Autoplay: Not-so Stories

by G. Sampath

  The SS programme, however, had to be abruptly shut down after two months following vigorous protests by religious right-wing groups who, for once, found themselves on the same side as feminist and women’s rights groups and privacy activists, all of whom found the calculated masturbation of male citizens by strangers highly objectionable. While the religious right-wingers objected to the practice of male guards stimulating male citizens, feminists found the very idea of using female guards for mass masturbation of the male masses repugnant, while privacy activists objected to the state’s recording of the private parts of human beings. Also, with all the controversy surrounding the SS, security companies found it more and more difficult to find females willing to join the SS. The SS controversy became a national issue with political implications and the PM ultimately ordered the NSA to shut down the SS programme.

  The NSA by then was already sitting on an AV database of 560 million penises, covering more than two-thirds of the sexually active male population of HAIR. He didn’t mind shutting it down too much. But cunningly, he kicked up a mega-stink over it, about how it was gross extraneous interference on a matter of national security that was best handled by experts, how this would compromise the safety of the HAIR union, etc., as a result of which nobody dared object when, two weeks later, the HAIR government issued an ordinance making it mandatory for every male citizen above the age of fourteen to carry a Unique Penis Identity (UPI) card with a recent passport-size photo of his erect penis – to be updated every eighteen months – on his person at all times, and kept available for inspection by state police officers on demand. A week later the ordinance was made into a law, the Penis Identity and Safety and Security Act, dubbed the PISS Act by the media.

  Unlike the ordinance, however, the PISS Act made it mandatory to display, or submit a copy of, as applicable, the UPI card when applying for a gas connection, driving licence, voter ID, PAN card, or when opening a bank account, buying property, entering a stadium, restaurant, shopping mall, cinema hall, airport, train station, government office, court, brothel, or place of religious worship.

  The PISS Act was a watershed in the cultural and social history of HAIR and the most radical and far-reaching legislation passed by the PM, who had been the Supreme Leader for forty years now, having won eight consecutive elections practically unopposed and defied both death and old age with his top-secret regimen of tantric yoga and anti-ageing quantum therapy developed by the Department of Science and Technology in partnership with SpermaPharma and Raytheon exclusively for the health and longevity of the HAIR PM and the safety and geostrategic security of the HAIR.

  The BRF militants, however, continued to elude the ever-widening dragnet of the NSA. With the passing of the PISS Act, practically every male HAIRian should have had his penis in the PISS database. The gargantuan HAIR security establishment was at a loss to explain how the BRF terrorists could continue to function, let alone survive, without any of the identification documents, every one of which needed a UPI card to be validated. It was as if the guys did not have a penis at all, the NSA brooded, as he sat on the pot one morning, and that’s when it struck him – Yes! Of course! How could I have been so daft, he cursed himself. They could not be – were not – real penises. Their weapons were artificial, and probably detached and kept at home when these individuals – of indeterminate sex – went about their normal lives, donning their 21-inch WMDs only when they had to shoot their terroristic videos.

  But what could they possibly do with this knowledge? He couldn’t possibly order a suspect profiling based on sex or gender, could he? No, he would be called all sorts of names by these blasted LGBTABCDEF-whatever groups.

  The NSA called another emergency meeting of all the security and state police chiefs and announced his breakthrough. ‘Gentlemen, we are not looking for suspects with 21-inch-long penises, we are looking for suspects with access to 21-inch-long detachable penises. In other words, we need to get to those who specialize in detachable penises and track who they’ve been selling these items to.’

  6

  – Sir, there are only two companies in the world that sell detachable penises. But they both sell only ornamental phalluses.’

  – What do you mean, ‘only ornamental’?

  – Em … sir … uh … they can be deployed for penetration of the partner … but are not capable of firing indigenous organic matter.

  – Oh I see. We don’t know that the organic matter fired in BRF videos is indeed organic matter. Maybe they are synthetic stuff that look like semen and are triggered by pressing a button in the waist.

  – We checked that, sir. At present there is no product in the detachable penis market that can fire organic or inorganic matter on demand.

  – So you’re telling me those 21-inch penises are real 21-inch penises?

  – Sir, at present, that seems to be the only viable hypothesis, sir.

  7

  It was three in the morning when a group of seven beefy men in mufti broke into his apartment and arrested him in his bedroom. There was no knocking, no smashing of the main door. They quietly let themselves in, and stood over Satya, watching him sleep for a full two minutes before turning the lights on.

  – What have I done? Who are you guys?

  – You are under arrest, Mr Satya.

  – What? For what? I’ve already said everything to the cops. I had no knowledge of SpermaPharma’s illegal operations. I can prove it to you.

  – No, we are not here for that.

  – Then?

  – We are arresting you for your involvement with the BRF.

  – The BRF? I have nothing to do with the BRF.

  – Tell us where you’ve hidden the detachable penises.

  – Excuse me?

  – Mr Satya, we found a DNA sample from a site where the videos were recorded. Your DNA matches with a semen sample we found on the site.

  – My semen? You think I’m one of those jerks beating off in those disgusting videos? You wanna see the size of my cock?

  – That doesn’t matter. These days everything can be digitally enhanced, altered.

  – Then maybe the whole video was digitally constructed. Maybe those men aren’t any more real than their cocks, which you seem to believe are unreal.

  – Let us be the judge of that, Mr Satya.

  8

  Strangely, the BRF attacks ceased after Satya’s arrest, and the media and public moved on to other, more important happenings. Satya was one of several hundred picked up by the NIA based on a computer-generated random sampling. He was let off after the SpermaPharma shareholders interceded on his behalf with the Central government, and paid a handsome bribe for his release.

  Some elements in the BRF wanted to resume the attacks. But by now the risks were too high. Bukkake had become part of the cultural mainstream, with birthday parties and farewell parties routinely ending with a bukkake ceremony performed on the person whose birthday or farewell it was. Even wedding receptions had a bukkake going on side by side with orchestra and musical concerts, with all the male guests not only encouraged but expected to bukkake on a life-size sculpture of the bride embracing the groom – a practice that was said to aid the fertility of the couple.

  And thus, a full two millennia after offering the world the Kama Sutra, HAIR became synonymous with bukkake, originally a Japanese invention, just as Japan became synonymous with Buddhism, a system invented originally in HAIR.

  PARTICIPANT OBSERVERS

  The cockroaches then were the ultimate insult in terms of the degradation the husband believed he was being subjected to, with specific regard to his role as a husband and handyman around the house, a role that now seemed on the verge of being reduced to the function of pest management.

  C’mon, you’re educated, politically aware, radical even, if one is not mistaken, the husband addressed his wife in absentia, as he often tended to do, and yet, you’re so comfortable with this particular gender-based straitjacketing and stereotyping – that the
man of the house (or, to be precise, the male of the house, given that claims have often been made that you are the ‘man’ of the house) is the one who has to deal with all the bugs?

  Okay, one can understand if there is some theoretical danger involved, or some measurable lack, say, in terms of physical strength or capabilities or dexterity, and that’s why he has had – and still has – no problem shielding her from street dogs when they were out late or when one of the dogs, being illegally fed by the teenager on the first floor, lay stretched across the landing by the first step (or the last, depending on which side you start counting from) of the staircase, blocking the way, and she called him from her cell, he never once hesitated to drop the newspaper or book he was reading or news update he was catching on TV and rush to her aid and chase away the canine pest though all she would have had to do – and which he himself did and everyone else in the entire building did, knowing that the mammal was old and harmless (even the one-and-a-half-year-old baby of the assistant professor–area sales manager couple in the flat opposite their own on the third floor had no trouble sensing the neutral intentions of an animal the baby had grown rather attached to and was fearless around even though it was at least three times his size and he, in fact, would not imbibe nutrition unless the under-aged, underpaid, undernourished domestic employee who had been appointed to do so transported him down two floors for visual contact with ‘doggie’) – was to simply step over the dog and proceed. But no, she would solicit his personal physical intervention by calling him on his cell every single time, which, lately, had become every single day, and had, on the odd occasion, even resulted in him missing a vital train of thought in the course of his customary morning session of metaphysical reflection which happened to coincide with his spouse’s office departure time and the resultant unpleasantness of this creative and professional loss was made even more unpleasant for him by the ensuing mandated unpleasant conversation with the teenager who fed the dog and said teenager’s over-aggressive Punjabi mother over the (as his spouse argued) gross impropriety and absolute illegality, as per the Society’s norms, not to mention the complete lack of basic civic sense or sense of public hygiene or concern for others, of the teenager’s practice of feeding the homeless canine, which1 was causing such inconvenience to all those residents of the apartment block who were not dog lovers, and if they really did care about this dog so much, why not take the dog into their own home and make it one of their family, why leave it out on the staircase for it to intrude into the lives of others who did not want a dog intruding into their thusly othered lives, that too first thing in the morning every single day of their already hardship-laden, unpleasantness-full lives? But the husband’s spouse’s arguments, as all arguments between two (non-related) residents2 of a cooperative housing society tend to do, proceeded nowhere until a point was reached where the spouse was getting inordinately late for work and ended up simply shaking her head in disgust and proceeding, enveloped in a foul mood, to her vehicle in the parking lot, with her foul mood deteriorating further on account of the morning rush-hour traffic conditions and deplorable driving styles of assorted motorcyclists and bicyclists and auto-rickshaw drivers as well as other office-goers and random commuters on wheels to even greater levels of toxic foulness such that by the time she made it to her workplace she was in the highest and literally the Mount Everest of high dudgeon possible and her colleagues and inferiors instantly knew, with one look at their colleague/superior’s face, that they were going to get it from her today and strove hard to do their best to steer clear of her. Nevertheless, her entire day was besmirched beyond redemption by the incident of the dog on the staircase and through some form of supra-rational transmutation that was not accessible to her spouse, in her head, it was the husband that was behind her entire workday going wrong in every which way it could go wrong, so that by the time she was ready to punch out in the evening, what had begun as, and seemed like, a matter of petulant annoyance at her spouse of forty-eight months had solidified into a rather pernicious proposition of immutable truth, viz., that she had had a bad day at work for the nth time in n days only on account of her spouse who could not even grant her the littlest of little wishes, namely, that she get to her car in the morning without having to deal with pests, toward which end she had been nagging him for many months now to go ahead of her when she was about to leave the apartment in the morning and ensure that the dog was not occupying the staircase landing on the first floor and to shoo it away before she reached there and was forced to waste precious seconds – when she was already running late – taking out her cell phone from her handbag, scrolling down/up to his number, dialling his number by tapping on his name (two or three times if her smartphone was feeling phlegmatic or drowsy and slow to respond), waiting for him to answer, then hang up (his phone), put on a shirt, dig out his slippers, slip into his slippers, extract the main door lock with the key in it from the assorted mess of random stuff (bills, other non-main door locks and their keys and the keys’ duplicates, polythene bags that tended to accumulate for some reason, old clothes that she meant to give away to either cook or cleaner but could never remember to do so when they were physically present in the house at the same time as she was, etc.) that cluttered the mantelpiece near the main door, open the main door, shut the main door and bolt it and lock it,3 then climb down two flights of stairs and reach where she was stuck in front of the dog – a faecal brown, totally undistinguished animal with one ear bitten off and bald patches on its left shoulder and an unexpectedly shaggy tail like pieces of dusting cloth material stitched together with floor mop cilia – by which time it was already too late for everything and the day was set on a steady course downhill.

  And so when she got home in the evening, with resentment (at her spouse for having ruined her entire day) enjoying a 90 per cent share in her psychic market, the smallest of mercies she could justifiably expect was to not have to deal with any more pests at least for the duration of the remaining hours of the already ruined day but no, he could not grant her even that tiny little wish, despite having been home all day4 with all the time in the solar system to supervise the cleaning and dusting and pest-ridding of the house – which he used to be so good at for god’s sake – and the first thing she sees the moment, with the idea of making herself some soup, she opens the top drawer of her kitchen cabinet to take out a heating vessel, is an enormous reddish brown cockroach waving its antennae at her, as if saying, hiya sweetie, how was your day, and she bangs the drawer shut, shrieking, and flees the kitchen in tears, yelling for him to go and get rid of the beast in the drawer so she can make some soup please, and the effect this whole melodrama of hers – for he had, by this time, begun to see it as melodrama – had on the psyche of her husband is what the husband had tried forever but in vain to communicate to her, namely, that the last interaction that the two of them had had in the day was concerning her urgent request to him to get rid of the dog on the staircase which went badly, causing either of them to feel underconfident about giving a courtesy call to the other during the rest of the day – a call that may have gone some distance toward helping either of them heal partially from the morning discord if not put it behind them entirely – as they used to do in the earlier years of the marriage when pest control had not occupied such a central role in their interpersonal dynamic, as they were afraid of provoking the other into saying something hurtful and inappropriate or themselves saying something hurtful and inappropriate either first-off or in response to something hurtful and inappropriate said by the other, and so, not having interacted during the day’s working hours, the immediate very next interaction they were having after the morning interaction that pertained to her request to him to get rid of the dog on the staircase for her was this night-time interaction wherein she was requesting him to get rid of a cockroach in the drawer for her, and so all that he was asking her to consider was to consider what any individual in his shoes would feel, if day after day, the primary solicitation this
individual was receiving from his life partner and cornerstone of his emotional stability and psychological well-being was to do with the getting rid of some pest or the other, and to this, what seemed to him to be a very reasonable point of his, her response always was will he please get rid of the cockroach in the drawer first and can we please talk about the macro-aspects of relationship-related issues once the cockroach in the drawer had been gotten rid of, except that eight times out of ten, by the time he reached the kitchen drawer and opened it, there was no cockroach inside – the creature (probably the German variety) evidently smart enough to know when it was time to vamoose, and thigmotactic to boot, had probably retreated to behind the drawer through the crack between the drawer rim and the underside of the kitchen counter – which had the effect on him of making him mad that he had been roused from his interruption-sensitive intellectual work for no reason at all, and on her of making her mad that he had failed to find the cockroach and kill it despite his much-vaunted cockroach-killing prowess that he took so much personal and professional pride in and won promotions for, which meant that after he goes back to whatever he keeps going back to these days and she comes back to the kitchen again to make her soup, it would be with the knowledge that that antennae-waving cockroach was still there, alive and smirking, to give her yet another fright the next time she opened that dreaded drawer or any other cabinet or even merely opened the kitchen door and turned the light on at 3 a.m. for a glass of water – because he had yet again failed to keep a bottle of water next to the bed as was their agreement that he would do – only to find that very same cockroach, now with some twenty other of its adult friends and relations and their too-numerous-to-count offspring, having literally a late-night rave party extending all the way from the kitchen counter to the floor area all the way to the kitchen drain that had once again been left open!