Neeraj
comes back from work hungry and irritated, kicks off his shoes and slumps down
in front of the computer, ignoring his wife’s questions, ignoring her tales of
what happened during the day and what the children did at school.
“Is something wrong?” She fusses around
him, like a buzzing dragonfly, brightly coloured and vapid as the insect, and
he doesn’t even look at her.
“The usual,” he snarls eventually. “I’m
supposed to do everything at work. If it goes all right, then it’s all their
credit. If something goes wrong, then I’m to blame.”
“Yes,” Brinda, his wife, says. “You work
too hard and they don’t give you the appreciation.” She’s said it so many times
over the years that it’s become a soothing incantation. She brings him tea,
sweet and very milky, the way he likes it. “Isn’t your game on tonight?” she
asks as he sips at the pale brown fluid.
He perks up at the mention of the game. He’d
been looking forward to it all week, but the day at the office had driven it
from his mind. “Right. You were saying about the boys?”
“No, it’s fine, they’re at their tuitions.”
She and the boys know well enough to stay out of his way on a game night. “They
asked if they can watch the game on television.”
“Yes, why not.” Neeraj suddenly feels good,
even without the neuroweb stimulation. “We’re going to win big. We’ll slaughter
them. Why shouldn’t the boys watch.” He walks over to the cupboard inset into
the wall and gets the neuroweb headset. “Next year, hopefully I’ll get the
promotion and then we can web all of you.”
He’d been saying this for years as well,
and had already got two promotions, but the money was always used for something
else, holidays and a larger television, and of course the payments for the
flat. Even so, Brinda never failed to go slightly white at the thought of being
webbed. He knew she was terrified at the thought, and grinned with pleasure.
“Well?” he demanded, holding up the black
hooded helmet of the neuroweb headset, with its dangling wires, its opaque
visor and the two rolls of material like doughnuts over the ears. “Wouldn’t you
like that?”
“Yes, yes,” she says, her head bobbing like
a doll’s. “But do the boys first, they’ve been asking for it for ever so long.”
“Hmm.” He grins again. “All right, we’ll
see. Shouldn’t you be getting dinner? I want to eat before the game starts.”
With a sigh of relief, she disappears
towards the kitchen. Neeraj turns to the computer, attaching the neuroweb
headset to the grey and white plastic cube that fits on the CPU. It’s Chinese,
and it’s unpatriotic to buy Chinese, but everyone does that because the Chinese
ones are the best, fastest and cheapest on the market. Only nobody admits it.
The headset lights up, green and red dots
coming on over the temples, and he slips it on to check the connections, the
little metal tabs in the inner lining connecting to the micro-electrodes
implanted in his skull. Unconsciously, he begins to hum.
There’s still some time to wait, so he goes
online and trolls liberals, threatening them with rape and death and telling
them they’d all better go to Pakistan. Sitting back with a happy sigh, he hums
some more.
He feels great. He feels alive. It’s the
best feeling in the world.
***************************************************
Satwant
Singh runs in to bowl, his boots pounding the grass, the floodlights hot on his
face. The ball is sweat-slick in his hand, seated between his fingers gripping
the seam. The batsman, in the South African green and yellow, is peripheral to
his attention. His attention is fixed on where he intends to pitch it, on line
with the leg stump, the ball intended to swing towards the off. With luck he
can induce a snick to the wicket keeper.
His left arm goes up, he comes down on his
right boot, his right arm swinging, and the ball streaks away over the pitch
towards the batsman. He pitches it where he wanted, and the ball swings, but
not enough. The batsman doesn’t go for the shot, just blocks it, and the ball
drops to the pitch. Satwant bends to pick it up on his follow-through. Dot
ball, no runs scored, a little victory in itself. The crowd roars.
Neeraj sighs happily, feeling the sweat
trickle down Satwant’s back as he goes back to the start of his run up. Satwant
flexes his shoulders, and Neeraj feels the muscles bulging under his skin,
feels the hot night air in his lungs, the knowledge that he’s a hero. Neeraj
drinks it all down like wine.
The over ends, and Neeraj waits to see if
the bowler will be changed. Sekhar has already bowled five overs on the trot
without a single wicket, and Neeraj wants to be sure before switching to his
neuroweb channel. Briefly, he becomes the wicket keeper instead, and his hands
suddenly become heavy with the two pairs of gloves, and his legs with the
wicket keeping pads. He feels himself walk up to the stumps, take up his
stance. It’s Sekhar again, and Neeraj knows the commentary will criticise
persisting with him. Still, he changes over once more.
An advert floats up in the corner of his
vision, a fish with rippling fins, painted in all the colours of the rainbow
and then some. A fabric company? Who cares, it’s just an irritant. and people
who have paid for neuroweb implants shouldn’t have to be subject to this kind
of thing. Neeraj blinks, shakes his head, and the fish is gone.
Sekhar is very tall, with a loose-swinging
gait, much taller than Neeraj, and the great height is a little disorienting.
When he follows through his head twists round in a way that makes his long hair
flap in his face, and that is why Neeraj even misses the moment at which his first
ball sneaks between the batsman’s bat and right pad and clips the leg-side
bail.
Pandemonium. Teammates piled on Sekhar,
someone’s throat – Sekhar’s or Neeraj’s own? – hoarse with screaming. There
will be fortunes made in the bookies’ illegal rackets at this moment, but right
now there’s the grass under Sekhar’s knees, the hugs of his teammates, and the
joy of knowing that the same commentators who were condemning him a moment ago
will be praising him now. What is a bet with a bookie worth, compared to this?
Later. Neeraj does not know how much later.
India is batting now, and the match is headed for the kind of tense finish that
make people scream with tension and clench their fists over their mouths.
Neeraj has shifted many times by now, back and forth, between Indian players of
course. The entire Indian team is neurowebbed, that is a condition of their
contract with the cricket control board, so he can choose whoever he wants to
be. Once or twice he has had a vague impulse to switch to a South African player’s
web, just for a moment, but he can’t. The South African team has refused
neurowebbing, and threatened to cancel all cricket ties if the Indian cricket
control board insists. Neeraj can’t understand this. Don’t the South Africans –
and the Australians, and the English, the New Zealanders, and the remnants of
the West Indies – want their players
to connect to their fans directly? Don’t they understand how popular they would
be?
But now, right now, it’s the last over,
three balls to go, seven runs to get, two wickets left. Not impossible, not at all,
but two balls earlier there had been seven runs to get, also, and three wickets left. He’s Satwant again,
along with twenty million others, with the wicket keeper, Jahangir, at the
other end. The bat is heavy and solid in his hands as the South African fast
bowler, a tiny figure in the distance, starts on his bowling run.
And here comes the ball. It’s just short,
rising to mid-chest level, and he swings at it, pivoting on his leg, feels the
satisfying crack of the wood of the bat striking the ball, and the white orb streaks
away as Jahangir races down the pitch towards him, screaming for a run. Satwant
runs, Neeraj runs with him, the far crease coming up, he slides his bat forward
enough to touch the crease, and the ball is still rolling away, two fielders
after it as Jahangir is running back for another. They cross, they’re across,
and the fielders are just cutting off the ball short of the boundary. The crowd
is on its feet shrieking, and Satwant feels their exultation, and he turns and
goes back for the third run, yelling at Jahangir to move, move, go for it now.
He doesn’t see what happens, but the sudden
silence of the crowd tells him what he needs to know. Jahangir is on his face
by the far crease, picking himself up, and the South African wicket keeper isn’t
even bothering to celebrate.
One ball to go, five runs to get, and he’s
at the far end while Sekhar, the worst batsman on the team and hence tail end
Charlie, will just lose the match for everyone. Neeraj doesn’t even bother to
switch. The bitter anger in his mouth might be either Satwant’s or his own.
***************************************************
The next
day in the office he’s furious. “It was that bloody Muslim,” he rages. “That
Jahangir. He deliberately got run out so that we’d lose. Never trust a Muslim.
We should never have taken one on the team.”
“That’s not fair,” Dhruv says mildly. He’s short,
young, fair, and the newest one in the office. Neeraj has heard the women refer
to him as “cute”. He hates Dhruv. “He took three catches,” Dhruv says. “And it
wasn’t he who called for that last run, it was Satwant. It was a suicidal run
anyway. And Jahangir did dive as hard as he could for the crease.”
Neeraj has seen the television replays, so
he can’t deny this. But it’s still intolerable to be countered by this arrant
pipsqueak. “I’ll bet he was being Jahangir on the neuroweb,” he mutters, after
Dhruv has gone. “He’s a closet Muslim-lover, mark my words.”
Amitava, the nearest thing to a friend he
has in the office, slaps his back. “Cheer up. Didn’t you get the latest bit of
news?”
“What news?”
“They’re neurowebbing soldiers. It’s still
experimental, but it’s supposed to be made available to the general public from
today. It’ll increase patriotism.”
It’s impossible to tell if Amitava is being
ironic, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Neeraj is seized by the idea. “Is that
so? Really? Which channel?”
“All you have to do is go on the web, and
you’ll be told,” Amitava says. He glances pointedly at his watch. Amitava is notionally
Neeraj’s supervisor, and is supposed to make sure the team’s work gets done. “Why
don’t you check it out this evening? We have work to do.”
Before evening, Neeraj has already got
confirmation from at least three other people. All of them are excited. “See,”
Girish says over lunch. Girish is fat and greasy and smells of sweat, but he’s
supposed to be a marketing genius. “See, I always wanted to join up, but my
parents wouldn’t even let me enlist in the NCC. And the libtards jeer when I
support the army and want to know how many years I served. We need to show
them.”
“It should be compulsory for everyone to
watch,” Satish puts in. “Anyone who’s on the neuroweb who doesn’t watch is a
traitor.”
There’s a general consensus on this. “At
least in this office,” Neeraj says. “Every single damned person had better
watch, or else.”
“Right. We’re all neurowebbed, aren’t we?
Is there anyone who isn’t webbed?”
“These days,” Neeraj says, “anyone who doesn’t
get webbed the moment he can afford it can only be a traitor, or something
worse.” He glances at Dhruv, who’s on the other side of the room – not too
much, just enough to make the point.
“You know my cousin is a major in the army?”
Satish says. He leans forward conspiratorially, and whispers, though who he’s trying
to keep his words from is a mystery. “He says the army intelligence is
investigating a lot of lefties. You’d be amazed, he says, how many are in the
pay of China. No evidence, of course, but the signs are all there.”
“Well, we’ll know now,” Neeraj replies. “We
don’t need evidence, when the facts are clear in front of our eyes.”
***************************************************
Neeraj
crouches with the soldier behind a tree, listening to the crack of bullets
smacking into the trunk. The sound of firing ahead rises, and he tenses as
something flutters in his peripheral vision. But it’s only a twig, severed by a
bullet, falling.
The soldier’s name is Prashant, and he’s a
lieutenant. He’s the only one of the unit who’s webbed, so Neeraj can’t switch
to another view, though he’d have liked to. He’s been stuck behind this tree
for several minutes now.
Prashant is young, not long since he was
commissioned, and excited. This is his first operation. If he can eliminate the
militants in the village, he’ll get noticed, and he badly wants to get noticed.
After all, the nation is watching on neuroweb, is with him at this moment, and
what he does will be felt by them all. He turns, checking over his shoulder at
the troops of the platoon, and Neeraj turns with him. The soldiers are
spreading out, as ordered, to surround the building ahead to ensure that nobody
inside gets away.
Up ahead there’s the house, built on a
steep slope, thick stone walls surmounted by wood. It’s not going to be easy
for the soldiers to surround the place without being fired on from the upper
windows and the roof, and Prashant hesitates a moment, wondering whether to
call for backup and reinforcement, before he decides that this would take too
much time and let the terrorists escape. Neeraj cheers aloud as the young
officer signals the troops on his right flank forward. This is better than a
movie. This is life, instead of
sitting in an office.
Then there is heavy firing from the right,
so quick and heavy that individual shots merge into a continuous burst of
noise, and there are suddenly no longer any bullets striking the trees in front
of Prashant. He acts on the impulse of the moment, throwing himself forward as
he screams out an order for a frontal charge.
Neeraj sees out of Prashant’s eyes the
house, jerking and bouncing as he runs towards it, the AK in his hands shuddering
as he squeezes off a burst, the blood roaring in his veins as he runs. Neeraj
cheers, screaming full-voiced, and he’s at the wall, Prashant is right under
the wall, fumbling in his pouch for a grenade. And suddenly there’s someone
jumping out from behind the corner. The glimpse of a pale Kashmiri face, a
hooked nose and black beard, a raised gun, and something strikes Prashant, like
a hard punch in the chest. He falls over backward, the sky and trees reeling
over him. There’s a metallic taste in his mouth, and every
thing
goes
black.
***************************************************
The men
are crouched on a cracked concrete floor, heads together. One of them hands out
crudely made pistols. “Don’t use these unless you have to,” he whispers. “Those
are our real weapons.”
Everyone glances at the petrol bombs lined
up against the wall. It’s a narrow room, and the bombs are almost within reach.
They’re simply Molotov cocktails, beer bottles with rags stuffed into the
necks.
“Got it?” the leader whispers. His name is
Rajesh. “We go in, hit the bastards, throw bombs on their houses. If they come
out, use the iron rods and swords. Guns only if any of them have anything to
shoot at us with.”
“Right,” the others whisper. The iron rods
and swords are piled against the far wall. “What about the police?” one says.
“The police? The police won’t bother us.
The Muslims have to be taught a lesson they won’t forget, and the police are on
our side.”
They nod, rise and pick up their weapons. Neeraj,
at his neuroweb headset, rises with them. His throat and chest are filled with
the exultation of vengeance. For the death of Prashant, for the loss of the
cricket match, for the daily troubles in the office. For his stupid wife and
for the money he can never save.
Neeraj has never felt so alive before.
Tonight, someone will pay.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2018
