he grinned. I wanted to ask how he could’ve seen the movie but I let it pass.

“So you are really an ali-” I was going to say it again and then corrected it, “You’re an A-word”

He laughed loudly, a hearty laugh, “You make it sound like a curse word. Yeah, I’m an Extra-terrestrial… to your planet.”

“E.T?”

“Yep”

“And calling you an E.T is fine?”

“Yeah it’s fine” he said shortly and didn’t explain further, “So can I get something to eat?”

I passed him the plate of Murukku that I had brought back from my vacation to home. He chewed on it with surprising efficiency “Mmm, crunchy. As much as I feel sorry about your species I enjoy your food. That’s the one thing you’ve done good. Food in my planet is bland. We don’t have spices you see.”

“Sooo…” I thought of a reply to give “take some spice from here with you”

‘What? Ask him how he knows so much about us’, my mind-voice was back, now that there was no danger.

The E.T that called himself Paul chuckled “I wish!”, but didn’t explain further and munched on some more Murukku.

“Sooo…” I pondered over what to ask him, “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing. Just traveling.” He said looking at the snacks and not me, but again didn’t explain further.

“You can travel planet to planet, I mean… galaxy to galaxy just like that?”

“Yeah, pretty much” still not looking at me but the snacks and then his big fluorescent eyes turned towards me, “Oh I’m sorry. Where are my manners? You see, I didn’t simply land here because I wanted to. My shuttle broke down. So I had to park it outside your house.”

‘Oh that’s what the bright light outside the window was’, my mind-voice put two and two together.

“So you crash landed on earth? You found lights on in my room so thought you’d come say Hi” I tried to make it sound formal all the while my mind-voice was shouting ‘Cliché! What a Cliché’

“Well, there was a lot of stuff that happened in between but that’s a fair statement which explains how I got to be sitting here” he said having almost finished eating the snacks.

I nodded and tried to make more conversation before he got bored and left my house, “So… Paul. If you guys have been out there for so long, I mean your species as a whole, why haven’t we heard from you before? You know there are satellites listening to radio frequencies from outer space.”

Paul seemed hesitant at first and then spoke, “Well kid, I belong to a highly intelligent species. There are only a handful of such elite species in the universe. Our people didn’t see it worthwhile to contact you humans.”

“What do you mean?” I said it a little too loudly than my usual self.

“I’m sorry if that offends you, but that’s the truth. We usually keep it to ourselves. Like the secret societies in your world. We are like a gang of Ph.D graduates.”

“So you don’t hang with us kindergarten folks.”

“Umm, more like primates.”

“Okay” I didn’t like that I was agreeing to him, “What makes you think you are so smart?”

He kept his cool, “I travelled several galaxies to get here in less time than light takes to travel from Sun to Mars.”

“Oh” was all I could manage.

“The deepest into space you’ve gone is to your own moon and the farthest you’ve sent anything is the Voyager, that that has gone just a little a bit farther than Pluto.”

“And it’s still going.”

“Yeah yeah, Very impressive. You know where I’m getting at. How are you supposed to go ‘To Infinity and Beyond’ with such speed?”

 “Point taken” I couldn’t argue with that, and my mind-voice said ‘He’s quoting Buzz Lightyear now’.

“That’s why I said I don’t want to offend you. It’s a decision taken by powerful people that Earth is not yet ready for our contact.”

“We can be taught”

“There are limitations. Even if we dumb it down from our end, the technologies are way out of your understanding. You see, your communication skills are not yet developed to match ours. Just like maths has to be taught in numbers and not English, our technology needs a very high level language.”

“Like Java?”

He chuckled, “Something like that”

“We can learn that language”

 “You can teach sign language to a Gorilla or Orang-utan but will you go about teaching sign language to a cat? Java is a high level language for computers. But it’s made on top of low level languages which are made on top of binary language. In the end the bits and bytes are what make the difference, but they are nothing on their own. You need to arrange them as per the rules of a language. Can you write a Java program in Zeroes and Ones straight from memory? It’d need a powerful mind to do that right? That’s how our language is. Language makes difference”

“So you’re saying that language has the power to make people smart?”

“Yeah, your languages are stupid. Just 26 letters and a handful of grammatical rules that people are too cool to follow. But Chinese, now that’s a language. Took me almost a month to learn”

“A month?”

“Yeah, can you believe it? So long for one language.”

I was going to say that that was not what I meant but he continued, “An average Chinese or Japanese is smarter than an average person elsewhere. That’s because their minds are moulded to process more information per symbol than other languages do.”

“So why can’t we process your language? You can teach it to those smart Chinese or Japanese people.”

“There’re still limitations” he grinned, “We use more than just sounds to get our thoughts across, and that’s not something you can do yet.”

“Like what?”

“Just like how you use vocal sounds along with your body language to get a point across effectively, we use vocal, nasal and mind-voice.”

“Mind-voice?” I was shocked to hear the name I had been using all this while to refer to my inner thoughts.

(--To Be Continued--)