Finally, Tokharian Tales

The Tokharian Tales is a project I first started seven years ago, and was based on a glimpses of life I got around the time when I was working as a consultant for a now-defunct dotcom. I was living in a high-rise condo on King Street in downtown Toronto at the time, and the first glimpse came to me shortly after I had broken my wrist while snowboarding over the weekend; I curtailed my snowboarding, drove home into the city, and spent the night popping aspirin pills and feeling sorry for myself. I was spwarled out onto my couch for hours into the night, and at some point I noticed a woman was still working in her high-rise office across the street, late into a Saturday night, probably striving for a promotion. In that moment, I realized that even into the far future, on that day when men and women start to depart the planet on spaceships for new futures, there will still be unrecognized people working late into the night for promotions, striving for recognition, even though such recognition is cosmically insignificant. I built on this glimpse of life and as people started quitting my dotcom — quitting, well, or getting fired — I wrote a story for each of the people as they left. I wanted to remember them somehow….

The feeling of working in a dotcom which was going bust in the hinterlands of Canada felt sad, and as the people gradually faded away and died, it felt more and more what life was probably like for the ancient inhabitants of the far western desert region of China. The Tokharians gradually faded and died as their land became less lush and more deserty, and with the blustry gales of snow in the hinterlands, I myself left like the last King of the Tokharians….I want to thank all my former faded Canadian coworkers at BroadVision, who are remembered inside this novel — I want to thank Sean Fitzpatrick, Lisa Bright, Rendi Wardhana, Martin deLoughery, Eric Yip, Alice Jen, Ben Torres, Sergey Grish, Noelly Bonilla, Adisa Lazetic, Chris Wojtowicz, Tina Wong, Greg Selvitelli, Mark Wainess, Jim Vastbinder, Irina Sedenko, Manisha Arora, Gerrie Weldon, Pauline Wylie, Debra Williams, Bill Groves, Jonathan Pollock, Dale Hsu, Marie Sarrasin, Greg Mezo, Kristina McBlain, and of course Sridhar Narra, who somehow became “Sridhar Joe, Hovercipher Pro!”