Autoplay: Not-so Stories

by G. Sampath

  At the age of eight, Partha rammed his bicycle into a stationary 37G as it stood waiting for passengers to board on Meenakshiamman Koil Street. He learnt balance soon after. All other buses henceforth would be measured against 37G. Including glamorous ones such as 3M.

  When he was fourteen, bunking a school excursion to the Connemara Library, Partha made the first of his several visits to Blue Diamond, which, unlike Hotel California, you could enter anytime and check out anytime for the price of one movie ticket. Ever since this fateful visit as a school boy, the entire area around Blue Diamond – stretching as far as Stella Maris in one direction and Devi Paradise in the other – became one big erogenous zone for Partha. A mild erotic tremor pulsed through his synapses every time he crossed Gemini Circle on his way to somewhere else.

  Partha preferred the Anglo-American and continental parts of the city to the indigenous ones. He liked signboards that promised to take you to Paris, Broadway or Foreshore Estate. He avoided buses that spoke of Otiambakkam and Pallikaranai. One day he went to Bell Nagar. From there he set off for Liberty. Got down at Gemini. Walked to Thousand Lights. Found himself at Woodlands.

  It was at Woodlands that Partha one day met She. This was many years later. At a party. She was then a PhD student at Wisconsin. Back for the summer. He worked for a newspaper in Anna Salai. What do you do, she’d asked him, to be polite, he thought, still unaware of being the landmark that She was in the landscape of his city. ‘I sell space.’ She smiled. He noticed that it wasn’t a smile that smiled at him. ‘You are into real estate?’

  ‘I guess you could say that,’ he shrugged, half-nodding, elevating his eyebrows. ‘Only difference being the space I sell is occupied not by people but by words.’ She laughed. ‘What’s the difference?’ Ash spilled as she weaved a gesture with her hand. ‘Are there people you know who are not words?’

  Their second encounter, if one may call it that, was at the British Council. They had come – each following a unique and independent trajectory of volition, to watch the same film at the same time on the same day: The Handmaid’s Tale. Or maybe it was The Comfort of Strangers. He’d recognized the silhouette of her head in the flickering light of the movie-lit auditorium. Two rows ahead, three seats to his left, it was She. The film was both erased and redeemed by her manifestation – as unexpected as it was anticipated. After the screening he followed her out. They walked side by side till they reached Mount Road – it was no longer Anna Salai. He was distracted by how tightly she clutched the folder to her chest. Did not suit a doctorate student, he thought.

  ‘How come? Aren’t you supposed to be selling space?’ Her hair fragrant even in the afternoon sun. Or maybe it wasn’t. Could have been the heat. Or his imagination. ‘I quit’. She gave him a look that was optically impossible. She was seven inches shorter. Yet her gaze seemed to alight on his face from above, like a seagull. Or a blimp. ‘Oh,’ she said. She didn’t ask him why.

  The psychiatrist’s office was in Thiruvanmiyoor. Not far from the Marundeeshwarar temple where his mother once took him to introduce him to God. And show him in front of everyone how to speak to God by joining palms. As they were leaving the temple in a taxi, he put his index finger in the doorjamb of the driver-side door. That was his first definition of pain: finger in doorjamb. He wasn’t impressed with either God or Thiruvanmiyoor after that. Though he paid him 9k in total, he told the psychiatrist nothing.

  Partha’s son and daughter enjoyed equal and opposite failed marriages. The son was an alcoholic and philanderer. The daughter married an alcoholic and philanderer. Equally separated, the three of them lived together in Thousand Lights.

  Partha’s gall bladder surgery, when he was fifty-eight, took place at Anna Nursing Home in West Mambalam. Right next door was a well-known jewellery store. Partha’s stone was lodged in the neck of his gall bladder, blocking rush-hour biliary traffic. It had to be shoved into the large intestine to be evacuated via faeces. Why doesn’t anyone make gallstone jewellery, he asked the nurse who came to catheterize him. The look she gave him, Partha’s pulse jumped a red light. From his pillow, she could’ve passed as a Manipuri remix of She.

  Are people with diabetes, arthritis, osteopenia, hypertension, slip disc, high cholesterol, haemorrhoids, constipation and valgus deformity medically disqualified from feeling anything higher, or existentially nobler, than pharmacological distress, he wondered.

  Partha did tag along for the wedding reception. Her wedding reception. A resort on the East Coast road. He wandered the lawns behind the reception area, drinking non-stop, keeping a low profile. At some point, close to midnight, he spotted two slugs mating on the grass. Each sliding on top of the other, perpetrating a mutual body-massage with their highly viscous mucus. The pace of the congress was glacial, with each thrust lasting as long as a lunar evening. The only visible sign of erotic frenzy, Partha noted, was their feelers, which twitched and throbbed in the salty breeze.

  Partha did not know it yet, but his mortal remains would make their final journey to a new electric crematorium opened in Old Washermanpet by the nephew of a DMK MLA from the area whom he did not like.

  Partha’s son and daughter now live in what used to be their grandfather’s house in Thousand Lights. The son is an assistant manager in a firm that sells security. The daughter is an anti-domestic violence activist. The son takes his TVS-Suzuki to his office in Saidapet. The daughter works out of a lawyer’s office in Guindy. Neither of them have been to, or will visit, the IIT in Taramani where She lectures sometimes – lectures Partha always attends – and lives now, in the Staff Quarters, never out of Partha’s sight, ever.

  A CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED

  The young and upcoming creative consultant, who had started her own studio only eighteen months ago, wanted to jump out of the car, except that the car was stationary and jumping out of it would have served no conceivable, or inconceivable, purpose.

  Her much older husband, an IILDEE1-accredited executive coach, was on the phone, seated beside her in the car, which itself was seated uncomfortably by the kerb at a spot that, while not explicitly marked as a no-parking zone, was clearly no parking zone either, considering a major chunk of the car’s upturned ass was jutting out into the traffic-flow zone of the narrow, semi-residential main road, ripe for molestation by other passing members of the automotive community.

  The husband, who had also authored an intellectual property on the Seven Secrets of the World’s Top Influencers®, was busy flexing his influencer muscles to try and influence his friend’s colleague’s wife’s contact in the CID to use his influence so that a metaphorical match may be lit under the asses of the cops in the police station so they would take their complaint seriously and get cracking on it, assuming his spouse, who was prone to emotional shit storms under stress, did not in the meantime do or say anything to disincentivise the cops in any way.

  The husband’s overzealousness in pursuing the criminal justice system, as evidenced by his willingness to go to the extent of contacting the contact of his contact’s contact, and in, through different channels, prodding and cajoling and begging and threatening and pleading with it, not even precluding the possibility, his conflicted spouse willing, of bribing it, so as to get them to act on their complaint and recover the stolen goods which shouldn’t be all that difficult given the finite number of suspects, was only the extended follow-through, in the eyes of his wife, of the selfsame non-listening, hyper-competitive, MBA-type ultra-arrogant, know-it-all, smug overzealousness that had landed them, and her specifically, in this unholy shit in the first place, and was, for that very reason, an overzealousness that was understandable, if not quite forgivable.

  After all, it had been he who had sparked the series of unfortunate incidents, or the incident rather, that had led to their current predicament, and he it was, her super-efficient husband who trained other super-efficient husbands like himself as well as singles to be even more super-efficient who, despite her express reminders via voice telepho
ny, text message and electronic mail, and before her departure for Mumbai, even live, in-person verbal reminders, having forgotten to give her deep black, sequined Anarkali kurta–churidar ensemble2 to the Society presswala on Saturday morning, felt compelled to make amends and ended up delivering said clothing to the concerned recipient on Monday morning instead.

  And he had done so in complete disregard of her unambiguous assurances that his having forgotten this small chore would not be weaponised and unleashed on him in the unlikely event of a conflict-situation invading their conjugal peace. As a chore, it certainly was small, if not microscopic, in terms of time or effort needed. All he’d had to do was open the door when the presswala kid rang the bell on Saturday morning and hand him the bundle of clothes kept in the second shelf of the second-hand wooden cabinet in the living room that she’d herself painted3 a healthy spinach-green but he’d been asleep – having watched Ocean’s Eleven +1+2 back-to-back4 till 3 a.m. on Friday night on Friday Night HBO Blockbusters on time shift television – in the bedroom with the AC on and hadn’t heard the presswala kid ringing the bell at 8 a.m. as always. When he’d finally woken up around noon, it had never entered his consciousness that this was the day he needed to give his spouse’s all-important kurta–churidar ensemble to the presswala, and because they happened not to speak even once over the whole weekend (contrary to their mutually agreed upon practice when separated by geography – a rare occurrence, a veritable black swan in the sky of their relationship), what with her brain-storming sessions with the exceedingly demanding, tough-talking and difficult-to-please client5 dragging on till way past midnight on both the weekend days, he had not remembered on Sunday either, for he’d been busy the whole day with the final rubber of the India–Australia ODI series, and post-match, had once again gotten sucked into a vicious blow-out on social media over who should actually have won the Man of the Series (as opposed to the clearly flawed official verdict) award, and it had rapidly become a public wrangle with dignity implications that he just could not afford not having the last word on and it took up all evening before he finally, round about 2 a.m., managed to clinch the argument and block all his imbecile adversaries (reporting two of them for abuse), with the result that when his spouse returned from Mumbai on Monday morning and it transpired that he’d failed to get this simplest of tasks done despite her multiple reminders, he’d been so overcome by remorse that he’d made up his mind then and there to postpone the entirety of the rest of his life to a point in time that shall not come to pass until after he had deposited the concerned clothes at the presswala. And so he had.

  He’d jumped up from the dining table, chair scraping, and abandoned his plate of puri-bhaji. Despite running late for an industry Round Table on Talent Retention at which he was the keynote speaker – the event, with a battery of high profile speakers in the ‘confirmed’ list, was a significant networking opportunity, and he’d devoted nearly a week to revising and re-revising the slides – he’d grabbed the aforementioned bundle of clothes from the aforementioned cabinet, sprinted down the stairs, still clad in that abominable white UNICEF T-shirt she’d gotten printed 250 pieces of for a UNICEF-sponsored walkathon last year and let him have a sample of when he’d taken a fancy to its text-heavy, propagandist design advocating child rights, not anticipating that he would take to wearing it all the time, much to her embarrassment, which in turn made her harangue him incessantly about its tackiness and inappropriateness for public display and forcing him, in turn, to blame her for his not owning even a single better-fitting home-wear T-shirt that could also be worn outside at short notice, like for going to buy milk, vegetables or the chicken that she never remembered to order until it was too late in the evening for the chickenwala to home-deliver through his delivery boy and he had to personally go, at short notice, and without any say in the matter of whether he could go now or later or tomorrow, all the way to the chicken shop to get the chicken, etc., thus implying that if she really cared now as much as she used to, about him, or as much as she wanted him to believe by going on and on about this T-shirt, she would have actually and automatically, he once told her, ensured that his wardrobe was not, a priori, in necessity of being supplemented by a UNICEF T-shirt but rather was, at any given time, adequately populated with T-shirts compatible with her sense of aesthetics as well as his sense of fitment and given the sad fact of this not being the case at the present juncture, if anyone needed to be faulted for his wearing this abominable (in her eyes) T-shirt that did not qualify as human habiliment (in her eyes), it definitely was not him, etc., thereby calling into question both the real motive behind her attacking him for wearing the T-shirt as well as the real object of the caring that was purportedly the driving force behind her disapproval of his patronage of said T-shirt, which he had, on this particular instance, on Monday morning, paired with the even more abominable cheap blue semi-torn shorts that he’d presumably retired, following sustained spousal pressure, from its being a member of the panel of clothing items that formed his gym-wear and now wore within the precincts of domesticity only, and so clad, he had literally bolted out of the house as if under pursuit by a demon of some kind, and run all the way to the presswala, raising quizzical stares from other residents and the main gate security guards whom he passed and who would certainly have tried to stop this suspiciously clad individual fleeing with a cloth bundle under his arm had they not also almost immediately recognized the object of their suspicion as one of the owner-residents, and after depositing the clothes he had also extracted a silent promise (a nod of the head) from the presswala kid who’d taken the bundle from him that he would deliver it home to the memsahib by four in the afternoon.

  And now, after all this, all that he’d done to make amends for what he had not done, the bottom line was that she was sitting in their car in front of a cop station wishing she was dead or had gotten cancer or something – okay, not cancer maybe but something equally terrible but less dire, with no long-term pain, either physical or financial – instead of the calamity that had befallen her and to which, it seemed now, there was no remedy. This aspect of there being no remedy was too, too painful – as much, if not more painful than the calamity itself, for it had burst their bubble of self-sufficiency and all-round adequacy and delusions of having arrived in socio-existential terms and exposed them, brutally, it seemed to her, as being just as vulnerable as those they’d assumed they were not – to contemplate. How was she going to gather the broken, scattered, swept-into-the-recycle-bin and deleted-from-recycle-bin pieces of her life (online and offline) and put them back together and carry on? How?

  How easily this entire disaster could have been avoided, she thought, staring glumly at the particulate matter encrusted on the windshield – but could she have, really? The scene played out in her mind again and again in a loop. How she had tried to convince him on Monday morning when she’d arrived from Mumbai and asked him about it and he’d slapped his forehead in what had struck her as too dramatic a dismay and she’d even felt, for a moment – she actually had, on account of the overly thespian aspect of his show of remorse-guilt – that he was having her on, as he’d done on numerous occasions in the past, as say, when she’d asked him to buy lemons on his way back from the club and he would tell her alright he would and as he walked in through the door when she asked him if he’d got the lemons he would slap his forehead in the exact same way, only this time (this one time when it should not have been) it had been for real, and when it transpired he had actually forgotten, she’d said it was alright, she’d press the kurta herself, and given an array of reasons to make him feel not so bad – such as, for instance, that it was probably all for the best since it was an expensive dress of sensitive material and so it hadn’t been a great idea in the first place to trust the presswala with it, and besides, she could do with some minor physical exercise handling the electric iron at home and said electric iron, which they’d received as a wedding gift, may as well justify its continued occupation of scarc
e storage space in the house by moving its hot ass purposefully this one time at least, but he’d shot her down, coming up with the bizarre (in hindsight) line that the electric iron was too lightweight and would prove less than efficacious on the thick, texture-rich fabric of her Anarkali and when she’d countered by arguing that the electric press was female-friendly because it was lighter and thus easier to manoeuvre for her, he’d said she could manoeuvre it all she wanted but what’d be the point if it didn’t do the job and she’d been, to tell the truth, secretly pleased that he seemed to care so much for her, and for something this minor, banal even, and so hadn’t persisted and let him have his way, partly also to please him by letting him have his way even though, paradoxically, what he wanted to have his way for, in opposition to her wishes, was to please her by making amends for having displeased her earlier. But the crucial point here, however, was that he was doing so despite her having conveyed to him in no uncertain terms that her displeasure at his act of omission had been completely neutralized, forfeited even, with resultant complete acquittal of him of all (verbalized) charges of negligence and/or all (non-verbalized but subterranean) charges of not caring enough or not loving her enough. In thus electing to dismiss her acquittal of him for the hurt – real or imputed – caused to her by his negligence, he had ended up hurting her on an order of magnitude that was like several hundred megaton times the hurt he’d subjected her to by his original act of omission, along with, of course, attendant several thousand megatons of guilt, and its, in turn, attendant megatons of effort on his part to make amends, and so on in a downward spiral that was threatening to overturn the shared emotional locomotive of their interlocked lives, with very little chance of redemption for him or recompense for her.