What would you do?

She wasn’t herself.

It might have been the new city not agreeing with her, but we had moved far too often for location to affect her profoundly. Plus, she seemed cheerful when we first went around the place. She quit her job. This wasn’t garden variety depression or a passing phase. Something had affected her. What irked me was that she wasn’t opening up. Openness had been an unspoken principle of our relationship, and she had steered well clear of that responsibility.

That something was amiss was not immediately discernible. She acted normal. She kept herself busy; cooking, reading, TV. But then there would be times when she just sat there, lost in thought, biting her lips, playing with her hairband. I’d ask her why she gave up her job, and she would give me a smile, laugh it off. A plastic smile, a hollow laugh. We talked. In the way two people sharing coordinates talked.  Her only acquaintance was our neighbour, a lady with a morbid, forbidding demeanour. The first thing she told us was about the previous occupant of our flat. A young couple. Marital strife. Domestic abuse. Slit wrist. The lady exerted some sort of mysterious pull on my wife. She seemed alive while talking to her. The neighour was a switch that controlled my wife. This scared me.

“Do you want to step out today? Grab dinner?”

“Yeah OK”. No hesitation. Perfectly normal.

I took her to a resto-bar we’d been to on our first day in the city. The Watering Hole. It might have been a seedy bar for all you know, but for the price card.

She drank more than she ate.

“So. How are you?” It had been woefully quiet save for the sound of cutlery, and my intention was not to just eat and go back to status bloody quo.

She laughed. Hearty. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just that you seem off-colour of late. Is something bothering you?”

“How’s work? You like this city? I think it’s alright. A bit on the warmer side, but it’s OK.”

This sudden burst of eloquence took me aback.

“Yeah it’s good. Good place.”

“You know Didi was telling me about this place. She said you have good taste.” Didi is our neighbour.

“How did she know?”

“She gazed into her crystal ball. I told her dummy.”

She had left the tipsy station far behind. I was just pulling in.

“Why are you chummy with that lady? She puts me off."

“She’s a doll! She talks to me”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Why do you think my folks named me Ganga?”

I was bristled by her previous remark and was just about to give her a piece of my mind when this sudden whimsical question left me surprised a second time this evening.

“Huh?”

“My name. What do you think of it?”

“Ganga is such a majestic name! The mighty river, wild and untamed.”

I raised my glass, but there was no clink. She obviously had some broody, melancholic agenda to this question.

“But that’s not me. I am meek. Cowardly. Submissive. “

I was incensed.

“Is this something that woman fed you? She’s bad for you, stop talking to her! Wait, is this the reason you quit your job?!”

Her head was on the table. She looked at me through the glass.

“The girl who slit  her wrist, she did it as her husband stood watching. What would you do? Would you stand watching?”

I reeled. She had either gone overboard with her alcohol, or…  I chose to go with the former.

“You’ve had a bit too much to drink. Let’s go.”

I walked over to her. She still had her head on the table, but a curious expression occupied her face. That same vacant stare. I tried to help her up by her arms, but she pushed me away. With extraordinary might.

I was furious but all fury and anger gave way to morbid fear and shock when I looked into her eyes.

She had shrivelled up, in a foetal position, as if she was protecting herself. She was shivering violently. Tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“Please don’t kill me please let me live please please don’t hurt me…” She went on in a bleating voice.

Shock and alcohol induced laggardness made me stand motionless, a powerless observer to the scene playing out in front of me.  I shook myself out of my stupefied state, mustered whatever strength I had, and brought down my fist heavily on the table. 

“Shut the fuck up!!”

The effect it had on her was instantaneous, and pushed me further down my abyss of fear.

“What just happened to me? What did I say?”

She sat up straight and tried to arrange her dishevelled hair, looking questioningly at me. She was scared.

A glass rolled over and shattered, delaying the onset of a terrified silence.

Old man

An old man had no right to be optimistic. Men as close to the grave as he should only be thinking of the number of people who would be turning up at his funeral , shedding tears of formality, making their attendance known to all and sundry.

He picks up the cracked mirror and holds it with awe and pride. After all, he had given up all he had for this practitioner of non-pretense and unflattering commentary. The mirror hands him a rose and tells him he is most pretty. It then proceeds to draw his attention to a clearing in his otherwise luxuriant mane. He frowns, and knits his brows in silent disapproval. The patch bereft of hair had the shape of a dog-ear. The final batch of brain cells sends out a proposal which sends the old man into raptures of ecstasy, with an aftertaste of cardiac arrest.

He wakes up in the CCU, twiddles a dial, and tunes into Mann Ki Baat. Make in India reminds him of the idea that put him here in the first place. He yanks clear of all wires filmi style. He goes and incorporates a company and calls it Bald, a hair transplant company for dogs. Its logo is a dog-ear.Business goes through the roof. He is rolling in paper bills featuring a bald, bespectacled man smiling at him. When he is bored of all the rolling, he goes and pats a few dogs. One of the pat recipients takes exception, and registers disapproval with a well-timed bite of the old man’s flesh.

The old man feels ticklish and wet. He picks up the mirror. It hands him a rose yet again. Its redness is accentuated by the frothy red goo dripping from his mouth. A wave of optimism washes over him. But he checks himself in time. An old man as he had no right to be optimistic.

The significant other

Her mischief is in her eyes. She keeps batting her eyelids to shield that epicenter of attraction from her long time suitor. As if that was not enough, she maintains what many would call a respectable distance, probably as far as two ends of a cricket pitch. I prostrate before her, my forehead almost touching the ground, as if to provide a conduit for her electric magnificence to course the separation between us and travel through my body ; light me up with the potent concoction she was the custodian of. That dark formless elixir known to tame humans , ensconce them in its hypnotic allure. I ask her to come close. I beg her. All that she has for me in return is a smile; a smile that would implant in the otherwise calm and serene surface of her cheeks two beautiful dimples. That sort of smile that would make mortals of the highest intellectual order yearn and pine for her with an intensity most extreme. I hear her soft saccharine voice; it tickles my eardrum and makes me sway this way and that. She laughs again. But this time it’s not just laughter. Her voice has taken the shape of words. They seep into my consciousness, and I can hear her saying something.  “I am not playing hard to get, you are just too weak in spirit and desire!” I am stung by her accusation.

At this moment, all that I want is you. All that I want to embrace is you. Embrace such that where I end and where you begin, no one knows. Every microscopic particle of my being is attuned to this need. And there you stand, sticking a dagger through my resolve. What have I done to merit this misery? Why would you not satiate me, as you have innumerable others? Is this not cruel? Do you not have a conscience?

Let’s play a game, she says. Close your eyes. Or don’t. But lie still. Absolutely still.  Let the stillness of your body overwhelm you, let the numbness of your limbs permeate to every cell of your body. Let all activity in your brain cease. Lie thoughtless and motionless, with just your heartbeat reminding you of your existence. For every minute that you do my bidding, I shall come closer to you, until you and I become one.

OK that’s easy. No problem. I do as I am told. I just lie there. And suddenly, thoughts about the absence of thoughts start sprouting. About decay. About the futility of existence.  About perversion and decadence.  About the absence of an exit route. This cocktail of negativity constricts me. I feel short of breath. I wait for her disapproval. Even a clicking of the tongue would be like a drop of water in a parched mouth. But she is not there. She is gone. Her absence feels like a dead-weight tied to my legs, dragging me to the depths of a bottomless abyss. She won’t come back. She is too haughty to be affected by compassion and sympathy. She won’t give a second thought to the plight of this tormented soul, for she has many others to tend to. And I lie there in the deafening silence, twisting and squirming, praying that she blesses me tomorrow; hoping that she takes my hand and leads me through this treacherous night, to a morning of sunshine and possibility. 

The audacity of hope

A popular sitcom elegantly described creativity as something possessed by people with glasses who lie. Tell that to a person who was immobilized from the waist down, he thought, a person for whom creativity and imagination was the only escape route from a world that constantly reminded him of his inadequacy and sheer helplessness. A manic rage gripped him every time he rolled into his lecture halls in his wheelchair (sophisticated beyond belief) and students stood up by way of greeting, a nauseating mixture of pity and sympathy oozing out of their being.  Every contact with humanity reinforced his ‘invalid ‘status and exacerbated his despair and agony.  

The only way he could cope with this endless abyss of self -loathing and disillusionment was by involving himself in his work. It was something that he cherished; something he wished to be known by, a visionary scientist who took the concept of Artificial Intelligence and expanded the realm of possibility. His name was associated with some of the seminal developments in the field of robotics. The Android project, which further blurred the distinction between man and machine, was his brainchild. It was an idea that sprang forth from his overall cynical outlook towards mankind; it was his testament to the eroding values and ideals of that ilk.

He had been an athlete before he lost control of his feet; a long distance runner. It was a passion in which he invested all available time outside of his professional commitments. He would run for hours on end, as if bodily constraints didn’t apply for him. Looking back, he would chuckle to himself over the perverse cruelty that fate had meted out to him; it was almost like a morbid April Fool’s Day prank gone wrong. But he could not let that phase of his life fade away and die out with him, he wanted to leave some sort of tangible evidence by way of proof that he was once a vivacious, energetic chap. And it was this desire that drove him to build into his creation the ability to run. He set himself to this task and worked like a man possessed, often all by himself, and after 3 years of excruciating effort, he had given his audacious dream a physical manifestation. He called it Twerp, which was the nickname his colleagues had bestowed upon him. Twerp was made to resemble the Scientist at the peak of his youth. Even his sternest critics couldn't help but begrudgingly hail this momentous occasion in Robotics history.

He however had one more wish.  He wanted Twerp to take part in the Boston Marathon. Realizing that the name could possibly trivialize his seriousness and jeopardize his campaign, he dropped the ‘p’. This announcement was however met with ridicule from all quarters, not to mention fierce resistance and outright rejection from the organizers of what they called a stupid idea. “ That ruddy thing is not even human, is he even in his mind?!!”. The Scientist was not to be deterred. He went on a whirlwind opinion mobilization tour, taking his invention along. The tour was an outright success; people were simply overawed by the Android. And slowly, the tides began to turn in his favour. He now had a huge body of passionate supported lobbying for his cause. The organizers however wouldn’t budge. He took legal recourse, and made an impassioned plea in front of the judge, almost moving the courtroom to tears. After his speech, however, the judge said something that had the effect of lifting a veil that had shrouded the whole issue. His rationale was so elegantly simple, that no one could really raise any sort of opposition. “I really don’t understand all this fuzz”, he said. “ Twer is human!!”.