Mango Chutney: An Anthology of Tasteful Short Fiction. (14 page)

 

I could disbelieve what was happening if I were in a dream or a night-
mare. But it was as real as the colour of the red T-Shirt I wore that day.

“Don’t worry. All of this is normal. It will take some time getting used to.
But we are expecting it would be less, in your case. You are the closest we
have come to the production version,” he said.

I had absolutely no clue about what he was saying. It was a science fiction
movie and anything could happen in a science fiction movie. Although, I
thought, this time they had gone a bit too far

“Are you still in the movie?” I asked. I did not know what else to ask.
“Yes. You can say that. But this movie is meant just for you,” he said.

“Okay,” I felt a little stupid for asking that question. Of course it had
to be for me alone. Otherwise my female cousins, all seven of them
would have started shouting by now to get Michael J Fox’s attention.

“You are slowly getting ready, Vaman. We will be watching you. Don’t get
involved in anything that can harm you. A lot rides on you, okay?” he said
with a wry smile. Perhaps he found it difficult to believe that anything
could ride on me.
“Okay,” I said.

Then, he disappeared and everything else reappeared. The movie, the
theatre walls, chairs, and my cousins. Michael J Fox was in the past, in the
forties, struggling to make sense of it all. I don’t know for sure, but he
winked at me. Just once. He was delivering a dialogue and mid-sentence
he turned towards me, winked, and resumed his dialogue. Nobody must
have seen it since my cousins did not mention it later. I did not like the
movie. I stopped watching science fiction movies after that. Especially
the sequels to Back to the Future.

I did not grow beyond three feet and four inches. I was the shortest kid
everywhere. In kindergarten, where my teachers always made me stand in
the front row during the school prayer. At school, where I always had to
sit on the first bench for I could not see the teacher even from the sec-
ond. I was always at the forefront but strangely, always invisible. Nobody
seemed to notice me.

My father, too, thought that I was invisible. I had four siblings. Two older,
two younger. Anything my father got for his kids he got it in fours. I
thought he was always surprised that I existed when my mother told him
that he had forgotten to bring the fifth. His surprise, more often than
not turned into rage. And then there were words. Words so hideous and
acerbic that my mother’s tears dried up even before I was two years old.
My father refused to believe that he had fathered me. These moments
of my mother’s humiliation were the only bright spots in the lives of my
many aunts and grandmother.

I was ten years old and just five days before the ‘Back to the Future’ in
-
cident, I had participated in the selections for the track and field events
of the school. The selection committee started and ended with the sixty
four-year old P.T. teacher who always had a red whistle between his lips.
He never removed it and so a faint whistle accompanied everything he
said.

“What the hell do you want?” he asked me. Some people were annoyed
that they noticed me.

“I want to participate in the trials sir,” I said.
He waited for me to say something more as though I was going to deliver
the punch line of a joke. And then he laughed. So did the whistle. Slowly
the laughter dissipated and after a few moments, the entire school was
laughing to the tune of the P.T. teacher’s whistle.

“And what do you want to trial for?” he asked, chewing the end of his
whistle as though it were a cigar.

“Triple jump, sir,” I said. The laughter increased. I stood there for a rather
long moment and then walked away, the faint whistling laughter still in
my ears.

I loved triple jump. I was terrible at every sport, but I could triple jump
– The precision. The rhythm. The timing. Perhaps the best in the entire
school. They never noticed me practicing on my own after everyone had
left the school grounds. I thought I had become so good at it that I could
jump across the school ground. I looked up one night at the sky lit with
stars and asked, “Can I really jump across the school ground?” I did not
get any answer.

Eleven years later I was twenty-one years old, fresh out of my computer
science degree course and struggling to ingrain myself into the family
business of selling saris. My father and his brothers sold saris. My grand-
father and his brothers sold saris. My grandfather’s father and his broth-
ers sold saris. Beyond that, I don’t know. Bright and colourful saris. Just
like my mother’s stories. I could not sell saris. The customers ignored me.
One night there was an attempted robbery in our biggest shop. Nothing
was stolen. The burglars ran away after the alarm went off. My father
and his brothers counted each and every sari, just to be sure. I remember
there were three hundred twenty eight thousand six hundred and forty
seven saris. My father insisted that someone sleep in the shop every night.
Everyone was scared to do so. My father saw me then. Perhaps for the
fifth time in my life.

“Vaman, you will have to sleep in the shop,” he said to me. He actually
looked at me when he said that. I was so giddy that I nodded my assent.

I was scared and desperately trying to sleep that night when the shop
disappeared. The blackest darkness returned. I thought I saw some-
one walking towards me. It turned out to be a woman and she was the
most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She was wearing the saris from
our shop. Incredibly, I thought she was wearing all three hundred twenty
eight thousand six hundred and forty seven saris. They were like little
stamps joined together to make one most colourful and beautiful sari.

“Hello Vaman,” she said.
“Are you trying to steal the saris?” I croaked.
She laughed. The most beautiful and crinkling laughter I had ever heard.

“No Vaman. I am not. I am here to tell you the story of your birth,” she
said.

 

“I already know the story of my birth,” I said, “My mother has told
me.”

 

“That is a fairytale. I have the real story,” she said with an indulgent
smile.

 

“What do you mean?” I did not like her condescending smile.

“Our systems have been attacked by a virus. A virus so deadly that in all
likelihood it will destroy our systems. It has already attacked and wiped
out five hundred thousand human terminals attached to a central proces-
sor. We cannot live without our systems, can we? Honestly, we are the
systems,” she said.

I nodded as though I understood, but I had no clue.

“You are the antivirus carrier, Vaman. Your mother was one of the ten
terminals with the potential to spawn the antivirus carrier. All the other
nine have failed. You are our last hope,” she said.

I thought I heard a faint quiver in her voice as she said the last part.
“Are you people what we call Gods here?” I asked.

“No. Okay, maybe. But you have used your limited imagination to under-
stand us. We are far more complex than you think.”

I nodded though it made no sense. As she had said, I was a being with
limited imagination.
“The next time we meet, you will have to come with us and destroy
that virus. We will equip you with the necessary weapons. Don’t worry,
okay?”

A shadow of deep worry passed over her face and for a moment I
thought she had let her charade down. I saw her in that moment. She
was a machine. There were strange coloured lights blinking inside it. It
had parts that were very recognizable. I could see a big central processor.
There were bright colourful wires connecting other parts. The cooling
pins. It did not look very complex to me. It quickly realized that I was
looking right inside and restored the charade.

“Don’t let any harm come to you. We will meet in a few more hours.”
“Hours?”

“Yes hours to us. For you, it might be another ten years. We are planning
to shut down a lot of systems. So nothing much would happen to you in
the next ten years.”

Then she was gone. I was lying on the mattress in our sari shop with all
the saris safe and sound. But she was wrong. A lot happened to me in the
next ten years. Those were the best ten years of my life.

I met Tara when we were sitting in a bus. She was sitting at one end of
the bus and I was standing on the other. There were around a hundred
people huffing, sweating, fidgeting and twisting in the bus that could ac-
commodate only fifty. And it was incredible that Tara and I still saw each
other. The bus stopped at one of the most nondescript stops and all the
passengers got out. Just the both of us remained. This was one of the
implausible things that happened in those ten years. There were other
things. Some of them big. Like the discovery of three more planets in the
solar system. Like the sudden inventions of the cures to dreaded diseases
like AIDS and cancer. Like the rain that fed the Sahara for two years.
Some of them were small. Like me finally fulfilling my dream of selling
my first sari. Like my father talking to me seventeen times per year. Like
my getting the courage to talk to the most beautiful girl I had seen.

“I sold my first sari yesterday,” I walked up, swaying like a drunkard in the
lurching bus and said to her. I wanted to remember that it was the first
thing I said to her. I thought she was going to slap me. Or at best ignore
me, like everyone else did. She was an inch shorter than I was but a few
notches more visible(I don’t know what the unit for the measurement of
‘visibility’ could be, so notches would have to do).

“What colour was it?” she asked, her eyes widened.
“It was green. Like an emerald,” I said.
“That is my favorite colour,” she said, “I am Tara.”

I told her my name. Two months later we were married and stayed that
way for the next nine and a half years. I prayed that they, the almostGods, would keep the systems switched off. The world, or the space that
I inhibited, worked just fine without the systems. But it was not to be.

Ten years later I was thirty-one years old and had just lit my wife’s
pyre. She died while giving birth to our baby. The baby died too. The
custom was to bury the baby and burn the wife. I did both. I knew I
was going to kill myself. There was nothing left for me in this world.

And that was when I saw them the third time. I lit the pyre and stood
a few feet away. Just like the last two times, there was the now familiar
darkness and everything disappeared. Except for the burning pyre of my
dead wife. I thought it burnt with ten times the intensity. Or maybe the
blackest darkness was magnifying it. A human form jumped out of the
pyre. It was made up of fire, of course, but had the very distinguishable
features of a man.

“Sorry about your wife,” the fireman said.
“Can you bring her back?” I asked.

“It is not part of the plan, unfortunately,” he said. I saw the sorrowful
expression on his fiery face. “You remember what we told you the last
two times, don’t you?”

“Yes. I will do it. But only if you bring back my wife and my son,” I
said.

 

“You cannot make demands. We own you,” the man said. He burned a
little brighter.

“No you don’t! I will kill myself!” I said, with as much courage as I could
muster.

The man lifted the pyre of my wife as though it were a little orange ball.
For a moment, I thought he was going to hurl itat me. But after two of
the most terrifying seconds of my life something changed in the man. He
burned more like an ordinary fire and dropped the pyre.

“Why are you being stubborn?”
“She is more visible than I am,” I said.

He nodded resignedly. They took me after they promised to bring back
my wife and baby. I had to trust their word. They had no reason not to
honor it.

I felt the most excruciating pain as I opened my eyes. My whole body
had innumerable wires attached to it. I thought my mind was aware of
the unique pain caused by each and every wire stuck into me. I could not
breathe. I was submerged in a liquid substance that resembled thin milk.

“Take quick breaths and stop thrashing around,” a voice said in my
head. It seemed to be accompanied by the faintest of whistles. I
stopped twisting around and tried to breathe.

“Don’t struggle,” the voice said. This time I could hear the whistle quite
clearly.

 

I could breathe a little. But the pain shot up as though rejuvenated by my
breathing.

“Inhale. Exhale slowly.”
I did. The pain did not go.
“Again. Inhale. Exhale slowly.”

The pain subsided a little. After a few moments I could breathe and I
got used to the pain. I looked at my body or whatever of it that was vis-
ible through the wires. It was white, like the skin under the wristwatch
that is never removed. Suddenly the liquid enclosure burst and I fell. All
the wires snapped and I screamed with pain. That was when I saw the
hives. Huge clusters of enclosures, just like the one I was in. Shaped like
inverted Christmas trees and as big as mountains.

I slowed down as I fell and after a few seconds came to a halt. There was
no ground beneath me. It was as though the air had solidified just enough
for me to get my footing. Someone walked towards me from a distance.
I was stunned to see that it was the P.T teacher. He had the same red
whistle in his mouth and was twisting it as if chewing a cigar.

“You are aware that you are our last hope, Vaman,” he said.
I nodded a yes.
“All of us have been watching you. Every single one of us,” he said.

“Nobody could see me back there, except for Tara,” I said. My voice
sounded electronic, as though it was coming out of an ancient tele-
phone.

“We did not want any harm done to you. So we made you invisible. We
don’t really know how Tara could see you though. What you call love,
we call anomaly. We still haven’t figured it out yet. We do not have much
time,” he said. He didn’t seem very happy talking to me. The whistle was
a lot more distinct.