From my
Lifestyles in Early South Asia: A Sourcebook for Time Travelers, which I hope to launch soon!
It's your lucky day. You're just minding
your own business in your favorite bookshop when a group of people
stumble in from the street. Sort-of. You're rather certain they weren't
there, on the street, a moment earlier.
They look exhausted and not
terribly clean. They talk in what sounds like a couple dozen
languages, and you see clay-encrusted pickaxes sticking out of a couple
of their knapsacks, and one of them is carefully putting away a stack
of narrow leaves covered with impossibly tiny writing. Another has a
set of crude little bowls in tow, and another a notebook open to some
sketches of – are those toys? and is that a musical instrument? Oh,
god, is that a lice comb? Then you smell something very odd and notice a
collection of spices, maybe, tumbling out of one of their pockets.
Some of them start toward the linguistics section, others toward the
history, others –
I should have mentioned that you're minding your
own business in your favorite bookshop because you happen to own your
favorite bookshop. So unfortunately it falls to you to mention that the
pickaxes are frightening your other customers.
"Oh, sorry. We should have realized. Smyth, can you take these out?"
"Certainly."
You're
just wondering if you also want to mention you'd rather not have Odd
Spice all over your floor, when one of them turns to you. "Would you
mind filling us in, dear, on what year it is?"
He seems terribly relieved when he hears your answer.
*
It's
your first encounter (I presume) with time travelers. They explain,
naturally only after they've fetched you a cup of tea "to soothe your
nerves, dear," "Our speciality is meeting people, seeing how they lived –
most of those unfortunate people no one's met for millennia, think of
that." You're assured that every effort is made for reports to be
accurate, as reliable as possible. "Though no one believes us when we
tell them we're time travelers," one mentions sadly.
For some reason,
you are inclined to suspend disbelief for a while. One explains that
their speciality is South Asia, and they pull out a tattered map…and
someone else explains they go to any time, as long as it's around 700 CE
at the latest. Others go later, but they like the really old stuff.
Then they go browse in your shop, and you tend to some other customers as you think over what they've said.
An hour or so later, as they're purchasing a stack of maps and
books, using wads of modern currency that seem to have been sewn into
their clothes, they ask you if you'd like to join them. Strictly
part-time, of course; you have a life. This is when you realize this has
been your lucky day, and of course you decide to join them at least
for a short tour.
However, for some reason you feel a bit
suspicious and ask them how the vacancy arose on their team. You could
swear someone murmurs something about human sacrifice, religion and all,
but you shrug it off as a problem with their accent....
...Over dinner, the time travelers you met at your bookshop get you
started on your first expedition. They introduce you to their newspaper
where they gain their information on places to stay on their travels
pre-twenty-first-century, and they advise you to eat at various
restaurants that specialize in historical cuisine in order to get the
full, um, flavor of life in various eras.
Then, at the end of dinner, they present you with Lifestyles in Early South Asia: A Sourcebook for Time Travelers,
which includes menu cards, some articles published recently in their
newspaper, and other documents that some of them wrote about their
travels, including some fictionalization, in with editorial notes and
(mostly, to tie it all together) an attempt by a modern-day writer to
tell the story of how humans have lived in South Asia....
