by Oindrila Ghosal
The automatic doors of the train parted. Ranveer, clutching his harmonium in the canvas bag, stepped in. At this time of the evening, there were not many people on the platform. Not many people disembarked either. And so, without much hassle, he found himself a seat by the window. He first made room for the harmonium on the seat next to him and then leaned his temple on the window. A few seconds later, the whistle of the train blew and the engine, chugging, pulled the train out of the hooded station. The announcer’s crisp voice leapt over the mechanical din to announce the next station.
Ranveer stared at the advertisements for job vacancies on the hoardings they sped past. A little aloud, almost to himself, he scoffed. And immediately, he ran his eyes around the compartment if any of the passengers had raised their heads. They, hovering over their glaring screens with attached headphones, had perhaps not heard. He wasn’t new to the advertisements. Along all the routes, alongside the posters for the new movies and gadgets, these were commonplace. He knew the recruiters were forever on the lookout for trained professionals who could communicate with the machines in their languages. Mimicking the Pied Piper of Hamelin, they lured the students, as well as those not tagged to any institution, with dreams of a sprawling poolside bungalow. And at the end of the campaign, they drove back to their headquarters with trucks full of people, old and young, blindfolded by the romance of the machines. What irked him that day, perhaps, was how the evening had plunged into the drains.
Who was to be pointed at? He, his art or the crashing wave of technology that had ruthlessly submerged anything not entangled in the hyphae of algorithm? There was no definite answer. Even if there were clear grounds for annotation and ordering the ranks, there was no way to stand atop the soaring waves operated by the machines and their stakeholders and lash them to the ground. From the run-of-the-mill disparity, there was no obvious escape, and the signs of the emergence of a messiah were too bleak to shine bright in the dark.
In the grip of the helplessness, he oscillated back and forth in his seat like the bellows of the harmonium. Except that, there was no music in his movement. Perhaps music would be too jarringly subtle for the steel air-conditioned compartment and the commuters with steel ears. The muted movement, or at most the soft gush of air, did not enmesh his eyebrows. It kept him from hankering his way out of the labyrinth of futile hope and the ground it stemmed from—the binary code of life.
In another thirty minutes, the announcer chirped his destination and he, lugging the harmonium, rose from his oscillations and made his way to the taciturn doors.
Under the hooded station of Vishnu Nagar, he copiously filled his lungs with the sweat sticking to the shirts of the people strolling to and fro. After the metal wheels of the train were replaced with magnetic circuits, it was the surviving relic of a time not rolling at quantum speed.
He was so engrossed in the reminiscences fragrant with the heated metals that he took no note of his streaming out of the station and into the sea of the skinny hands of the homeless and the unemployed. His irises coloured again only when a searching hand reached his pocket. Gawked, he wasted no minute in elaborate escapades, though. Grabbing the harmonium ungainly, shielding his chest, he waded out of their blaring cries for a piece of bread, and fled to the other side of the road. Heaving, almost toppling over the shack he frequented each day after alighting from the train, he stashed the harmonium on the plank between him and the shopkeeper. He held out to the bamboo pillar on his left and breathed with his rasping tongue, flared nose and bulging eyes.
When his breaths eased a little, he complained, “Are the air valves at low pressure today?”
The shopkeeper said, handing him a bottle of water, “Trains at this hour are not so crowded.”
“Not the train,” he pointed at the opposite pavement, “Them.”
“That is what I was wondering. You come with the crowd returning from their offices,” he sneered awkwardly, coating lime on a wet betel leaf, “Make sure that next time when you cross the road, you look both ways.”
By the time he had finished dispelling the last syllable of the advice, the now released traffic held at the signal up the street, wheezed past them. Ranveer, clutching the uncapped bottle of water, craned his neck at the noiseless, smokeless, fleet of suspended disc-like automobiles cutting through the air current.
“This morning, a fifteen-year-old boy was run over by one of these while crossing the road. And even if they hit you, they won’t stop to check on you. You are lucky if you can stand up on your broken feet.”
Ranveer nodded and splashed some water over his face. After wiping off some droplets dripping down his salt-and-pepper stubble, he poured the remaining water down his throat.
He asked, returning him the label-stripped bottle of an erstwhile carbonated water brand, “What time is it?”
The shopkeeper lifted his wrist and read out the numbers displayed on the modified AMOLED screen. “Six.”
He nodded and felt for the wallet in his trousers. “One.”
“The usual?”
He nodded again.
The shopkeeper picked one from the glass display in front of him and handed it to him. He tore open the plastic seal and turned on the small switch at the bottom of the electronic cigarette. He waited for the front to glow optimally red before shoving it between his tanned lips.
He finished his cigarette in peace. The essence of spearmint-flavoured tobacco calmed his nerves. In the end, he stubbed it in the air-tight bin at his feet and twisted the wallet out of his pocket. Briefly, his eyes strayed to the watch on the shopkeeper’s hairy wrist he had pawned the previous day to clear his debts. The shopkeeper had surely not noticed, for he was again engaged in smearing the betel leaves with lime. He shifted his gaze to the notes that the mother of the kid he tutored had paid him for half a month, after holding his agreed-upon salary for months. He paid him the exact changes and left.
With his harmonium across his shoulders, he flocked to the marketplace—roundabout from the shack.
From the vendors there, bellowing their contents, he spent a quarter of what he had been paid to buy the fresh laboratory-grown greens and tubers. He would have filled the entire produce in his bags if, at a point, his strained arms hadn’t ached. That was precisely the moment when he looked at the peeping green leaves of fenugreek and decided to draw a close to his collecting finds that could stuff the refrigerator with more than it could hold. The trailing decision quickly followed. Dragging the bags to the periphery, he dropped them to the ground and queued for the disc cabs.
But the line didn’t seem to move. Standing at his place, he started to move, instead. He began by clenching and unclenching his fists. The impressions of the bag handles had set deep on his palms. He clenched them once more and moved them in circles. He circled his neck from side to side. Next, he swung his waist back and forth.
Finally, when his turn arrived, he caught one glimpse of the salmon pixels of the overhead dome and adjusted his waist on the little space left by the harmonium and the vegetables in the cab. The driver, tightening his seatbelt, asked him his drop location. He checked his screen for the fuel status and the complete closure of the doors, and pressed a button. The disc levitated from the ground.
The driver, many years younger than him, did not ask him about his day. Neither did he comment anything on the night drawing in. The silence did not entirely unnerve Ranveer. To fill the space, he could have asked the driver if he missed seeing the untainted sky. But what if he had grown up knowing the screen of the dome to be the sky? Was he even born when two major fires, sparked by solar ultraviolet radiation, had reduced the city’s major offices to ashes? Maybe his parents were glued to the television when the memorandum of agreement was signed across nations to commission the construction of the globe-encapsulating dome.
The screen of silence remained intact till the end of the seamless ride. The screen was so impenetrable that, at the end of the ride, the driver remained seated at his panel of buttons, through his dragging his bags out. Once he counted the cash, he was handed through the rolled-down window, he fleeted.
As the final display of strength for the evening, or so he thought, he lifted the bags one more time and covered the distance from his little gate to the front door in a few steps. He touched the luminescent sensor on the knob, and beyond his senses, a piezo electric circuit fired.
At the unlocking of the hinges, he pushed his way in. The air, stale from the day’s immobility, leapt up to him instantly, as a pack of hungry hounds would. He fought to remain standing, sometimes staggered, and with all his might swung the door closed. The air, now a lot tamed, looped in and out of his nostrils. But apart from the staleness, his nose caught the notes of lachrymose in them. He sniffed. And sniffed. And sniffed again. Weak in his knees, he pushed his back to the closed door, and heavily breathing, slid to a crouch, a centimetre per minute. Two drops plummeted down his eyes. The guards were off. He did not rebuild the walls. His broken heart, minced before boarding the train home, brimming from his eyes, flooded the pores on his tanned cheeks, his unruly beard and his trembling chin. His retracted floodgates and the bags by him, perhaps abandoned for the evening, looked on.
Tears only invited more tears. He paused for a few seconds to gasp for some air before resuming crying. Would things have been easier if he had a screen to pour out his heart?
The kid he had just been laid off from tutoring had once confided in him that his mother spoke day in and out to an artificial intelligence interface. Often behind closed doors, he had heard his mother laugh and cry and whisper, even when his father or any visitor was not around. She, the wife of one of the owners of the big offices that had burnt down, had her itinerary decided and approved by the interface, the kid had shared. He had then thought of the first day she had called him to their place. Sporting tangerine hair and electric blue painted nails, she had blurted out that the interface had suggested she hire a harmonium teacher for him. It had even looked up his name and credentials. When she had caught him off guard staring at her hair and nails for way too long, unapologetically, she had laughed that they were for pleasing the sun and calming the moon, as per the interface. Her technology-driven eccentricity had irked him quite a bit, especially when reasoned that it had advised her against paying him his dues. It was again in the court this time for stating that the kid no longer needed to learn the instrument. Half a month’s pay was decided by the godforsaken latest advancement of the silicon chip.
Would it have helped if he had argued that the kid had just learnt the notations and had only been initiated in Raag Desh? Maybe the interface would have butchered his defence before she could begin to think.
Spiralling through the hapless helplessness, he realised his toes could feel the gritty moisture of the unending saga of grief. Now the only way out was to stand. And he stood. He lifted his head above the desolation of his home and turned on the switch. In the light that covered the nooks in no time, he stood gaping, his finger still on the switch. Standing in front of him was a man looking exactly like him.
He blinked twice. Long, slow blinks. No, he wasn’t hallucinating. From the gaze in his brown eyes to the tiny bald patch and the unshaven salt-and-pepper beard, the man was his identical clone. The untucked black and beige striped cotton shirt and grey trousers were as if tailor-made from the same fabric.
“I am Ranveer.” The doppelganger spoke in the exact same tone.
Ranveer’s gaping lips fluttered. “Which version?”
“Beta.”
He remembered that a year ago he had shut the door in Ranveer Alpha’s face.
He sneered, easing a bit, “I had forgotten that your sensors work even in the sewers.”
The doppelganger did not rebuke. Ranveer, licking his lips, added, “You know, I can’t stand your lot at all.”
“Very well and that is why this time they did not want to risk sending me to your doorstep. After my preliminary examinations turned out fine, they teleported me to your living area.”
“When?”
“Long back. You weren’t around then. I had been sitting the entire day on your sofa,” he pointed to his back, “I had been taught that you play the taped videos of your wife, Manjari, lighting a diya under the tulsi and blowing the conches. I could not decide if I should play them because you see, we are running late by an hour. But if I did, you might have been startled into a fit. Now that you are here, how do we go about the evening?”
“You should leave my house. Immediately.”
“Why? It shall take another year for Gamma to be ready.”
“You can ask Alpha the reason.”
“We had found no notes of rejection on Alpha before it was dismantled. No direct evidence at all. Over the year, the indirect snippets from your shower, bedroom, the trains and the house you taught at, have helped us shape an inference.”
“You talk in riddles.”
“I can rephrase.”
“We can talk over tea. I am too fatigued for your mumbo-jumbo. And you can leave after that.”
And he limped out to the kitchen, skirting past the doppelganger, with his newfound strength.
It replied, minutes after his departure, “That is not scripted in the program,” and sat down on the orange high-backed sofa.
It did not rise when he brought them two steaming cups of tea and a saucer of crackers on a tray. It did not stir at all when he centred the tray on the coffee table. Only when he sat on the ottoman beside him and lifted his cup did it turn its head.
“I hope the tea suits you well. Either way, you are free to charge yourself with an adaptor.”
It stared dumbfounded at him for some time and then curled its fingers around the cup. “You cannot simply ask me to leave. That is against the conditions.”
“Why so?”
“You are of use to us. They need you to work in those offices.”
“I know nothing about your ways.”
“That’s just it. You can stay here and practice your music. I shall be borrowing your identity and entering those premises to code for the machines. You don’t have to leave at all.”
“And you shall be bearing the responsibility of feeding me?”
“O no. They don’t pay us. You can give me something of yours to sell each day and I can bring you home the money.”
“What if they are exhausted one day?”
“Then, I can continue working at those offices and you can slowly wither away and die.”
Ranveer sipped. It attempted soothsaying, “They need a lot of people there to run the machines. You are a wasted potential to them that is being resurrected. What use are you and your art to the world, anyway?”
Ranveer understood the task. He had to die. If not this way, then out on the streets, like the millions who had been stripped of their employment, shelters and identities. The concealed sprinklers, that couldn’t be told from the oxygen- dispensing ones, annually let loose germs by the creators of Alpha and Beta. They attended the mass funerals afterwards and lectured on why maintaining a homeostasis was crucial for the ecosystem to function. Was fate contagious?
Were Manjari and Tishya happy dead? To start, Tishya, named after the Purva Phalguni constellation she was born under by her mother, had flickered and fused before knowing what death was. It was on one of those days, the days of the rival pharmacies. Each morning, they would litter the streets and the doorsteps with whatever their reactors had just minted. Every name, big or small, resorted to the tactic, circumventing the meandering route of clinical trials, which unfortunately had not proceeded to their light-speed era. And Tishya, knowing no better, had crawled and popped a sparkling red capsule, strewn at their threshold. As an immediate after-effect, her heart was the first to stop throbbing.
The case in the court had dragged on and on for years. The giants playing football on either side of the gavel, ended up drawing the game. Leave alone compensation, no apology dropped in their mail. And in those years, Manjari had been a miserable chronicler of her days of motherhood. While people advised him to show her to a psychiatrist, he had refrained. Having studied the ins and outs of the workings of the healthcare industry through the trial, he knew no better than to hug her to sleep. If only he had documented concrete evidence, he could have held them by their necks to look into their logbooks of distribution, he regretted in those nights.
Then, as is the nature of time, Manjari’s scars began healing on their own some years down the line. Her accounts of her days of pregnancy and her longing to see the real night sky had started to dampen. It was during her days of carrying Tishya that she had decided her name and ruthlessly rejected Ranveer’s proposal of an evening Raag. Out of sheer nostalgia, she had coaxed him to buy her the latest virtual reality device that could simulate anything cosmic and otherwise, for her baby shower. She had said that it would help her track the astrological shifts. He had spared a little thought and then given in, that at least before introducing the syntax of brackets and clauses at play-school, he could teach the baby the tenderness of a rose petal.
And one day, during Ranveer’s somewhat easy phase, she had blurted out that a salesman from an emerging pharmaceutical company that believed in the ethics of the book, visited her often, when he was out teaching his disciples. His antidepressants were working like silver bullets, she had chirped and revealed that she had planned to call him home for Raksha Bandhan.
Nothing had alarmed him when she tied the sacred thread around the salesman’s wrist. In fact, when she came home one evening after vegetable shopping with a fever, he had left the door open for the visiting salesman. He had not protested when he pushed the pills down her throat. Rather, he saw signs of improvement. Then, one day, she died—coughing foam at the gulp of a pill that looked no different from the predecessors.
Of course, the salesman had escaped unhurt. His puppeteers had again turned the right keys from keeping the case ever reaching an epilogue. Outside, the people playing dice with power, and the umpiring journalists feasted. Anyone who protested was first ground in conspiracies and then left to die from the incurable infections of unheard-of germs on the streets.
No one had visited him during the period of mourning. The harmonium had not sung. His fingers had not played the keys. But the morning he mustered the strength to dust the keys to render Raag Bhairavi, a knock had rattled his door.
Emerging from the den, squinting his droopy eyes set deep in the mane of hair and beard, he had only stared at the strangers standing on the piled-up pamphlets of assisted reproduction interventions at the door. One of them had handed him their card. Another had explained that they worked for a firm specialising in wormholes and portals, and that they could help teleport Manjari from another universe, where she would be dumping him over the salesman. He had justified that it was an absolute necessity, given that they could not really change the past. Confused and irritated, he had slammed the door in their faces. That was the last he had heard of those sorcerers until Alpha stopped uninvited at his door. In the years in between, wearied, he had seen and heard of the shells of the people sharing his fate, crushed like peanuts by those playing hands.
The doppelganger cleared its throat. “Given that you have had enough time to consider, I believe you shall agree to sign the deed of agreement. There is still time for your passing though. But before that, you can give us anything of yours to train our future models.”
Ranveer smiled. He looked at the tea left in the cup and the hand holding it. Had the vagueness of fossilisation begun to throb in his veins? It’s only a matter of time, he thought to himself.
#
The doppelganger sat cross-legged across from the harmonium, with a diary titled “Archival” on his lap. Ranveer was yet to join him. After dining with him from the same plate and sliding under the blanket beside him—aping his clubbing of fingers and curling his back, it had noted some of the subtleties conjoining his name to his identity. For instance, he preferred spending long hours in the kitchen and the shower for still elusive reasons. The reasons, however, would not take long to be decoded, it was convinced.
Ranveer stepped out of the shower, wiping his hands on his moth-eaten kurta, enraptured in the daze of life and afterlife. It didn’t complain about the wait. He, tiptoeing across different timelines, strayed away from bringing it up. Neither the doppelganger nor he was recording time.
He sat down and bowed to the keys. It flipped to the first page. He, eyes closed, released the bellows, and his crinkled fingers scurried across the soft Re Ga Dha Ni keys. It scribbled the notation on the blank white sheet. He retraced the keys and glided his voice along.
END