Eternity is Moments

by R. P. Sand

 

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September-October 2024. 

Solicited for The Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth anthology 2025.

Read my author interview over on the Asimov’s blog, in which I talk about this story, writing craft, and inspiration.

 

 

I met my grandfather today. He wore his usual white cotton garb: kurta buttoned up to his neck, dhoti loosely twined about his legs. The clothes were a tad frayed at the edges, and the occasional hint of brown skin when he moved betrayed a hole here and there, but for the most part they were perfectly pressed and clean, free of stains and wrinkles. I resisted the urge to tell him he needed new clothes; I’d said it a hundred times before, and his response was always the same:

“What, these? Pah! They are perfectly good, they’ve lasted me years. Don’t fuss.” And then complain he had too much money than he knew what to do with in the next breath.

The sunshine was atypically bright in the absence of air tainted by pollution, casting him in a golden wash. I had to shield my eyes with a palm and squint, but he seemed unperturbed by the unusual brightness, eyes leisurely grazing the land, unaware of my approach.

We stood on a charming stone bridge, and it was both unlike any bridge I’d ever seen and remarkably close to the one in the park he took me to as a child. There were differences, of course. Here were lush, multihued trees, sparkling blue waters, and an array of vibrant blooms, while the childhood version was muted; the earth as humanity knew it had begun its slow death long before I was born.

In the subdued version of the past, my grandfather crouched to my height as I toddled delightedly into outstretched arms, then hoisted me on his shoulders and took me for a walk. He loved to talk and it didn’t matter that I could not yet formulate complete words in reply; he provided a steady discourse describing everything we encountered and I responded in gleeful babbles.

“Have you seen such a strong trunk before? Oh look! A peacock feather! I didn’t know there were any left in Agra. Come, shall we hang it on the wall and scare off chipkalis? What do you think, my kishmish?”

Ma and I visited from America only once a year, so I outgrew his shoulders in the blink of an eye, my vocabulary growing along with me. I latched onto his stories of the world as it once was, fervently devouring descriptions of verdant terrain and crisp air as though I’d never eaten.

“Trees and flowers were all I had when I was very young,” he would say. “We were too poor for anything else.”

As we walked, we remarked together on the increasingly rare blooms, the lackluster grass, the dearth of birds and squirrels, me from under my pollution mask, his face stubbornly bare.

Even if Ma and my masi tagged along, they would hang back on a bench at the park’s entrance, catching up rambunctiously as only sisters could; Masi with a big belly one visit and a bundle in her arms the next. Ma would share tales of our life in America, and my aunt of living in Agra with their father.

Over time our walk conversations evolved into questions, and eventually: tests. Because, Raagini, Masi’s daughter, was big enough now to join us, and my grandfather’s love for numbers translated into grilling his two granddaughters on their multiplication tables.

If it took me even a split second longer to answer 7 times 4, he would rap my hand with a hard finger, comment on the abysmal state of the American public education system. And Raagini would flash her teeth and remind him that she was well-versed in all the tables up to 14 because he quizzed her every evening at dinner, and wasn’t she so lucky to have a clever teacher like him? And more, wasn’t he so lucky to have a clever granddaughter like her?

Deep shame coiled around my heart, and a stifling fear that I, his kishmish, the eldest, the first grandchild, was no longer the apple of his eye.

#

 

I met my grandfather today. On the bridge that was not my childhood bridge, over waters sparkling blue under a brilliant sun. Birdsong roused in the air—how long had it been since we heard a bird? The notes rang clear and true, and in my grandfather’s face, still directed away and unaware of my approach, I saw bright flickers as though the notes prompted him into a journey of joyful memories. I knew this expression; I’d seen it at least once before.

It was in our cramped Chicago living room on one of his rare visits. I sulked in a corner because I’d failed to catch his attention with a middle school science fair trophy my young mind thought incredibly fancy. I devised a filter to render salt ocean water drinkable, a method that I later learned was hardly uncommon, but at the time felt like sheer genius and definitely grandfather-worthy.

But he was busy describing to my mother the Himalayan vacation he’d taken Masi and Raagini on—a luxury because who could afford vacations like that anymore?—swiping through picture after picture. Ma smiled politely and sipped her chai.

The next song came on the radio and he suddenly paused, face transformed into one of bright, contemplative joy, as though he was plucked inward to some place moulded by memory and melody.

“Do you know how to dance?” It took a moment to click he was asking me. I blinked, then shook my head.

“No?” He laughed, and I braced myself for a zealous reveal—was Raagini some sort of a kathak prodigy or something?—but instead he took my mother’s hand. “Then we must demonstrate at once!”

Ma, whisked into the arms of a father who scoffed at hugs, was as surprised and delighted as I. They spun around in what little free space the living room offered, and I watched with wide doe eyes, clapping to the beat until they pulled me into their circle. We danced and spun and danced, a euphoric waltz of three.

#

 

I met my grandfather today. In his white, slightly frayed attire on a charming bridge among trees rife with birdsong. When he finally noticed me, his face lit up like a thousand diyas on a festive night, gleeful as a child who knows festivals mean gifts and no school. Not unlike the time I sent him donuts after being accepted into my dream PhD program.

He was fond of sweets, too fond for his own good like many Indian grandfathers, perpetually sneaking extra barfi and donuts onto both his plate and mine after dinner.

My protests were thwarted by a “Full? You are not full! Don’t you know we have a second stomach, just for dessert?”

I called in while the donuts were delivered, watched him light up in real-time at the full to bursting box. My own pulse quickened with anticipation, how delighted was he just for donuts, how much more would he become when I shared my news!

“Oh, achcha, a PhD? In environmental engineering?” he said, arranging the donuts on a table and pulling out three dishes. “Does that pay well?” My heart sank.

“Well, not exactly, Nanaji. But that’s not the po-”

“You must always strive for abundance. Choose good pay, save as much as you can, make smart decisions. Did you know Raagini is starting her own business? But you were never really good at numbers anyway, nah, were you? You must make it a priority to learn.” And the commentary went on, injected periodically by his wondering when Masi and Raagini would return home from their daytime affairs so they could enjoy the donuts—the ones I’d selected were apparently their favorites—and I could not get a word in edgewise.

If I’d been given the chance to speak, though, what would I have said? That I believed I could make a difference? That my advisor was the chief scientist of the ecodome initiative, domed cities in strategic locations around the world in the hopes to salvage whatever quality of life we could? That I wanted to bring back a fragment of the world he described to me as a child?

Not many people took us seriously, no, all eyes were turned instead to our aerospace colleagues designing starships and dreaming of places far, far away from our dying Earth. When the world was so pessimistic about what I did, could I really begrudge my grandfather his lack of interest?

And… could I really begrudge the hoarding, material sentiments of a man who had had nothing as a child? He means well, he’s only looking out for me, I’m his kishmish, he means well… It became almost a mantra, looping and weaving through my thoughts, though it did nothing to allay the sting.

#

 

I met my grandfather today. Face illumined by brilliant golden sunshine, on a bridge among abundant foliage and sparkling waters, he reached out and gave my hand a tender squeeze. My heart swelled, and I was reminded of another hand squeeze, though that one was not with flesh but silicon beads.

Tactile interfaces: the new rage as people could afford less and less to visit loved ones across borders. Cyber hubs with such technology were continuously booked weeks in advance but it was my luck that my lab had a complete silicon body to interact with so I could call my grandfather the moment I found out he’d turned down my wedding invite, and place a pleading hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, beta, I cannot come. I tried my level best to convince her to choose another date for her exhibition, but… Raagini really relies on me, nah? She would be lost without my guidance.” And lost without the money you pour into her string of failed businesses, I thought, but could not bring myself to say.

I debated whether to point out that Raagini distributing invitations shortly after my own that bore the same date was more than mere coincidence.

My grandfather sighed, and for a few moments we sat in silence. His face, comprised of silicon beads that had rearranged and color-shifted to assume his features, suddenly twinged. The movement was slight, as though he suppressed a wince. Faint shrieks from somewhere behind him leaked through the lines; I did not have to check with Ma to know that she, too, was on a call, with her sister, presumably for the same reason as I. And that Masi, somewhere in the background, was cursing at her. A sound not uncommon since Raagini was born; Masi drove her daughter to eclipse all—especially in her father’s eyes—no matter the cost, forcing an insurmountable rift between the two sisters.

On the screen beside my silicon grandfather, the torso of my cousin appeared by my real grandfather.

“Hey girl, how are you, congrats on your wedding, but just give me a second nah—Nanaji, my throat is sore. And I think my nose is a little stuffy. Do you have something I could take for it? If you have a moment, of course, I don’t want to waste your precious time!”

It frustrated me that he couldn’t see what she was doing when it was so obvious. But it came as no surprise that he reassured her he had just the remedy, she should go wait for him by the medicine cabinet, he would be there in a moment.

Perhaps the gut punch I felt was reflected on my silicon face on his end because just as my grandfather stood up to go—fumbling a little more to steady himself than he ever had before—he gave me a sad smile, took my hand and squeezed, tenderly.

#

 

I met my grandfather today. Brilliant sunshine, a charming bridge that was not my childhood bridge, a tender hand squeeze. A playful breeze darted through the trees and with it came the scents of fresh grass and earth. Scents that were rare, foreign to my nose until the ecodome prototype was erected.

The ecodome initiative had originally focused on preservation and filtering an enclosed city’s air. But once I’d assumed the mantle of my retired advisor, my scientists and I engineered one that did all that and more: it detoxified, fertilized, and replenished tainted earth. The romantics among us nicknamed it terraforming, though that was not quite accurate. At the least, a single city is hardly a planet, and the process was constrained to within the domic structure.

But it was enough to garner wide acclaim, and my field was propelled forward as the one onto which humanity latched with desperate hope. It helped, of course, that it finally dawned on people that the capacity of the imminent starship fleet would barely scratch the surface of Earth’s population. Heavy whispers clouded gatherings, of lotteries, of meritocracies, of whether those in charge would simply claim seats for themselves and yield the rest to the highest bidders.

There were other whispers too, these among my colleagues, whispers about the Nobel and the spark of hope my design provided despite the daunting projected timeline of its widespread adoption. I had never coveted the Nobel, but when the call came from Agra that my grandfather was very ill, a thorn unprompted occupied my thoughts: please don’t die before I get this so that I may share it with you. I was immediately plunged into shame.

My grandfather did not die, well, not then, but while I received the esteemed award for the ecodomed prototype mini-town, Raagini took it upon herself to ignore him.

This I came to know during our call. My grandfather traced his silicon fingers over the medal—they carried a relentless tremble now. He commented on how beautiful the medal was, and then: how proud of me he was, and it might have been the first time he used those words. With his other hand, he instantly wired some money into my account, and while the ping on my app was far less substantial than I knew Raagini would get for a weekend start-up idea, I was nonetheless moved and grateful; I understood his articulation of love.

We sat together in silence for a handful of warm, close moments, when I noted a tint of sadness in his eyes.

“What is it, Nanaji? Is something wrong?”

“Oh nothing, nothing. Nothing is wrong.” He paused for a moment. “Well… it is… Raagini. You see I was just making adjustments to my will, you know, given my state, making sure everything is in order. And she came to know that as my first child your mother is both the executor and primary beneficiary. It is logical, she should see that. But still she hasn’t spoken to me since, and I am feeling… lost. I do not… I do not know what to do.”

Despite Raagini characteristically wrenching away his attention, the acute hurt and desperation in his voice clawed into my core, and for once my grandfather did not seem a zenith of a personality but a vulnerable old man. And so, for the first time since I was a child I leaned forward—hesitant at first and then determined—to give him a hug. And for the first time? He let me.

#

 

I met my grandfather today. Under brilliant sunshine, on a charming bridge, the scent of fresh grass and earth in the air. He held onto my hand, and gave it a second squeeze. Curiously, delicate notes of Veena stirred in the distance along with the soft thunder-like thrum of a tabla.

My family’s favorite instruments. They were played at my first daughter’s one month celebration, a small gathering of loved ones in the mini-town park we managed to snag for a few hours before returning to decrepit neighborhoods far from the ecodome prototype. We pretended for a while that we picnicked on a lush, alien world, or that we’d somehow travelled decades into the past on our own Earth.

During the modest festivities my bedridden grandfather was on-screen, and I held my daughter up for him to see. Our calls had grown less frequent over the months, not for a lack of trying, but Masi and Raagini would say he was very busy. So my daughter was a surprise to him, and he smiled—weakly but widely—lifting a hand to the camera.

“Very cute, very cute,” he said. “She looks like your mother did. I knew her as a child.” I blinked, studied his face, the father of my mother. Knew her as a child?

“Oh there is some news I can share,” he continued. “Do you know Raagini? She is pregnant. Can you believe it? I will live to see my very first great-grandchild.”

It was my first hint of the cloud that swathed his mind, a cloud composed by dissonant untruths. The second was much more than a hint, and was a few months later: Ma made her way to Agra at my insistence on painstakingly-saved award money, because my grandfather was critical. She was turned away at the doors of the lofty, immaculate bungalow that housed my grandfather, aunt, and cousin, turned away each of the three days she tried to see her father.

We were throttled by helplessness and anguish, despairing over what could be wrong; no amount of pleads or bribes or accusations could drive Masi into opening the doors for her. Why wasn’t Ma allowed to see him? Even calls were barred now. Though, occasionally, oddly, a ping would find its way to the social app on my device, at an hour I knew the two in my grandfather’s household were fast asleep: Hug for ‘kishmish’! Do you accept?

A few weeks after Ma returned to Chicago without so much as a glimpse of her father, Raagini and Masi went away for a weekend, along with his communication devices because their own were apparently faulty. The getaway was brutally truncated by an alert from their domestic help: my grandfather had died. Alone and cold, in his bed.

Masi informed us immediately, faster than she’d ever conveyed any news, and in the days that followed understanding dawned on us like a black, oily sun.

Ma was no longer the executor of his will.

She and I were not mentioned at all.

#

 

I met my grandfather today; sunshine, leaves, music. We stood on a charming bridge made of silver-gray stone that felt neither too warm nor too cold against my bare feet. The texture was a soothing one, and I was surprised I did not feel the usual crackles and aches in my soles.

I relished in pressing my sore feet against stimulating textures, a furry carpet, grass, warm sand. In the days following my grandfather’s death, I crumpled inwards, relinquishing myself into a black hole, and Ma sought to draw me out and soothe the grief we shared with salt soaks and a sandbox.

Our loved ones assumed I felt robbed, an enormous inheritance snatched away, but they were wrong. I grieved not for the wealth, not for the elevated, comfortable life I could have lived while the rest of the world toiled. My grief comprised the staunch void of a relationship that could have been.

It did not help, of course, that inundating obstacles piled up, delaying the timeline of widespread ecodome adoption. I scrambled for solutions, but it seemed the more I tore I my hair out, the more insurmountable the mountain of failures, and the imminent doom of humankind buried me alive.

The mountain only grew, and over the bleary years our home flooded with slammed doors and red eyes, a failed marriage, and once, even, a broken teddy bear cup.

“Tea party? Right now?! Can’t you see I’m working?!” It was as though someone other than me shouted those words, and yet, they continued to tumble from my mouth, words I thought I’d never say, words like: “Be more like your older sisters, they don’t waste my time with such nonsense.” and “How do you think I paid for the clay you used for this cup?” followed by a door slam, the sound of shattering, and my youngest in tears.

I spent many a night in my lab while Ma—no stranger to my curses and slams—took care of my three girls. Sleep was a thing of distant dreams, and instead I wrestled with the weight of failing not only my grandfather, but the entire world, stale coffee on desk, smog masking stars outside. How could people have trusted me so quickly, so blindly? How could they have pinned their hopes on someone like me?

Meanwhile, my aerospace colleagues across the aisle had achieved their goal, spurred ahead of schedule, in fact, by the discovery of some key substance that finally rendered starflight stable and sustainable.

A fleet of starships, ready to depart, limited capacity, well, good for them. What would become of the rest of us? By the time ecodomes became a thing, the remaining population would be greatly diminished.

The fleet was launched and word came through the grapevine that Masi and Raagini had bought their way onto it. They had boarded different generational ships, ceasing to be on speaking terms over goodness knows what.

One day, when the fleet was distant blips in the sky, the sounds of laughter drifted in through the filtered windows of my lab. The disturbance annoyed me at first, but when I looked up from the disarray of papers and calculations on the desk, my breath caught at the sight: my three daughters, holding hands and spinning in a circle on a patch of barren grass, howling with glee every time they fumbled or slowed. Spinning, spinning, spinning. My daughters’ faces were hidden behind their pastel cat-eared gas masks, but I could picture their smiles, discern their pure, simple euphoria.

I was reminded of another spinning circle, in a tiny living room. My grandfather’s eyes, flushed with delight, as he danced with Ma and me.

In that moment, the inferno that infected my thoughts dissipated. Funny how a seemingly trivial instant can do that. In stillness that felt both alien and comforting alike, I simply watched them.

Masi once told me that mothers’ sisters are called masi because they are “ma jaisi”; they are like mothers. But… she was far from the mother I wanted to be, the embodiment of my grandfather’s misguided values about worth and abundance, amplified in the daughter she raised. Not very far, however, from the mother I had become.

Here I was trying to build a future for my girls, but what good is a future if I deprived them of a present? Blinded by the bigger picture, I’d completely missed the little things, missed how my youngest clamored for my attention and approval, not unlike I had for my grandfather’s, and missed that my two oldest never disturbed me because it was safer to seek Ma’s unflinching support instead… Ma. Oh, Ma.

How I had failed her too. She’d lost a father, yes, but she lost a daughter as well.

I pressed my forehead to the cool glass, watching my spinning girls, and fervently vowed to do better.

My thoughts capered from one pleasant memory to the next, from a spinning circle in a tiny living room to plates stuffed with sweets to long walks in an Agra park where we collected peacock feathers to frighten off the chipkalis that skittered across walls in Indian homes. From spinning circles to peacock feathers.

And something clicked.

A seed of an idea that would later change the world: not ecodomes, at least, not now, but ecohomes.

The world was no stranger to self-sustaining, zero-waste homes, and my fellow environmental engineers were caught in perpetual loops of upgrades and adaptations. But those constructions required new land or demolition of existing structures, building from the ground up. Which excluded cities.

The structure of my ecodome, simply put, was a domic mesh of fields that could cover existing territory—forcefields, people would say, another inaccurate, romantic term. If I scaled down the generators, enmeshed existing walls of smaller spaces with suitably parametrized spinning forcefields that deflected unwanted toxins—the way peacock feathers deflected chipkalis—I could provide a near-term incarnation of the technology. It would take much less to convert warehouses, apartment buildings, trailers and the like citywide. People would be able to breathe fresh air and grow fresh food aeroponically within their homes, and it did not matter that diverted funds would mean ecodomes being further delayed; the potential number of lives saved was worth it.

It was towards this vision that I directed myself with reanimated vigor, but I spent no more sleepless nights away from my family.

Within years, a substantial percentage of our city was transformed, and along with it, the relationship with my daughters deepened.

In the entire kineograph of time that passed, my colorful, close daughters growing to have colorful, close daughters of their own, initially in ecohomes and then the very first ecodome, I lived the epitome of abundance.

True abundance.

I think, in the end, my grandfather, who hoarded and counted every rupee unless it was spent on the favored daughter and granddaughter, grew to regret the values he encouraged. I thought often of those obscure social pings, of the silent gestures that voiced what he could not.

My grandfather was alone at the time of his passing. Surrounded only by domestic help as his daughter and granddaughter vacationed.

But me? Under a dome brimming with vivid sunlight, crisp air, and fresh earth, surrounded by my daughters, my granddaughters, and a buoyant, babbling great-granddaughter with henna red cheeks, I drew my last breath.

#

 

I met my grandfather today. Brilliant sunshine, sparkling blue waters under a stone bridge. Vibrant trees and blooms swaying in the breeze, birdsong and Veena and tabla sweetening ears, scents of fresh grass and earth in the air.

My grandfather wore his usual white kurta and dhoti, slightly frayed at the edges. His eyes flooded with light and warmth, as did his hand tenderly gripping my own.

His smile deepened and then came the words:

“Come, my kishmish. Shall we go for a walk?”