by G. Sampath
Roll No. 27 must have replayed this incident in his mind hundreds of times, wondering if he could have handled it differently, but every time he felt its shame as sharply as the first. He had only wanted to compliment JH, nothing more, but he had been made to feel as if JH would be doing him a favour by allowing him (Roll No. 27) to compliment him (JH) in front of other people, the insinuation being that Roll No. 27 had fallen so low in the academic status ladder (while JH had simultaneously risen so high) that it would actually be too much to expect JH to acknowledge the likes of Roll No. 27 – such, indeed, was the meaning of the snub. And Roll No. 27 could neither forgive JH for it, nor forgive himself for having gotten into a situation where he had to endure such a public humiliation.
If Roll No. 27’s story had been fiction,4 he would have buckled down, worked twice as hard as JH, beaten the crap out of him in the final exams and paid him back for his insult, with interest. But JH’s putdown had the opposite impact on Roll No. 27: it crushed whatever self-confidence and self-esteem he still had left.
He was now less able than ever to do his daily studies, more susceptible than ever to daydreaming and to what his female parent called ‘storybooks’. He, however, still paid attention in class, more out of habit, took notes, also out of habit, and these, combined with the furious mugging he did on the morning of the exams, kept him afloat – but only until Class 11.
9
According to Newton’s Law of Gravitation, the apple and the earth experience equal and opposite forces due to gravitation. But it is the apple that falls toward the earth and not vice versa. Why? (2 marks).
Class 11 was, till date, the worst year of Roll No. 27’s sixteen-year-old life, both academic and non-academic. In brief, theoretically speaking, his crisis could be summed up thus: His intuitive, and in all likelihood, subconscious, conception of education as the pursuit of knowledge was completely at odds with a systemic apparatus that conceived of education as the methodical acquisition of requisite skills, both informal (such as the ability to endure boredom for extended periods of time, the ability to dissociate emotion from the achievement of progress or lack thereof vis-à-vis the tasks on hand, the ability to defer gratification in the short-term or immediate-term for greater rewards in the long-term, etc.) as well as formal (solving mathematical equations, writing leave letters, memorizing and/or analysing data, etc.), and the efficacy of whose acquisition would be evaluated and graded through standardized processes known as examinations, and certified in the form of mark sheets and pass certificates. Roll No. 27’s mind, when pressed into slavery-mode in the service of the above-described system, rebelled, as any mind enamoured of the ways of freedom would. In other words, he was the apple that was destined to fall, though it was the earth that deserved to.
10
Define entropy. (2 marks)
On the first day of his class 11 annual examination (the subject was physics), around quarter to 7, Roll No. 27 was found by his female parent, who had come to give him his morning cup of milk, huddled beneath his desk, whimpering incoherently in a semi-conscious state. The female parent let out a cry that brought the male parent rushing to the room, and together they retrieved their offspring from under his study table, on which the night lamp was still on and fighting a losing battle with daylight.
The parents took turns trying to feed Roll No. 27, first some water, and then some milk, both of which leaked down his mouth and vest more than flowed down his gullet. They tried to calm him down, and assured him he need not appear for the exam if he did not feel like it. The male parent called work to convey that he would be coming in late, and called again to say he was taking half-day off, and called again to say he was taking the whole day off. The female parent was about to call her brother, Roll No. 27’s uncle, to ask for advice on what to do when the male parent snatched the phone away from her, asking her not to make a public spectacle of it. He then called up his best friend, a former colleague, who, after hearing him out, told him not to worry, that it was only a kind of panic attack induced by the prospect of having to appear for the exam and that he (his son) should, as an otherwise healthy boy, and given his genetic OS, be back to normal soon.
But even by mid-morning, there was no change in the state of Roll No. 27. He imbibed no solid foods nor any liquids other than what had been fed to him earlier in the day (of which more than half had not gone in). And he continued to whimper and utter words his parents could not catch no matter how hard they tried to do so, applying their ears to his mouth. The words, to them, sounded like ‘Mgyi Kn Byo It’ or like ‘Mgyu Zngnt Wyo’. It was either gibberish or some new language that they did not understand.
Toward noon, a decision was made to take him to a hospital, where they were given an appointment with a consultant psychiatrist. The consultant psychiatrist did a routine physical check-up of Roll No. 27, who was still not in a position to utter any words that might be intelligible to their available recipients. The consultant psychiatrist posed questions to the parents and listened to their answers with either growing impatience or growing indifference. He wrote out a prescription and asked them to come and see them with their offspring after three days.
11
Two PAN numbers, WEOXZ0987T and MSGBT9823D, take birth as human beings on planet earth. The probability that WEOXZ0987T will die a happy soul is 0.16. The probability that MSGBT9823D will die a happy soul is 0.12. The probability that both will die happy souls is 0.04. Find the probability that:
A: Both WEOXZ0987T and MSGBT9823D live and die in utter misery.
B. Only MSGBT9823D dies a happy soul. (5 marks)
AUTOPLAY
Some evenings I go for walks near my complex
to places you would not accompany me
to places like gaps between other places
to places like ellipses
to places beneath the lines between the lines
and I walk to these places wearing your favourite thoughts
with the dirty rucksack on my back, my sutured intestines, my trigeminal neuralgia, my source of renewable pain, my anticipatory Braille, and my climate-controlled oral cavity, musty with low-calorie words unspoken, unswallowed.
I collect cylinders of me from the basement packing unit. Handlers in hazmat suits pipe me into this body through a 12 mm cadmium cable connected to a PVC console. My skin, which is 100 per cent organic, erupts in roseine indurations because my edges are sharp and not all fragments have dissolved in the day’s currents flowing in from power plants and box files.
My shadow, gripping me tight, steps into the night. We visit a mall designed for humans. After a full body scan by compound-eyed gun-toting nematodes perched on the minarets of a fortified gateway, we enter the ground floor, and walk past giant OLED screens beaming episode 17 of Game of Drones Season 60, past unicellular speakholes that guzzle attention from fingers curled into claws, from pockets fat with envy, from shoulders raised to ears, and past speakholes that burp from bodies and bags, and tables and chairs, while molecular mouths work words into space and eyeballs roll on the floor like marbles.
The corpuscle-red elevator arrows pause at every floor but the one we’re waiting on. The girls, the girls are everywhere, with grass-like fringes and geometrical earrings and anti-tank tank tops and ponytails that bounce in inverted parabolas. The girls, with their lavender flesh their metaphysical stockings their electrostatic hair their baby doll squeals their designer smiles their plug-and-play masks consume their day’s quota of adipose before their next prayer at the gym where they will excrete through the pores of their fair and lovely skin what they digested yesterday.
Backlit hoardings are the only rabbits that point their noses at me directly, urging me to buy a flat and win a prize that will take me to Italy, or France, or Alpha Centauri. I sidestep a legless man on twin casters. His face is a socket with holes that can hypnotize. I look away. He yells after me, ‘I see in your face a punctured embodiment of hope.’
I reach a bus shelter and wait. T
he route that takes me home is not listed here. I lean against a metal pole and ask my thoughts to wait. They are in a hurry. I inform them politely that I shall not throw my body into an opening for bodies.
And then I did.
Bin bags are important characters in the story of your life. They all have the same body, the same form, the same shape, but each has its own unique content, its substance unlike any other, its themes and motifs as distinct as your fingerprint, your saliva, your iris. Their black lips extend over the rim of your bin like a smile. The future of waste shines bright like the sun.
Bin bags, they come in different sizes. Baby head, dog head, adult human head, donkey head, horse head, all the way to elephant head, though the last ceased to be available for purchase online after Amazon quit stocking it following violent protests from a religious sect that worships the faecal matter of tusked mammals and uses them as holy ingredients in Yajurveda-accredited sacrificial yajnas.
Bin bags, they also come in varying microns of thicknesses – from 5 to 125 microns. The thicker they are, the better for the soul of the user, which is still biodegradable. But they’re only ever black in colour in the Hindu Aryan Indian Republic, and only one kind of black.
In Stockholm, I’ve seen greater consumer choice in colours and design. I’ve seen bin bags in purple, in fuchsia pink, peacock green, Bali blue, Olympic bronze, banana yellow, Brandeis orange, and Persian rose, with pictures of Tibetan babies on them, and designer ones too – both the regular labels – Versace, Armani, Tommy Hilfiger, Ferrari, Givenchy – and celebrity lines. Some years ago Shakira launched an exclusive line of hip bin bags that shake themselves every time you put stuff into them so they can accommodate more stuff in them. Deferer is launching a bin bag that’s exclusively for discarding bald old tennis balls. And Namak Haram has launched its own line of bin bags for draping the heads of people you’re beheading.
But don’t ask me why there is no consumer choice when it comes to bin bag colours in HAIR. All we get are the same old depressing pasty black with nothing on them but creases and crinkles. Our laws are dated. We need to reform them, deregulate the sector completely, open it up to FDI. But since you and I can’t wait for all that to happen – we know how slowly things move in the HAIR – we’ll have to make do with the boring black ones.
On the positive side, all this is irrelevant. Because if you’re not good with hands, your life expectancy goes up. Like if you can’t do a simple noose knot. Or a slash job, cutting precisely, longitudinally, from the wrist down. Or kiss a syringe with your veins. Then you’ll need the bin bag anyway. To draw it over your face. Wear the world of black stored in the bag body. And consummate your last date with oxygen. While loving fingers compose a constriction for your neck.
But this is important: remember to leave on your final face a suitably forensic expression for the post-mortem.
And as the day after wakes up, yawns, stretches its fingertips in your newly minted void, the garbage boy is sure to come punctually at ten. He knows, better than you, the value of what you bin.
After he collects your offering and dumps it in his wheelbarrow, who do you think will recycle you?
Notes
THE DEVELOPER
1 A term in the native tongue that means ‘HAIRian woman’.
2 The first ‘Su’ was from ‘susu’, a native word meaning ‘pee’, and the second ‘Su’ was the first two letters of the name of the developer’s company.
3 It goes up to 70,000 litres on holidays and on hot summer days when people tend to drink more and therefore urinate more.
4 Because it rhymed with urine, according to one disgruntled British film critic who wasn’t invited that year.
A TRAUMATIC INCIDENT FROM THE EARLY CHILDHOOD OF THE CMD
1 It was little more than an alcove really, the toddler’s room, and intended by the evidently pious builder to serve as a religious ritual room, meant to be adorned to full capacity with portraits and figurines of the gods and goddesses and their various animal-transports (along with separate parking for the animal transports) – as well as the various prayer-worship-ritual-related paraphernalia such as bell, oil lamp, incense sticks and incense-stick holder, sacred ash, etc. – that both the parents had grown up addressing their fears to and celebrating festivals about and fearing and being in awe of, if not actively worshipping. But since neither of the parents could afford the mind space (or the residential space) for religious activities in an exclusive big way, they had converted it into a cosy sleeping nook for their offspring.
2 At this point of his narrative, there would be a welcome interjection from the CMD’s interlocutors, extolling, in a tone and attitude that was a carefully calibrated admixture of awe, fear and indulgence, the CMD’s legendry tantrums, and the CMD would come off all surprised and apologetic and half-embarrassed about it and make it sound like a personal failing that his loyal subordinates have been so supportive about by putting up with, but what could he do, he was tantrum-ish even as a toddler, as they can see now from this story, and the female members of the Leadership Team quickly took the opening to affirm that he still was an adorable toddler at heart, and was it any wonder they all loved working for him and he was so good with people, etc. When all this was going on, the Senior Vice President (Leadership Development and Talent Management), who had been listening to everyone silently, wanted to point out a distinction that nobody else seemed to have noticed, viz., the toddler-CMD’s tantrums were strictly meal-related and sleep-related and bodily discomfort-related and did not have anything to do with dipping sales numbers or market shares or rising costs or unhappy clients. But by the time the SVP (LD&TM) had made up his mind to speak, the CMD had resumed his narrative, and he was not quite sure about interrupting the CMD with a potentially controversial point – the last thing he wanted was to spark a tantrum about his tantrum – and so he let it go.
3 The toddler-CMD’s paternal grandmother was the only one he knew growing up.
4 The adult-CMD himself did not seem to have any memory of the incident. Rather, whatever ‘memory’ one might say he had of it was not really a memory so much as a post-facto, reverse-engineered, mentally imaged narrative based on the story he had heard several times over the years from his female parent. And it was understandable too, if he had no memory of an incident that had happened at a stage of childhood when the child (him) was, generally speaking, not yet old enough to form memories that would be easily retrievable in the distant future.
5 Editor’s Note: Readers are hereby advised that this particular narrative is the Authorial Narrative, not to be confused with the narrative narrated by the CMD’s own vocal chords to his Leadership Team from time to time at The Club or The Lounge. Though, of course, there are bound to be factual overlaps between the two, and though the story versions are identical, the narratives themselves are not – in the sense that the points of view of each, the context of dissemination and the motives/objectives behind the dissemination are distinct and separate.
6 This again elicited exchanges of knowing looks and suppressed smiles among members of the Leadership Team – with the exception of the SVP (LD&TM) – which the adult-CMD pretended to be too engrossed in his recounting to notice, though he did make a mental note of the reaction (or the lack thereof) of the SVP (LD&TM).
7 At this point of his life’s journey, the toddler-CMD had only been partially toilet-trained, a matter that had begun to cause much anxiety and consume excessive mindspace in the minds of both the parents, also leading them to introspect frequently on this and other (as it seemed to them) mutually reinforcing lacunae in their parenting strategies.
8 This was also why the female parent had agreed to have her offspring’s female grandparent, with whom she did not enjoy above-average temperamental compatibility, cohabit with them, for the latter, being far more experienced in offspring management across age categories, was expected to lend a helping hand to the female parent precisely in crisis situations such as the unfolding present.
9 One of the bonding elements between the two – notwithstanding the toddler-CMD’s female parent’s suspicion that her matronly neighbour (whose husband was a perennially sweat-soaked medical rep with dark patches on the armpits of his terrycot shirt) belonged to a status band that fell outside and below the lower extremity of the status band of the social elements she could afford to be seen associating socially with without compromising her own social station in the public eye – apart from the medically mandated energetic circumambulation of the neighbourhood park, was the extreme congruence of their opinions with regard to the nature and utility of mothers-in-law.
10 The pun was unintended by the female grandparent.
11 The exact phrase reported to have been used was ‘screwed his happiness’.
THE BRF
1 The same shade as the one used by the Dutch national soccer team
2 The executive committee (EC) was fully representative despite its number of members being less than the number of identities that make up the LGBTQQARSTUVWXYZLF because many of the EC members identified with multiple discriminated-against minority identities. The general secretary of the LGBTPOCQQARSTUVWXYZLF, for instance, who was also an EC member, identified as L,R,S,U,V,Y and Z – making it unnecessary to have separate, stand-alone representatives for L,R,S,U,V,Y and Z.
3 The original 9,000-word draft statement that was prepared after incorporating the political concerns and editorial inputs of all the nine EC members was rejected by Q9000++, the queer Artificial Intelligence that happened to be the chairman of the EC and the supreme commander of the LGBTQQARSTUVWXYZLF.
4 Pun unintended.
5 Special Task Force
PARTICIPANT OBSERVERS
1 The unauthorized feeding and its consequent effect upon the canine’s habitat preferences, not the canine itself, as the husband hastened to clarify in order to pre-empt any accusations of cruelty or lack of empathy toward animals.