Autoplay: Not-so Stories

by G. Sampath

  In fact, on this occasion, too, spotting him in transit between the bedroom and the kitchen, both his spouse and his female parent, who were in the living room watching a popular TV soap, had asked him what he wanted, and his mother had even made to get up and come to the kitchen to see what her son wanted but just then a very important emotional breakthrough occurred in the TV soap they were watching and she, though a devoted mother, still happened to linger a few seconds to catch the exchange between the two female characters between whom the emotional breakthrough was happening, and in the space of that delay, her son had located the salt jar and announced his discovery (without going into the specifics) loudly enough for both the parties to hear even through the din of the searing background score of the emotional breakthrough that was being enacted in the soap that his spouse and female parent were together engrossed in, and now that there was no immediate requirement for them to temporarily abandon their entertainment to service the toddler-CMD’s male parent, both of them stayed put in front of the television screen in the living room.

  In other words, had the toddler-CMD’s male parent not chosen this particular evening to loosen the bonds of patriarchy a little, not chosen this particular evening to exercise unprecedented self-reliance on a matter concerning his evening meal, as well as demonstrating tremendous strategic foresight with regard to the fraught interpersonal dynamic between his spouse and his female parent, the toddler-CMD’s hyper-extreme, off-the-age-category-charts suffering, whose every nanosecond was like a light year for the bawling-screaming toddler which seemed not so much to be in agony as an incarnation of agony itself, would probably have ended without there being any added time, in fact, ended at least 120-140 seconds sooner than it did, for the salt jar would then have been resting in its usual place, and the female parent would have located it the very instant its necessity became operational, added the salt to the water, and taken the potion to the matron-neighbour in a matter of seconds. But the male parent, who had displayed admirable éclat – for reasons outlined above – in electing to help himself, had unfortunately, and crucially, failed to carry his vision of self-reliance and strategic pre-emption through to its logical end. So pleased had he been with himself for having gone out of his way, without disturbing either of his female ministering angels, to do by himself what ought, in the normal course, to have been done for him by either of them, that it had completely escaped him that he needed to follow, in this instance too, the principle, whose vital significance he had oft expounded upon to his captive female domestic audience (as well as to his somewhat less captive mixed-gender audience at work) every time a utility household item dear to him such as a nail-cutter or scissor or stapler had gone missing, namely, the importance of replacing every utility item back in its one and only appointed place – the same locus where it had been at rest prior to being displaced by humans for their use – after its use, and how the diligent practice of this principle would yield immense benefits in terms of time saved, opportunity costs saved (you could be using the time you would have spent searching for the utility item you were unable to locate doing something productive), and mental agony saved, the mental agony in this instance being the one caused by the time and opportunity costs incurred on account of not being able to access the missing item immediately upon becoming conscious of its necessity for a task at hand.

  And yet he had failed, unforgivably, from the point of view of his bawling-screaming offspring, to follow his own sacred principle of replacing the salt jar in its place in the kitchen, leaving it instead on the table under the newspaper he had been reading with his dinner, which fact (of it being under the newspaper) both kept it out of the swift visual scan performed by his canny female parent some ninety seconds earlier, and also added a few more seconds to the process of its (salt jar’s) discovery when he came rushing back from the kitchen, as even he, despite being cognizant of its physical coordinates, could not spot it right away either and had had to expend valuable seconds moving books and keys and watches and earphones around before finally picking the half-folded newspaper up unthinkingly and discovering, with crushing relief, the salt jar beneath.

  His spouse snatched the salt jar from him before he could give it to her. Ignoring the dwarfish, square-bottomed plastic spoon inside, she scooped out a pinch, mixed it in the bowl and hurried to the bedroom where the matron-neighbour was seated cross-legged on the floor with the toddler-CMD’s head on her lap, his nose pressed against the soft cotton material of the nightie wrapped in tight creases over her fatly folded right thigh. The female parent squatted right behind the toddler-CMD’s head, on the other side of the flailing body from the side where the toddler-CMD’s male parent kneeled, gripping his offspring’s head firmly.

  The toddler-CMD’s screams hit new highs in terms of volume and pitch as the neighbour poured the salt water into his right ear, gently, gripping the restless, struggling, twisting head with the bawling mouth with her left hand, pouring with her right, and as the liquid trickled in, and the toddler squirmed even more violently, some additional muscular aid from the male parent was requisitioned to hold the head still for the procedure to be carried out without all the water spilling out of his ear hole and down his face and neck.

  As the water went in, and began doing what it was mandated to do, the toddler-CMD’s cries began to soften. Abruptly, the matron-neighbour, whose face was bent close to the toddler-CMD’s ear, jerked her body back with a muffled cry, startling both the parents and causing them to accidentally head butt each other. And as they recovered, what the two parents saw they would never forget, and neither would the toddler-CMD, even though he could only ever see it with his mind’s eye, not having been in a position to do so when the sight presented itself in real time for spectation.

  And this is what the matron-neighbour and the toddler-CMD’s parents saw: as the salt water trickled out of the baby’s ear, out came crawling, in all its full-bodied glory, a wood-coloured, tiger-striped, medium-sized wasp, stinger and all, looking menacing even when wet. The female parent shrieked, the male parent, who feared any organism that wielded a stinger, and also had BP issues even at his pre-middle age, suffered a near-cardiac incident, while the wasp buzzed and whizzed and, without having been made to atone for its massive misdemeanour, took to the air, weaving its leisurely way to the kitchen, and thence exiting through the open window.

  Comments were duly exchanged between the four adults regarding the size and temerity of the said invertebrate. The toddler-CMD’s outraged cries, by now, had subsided substantially, to a more sedate wounded whimper of the how-could-you-let-this-happen-to-me kind. The matron-neighbour was profusely thanked by all present, with the female parent resolving to retire, once and for all, all question marks pertaining to the former’s status appropriateness for socialization purposes vis-à-vis the latter. A visit to an ENT specialist the next day, or rather, the same day, given that it was 12.45 a.m. when the closing ceremony, so to speak, of the incident was taking place, confirmed – much to the relief of the male parent who by then had had to endure non-stop bombardment of guilt-inducing closing remarks on the incident from his still semi-hysterical spouse on how he had single-handedly extended their offspring’s agony and possibly also endangered his future well-being by irresponsibly choosing this particular night to misplace the salt jar (‘As if I knew in advance!’ protested the male parent, to no effect) – that there was only mild inflammation and minor tissue injury but no permanent damage done by the wasp, which the ENT specialist found miraculous considering the amount of time the wasp had spent exploring the insides of the toddler-CMD’s auditory apparatus, and what was even more miraculous, the wasp’s stinger had not punctured the toddler-CMD’s tympanic membrane. The male parent then conjectured that since the wasp entered the toddler-CMD’s auditory apparatus head first, and since the stinger was on its ass, unless it was able to turn around 180 degrees within the extremely confined, and presumably claustrophobic (even for a wasp) space of the toddler-CMD’
s outer ear canal, its stinger would not have been anywhere close to within stinging distance of the toddler-CMD’s tympanic membrane, with which the ENT specialist concurred, admitting that even he had never seen a wasp locomote into an opening in reverse gear.

  Though it would be difficult to pin down the impact on the toddler-CMD’s psyche of this whole incident, which the toddler-CMD says he has no organic memory of, but only internalized and memory-like solidified images based on his female parent’s narrative iterations, after hearing the whole story, nearly every member of the CMD’s Leadership Team was inclined to believe, given the toddler-CMD’s tender age, the extreme suffering he had had to endure at that age, and the central role played by this narrative during his formative years, that it must have had a definitive impact on his psyche and personality and perhaps, even life goals and political ideology. The only dissenting note was struck by the Senior Vice President (Leadership Development & Talent Management), who held that the real question that needed to be asked was the obverse of this one, viz., what impact did the specified incident of the wasp have on the temperament, personality and life cycle of the other players who had played key roles in the selfsame incident – namely, the toddler-CMD’s male parent, his female parent (and the all-important interpersonal dynamic between the two with attendant impacts on short-term, medium-term and long-term parenting outcomes vis-à-vis their offspring), the matron-neighbour, the female grandparent, and last but not the least, the wasp that caused the toddler-CMD so much trouble11 and still got away, with no accountability, and no punitive measures being taken against it by the concerned responsible adults vested with HR functions.

  THE BRF

  Ever since the attacks began, both the newly appointed National Security Advisor and the Prime Minister’s Office had been holding con-call briefings with IB, RAW, NIA, CBI, CID, BSF, CISF, CRPF, NSG, COBRA, SOBF, SF, MF, and MI heads, as well as the heads of all the thirty-one state police forces to review the progress made on gathering leads or at least some sort of promising reliable intelligence on the BRF so as to be able to strategize and plant appropriate stories with the gaggle of national security editors of national and regional English and vernacular-language newspapers and news channels and news agencies who were daily badgering the head of the PIB and also every single person working in the MHA, from the chaiwala and the peons and PAs to every one of the secys – under, deputy, joint, over, side, principal, chief, plain, strawberry – all the way to the minister himself as well as the minister’s cook, driver, cleaner, members of the A-Z category security detail, concubine, pimp, wife, in-laws, assorted relatives, business acquaintances, henchmen and hawala operator for fresh inputs on a matter of national security and national self-esteem and Hindu Aryan Indian culture that the entire 2.1-billion-strong citizenry seemed to have overnight developed a limitless appetite for and could not have enough of either on print or broadcast or online or social media with even the international press hyper-salivating and FedExing their camera crews and top-dog correspondents and columnists to New Delhi to camp out here and, even if they got nothing, to at least churn out colour pieces about this terror group that called itself the Bukkake Revolutionary Front, or the BRF.

  But so far it was all a blank with the videos and pictures posted on social media seemingly having materialized from shell accounts instantly deactivated post-dissemination and protected serially by asymmetric cryptography and a maze of poly-encrypted, public key algorithms based on integer factorization and elliptic curve correlations that would be impossible to hack through even if you gathered the entire universe’s collective computing power since the Big Bang into one salted mega-chip under your command and set it loose upon the problem.

  No way.

  They had drawn an invisibility cloak around their digital activities and accounts and that was that, according to the Israeli security experts flown in all the way from Baghdad in exchange for New Delhi not condemning Tel Aviv’s decision to execute four Palestinian foetuses soon after they were born for having hatched a murderous conspiracy while in the womb – communicating via coded calcium compounds bonded to placental nutrients – to launch a suicide bombing attack on the Knesset when they turned thirteen.

  The first BRF attack came on a Saturday afternoon. It was a slow juice day. The entertainments were closed. Human vegetation was being cooked on rooftops across the city in large, uncovered dishes. And the terror video had exploded instantly, its digital shrapnel going viral on social media and coagulating several hundred thousand streams of consciousness within twenty minutes of being tweeted.

  It was basically a ten-minute clip of the PM giving a speech from the Red Fort on International Prime Minister’s Day. While he addressed the citizens of HAIR and those parts of the international community that had tuned in to his speech about his achievements as PM – about how he had grown the national reserves of frequent flier miles to heretofore unprecedented highs, about how the computer-aided cow-breeding programme that he’d launched for developing good-mannered cows that wouldn’t tarnish HAIR’s international image by straying onto car lanes or bus lanes or national highways or waste dung by randomly strewing them on car lanes or bus lanes or national highways had yielded windfall dividends for the nation in the form of CAGR of 65 per cent in foreign exchange generated by export of cow dung, 85 per cent self-sufficiency in cow urine and 91 per cent reduction in rape cases in rural areas, about how the Ultra-Smart Cities, or USCs, of his pet project, the Ultra-Smart Urban Renewal Yojana, better known as USURY, had already finished bombing eleven of the seventy Smart Cities they were meant to replace and were proceeding on schedule with the cold calling of eligible demographic elements residing in non-USURY areas and persuading them to purchase property in the caller because they were all – every single one of the USCs were – Mensa members, unlike the non-USURY cities they were currently residing in, and who, asked the PM, rhetorically of course, doesn’t like to live in an urban setting that is as smart as themselves, if not smarter, not to forget the fact that all the USCs were equipped with assassin drones with automated command-control systems that immediately terminated all prospects who were too dumb to exist anyway because they were not smart enough to commit their extant savings and future earnings to a property in a USC, and about the various other initiatives of his government and their various superlative outcomes, and about how, despite the various superlative outcomes of his government’s various initiatives, the Opposition wanted his head on a platter and how he would gladly dispatch them his only head on a platinum-coated silver inlay 27-carat bevelled Gili gold platter with Mughal-era art work on it if that’s what they wanted so long as he could continue to toil for the nation and the nation’s aspirational tax-paying upper-lower middle-middle classes from aforementioned platter, and so on in that vein – a series of masked men emerged on the podium.

  The intruders, clad in black overalls, leant a Zenplast telescopic aluminium ladder on either side of the bullet-proof glass enclosure laminated with polyvinyl butyral to provide the occupant with ballistic, blast explosive, and forced entry protection, climbed seven steps up the ladder, balanced themselves with one hand, and massaged their incredible 21-inch belan-like units with the other in a rapidly quickening rhythm so as to deliver thickly and copiously on the PM’s transplanted hair and face and eyebrows in supersonic jet streams and climbed swiftly down and exited the frame so as to make way for the next in line. By the end of the video, the PM’s face was a mask of glutinous white, reminiscent of the alien goo that splatters all over Will Smith in Men in Black. His left eye was plastered shut, the lashes of the right eye were fused into one contiguous shutter of the kind shopkeepers used. His nostrils produced tiny bubbles that expanded and contracted with every breath. He continued his speech with some difficulty, as his lips stuck to each other every time he brought them together to articulate a plosive while his tongue slipped and slurped on every sibilant.

  A total of twenty-seven men were seen to climb the ladder from the
left and the right and deposit ectoplasm on the PM – unless one entertained the possibility that some of the participants were able to, within a span of ten minutes, which was the running time of the video, stimulate themselves to climax for a second time. And by the way we are speaking not just of a formal or functional climax but a climax of very high quality characterized both by a substantial volume of fluid that was visually impactful on video as well as impressive muzzle velocity so as to present an unbroken arc of viscous white from the tip of the launching apparatus to the point of impact on the high-profile target.

  The camera dwelled lovingly, and in micro-close-up, on the dome-like beautiful, elegantly engorged, intricately veined phalluses of the attackers, each of which had the same slogan tattooed on the shaft in bioluminescent orange1 in tightly packed but clearly legible cursive Vladimir script: Screw the Brahmin-Bania-Zionist-casteist-authoritative-patriotic-homophobic-xenophobic-misogynist-misanthropic-ageist-consumerist-statist-pragmatist-racist-military-financial-educational-industrial-technological complex!’

  Stills of the video, displaying a singular connecting strand of genetic material between the nose of the PM and the tip of one of the terrorist’s units, proved particularly popular on social media, as did other stills of organic matter dripping off the PM’s glasses, and one picture in particular, of a particularly viscous string dangling, and trembling, and quivering, like a spider’s web, or a very, very long chromosomal earring made of protein-enriched gossamer, from his left ear, became the most tweeted and most shared meme of the year, with Bosnian grandmas and Senegalese teens and Cambodian porn stars who might otherwise struggle to locate HAIR on the map and may have never even heard the name of HAIR’s PM, circulating the clips with enthusiasm and proclaiming vociferously, on camera, their support and lifelong fealty to the BRF.