by Bajaj, Karan
He warmed up to someone speaking the same language as him, and didn’t seem to notice - or care - that I was an armless hobo.
‘Oh, I have tons of ideas,’ he said. ‘You name it, I’ve got it. Things are really starting to look up. I am developing a live internet gaming device for mobile phones, the biggest online fashion marketplace ever built, and a comprehensive virtual pet shop. The VCs love the ideas; they just want to see the user interface and the business model and then, Eureka! I’m done, retired a billionaire at forty.’
I gave him a suitably appreciative look. There were lots of questions I wanted to ask to make sense of what he had said - online, internet, gaming, etc - but they could wait. I had a more fundamental question to ask first.
‘Er… do you need an assistant or an office manager? Someone to handle your phones and stuff?’
‘Sure,’ he said.
Just like that.
‘I mean, can I get a job?’ I said, taken aback.
‘Of course.’
I stared at him stupidly.
‘The only problem is, I can’t pay you anything more than minimum wages - twenty dollars a day. But I can pay you in stock. How about ten per cent of the company?’
I stared at him open-mouthed.
‘Okay, twenty per cent then. Don’t ask for more. Soon your stake will be worth millions, maybe billions of dollars, and you won’t know what to do with it,’ he said, eyes shining with excitement.
‘That’s fine,’ I said, unable to believe my luck.
‘Any other questions?’
‘Well… I hate to ask, but can I sleep here at night?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We are partners now.’
A deep silence descended on me in the days that followed. I strove for nothing, I wanted nothing, I felt nothing. I just sat in silence, suspended, it seemed, in a state of un-being. I was used to remaining alone for extended periods of time and this job demanded nothing more. In the beginning, I attended a few phone calls and manufactured stories about Philip’s unavailability. Later, I scheduled meetings, but Philip’s software code wouldn’t be ready so I would re-schedule the meetings. And so it went, taking calls, arranging meetings, scheduling and re-scheduling appointments - work that required neither physical nor mental ability, which suited me perfectly. In the long, lonely nights, I would sit - sometimes on the plastic chair, sometimes on the wooden floor -and think. I would think of the past: losing Mom and Dad; gaining a friend in Sam; losing my arm and my sanity in Cambodia; grudgingly learning to accept my situation in the monastery; finding love and a family in Rio; and losing everything in a moment. I tried to coax a pattern from these events but all I saw were unravelled threads. Where was the tapestry the homeless guy had mentioned? I’d been running in circles for forty years and I was now behind the starting point. Perhaps this was why I saw a kindred soul in Philip.
‘Where did you go to school?’ he asked one day as I was sitting on the floor, smiling at Lara’s earnest expression as she challenged my life-denying Buddhist philosophy.
‘MIT,’ I replied without thinking.
‘Really?’ he said, looking up from the computer on which he was always tapping away. ‘Which class?’
‘I mean, I wanted to go to MIT,’ I said hastily. ‘But I haven’t even completed high school.’
As usual, he was too distracted to notice my slip.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I was in the class of 1973.’
Just a couple of years senior to me. Sam and I were in the class of 1975. He would have been in the campus at the same time as I was. But it had been a large campus - almost five thousand students across four classes - and a lot had happened since then, rendering those years almost meaningless.
‘That’s great,’ I said, not knowing what else to say. We rarely talked to each other, comfortable in our individual cocoons. I, in my thoughts and regrets; he, in his programming books and computer.
‘It’s great if you do something with it,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘But I have done nothing. My classmates from twenty years ago, and even those many years junior to me, are all millionaires many times over. MIT has produced partners in consulting firms, heads of investment banks, CEOs of Fortune 100 organizations and entrepreneurs of the hottest startups. All of them have big houses, one or maybe more wives, and at least two kids. Everyone has achieved something of consequence.’
There was at least one exception that I knew of, I thought ironically, and I knew him very well indeed.
‘I live in a rented apartment with three cats.’ He said it so matter-of-factly that we both burst into laughter.
‘But you are on the verge of something big,’ I said when we had stopped laughing.
‘I’ve been on the verge of something big for twenty years now,’ he said. ‘I’ve been moving from job to job, running in circles, searching for the next big thing which always seems to be around the corner - but isn’t.’
If the last three months were any indication of how he had lived twenty years, I knew exactly what he meant. He’d been ‘about to crack it’ every few days, and I had scheduled and re-scheduled venture capitalist meetings until they had stopped calling altogether.
I kept quiet. He looked expectantly at me. Perhaps a word of comfort from one failure to another, his expression said.
‘This time it’s different, isn’t it? You have venture capitalists lining up to fund you,’ I said.
‘Didn’t I tell you about the internet? VCs are breaking down the door of everyone who has a computer. Every twenty-two-year-old kid with a finger has a million dollars in funding from a VC right now. But I’ve been through this cycle with the telecom boom. I’m not going to make the same mistake again. I will accept VC funding only if I have a plan, else they will sue my ass off later, forcing me to file for another bankruptcy.’
‘What about the one-stop pet shop?’ I said. ‘That’s a really cool idea. Who wouldn’t want to buy supplies online instead of trudging to the grocery store in this bitter cold?’
He called me over to his desk. ‘Look,’ he said and opened a slew of websites, all with assorted pictures of dogs, cats, mice, goldfish, horses, guinea pigs, turtles, iguanas, even tigers and snakes. Each website claimed to provide pet food, pet supplies and luxuries, including coupons for spa treatments. ‘Nowadays, before you even have an idea, somebody has already executed it.’
‘What about the others - the fashion store and the mobile game?’
‘All taken.’
He didn’t appear sad, just resigned, as if the same thing had happened many different times in many different situations.
‘What are you going to do then?’ I asked.
‘What can I do? I’ll keep working, trying new ideas, blowing up my meagre savings, and file for bankruptcy again.’ He smiled.
‘I’m sure something will work out,’ I said soothingly.
He shrugged. ‘I can only control the work, not the result. I just need to give the best to what I do.’
I stared at him in surprise. An image I had long tried to forget flashed through my mind. Ishmael gritting his teeth and passing on the secret before he died; a karma yogi, the highest of all beings, performs his karma without attachment to the results thereof.
That night, instead of shutting my eyes and surrendering to thoughts of Lara, or trying to imagine what my son looked like, I began to glance through some of Philip’s computer programming books. I had no idea what I wanted to accomplish, only that it was my karma, my duty, to learn - and contribute - to the business I was a partner in and shamelessly pawing daily wages from. A host of unfamiliar terms leapt out of the pages and I tried to shake off the weariness I felt at having to apply my mind to something new again. C, C++, Unix, Linux, Java, Microsoft, Office Suite, http - everything I read about seemed strange and incomprehensible. Computers had changed a lot since I had studied engineering at MIT, I thought; all I remembered studying then was BASIC, which was now referred to only sparsely in the books. I had a lot of catching up to do.
The bleak winter gave way to a bright summer. Every time I ventured out, I was assaulted by happy, smiling faces and athletic bodies jogging without a care around the turquoise Minneapolis lakes, kissing, hugging, laughing, talking, holding hands. I would retreat to the basement office quickly, seeking refuge in the darkness and the computing books. Night after night I read them, slowly piecing together the puzzle of modern computing. Philip, to his credit, turned out to be a more effective teacher than an inventor.
‘Read this one first,’ he would say, delighted at my newfound interest. ‘You need to learn an operating system before you understand programming languages.’
He would mark particular chapters for special attention and quiz me when I finished a book. My mind, which had regressed to its most primal state in the last twenty years - run, fight, survive, eat, shoot, defend, run - relished the inherently mathematical challenges of programming and I began to make a little progress.
‘Java is the language of choice for programming now,’ Philip told me when I finished learning operating systems. ‘But you should start with C; it lays a good foundation. Anyway, what’s the hurry?’
There was no hurry. Time had frozen and I was content being in the state I was in, learning without thought, working without ambition, living without desire.
‘More than anything else though, you should know all about the internet. It’s going to fundamentally change the face of the world. Nothing, I repeat, nothing could possibly be more revolutionary for civilization.’
I began to understand his enthusiasm for the internet in due course and was amazed at its possibilities. No wonder Philip was always bursting with new business ideas and, like Mr Micawber of David Copperfield, believed that the one that would change his life was just round the corner. The ongoing dotcom boom fuelled his fancy and he picked, discarded and re-picked ideas at such frightening speed that I began to tire just hearing about them. Soon, I began doing more and more of my study at night when he was at home feeding his cats.
On one such night, I was trying to create a graphic interface using Java applets and the mobile gaming software that Philip had downloaded on his computer when a message popped up on the screen.
‘Wanna chat MITstud? I am 24/F/Istanbul.’
Philip had probably forgotten to log off from the chatroom he had started frequenting recently. He had insisted I use it too, to ward off loneliness, but I desired no companionship. The thought of sharing my life - or even a chatroom - with anyone but Lara repulsed me; my guilt was too deep and solitude was my only balm.
Another message popped up. ‘Please, I am lonely.’
I paused. Why was a twenty-four-year-old girl in the capital of vibrant, colourful Turkey lonely? I felt unexpectedly irritated. What did she know about loneliness? Had she ever abandoned a family and run a thousand miles away? I don’t know what came over me, but I replied to lonelygirl24.
‘You can do a lot more about your loneliness by meeting real people instead of chatting with perverts.’
I thought she’d sign out. Surely she wasn’t seeking emotional counsel from ‘MITstud’.
But she replied immediately. ‘No one likes me in real life.’
My heart thawed just a little bit.
‘You are young,’ I wrote back. ‘Things can be confusing when you are young.’
I was something of an expert at that, after all. I spent my twenty-fourth birthday tied to a wall with a bleeding, dying man at my feet. Things can be very confusing when you are young.
‘I’m not young,’ she said.
I nearly laughed out loud. If she was old, what did that make middle-aged losers like Philip and me? But then, age was relative; the older you got, the more your definition of ‘young’ kept changing. I was about to pass on this nugget of wisdom to her when a thought struck me. What if she wasn’t twenty-four? Lonelygirl24 could be a fifty-five-year-old balding, potbellied, foul-mouthed forklift operator from Ukraine for all I knew. Or she could be a man or a transsexual, how would I know any better?
‘Who are you really?’ I was about to write, when I stopped.
Did it even matter? Clearly, here was someone who wasn’t satisfied with the hand life had dealt her, or him, and had decided to take control and change that in the best way she knew. If she couldn’t be young and attractive in the real world, she would be so in the virtual.
I looked for the statistics of the chatroom. Sixty-five thousand members, it said, and most of them were under thirty.
How many were really who they said they were? Were most of them cranky old men with shrivelled dicks parading as young, virile Rambos or lonely old women with ten cats posing as eighteen-year-old virgins? For that matter, even Philip, usually honest to a fault, called himself an ‘MITstud’, and though he didn’t lie about his age, he didn’t make it a point to reveal it either. It had been twenty years since I’d thought about what a stud was, but something told me that a broke, middle-aged nerd with three cats wouldn’t qualify as one despite his golden heart.
There was another message. ‘Talk to me MITstud. No one has talked to me like this before. I am wet and waiting.’
It was a liberating idea. You could be anyone you chose to be. Everything was controlled by you. In the real world, fate and destiny teased you, tormented you and tossed you about mercilessly; in the virtual world, you could regain control in a moment. Wouldn’t I do so myself, given a chance?
I could go back to being Nikhil Arya and be with a Lara I met in the chatroom; I could even find a little son in the chatroom if I put my mind to it. I would find my family and be happy once again. Would it feel any less real if it happened only in the virtual world? Who said happiness was an emotion confined to the physical world? For that matter, what was real and what was virtual?
‘Are you there MIT Stud? I am real.’
‘Yes, I know you are real. It’s just a matter of perspective after all,’ I typed as an idea struck me.
‘What?’
I left the chatroom and worked on the idea for the rest of the night.
‘You look tired,’ said Philip the next day.
I was surprised he even noticed. But I didn’t want to tell him my idea just yet. I would develop a prototype before he quit working on everything else, as he was prone to do every time he heard a new idea.
‘I was wondering if you could teach me three-dimensional user interfaces,’ I said.
As usual, he had time to spare. We spent the rest of the day working on graphical interfaces.
‘You are really good,’ he said when we finished.
‘I’m good?’ I laughed. ‘You are the one teaching me!’
‘I’ve never seen anyone pick up things this quick,’ he said.
‘How many people have you even seen?’ I smiled at him.
‘You are way quicker than me, for one,’ he said. His eyes narrowed. ‘You said you’ve never been to school? That’s funny.’
‘It’s not funny when you don’t get the chance,’ I said with as much self-righteousness as I could muster.
‘When I think about it, you are quicker than almost all my MIT classmates - even the ones who are hotshot technology entrepreneurs now. I can’t believe you didn’t go to school,’ he repeated with a shake of his head.
I kept quiet lest I say something damaging.
‘I used to teach my classmates at MIT when they fell behind,’ he continued when I didn’t answer. ‘Now, of course, I’m the one who has fallen behind.’
‘I’m sure you will catch up soon,’ I said, glad that he had changed the subject. But it wasn’t for long.
‘Tell me, how did you lose your arm? You know, it suddenly struck me that we’ve been together for so long - more than a year now, right? Yet, we don’t know a thing about each other.’
The less you know about me, the safer we both will be, I thought. I am bad news: a mobster, a fugitive, a deserter. Every time there is a fork in the road, I take the wrong turn.
‘Did you grow up in Indi
a?’ he asked. ‘You look Indian, but you are tall and don’t sound like one. You don’t even sound American actually. You have this curious mix of so many accents like a… you know… ‘
‘A mongrel,’ I said with a forced laugh.
This conversation had to stop, I thought, nothing good could ever come of it.
‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean that at all. I mean you. you must have travelled a lot.’
‘A little,’ I said guardedly.
‘Were you in the Peace Corps?’
I almost laughed. First in Cambodia, then in Brazil, I had seen more blood, guns and violence than anyone should see in one lifetime - and done just about nothing to stop it. I would hardly be on the Peace Corps recruit lists.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I had a friend who worked for the Peace Corps.’ I thought of David. He was in a monastery, not the Peace Corps, but it was close. I was filled with unexpected emotion. ‘He was a good man, a very good man indeed. Were you in the Peace Corps at any time?’
‘Not me,’ he said. ‘But I sometimes wish I had decided to pursue a career in non-profit. Not that I am generating a lot of profit here.’ He smiled. ‘I’m just not cut out for this - business models, VCs, cash flows, pre-empting competition, etc.’
I clucked sympathetically.
‘Have you worked in a non-profit before?’ he asked.
I couldn’t handle this any more. ‘Philip, it’s getting late. Don’t you have to take care of the cats?’
He looked at his watch.
‘Oh, it’s nine already! Tell you what, why don’t we grab a beer tomorrow and talk? We rarely get out of office. It will be a nice break, won’t it?’
Just the break I was looking for, I thought. One thing could lead to another, and this entire pack of cards would collapse - like it had so often before. My life was shot anyway. I would end up wrecking Lara’s life too - if I hadn’t already done so.
‘Sure,’ I said.
I wouldn’t let it happen. I would have to discuss my idea with him tomorrow as I began to work on the prototype. I had to get him off his newfound obsession with my background. I forced myself to concentrate on the code I was writing.