A Bhairavi Beyond the Stars

Written in memory of legendary vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar on her birth anniversary, this sci-fi short story features a NASA engineer and his vocalist sister who find themselves at the heart of a cosmic mystery that defies time, space, and reason.

At 03:17 Pacific Time, Ravi Deshmukh narrowed his eyes at an anomaly that had just appeared on the telemetry console at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The signal originated from Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object in space, travelling beyond the heliopause some 24 billion kilometres from Earth. The probe continued its quiet surveillance of the interstellar medium; its scientific heart still beating, its instruments whispering home across the cold vacuum with dignified precision.

But this signal was different.

Not a spike in plasma density. Not a realignment of gyros.

It was audio!

Ravi isolated the channel and boosted the waveform. The transmission was fragmented, distorted by cosmic radiation and nearly drowned in background noise –but it was music.

A drone. And then, unmistakably, a voice.

“Jaat kahan ho, akeli gori…”

It was Kesarbai Kerkar, in Raag Bhairavi.

Ravi sat motionless, the spectral graph pulsing in front of him. That voice, recorded in 1947, had been included on the Voyager Golden Record, a curated snapshot of Earth’s sights and sounds meant to outlast its creators, to be found and hopefully decoded by some alien beings wherever, whenever in our endless universe. Among Bach, Guan Pinghu, and the Senegalese percussion of the Njembe, Kesarbai’s Bhairavi had stood as India’s solitary musical ambassador. It was personally chosen by celebrated astronomer Carl Sagan, the architect of the mission in 1977.

Yet the disc was not a transmitter. It was analog. Passive. Its contents not designed for playback, let alone transmission across 22 hours of light-speed delay.

But the data was real. This was not a reflection, not ground-side interference.

Something, somehow, had chosen to echo Bhairavi back to Earth.

Ravi picked up his phone and dialled Pune.

***

In a sunlit room not far from Sarasbaug, Meera, Ravi’s younger sister and a respected vocalist of the Gwalior gharana, had just finished her riyaaz session. Her tanpura still vibrated in the air when the phone rang.

“Dada?”

“Meera, I know this your time of riyaaz. But I thought I had to call you.”

“No, Dada, it’s OK, I’d just finished –was just rolling up my mat. I was practicing for my Dharwad concert next weekend. Why did you call?”

“Meera, were you practicing Bhairavi by any chance?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“You’re not going to believe this,” Ravi said. “Voyager’s sending back Bhairavi.”

She paused. “Kesarbai’s Bhairavi?”

“Yes. Started transmitting about twenty-two hours ago. Takes that much time to reach earth.”

Meera’s breath caught. She sat down slowly. “But that’s impossible… it can’t happen. It’s not a broadcasting system. And there’s no pickup arm there. It wasn’t designed to play,” Meera said with the confidence of the experienced electronics engineer that she was.

“I know,” Ravi said. “And yet it came through. It’s transmitting. From twenty-four billion kilometres away.”

“What are you suggesting?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe nothing. Maybe something. But I had to tell you. I checked everything. It’s not Earth-based. Not interference. It’s Voyager.”

Her voice dropped. “You recorded it?”

“I’ve got a segment.”

He played it. On the other end, Meera sat very still as the grainy audio spilled through: Kesarbai’s voice, cracked by time and distance, yet still bearing her unmistakable voice signature in Bhairavi.

“That’s… the original,” Meera whispered. “The inflections. The architecture of the raga. So very Jaipur-Atrauli. Beautiful Bhairavi.”

She paused.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know,” Ravi said. “I am gobsmacked.”

***

The next day, NASA issued a brief, bland internal note: an anomalous audio modulation in the Voyager 1 downlink, origin under analysis. The media picked it up. The usual theories made the rounds –signal bounce, faulty processing, a cosmic prank of the electromagnetic kind.

The Indian press gave it a more poetic spin. “NASA detects Hindustani classical raga in deep space signal.”

But Ravi knew what he had seen. And heard. The mystery refused to rest.

A few days later, Meera called Ravi. “I’ve decided to end my Dharwad concert with Jaat Kahan Ho,” she said. “I feel like I have to sing it now.”

Ravi’s breath caught. “Can you do a live phone patch? Call me as soon as you begin. I’ll make sure I’m on shift.”

She agreed. The logistics were absurd: twelve-and-a-half time zones apart. Ravi managed to rearrange his duty slot. On the night of the concert, just as Meera was taking her final bow and preparing her concluding Bhairavi, Ravi sat alone in the telemetry room, eyes on the deep-space monitors, headset on, signal logs armed.

Her voice came through the phone –compressed, slightly tinny, but unmistakably hers.

She began Jaat Kahan Ho.

Ravi watched the data feeds flicker. One minute. Two. No change. But he kept listening —both to her voice, and to the instruments tuned to Voyager’s endless hum.

And then, there it was.

A faint spike. Not in the audio channel. In Voyager’s magnetometer telemetry.

A pulse, feather-light and unmistakable.

Ravi checked the timecode. It matched precisely the moment Meera had rendered a delicate meend –a seamless, unhurried glide between ma and pa, infused with the poise and pathos only decades of training could produce.

He stared at the screen. The harmonic signature was clean. Too distinct to be random. Too subtle to be mechanical.

It had no logical reason to exist.

And this was happening in realtime. Not a forty-four light-hour round trip delay. Was he imagining it? Or was something beyond spacetime that was at work? He’d never know. He never told Meera that the spike had occurred.

The signal never repeated. Voyager continued its silent pilgrimage into the black abyss.

For weeks after that, Ravi would keep the monitors on –not for data, but for some sort of rationale for something neither of them could explain.

It wasn’t science anymore.

It was resonance. Intention. A kind of call across space and time.

No one ever solved the anomaly.

But somewhere far beyond the orbit of knowing, a question floated still:

Jaat kahan ho, akeli gori?

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