‘What happened to you? You look like bad sex!’
I turned to my friend of twelve years, his face brazen and pink like that of a toddler without toilet manners, and squinted. I wasn’t trying to insinuate anything; my eyes were tired after staring at an empty beer mug for the last fifteen minutes. The bottom of the mug had a few remaining drops of the worst beer I had had in sometime. It did taste like bad sex. That too on a Monday.
‘I told you we should go to The Bunker. It’s much cheaper there and the bartender is cute,’ my friend continued.
‘Bartender is a man,’ I said, returning my gaze to the bottom of the mug.
‘Don’t be a moron. She is not.’
‘It should be “bartendress.” The bartendress is cute. Like actor and actress.’
‘Are you fucking with me? Who says “actress” anymore?’
‘Yeah?’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘Why don’t they?’
‘Because it’s discriminatory. Women performers are no less than men. Everybody should be called the same. What is the matter with you?’
‘Why isn’t everybody called actress then?’
My friend fumbled for a couple of seconds but he recovered quickly. He had to. He used to teach literature at a university with a fake fountain and fake grass. Now he had grown interest in gardening.
‘The moment we start calling everybody actors, its maleness is gone. It becomes genderless.’
I didn’t want to argue with him. Let him win this battle. I was letting him win all the battles recently. I was really tired. And depressed. The world had suddenly become dreadfully boring.
It all started with an announcement on TV. The serious looking newsreader (another genderless word) looked genuinely terrified when she uttered the words: ‘The world is coming to an end. The world as we know it is coming to an end.’ I noticed she had a mole on her left cheek. For the next fifteen minutes or so, she blabbered a lot about an asteroid that was going to hit our planet in a few months. I kept on looking at the mole. It looked lonely.
I had this habit of staring at things without any reason or purpose. I was first diagnosed with this condition when I was eight. My mother caught me looking at a pair of scissors for longer than an hour. ‘What are you doing?’ I still remembered the horror in her voice. ‘Nothing, Ma. I am just looking at it.’ She said a prayer and took me to see his brother who always introduced himself as a musician. Medicine was his side business. In our neighbourhood, he started the fashion of music therapy. ‘Music is the best medicine. Antibiotics is the second best,’ read a signboard in his chamber.
‘This is very serious,’ my uncle told my mother and wrote me a prescription – playing violin for the next six months. One practice session each after every meal. We had to buy the violin from his music store. I was also admitted to his music school for lessons.
I met my friend for the first time in that school. ‘What’s your affliction?’ He asked me. He was seven.
‘You mean my problem?’ I asked.
‘Do you think it’s a problem?’
‘I don’t know. What’s yours?’
‘I talk a lot.’ He smiled.
It was true. He did talk a lot. He learned to speak when he was only four months old. Since then, he never stopped. At eleven, he memorised the entire dictionary so that he was never at a loss for words. The only time his tongue got tied when he tried to ask a fellow violin player out. She was thirteen. At least a foot taller than both of us.
‘It’s because I had to look up to her,’ he told me during a bathroom break. ‘The words that were at the top of my tongue slipped back into my stomach.’
‘You better not talk looking up then,’ I said with some concern.
‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘I must not fall in love with any girl taller than me.’
We didn’t learn violin but we became friends. None of our conditions improved. I still stared at things. He still talked.
He handled the news of our imminent extinction with his usual pragmatism. ‘It’s not as bad as you think. The dinosaurs were also wiped out because of an asteroid hit. After we are gone, in another million years, there will be a species which will be better than us. They will rule the world.’
‘Do you think they will come up with computers and stuff as well?’
‘Better. They will cure cancer.’
‘Too bad for my uncle then.’ He was diagnosed with lung cancer a little while ago. Strangely, he chose chemotherapy over harmoniums for his treatment.
A week after the first announcement, there came the second one which changed our lives forever. We were told – this time by a surprisingly young-looking scientist – that they had found a way to avoid the catastrophe. The press conference was telecast live.
‘Are you going to destroy it in the space?’ A journalist asked.
The scientist smiled, ‘Not at all. This is not Hollywood.’
‘What then?’
‘We are going to stop time.’
There were a few whispers in the room.
‘What do you mean you will stop time? How is that possible?’
‘It’s a complex process,’ the scientist was unfazed, ‘but we have devised a technology by which we will put ourselves, that is, the entire humanity, in a time loop. We will live one day over and over again so that the day on which the asteroid hits the Earth never comes.’
The whispers became louder. ‘What nonsense!’ Someone shouted, ‘Do you want us to be stuck in a single day? This is a prison!’
‘Do you want to die?’ The scientist leaned forward.
Everybody fell silent.
I was desperately trying to find something to stare at. The room in which the press conference was being held did not have anything remarkable except a cupboard at one corner. Was there somebody hiding in the cupboard? Was it a skeleton?
The conference ended abruptly amid a lot of hullabaloo. The Prime Minister’s smiling face appeared on the screen. He congratulated the scientists for their brilliant innovation. ‘This is a great day for us. We have conquered death.’
It took us some time to understand the actual implication of the time loop. Indeed, we had conquered death. Nobody was going to age or die anymore. Except those who would die on the very day the loop was scheduled. They would be alive again in the next morning though, perhaps to die again later or survive owing to a timely dose of the right medicine.
‘This is fantastic!’ My friend almost jumped in joy, ‘We would never have to work. We would never have to get up early in the morning. We can spend all our savings in one day and we will get it back the next day.’
‘There is no next day,’ I reminded him.
‘Exactly! Every day is today! We will live without any care for tomorrow!’ He was laughing like a maniac.
My friend was not alone. Since the day of the first announcement, everybody was acting crazy. News of violence – murder, robbery, rape, vandalising – was coming from every corner of the world. Nobody seemed to have any sense of morality anymore. The societal norms that dictated our individual behaviour were forgotten. The need for civility was gone. The purpose of good manners was lost. The neighbourly smile was replaced by a cruel smirk of personal vindictiveness. Even the police became inactive. Some of them participated in the mayhem. The proverbial state of nature was no longer a mere academic proposition.
The governments, of course, had to intervene. All the countries came together and declared that unless the violence stopped, they won’t initiate the time loop. This worked like magic. Voluntary organisations sprouted like mushrooms which kept watch on the potential lawbreakers. We became normal once again. Civilised, disciplined, pretending to be friendly. But for how long?
‘Now that the mask of civility is lifted,’ I asked my friend, ‘what do you think will happen after they initiate the loop?’
‘There is very little chance we will go back to the initial days of frenzy,’ he replied. ‘Violence, like all other forms of entertainment, loses its appeal on repeat viewing.’
The governments didn’t announce the date of initiating the loop. It happened unceremoniously as most of the big events of life happen.
‘You mean to say marriage is not a big event?’ My friend asked when I pointed it out.
‘Marriage is not a big event, I told him. ‘Its failure is, though. So poignantly unceremonious. Love fades without us realising it. For the first few weeks, or even months, we still feel the itch in the amputated leg.’
‘What made you this dark? Are you drinking a lot of domestic whiskey these days?’
For the last five-six years, we met almost every evening for drinking in some of the pubs of our liking. I was a light drinker, never had more than a couple of beers or whiskey, occasionally rum, never anything else. My friend loved to mix his drinks. Like his theories about everything that piqued his interest, his alcohol consumption was over-the-top and, equally regularly, cause for visits to the doctors.
It was during one of those evening sessions, we both felt something was amiss.
‘Didn’t we have the same conversation last night?’ My friend asked.
‘You mean this conversation about bartender/bartendress?’
‘Yes,’ he looked at me, bewildered and, perhaps, a little scared. ‘Is it happening?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The loop. Are we in the loop already?’
‘There hasn’t been any announcement yet, has it?’
We asked the barkeep who was serving us. He was equally baffled, ‘Didn’t you ask me the same question last night?’
‘Oh, shit!’ All three of us said in unison.
It was not as absurd as you might think. People seldom pay attention to the little incidents, the slightest of movements and gestures, the tiniest of pains and disruptions, the smallest bits of everyday action and reaction that separate today from yesterday or from tomorrow. We think all the time about pasts and futures which are undifferentiated masses of yesterdays and tomorrows, but very rarely do we care about their singular trajectories. No history is bothered about yesterday in itself. No policy talks about tomorrow.
We were no exception. We woke up, had breakfast, went to work, had lunch, came to the pub, talked about shit, took piss, came home, went to bed. This continued for weeks, perhaps months, before we realised that the itch in the amputated leg was not real. We were scratching in vain.
‘This just proves how predictable our lives are,’ my friend did not hide his irritation.
‘Or that we are not as unique as we think we are,’ I added.
Now that we knew that we were stuck in this loop for eternity, we started talking about our next plan of action.
‘Do you think we should go to work tomorrow, I mean the next day, I mean the day after today…?’ My friend was looking for the right word. I felt sorry for him. This was not something which happened to him usually.
‘I understand,’ I patted him on the back, ‘what do you want to do?’
‘Why not come here in the morning and keep on drinking till the end? We can also do bar hopping.’
‘OK, why not!’ I said. ‘But what about your students?’
‘Oh, come on, we have the eternity,’ he smiled like a child with a new toy and a fake medical certificate. ‘Wait, we can go to The Bunker and check that ‘bartendress’ out.’
It was the biggest mistake of my life – agreeing to come with him to that wretched bar. We reached the place at around six in the evening. It was still peaceful. Not many people around. No music. No smell of junk food. The woman at the counter smiled like we owed money to her. Did we?
‘We are going to stay here till the night ends,’ my friend was extra cheerful. ‘Give us two large pegs of your best whiskey.’ The woman nodded and reached for a strange looking bottle.
‘Are you sure we can afford that?’ I whispered.
‘How does it matter? We will keep on drinking till the end and then it’s the next day. Or not. The same day but a new morning.’
‘You have to pay upfront for each serving,’ the woman put two glasses in front of us. ‘It’s the house policy now.’
‘Motherfuckers,’ my friend muttered and brought out his purse. ‘Let’s go to another place after we finish this drink.’
I would have agreed but by then I had already discovered her. She was sitting at one of the shadowy corners of the bar, her face was slightly away from my vision like a dream without sound. She was not alone. Two men, probably work friends, were seated on her sides and arguing about something. I thought people would stop arguing since there was no tomorrow. I was wrong. All arguments were about the present. And the present was the only thing that we had.
‘Go and talk to her,’ my friend said. ‘God, this whiskey tastes like shit.’
I pretended that I hadn’t heard him. ‘It’s not that bad.’
‘You want to stay, don’t you? Do you know her?’
Did I know her? I couldn’t remember. Her face did seem familiar. I knew we were all having recurrent déjà vu since we got into the loop. I might have met her before but was it here at this bar? She stood up now as if she was leaving. She wasn’t too tall, my height maybe, and she looked directly at me with her lips parted and eyes slightly widened. I thought she was going to call out my name.
My phone was ringing. I had to take the call. It was my boss.
‘Where are you?’ Her voice wasn’t friendly.
‘Um,’ I looked around, ‘I am still in my bed. Why?’
‘Still in bed? It’s nine already. We need the report on polio vaccination today. Have you forgotten?’
‘No,’ I yawned, ‘I think it can wait. Let’s do it tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow? There is no tomorrow,’ she barked. ‘Come to office immediately.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I cut the call and went back to sleep.
I wanted to know if she knew my name. That would make a wonderful story. Not like this one.
‘Bartender is a man,’ I said, returning my gaze to the bottom of the mug.
‘Don’t be a moron. She is not.’
‘It should be “bartendress.” The bartendress is cute. Like actor and actress.’
‘Are you fucking with me? Who says “actress” anymore?’
‘Yeah?’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘Why don’t they?’
‘Because it’s discriminatory. Women performers are no less than men. Everybody should be called the same. What is the matter with you?’
‘Why isn’t everybody called actress then?’
My friend fumbled for a couple of seconds but he recovered quickly. He had to. He used to teach literature at a university with a fake fountain and fake grass. Now he had grown interest in gardening.
‘The moment we start calling everybody actors, its maleness is gone. It becomes genderless.’
I didn’t want to argue with him. Let him win this battle. I was letting him win all the battles recently. I was really tired. And depressed. The world had suddenly become dreadfully boring.
It all started with an announcement on TV. The serious looking newsreader (another genderless word) looked genuinely terrified when she uttered the words: ‘The world is coming to an end. The world as we know it is coming to an end.’ I noticed she had a mole on her left cheek. For the next fifteen minutes or so, she blabbered a lot about an asteroid that was going to hit our planet in a few months. I kept on looking at the mole. It looked lonely.
I had this habit of staring at things without any reason or purpose. I was first diagnosed with this condition when I was eight. My mother caught me looking at a pair of scissors for longer than an hour. ‘What are you doing?’ I still remembered the horror in her voice. ‘Nothing, Ma. I am just looking at it.’ She said a prayer and took me to see his brother who always introduced himself as a musician. Medicine was his side business. In our neighbourhood, he started the fashion of music therapy. ‘Music is the best medicine. Antibiotics is the second best,’ read a signboard in his chamber.
‘This is very serious,’ my uncle told my mother and wrote me a prescription – playing violin for the next six months. One practice session each after every meal. We had to buy the violin from his music store. I was also admitted to his music school for lessons.
I met my friend for the first time in that school. ‘What’s your affliction?’ He asked me. He was seven.
‘You mean my problem?’ I asked.
‘Do you think it’s a problem?’
‘I don’t know. What’s yours?’
‘I talk a lot.’ He smiled.
It was true. He did talk a lot. He learned to speak when he was only four months old. Since then, he never stopped. At eleven, he memorised the entire dictionary so that he was never at a loss for words. The only time his tongue got tied when he tried to ask a fellow violin player out. She was thirteen. At least a foot taller than both of us.
‘It’s because I had to look up to her,’ he told me during a bathroom break. ‘The words that were at the top of my tongue slipped back into my stomach.’
‘You better not talk looking up then,’ I said with some concern.
‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘I must not fall in love with any girl taller than me.’
We didn’t learn violin but we became friends. None of our conditions improved. I still stared at things. He still talked.
He handled the news of our imminent extinction with his usual pragmatism. ‘It’s not as bad as you think. The dinosaurs were also wiped out because of an asteroid hit. After we are gone, in another million years, there will be a species which will be better than us. They will rule the world.’
‘Do you think they will come up with computers and stuff as well?’
‘Better. They will cure cancer.’
‘Too bad for my uncle then.’ He was diagnosed with lung cancer a little while ago. Strangely, he chose chemotherapy over harmoniums for his treatment.
A week after the first announcement, there came the second one which changed our lives forever. We were told – this time by a surprisingly young-looking scientist – that they had found a way to avoid the catastrophe. The press conference was telecast live.
‘Are you going to destroy it in the space?’ A journalist asked.
The scientist smiled, ‘Not at all. This is not Hollywood.’
‘What then?’
‘We are going to stop time.’
There were a few whispers in the room.
‘What do you mean you will stop time? How is that possible?’
‘It’s a complex process,’ the scientist was unfazed, ‘but we have devised a technology by which we will put ourselves, that is, the entire humanity, in a time loop. We will live one day over and over again so that the day on which the asteroid hits the Earth never comes.’
The whispers became louder. ‘What nonsense!’ Someone shouted, ‘Do you want us to be stuck in a single day? This is a prison!’
‘Do you want to die?’ The scientist leaned forward.
Everybody fell silent.
I was desperately trying to find something to stare at. The room in which the press conference was being held did not have anything remarkable except a cupboard at one corner. Was there somebody hiding in the cupboard? Was it a skeleton?
The conference ended abruptly amid a lot of hullabaloo. The Prime Minister’s smiling face appeared on the screen. He congratulated the scientists for their brilliant innovation. ‘This is a great day for us. We have conquered death.’
It took us some time to understand the actual implication of the time loop. Indeed, we had conquered death. Nobody was going to age or die anymore. Except those who would die on the very day the loop was scheduled. They would be alive again in the next morning though, perhaps to die again later or survive owing to a timely dose of the right medicine.
‘This is fantastic!’ My friend almost jumped in joy, ‘We would never have to work. We would never have to get up early in the morning. We can spend all our savings in one day and we will get it back the next day.’
‘There is no next day,’ I reminded him.
‘Exactly! Every day is today! We will live without any care for tomorrow!’ He was laughing like a maniac.
My friend was not alone. Since the day of the first announcement, everybody was acting crazy. News of violence – murder, robbery, rape, vandalising – was coming from every corner of the world. Nobody seemed to have any sense of morality anymore. The societal norms that dictated our individual behaviour were forgotten. The need for civility was gone. The purpose of good manners was lost. The neighbourly smile was replaced by a cruel smirk of personal vindictiveness. Even the police became inactive. Some of them participated in the mayhem. The proverbial state of nature was no longer a mere academic proposition.
The governments, of course, had to intervene. All the countries came together and declared that unless the violence stopped, they won’t initiate the time loop. This worked like magic. Voluntary organisations sprouted like mushrooms which kept watch on the potential lawbreakers. We became normal once again. Civilised, disciplined, pretending to be friendly. But for how long?
‘Now that the mask of civility is lifted,’ I asked my friend, ‘what do you think will happen after they initiate the loop?’
‘There is very little chance we will go back to the initial days of frenzy,’ he replied. ‘Violence, like all other forms of entertainment, loses its appeal on repeat viewing.’
The governments didn’t announce the date of initiating the loop. It happened unceremoniously as most of the big events of life happen.
‘You mean to say marriage is not a big event?’ My friend asked when I pointed it out.
‘Marriage is not a big event, I told him. ‘Its failure is, though. So poignantly unceremonious. Love fades without us realising it. For the first few weeks, or even months, we still feel the itch in the amputated leg.’
‘What made you this dark? Are you drinking a lot of domestic whiskey these days?’
For the last five-six years, we met almost every evening for drinking in some of the pubs of our liking. I was a light drinker, never had more than a couple of beers or whiskey, occasionally rum, never anything else. My friend loved to mix his drinks. Like his theories about everything that piqued his interest, his alcohol consumption was over-the-top and, equally regularly, cause for visits to the doctors.
It was during one of those evening sessions, we both felt something was amiss.
‘Didn’t we have the same conversation last night?’ My friend asked.
‘You mean this conversation about bartender/bartendress?’
‘Yes,’ he looked at me, bewildered and, perhaps, a little scared. ‘Is it happening?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The loop. Are we in the loop already?’
‘There hasn’t been any announcement yet, has it?’
We asked the barkeep who was serving us. He was equally baffled, ‘Didn’t you ask me the same question last night?’
‘Oh, shit!’ All three of us said in unison.
It was not as absurd as you might think. People seldom pay attention to the little incidents, the slightest of movements and gestures, the tiniest of pains and disruptions, the smallest bits of everyday action and reaction that separate today from yesterday or from tomorrow. We think all the time about pasts and futures which are undifferentiated masses of yesterdays and tomorrows, but very rarely do we care about their singular trajectories. No history is bothered about yesterday in itself. No policy talks about tomorrow.
We were no exception. We woke up, had breakfast, went to work, had lunch, came to the pub, talked about shit, took piss, came home, went to bed. This continued for weeks, perhaps months, before we realised that the itch in the amputated leg was not real. We were scratching in vain.
‘This just proves how predictable our lives are,’ my friend did not hide his irritation.
‘Or that we are not as unique as we think we are,’ I added.
Now that we knew that we were stuck in this loop for eternity, we started talking about our next plan of action.
‘Do you think we should go to work tomorrow, I mean the next day, I mean the day after today…?’ My friend was looking for the right word. I felt sorry for him. This was not something which happened to him usually.
‘I understand,’ I patted him on the back, ‘what do you want to do?’
‘Why not come here in the morning and keep on drinking till the end? We can also do bar hopping.’
‘OK, why not!’ I said. ‘But what about your students?’
‘Oh, come on, we have the eternity,’ he smiled like a child with a new toy and a fake medical certificate. ‘Wait, we can go to The Bunker and check that ‘bartendress’ out.’
It was the biggest mistake of my life – agreeing to come with him to that wretched bar. We reached the place at around six in the evening. It was still peaceful. Not many people around. No music. No smell of junk food. The woman at the counter smiled like we owed money to her. Did we?
‘We are going to stay here till the night ends,’ my friend was extra cheerful. ‘Give us two large pegs of your best whiskey.’ The woman nodded and reached for a strange looking bottle.
‘Are you sure we can afford that?’ I whispered.
‘How does it matter? We will keep on drinking till the end and then it’s the next day. Or not. The same day but a new morning.’
‘You have to pay upfront for each serving,’ the woman put two glasses in front of us. ‘It’s the house policy now.’
‘Motherfuckers,’ my friend muttered and brought out his purse. ‘Let’s go to another place after we finish this drink.’
I would have agreed but by then I had already discovered her. She was sitting at one of the shadowy corners of the bar, her face was slightly away from my vision like a dream without sound. She was not alone. Two men, probably work friends, were seated on her sides and arguing about something. I thought people would stop arguing since there was no tomorrow. I was wrong. All arguments were about the present. And the present was the only thing that we had.
‘Go and talk to her,’ my friend said. ‘God, this whiskey tastes like shit.’
I pretended that I hadn’t heard him. ‘It’s not that bad.’
‘You want to stay, don’t you? Do you know her?’
Did I know her? I couldn’t remember. Her face did seem familiar. I knew we were all having recurrent déjà vu since we got into the loop. I might have met her before but was it here at this bar? She stood up now as if she was leaving. She wasn’t too tall, my height maybe, and she looked directly at me with her lips parted and eyes slightly widened. I thought she was going to call out my name.
My phone was ringing. I had to take the call. It was my boss.
‘Where are you?’ Her voice wasn’t friendly.
‘Um,’ I looked around, ‘I am still in my bed. Why?’
‘Still in bed? It’s nine already. We need the report on polio vaccination today. Have you forgotten?’
‘No,’ I yawned, ‘I think it can wait. Let’s do it tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow? There is no tomorrow,’ she barked. ‘Come to office immediately.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I cut the call and went back to sleep.
I wanted to know if she knew my name. That would make a wonderful story. Not like this one.
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