Robin Hood Reloaded

Dear Wrippers,
David Miller of Bedfordshire Uni is doing a project funded by UNESCO on how people see the Robin Hood story. He feels this is specially relevant in these times of financial turmoil and growing poverty in the West. He wants us to help him by brainstorming versions of Robin Hood in India.These could be completely fictional, or based on a real character or person. He suggests Veerappan, but I thought our very own Maoists or Angulimala would be better models. Of course, Robin Hood in this country cannot escape caste, race and class.
Dave wants to produce a book which will have augmented reality (AR) features: that is, when you point your mobile phone at it, new features will pop up, like speech balloons by the character's heads, a hidden layer, an alternative story, etc. So we will also need to generate some visual content. He will do the technical stuff for this.
What he wants from us is storytellers and stories. I think he wants us to do this in Bangla (he hasn't confirmed yet) and with an Indian setting. He has plans for a graphic novel and various other spinoffs as well. I'll try and post his full project note (it's a pdf)
Please comment here if you want to be part of this project.

Character Sketch

This is from Piali

Name: Miyamoto Takashi, age: 21 years, year of birth : 1987 nationality: Thai, occupation: hairstylist,  origin/ethnicity: Japanese,  parents emigrated to Thailand  before his birth.

Reason for immigration:  Mother had a premarital affair with an influential member of the DIET and got pregnant with Takashi’s elder brother Hiroshi. Hiroshi’s biological father didn’t accept paternity. Grandfather, florist,married her off to one of his students and paid them to immigrate to Thailand. Father opened a florist shop in Pattaya, and there Hiroshi, Takashi, and their younger sister Miyuki was born. The difference was two years between each conception.

Family and their behavioural characteristics, aka timeline and Takashi’s psychological development: Brother was told of his true paternity by a nosy relative (probably the mother’s aunt) when he was four. Father, trying to show that he loved Hiroshi despite his coming from a different father,spoiled him exuberantly and in the process alienated Takashi and Miyuki. Mother, who ran a parasol shop in the tourist district andwho was rather subdued and guilt-ridden for her past indiscretions, followed whatever her husband did. Being  so alienated, Takashi grew fond of his books, and Miyuki sarcastic and bitter, though they were the only two people in the household to truly connect. Hiroshi, a bully by now, used one of Takashi’s books as toilet paper. Miyuki hit him with a spanner. Father, suspecting Takashi to be the origin of Miyuki’s violent behavior, sent him to Singapore to his uncle. He had initially a very good relationship with his uncle, who had two daughters but no son, but the two soon grew distant as Takashi came to realize that his uncle fervently opposed his career decision, dismissing it as merely effeminate.

Major turn in life: 27^th December, 2006. He gets news that his parents and Hiroshi were killed in the tsunami. Miyuki was away on a vacation, so she survived. He is slightly relieved by the news, and feels no survivor’s guilt and feels very cold and clinical towards his parents’ death. Returns to Pattaya to look after Miyuki, who is still a minor( despite his uncle’s wishes, who wanted him to stay in Singapore and take on the family business). Opens up a hair salon with the aid of his mother’s friend Nakamura Tomomi and gains fame gradually. Tomomi, a widow made so by the tidal waves of tsunami, comes by often to talk about her friend and reveals that the son her friend used to talk about all the time was not Hiroshi but Takashi. Takashi does not want to hear nor believe, but he falls in love with Tomomi. He’s afraid of telling her, but he constantly offers to cut her hair. Tomomi refuses to do so, arguing that her husband used to love her hair, and will only allow her hair to be cut when she is ready to be put to coffin.

Present time: Takashi sits in his salon as he recounts all this. He is about to take part in a prestigious competition amongst hairstylists. This is the gala night. He is confident he will win and wishes to confess to Tomomi at the victory party, after she has seen him as a man capable of winning.

Characteristics: very sedate and pessimistic, but can excel if given the right incentive. His father indirectly taught him that even something as simple as a parent’s love also can never be taken for granted, so he has given up wanting even the simplest things and takes whatever fate throws his way. Has a love-hate relationship with older women, but prefers those with backbone, something his mother never had. Likes to be led around by the nose (which we may attribute to his fondness for external authority), and can never impose his own wishes upon others unless he finds a suitable and unselfish enough reason to do so ( He could only break his uncle’s stronghold on him because he thought Miyuki needed his help after the family disaster.)

Thwarter

Name: Miyuki Miyamoto, Age: 19, Nationality: Thai, Ethnicity: Japanese, Occupation: Medical Student, faring well in her studies at the moment.

Family characteristics and reasons for character development: Her father was fond of her, though she hated him with a passion. The reason for this was her father’s partiality, who favoured her eldest brother Hiroshi over the second brother Takashi for some unknown reason (She suspects that Takashi knows the reason, but he has never told her). She fancied herself and Takashi to be the second Justice League against the great big bully Hiroshi and defended her second brother at every opportune moment. At other times she was a quiet student, determined to make it out of the house and make enough money to support her brother, who she guessed (and rightly) to be a push-over. Has an intense brother complex that borders on downright incestuous feelings. She was also the only person to keep contact with Takashi over the years he spent in Singapore. The rest of her family simply did not bother.

Reason for thwarting: Nakamura Tomomi. Miyuki wanted, and still wants, to be the one to support Takashi, and does not approve of Takashi having a job to look after her, despite being only a young student herself (she resented being a minor at the time of her parents’ death). She has quite the independent streak and is convinced it was Tomomi who coaxed her brother to set up the salon. She also knows about her brother’s obsession with Tomomi.

Method of thwarting: She plans to invite Tomomi to dinner just before the latter leaves for the finale of the hairstyle competition. She will pour a few drops of a deadly poison into her dinner, and the effect of the poison is slow but sure and the subject will die within three hours of the intake, right in time for Takashi’s appearance on the stage ( and with Tomomi’s age and heart problems, it will most probably look like a natural death). She believes that witnessing Tomomi’s death will shake her brother out of the unhealthy obsession he seems to have for her locks (and looks) and he will promptly return to being her adorable big brother, completely dependent on her.

 Acknowledgement: Photos curtsey of google images. The model for Takashi is Kim Jae Wook (Koreo-Japanese actor who has worked in a bunch of Korean dramas. Do look up Coffee Prince if you ever need a sugar rush). And the model is from a hairstyle advertisement (I found it to be rather strangely appropriate.)

Locker Room

This is Safdar's.

When Swayam Patel felt a slight tug behind his right knee while stretching before the all-important final, he knew that it was something which was not supposed to happen. He sat down in slow motion and cautiously dug his fingertips into the flesh. It did not hurt, but it did not feel great either.

 He was a lad of twenty one, with a most endearing smile, and a gentle tuft of hair protruding from his chin on an otherwise spotless face suggesting that he’d never felt the need for using the razor on his skin- very different from the face you’d expect a merciless striker, who was the biggest name on the University circuit to have. If one looked at him strolling down the street, he could easily be mistaken for a school student who loved math and was going to appear for his tenth standard final examinations. It was, in fact, right about that time when he had to choose between appearing for his board exams and attending the National under-18 trials, when he realised that all that mattered to him in life, was playing hockey. Hailing from a conservative Gujarati family which expected him to take care of his family business as soon as he got out of school, getting this thought across to them had not been easy. But he was no good at math, nor could he remember names of customers, and he refused to learn anything about bathroom fittings. He’d hardly left his family with an option other than let him do the only thing he could.

He looked around the locker room at players who were busy warming up, the first spots of sweat appearing on their foreheads, and his thoughts went back to the day he sat all alone in a corner crying his guts out after an inter-house match back in school. His mother had passed away the previous day, and nobody in his family understood why it was so important for him to play a match that people skipped when they were down with cough. He had probably played only to take his mind off his mother, he had thought later, but there was a strange fatality that he had attached to that match back then. He had had abuses hurled at him from the opposition team throughout the match. Whispers also went around that he had faked his mother’s death to garner sympathy. He hammered five goals that day, a middle school record.

Casting these thoughts aside, he sprang up and got on his feet, he wouldn’t let anything get the better of him today, and tried walking around.  With every step that he took, he felt a slight niggle, but no major pain. He sat down again and absent-mindedly wrapped his palm around the Toofaan, a gift that his great grandfather had given him when he was shorter than the hockey stick itself.  The canvas grip had been replaced by foam, the stickers had given way to imprints made when dirt sticks on to the glue left behind by stickers, but the hockey stick itself was just the way it was when he had first laid his hands on it.

The coach called out for a last-minute pep talk, and everyone huddled around the chalk board. The strategy was to hold back during the first half, play the lone striker and play long balls to him, depending on him to convert and get the early break, after which they’d step it up and go all out. He drew stick figures and criss-crossed through the board, marking out what would be a flawless seventy minutes if the match went on the lines drawn on the board. The players could hear the buzz outside, the entire University had come out for the finals. Glucose was passed around, along with thumps on the back, and the odd come-on. Swayam glanced at the smiley that blinked on his phone screen as a text message and tried to think of all the nice things that had ever happened to him. He thought of Priya, who was in the stands, it would be the first time she’d see him play. He thought of her smile, he tried to pretend like it didn’t make him nervous. He felt the scar on his left elbow. It had become smooth over the years, fingers almost glided over it. He remembered how he’d got it, one of the first memories of the field for him. He thought of the Number 8 jersey, and how no one had touched it in his absence. He thought of how he was allowed to bunk the first three periods for practice during school for two years every day, because he was their star player and the school wanted to claim support when he finally made it big. Yet, somehow, this match held a lot of significance for him. He was back on the field after an enormous gap of a year and a half, and he had a lot to prove to his team and himself, a burden he’d almost become accustomed with over the years.

The team ran out to a huge roar all across the field. Their yellow jerseys shone brightly as they took their positions and waited for the referee’s whistle. Swayam looked all around, noticed a familiar smile, ran down the pitch and felt that the stage was finally his. The game started, he darted down the turf, in an opening move which had been rehearsed over and over again in the locker room. The ball was lobbed to him, he received it on the face of the stick, faked a flick and drove the ball between the defender’s feet, moving to his right while he threw the opponent off, and then pulling it back in spectacularly, while stretching for the drag. He felt the ball under his eyes and in front of his right toe, in perfect position for the end strike, and as he lumbered up, his right knee gave in, making him collapse onto the ground.

In the few moments between the whistle blowing, and him being lifted off the ground, he knew it was all over. He knew he wasn’t supposed to return to sport for another six months, he knew the ligament had torn again, he knew how it felt. He had just heard his life pop under his breath.

In the haze that followed, a familiar face was spotted hovering around, only without the smile, clutching the Toofaan very close to her, while Swayam Patel let out a sigh.

Story by Piku?

Another unknown genius. Please own up.It's official: this one is Anushka

It’s a question interesting enough to think about- well, at least for a little while. What kind of relationship has the most scope for pain? I’m not trivialising it by calling it interesting. It’s just that it’s difficult to defend tags like profundity whereas ‘interesting’ will always find takers. So yeah. I’d come down to two options. Parent-child is one. There’s too much emotional investment there, too much history, too acute an instinct for anticipation  and attack. You know just where to hit and it almost always hurts. And of course, man-woman. That one has a remarkable range of death-bound routes to choose from. The pair I’m going to talk about in a moment is just one of the ways it can get crazy.

So let’s begin with the girl- Sameera. She didn’t seem to be particularly exceptional in any way, except that most people who met her thought she was. And though naturally they didn’t think about why, chances are they couldn’t really offer an explanation for it. In fact to be honest, she was really, well... moderate. Patient without the halo of a martyr. Passionate without the zest of one who changes things. Acutely logical and perceptive, but always tempered by a distaste for harsh criticism and a fear of misplaced praise. Never really straining against the borders though she appeared so very close. Yet, with her, one was always moved. She moved people in the sudden, half-conscious way that an empty street at dawn, or a new bloom on a dying plant, or the soft sigh of an animal might move you. It didn’t have to be full of grace or subtlety, but it was real, it was alive, it was coursing through your veins and you couldn’t dismiss it. Long after the thrill of a first encounter with her had faded, the depth of emotion she had once evoked would persist and call for love, even if she had been intellectualised and dissected and scaled down to average size in the meantime.

Now that’s a lot of words and concepts. But if we want movement, we need a few more rounds of them. We need to introduce the man. Because till Sameera met him, there wasn’t much that was dramatic in her life. Family played a big role, and it was an affectionate, close knit family of four- well off, not highly cerebral but educated and in love with the idea of education. They had a very healthy respect for each other, and an equally healthy difference of opinions. There were frequent, pleasant little vacations. There was a lot of talk. Friendly repartee and fiery (but sometimes pointless) debates, the usual quarrels and some solid advice– this formed the stuff of Sameera’s home-and conclusively-early life. Sure, her thoughts were largely beautiful and her appearance entirely so. Her growth from infant to young woman was full of exquisite little details; but with the world so full of grand, explosive things, we need more than that. We need something big, something we need to grapple with before we can name it. And that only happened once she met Prakash.

It was in college, he was in her class, they were both studying English. There was however a distinct difference in the way they responded to literature. Sameera’s first instinct was to celebrate what she loved. She knew what to say and look for as a student, a budding critic, but above all she loved to pay tribute to a work that affected her deeply. She spoke of these books on very personal terms, pointed out little nuances for having struck her instead of working them into an argument; and often went about in a glorious haze of recalling and reliving the reading experience instead of following it up with a flurry of research. Prakash had no patience for celebration. It came too close to religion for him, and he despised religion, though that didn’t stop from knowing an awful lot about it. That was the thing with him, really. He knew about things and had a hell lot of opinions too but they hardly had anything to do with sentiment. As for ‘intuition’, ‘instinct’, ‘spontaneous perception’, they were dirty words. He believed they were convenient abstractions, maliciously created to place ideas out of intellect’s reach. And he believed they were degraded even further by romantic simpletons who pounced upon these concepts as a means of worshipping the artist, and taking some warped pleasure in widening the rift between the ‘intuitive genius’ and themselves. Was he a cynic? To say that would be the easy way out. Rather, he was full of anger and that anger worked at many levels. Often it was quiet like a snake in the sun, at other times bristling and restless, or at still others- just a resentful fatigue. Interestingly, his background was almost the same as Sameera’s, except that his family was more old-fashioned, milder, their tastes more at odds with his. And that little inclination towards the slower side was all it needed for him to reject them. Not through confrontation, no point there; but in his mind and heart. So he lived apart from them, in a mess near college, hardly ever got in touch with them, and earned money by working part-time; so that his scorn wasn’t dismantled by a parasitic existence.

Now from the above it would seem impossible for Sameera and Prakash to achieve anything close to intimacy. But that wasn’t how things happened. Prakash, for all his anger wasn’t cold and he wasn’t overtly hostile. He had a way of being friendly and full of laughs even when he didn’t really care for the person opposite. Sameera found something oddly appealing in him- the presence of an energy and ideology, even if it wasn’t very cohesive. She knew she herself would never achieve a concrete ideology- there were too many voices in and outside her head, too many things to make excuses for, bring in the ‘yet I can see why’, or the ‘even so, one might be justified in...’. Prakash’s ability to feel things definitely, to voice them in his inimitably crude but right on point, and often uproariously funny way- these were things that attracted and disconcerted (even annoyed) her in the same breath. An added factor was his face, endearingly nondescript when it wasn’t animated by declamations. As for her effect on Prakash- it wasn’t overwhelming, but the very fact that he couldn’t dislike despite her wispiness got him thinking. He could chart out a whole list of things he thought was wrong with her, were absolutely small and degrading. And yet, yet he responded to her physically, even emotionally. There was in her a generosity, a startling lack of ego, something which thrived on affection.  It was impossible not to meet that with pleasure.

They began seeking out each other’s company. It was easy and unobtrusive because they both wanted it. They never seemed to run out of things to say to each other- if opinions became too hard to handle, there was always an anecdote, or a fresh in-house joke to take off from. Perhaps Sameera was the only girl around who was as lovely as she was genuine. The rest seemed to be divided between glitz and dowdiness- the former was repellant to Prakash and the other not arresting enough. Perhaps Prakash was the only guy who was as stimulating without being frighteningly academic. But whether it was for lack of options, or sheer circumstances or a natural attraction between them, Prakash and Sameera were drawn closer to each other every day. Soon enough, the inevitable happened- a day when everything came together- good weather, unity of thought, a well-timed kiss. And they were, without a doubt, romantically involved.

At first, things weren’t too different. There was the same friendly banter, the exchange of stories. Their lovemaking didn’t seem to add much their non-physical relationship. But few things remain static. Prakash and Sameera were definitely heading along a trajectory and it was one that found most transparent manifestation in Sameera. You see, she was a girl who was unnaturally sensitive to opinion. Every little thing one said to her, unless she thought the person was a real idiot- mattered. And if she liked the person a great deal and had discovered the joy, thrill almost, of agreement, it mattered a hell of a lot. It’s not as though they made her change her mind every minute, but they put her through moments of torturous reflection and vacillation during which she’d find herself putting forward passionate defences of contrasting opinons to differing groups. And the conclusion she’d come to would be positively quivering with vulnerability, where the only certainty was an overriding sympathy with the simple, the ignorant, the pained and the conflict-ridden. Prakash listened to what others had to say, listened carefully, but unless it was ostensibly earth-shaking, irrefutably wise, his attention rarely seemed to serve a purpose other than inducing a sharp reaffirmation of his thoughts. He would acknowledge that compassion had its place in the larger scheme of things but it could never tweak his beliefs. So it was natural that of the two, Sameera would be disturbed by the other whereas Prakash would merely be annoyed as one might be with a child’s naivety.

---You’re too middle path. Middle path never goes anywhere.

--Never? That’s way too simplistic.

--That’s a common misconception. Extreme isn’t necessarily simplistic. It can be complex enough. And actually achieve more.

--What if I don’t want to achieve the same things as you do?

--Naturally, we’re different people. But it wouldn’t stop me from scoffing at diluted philosophy. Like, like private good, that’s another thing that really gets to me these days. People who have more patience for a friend’s sob story than, I don’t know- a classroom of poor children. I don’t know when we’re ever going to break out of the I-love-my-mother mode.

--You’re so bloody opinionated.

--Since when was that a bad thing?

These glib assertions on his path would trouble her more than one would expect. The worst part was, she couldn’t be sure if he was serious because he’d even be known to say things like -Oh I speak a lot of cock. Why was she so damn self-conscious?

But it was worse when they spoke of concrete things. Like poverty and government and war. The cover of reality that these subjects assume generate more memories, more tangible images than theory so that superficiality is often hard to detect, and jargon becomes inevitable. Sameera began to hate words like ‘fascist’, ‘tradition’, ‘neo-liberal’, ‘natural’. Every thing that tried to say something definite seemed suffocatingly smug to her. But she couldn’t shut tear herself away from them. They seemed too real, to urgent to shrug off. Retreat to the havens of art was impossible now. Art became too firmly affiliated with society, and none of the thinkers who she could respect without misgivings ever severed this connection.

She began using Prakash’s terminology with surprising ease. She would defend his ideas in his absence when she sensed them to be under a mere impersonal attack. And all the while she grew increasingly resentful towards him, for not realising that she wasn’t a ray of sunshine who’d never met a cloud. She wasn’t a fairytale princess obsessed with crowns and rose gardens. She was scared and confused, she always had been and the only thing she knew how to do was love. She, who would always give more time to the individual over a group, simply because the sight of one sad face sucked her in before a mass echo of depression could knock her out completely. It was survival, in a way. A loving heart has a lower threshold for sorrow than a harsher one. But he never felt pity for her, only indulgence and affection.

Prakash sensed the change in Sameera. More than anything, he sensed a core growing bitterness and anger within her. And it thrilled him. All along, he had questioned himself on his choice of lover. He had wondered whether it wasn’t mere lust, or surrender to fresh, feminine charm. He had even suspected with a shudder that he might’ve been pampering his pride with the tolerance and tenderness he knew he’d get from her. But now, he felt there was substance to it. She was allowing ugliness to breed inside her. She had opened her arms to anger. She could share his pain, even if she didn’t quite understand it yet. Now, when they had sex, there was a violence in it which gratified him.

With time, Sameera’s actions and words became more and more erratic. She would just not turn up at college on certain days, and refuse to explain why. She got a tattoo and then got it removed in the next three days. To compensate for the waste of money, she refused to buy herself lunch for a week and then gave up, though it hardly covered half the expense. She would stare at the raw, red patch of skin on her forearm with a menacing glare while it lasted. One day she woke up at dawn and walked over 5 kilometers to college, arriving flushed and jubilant. But soon she was bleary-eyed and slept through lessons, and when she went home it was like a dog with its tail between its legs- humiliated. Even while these changes were taking place, she initially retained the sweetness and vibrance of her disposition in direct conversation with friends. But gradually it wore off. She became increasingly argumentative and she would often just stop short in the middle of what she was saying and drum restlessly with her fingers on some nearby surface, staring into space. They found it tremendously strange and exhausting too but they couldn’t hate her. A few were genuinely troubled but at large they grew more wary than anything, backed off and hoped it was just a passing  phase. If anyone was really hurt by this change though, it was her family. They just couldn’t fathom it and they watched and acted and watched more with growing desperation and weariness.

 She still got into debates with Prakash but now she had had stopped being pacifiying and accommodating. Moreover, there was no consistency in what she was saying. Her views jumped from more radical than Prakash’s to indifferent or spiritual within moments. Prakash never bothered playing the role of quiet listener, but he found a peculiar sense of fulfillment in these outbursts. He looked upon Sameera’s whole change as a transitory phase- a necessary period of turbulence before something hard and profound set in. Even regressive views didn’t bother him as they would have coming from other people, because they were provoked by momentary madness. The madness would be self-redeeming. From the chaos would emerge truth.

One day they had a particularly violent argument. Prakash was somewhat restless that day; Sameera’s venom and hysterics were getting a bit taxing. The last words she said to him were-

You, and everyone like you. You’re just so fucking arrogant. And limited. In this world, how can you believe in anything? Anything at all? How can you even speak with a free conscience? I don’t want your ideas, I don’t want your pretty little guide-books telling me how to change the world. I want- I want to see pain. I want to walk into a room and see a crowd of miserable people, wasting away, not knowing what to say to each other, to themselves, to god or the sky or anything. That’s the only way to be.

In a few days, news emerged that Sameera had disappeared without a trace. Her family was frantic, her friends concerned but not entirely surprised. They all waited long enough till they stopped expecting a dramatic return from a whimsical absence. No news. The moment Prakash finally accepted her disappearance as final, he said to himself-

She’s free she’s finally free. She’s even free of me, she doesn’t need me or any of us anymore.

He kept muttering these words to himself, faster and hoarser. Then he went into his room, locked the door and wept for a while. 

Red vs Blue

This is from Anuj

Red vs. Blue

I shoved the barrel of the revolver into the traitor’s mouth. The Red’s eyes bulged. He choked on the gun.

“You should have surrendered.”

“Ethan,” Jon Tristan said, standing at my shoulder. “That’s enough.”

“No, Jon. This is enough.”

I pulled the trigger and made one helluva mess.

Afterwards, as the twin moons Phobos and Deimos rose in the west and east, one after the other, Jon and I set about burying the squad of Red Phantoms on the lush, green slopes of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the Solar System.

“Got any painkillers?” I asked. The altitude made the work hard, the air too thin. My head was killing me.

Jon wrapped his Blue armband across his brow to keep his hair out of his eyes as he worked. “Why do you use that old gun? The Red’s fear it, you know. Call you ‘Gunslinger’. Not very practical, is it. Only six sh—”

“—shots to the barrel. Yeah, I know.” I patted the original Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum, made trusted and true in the old United States of America at the turn of the millennium—some five hundred years ago. “It reminds me of home.”

Jon turned his gaze up to the plateau, reaching six miles above the surface of Mars, at the very tip of Olympus Mons. Creeping green vines clung to what was once barren red rock, disappearing into loose white clouds. In the three centuries since Mars had been terraformed from a wasteland of dust and windstorms, the plant and animal life had flourished.

“We’re along way from home, Gunslinger,” he said.

“Hmm… you looking for a few weeks Earth-side?”

Jon scoffed. “That won’t happen this far west of the Moon.”

I scowled and booted the last dead Red into the pit. The whole stinking planet had become a giant headache—a pain in the ass, Tess—for the Earth Defence Force. The Reds wanted ‘freedom’, wanted independence from Earth—and control of Mars and all its resources. They were traitors, spoilt children, clinging to red dust.

Terraforming Mars had taken the best part of four centuries. The planet was seeded in the 22nd century. Heat factories were constructed, converting CO2 into oxygen, nanobots introduced for nitrogen. Enormous solar mirrors in orbit directed light towards the poles. Superconducting rings buried at key lines of latitude, thousands of miles across, created a man-made magnetosphere, reflecting harsh radiation back into space. Comets and ice-rich asteroids were manoeuvred into sub-orbits around the planet, releasing vast amounts of water as they burnt up. Once the key building blocks were in place, the process was accelerated through a series of chain reactions and micro-feedback loops. Genetically adapted plant and animal life was introduced at the beginning of the 24th century. A hundred years beyond that, Mars was declared safe for biological humans. It had taken five hundred years and collaboration on a planet-wide scale, but it was done.

Humanity had created a second Earth.

Not long after, humanity started its first interplanetary war. The original settlers, the ‘Reds’, declared themselves independent from Earth. Mars, and all its vast potential, was to be denied to its creators.

The stink of blood and death clouded my nostrils. I drew my trusty revolver and punched six dark red holes into the scum at the bottom of the pit. The shots echoed across the undulating slopes of the enormous mountain, carried on the still air. I didn’t care if there were more Reds around. Jon and I were the best Hunters on two planets. We could handle it.

“Yeah? Who killed you?” I spat into the pit.

Jon cocked his ear, listening to something I couldn’t. My nano-communicator had been fried by Red electromagnetic cannon fire some days ago. “EDF commends us for holding Olympus Mons. Ethan Reilly is hereby promoted to Field-Commander, First Class.” He laughed, shifting our reserve ammo belt from one shoulder to the other. “Looks like you might get Earth-side after all, Commander. You’re being recalled.” Jon’s voice caught in his throat. “Oh… hell. They want you to lead the armada from Serenity Base against Ascension City.”

“Piss on that. I’m staying grounded until every last one of these rebel bastards is dead and buried.”

Jon’s smile didn’t touch his eyes. I could sense his discomfort. He was good at his job, but he didn’t want to be. I think he didn’t quite know how to kill himself. “Killing Reds won’t bring Tessa back.”

I shook the dead shells from the Colt’s barrel and handed it to Jon. “Hollow points reload,” I said, a brisk order, and turned to shovel dirt back into the pit.

The Martian moons hung in the sky against a curtain purpling toward night. Jon handed me back the Colt. I pointed the barrel at the bright star in the southern sky, at Earth, two hundred and twenty million kilometres away. “Killing Reds makes me feel better. Makes me feel like I’m making a bloody difference.”

Jon laughed. “Oh, Ethan, you are in the unique position of knowing you are able to make a difference. Most people never see that, they wait for someone else, anyone else, to be the difference. That makes you, right now, across both worlds, the most dangerous man alive. Mars fears you and Earth respects you. You have the opportunity to change how this story is supposed to end.” Jon shook his head. “Don’t. You. Fucking. Waste. It.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying maybe the Reds aren’t all wrong. Maybe at the head of an Eternity-class battleship armada you could force a peace.”

“Bullshit.”

“Is it? Tessa saw this war for what it was—brothers fighting brothers. She came here to make peace.”

“And they killed her in the uprising. They think they can just bite the hand that feeds them and not get smacked for it? No.” I shovelled more dirt into the pit, masking that stench of death. With any luck we could reset the ambush and catch some more of the bastards tomorrow. “I will take that armada and turn Ascension City back into red dust.”

“I thought you might say that…” Jon whispered.

Any soldier worth his salt could’ve sensed Jon’s next move. I twirled on the spot, drawing my revolver, as Jon raised his pulse rifle against me. I was the faster draw, always had been, and I didn’t hesitate. My finger hammered the trigger, as it had done a thousand times before, and a round of hot, solid lead—

The barrel turned with a dry click. Misfire? No…

Jon’s smile was grim. “Sorry, Reilly. Must’ve missed a chamber on the reload.”

I licked my lips. “Your mother was a nano-augmented whore.”

A sphere of arced light burst from Jon’s rifle and obliterated my shoulder, cutting through it as if it were warm butter. I was thrown back into the pit atop of the Reds, my shooting arm flying clean away from the rest of my body. Blood sprayed in a violent arc against the star-strewn sky.

This ain’t no painted desert serenade…

There was no pain—only cold, red dirt. Earth shone like a beacon so far away. Jon blocked the stars, kneeling down next to me in the pit. He unwrapped his Blue band from around his head and dabbed it against the bright, crimson socket where my arm used to be. It stained the cloth, soaked it. Not red, but—

“Close enough,” Jon said, wrapping the band back around his arm. He spared me a final glance and then turned and walked away.

I remembered running into the sea back home on Earth with Tessa. You’re my sad song, she had once told me, and you’re stuck on repeat, baby.

I remembered the smell of her wet hair. My headache was gone. I imagined her blood trailing through the waters of Mars. Bless her—she had been trying to do the right thing.

Jon Tristan would have understood.

Story by Unknown Genius

I suspect the Deeptesh

Prufrock

Thin shards of glass flew into her skin. At the moment of impact, she fell nothing. Everything seemed to have coalesced into a void. And then, as the sensation began to sink in, she felt pain. Terrible, unthinkable pain. Pain was beautiful.

~

AS LEENA STOOD on the bridge, she felt beautiful. The sky in the far horizon was melting into the Ganges. The sun had set leaving a crimson afterglow. She could almost taste the soft tobacco sky as it flowed inside her mouth. In the distance, a small dinghy was sailing in the crimson waters. Quietly it sailed towards the vanishing point of light and vision.

And you must vanish like smoke in the sky

Which no one holds back

Leena watched the boat vanish moment by moment and felt a great sadness. Now the boat was almost gone, beyond human vision and her eyes strained to catch the ghostly shape melting away. She could feel the boat sail along the curve of the river at Liluah. Further still, the boat will come to a narrow stretch where the river bed had dried up on both sides and the water was green with algae. The banks will still be hot from the golden sunbeams; on the ghat there will be women wrapped in saris taking a dip. Then children will come running in when they see the boat; their faces pink and white with fatigue.

Evening will descend on the bridge as in other places. Silver moonlight on the estuary. Leela standing on the bridge, a childish figure. Her hair is tied up and she is wearing a deep blue dress. She is fair complexioned and of short stature. Faces go past her. Memories. Men smelling of hot coffee and cigarettes. Porters in khakee dresses. Gunpowder lips. Time rolling down like liquid rust. Slender legs. Laughter thrown like a universe wrapped into a paper ball of time. Papermoneylust. Pink seahorses with dark, green vagina. A ghost-woman with a pendulum in her womb. Infundibulous time. Skytimewomen. A sentence ending with comma and full-stop,,…,

~

When she re-gained consciousness, she was not sure about where she was. There were dim lights in the room. She could see a woman in white uniform coming towards her. Death can’t be ugly, she thought.

~

In her dreams, she always rode on paper-horses. She always knew time was a strange paperboat. And her friends called her a paper-girl. She had always loved magic. She had written a poem about a paper girl in the rain. Her friends had liked the poem and called her paper-girl. Paper-girl. Paper woman. Gosh! What a name. She never believed life being real. Life for her was a huge joke and totally unreal. Emotion for her was placid as paper and real like rain. In those important junctures of life, where there is a possibility for a hundred decisions and indecisions, she would always tend to follow the dictates of her conscience ahead of anything else. Science and religion was for her pure magic. How time was elastic and even space could bend fascinated her. Time and space was like paper, she thought. When she would grow up, she thought, she would have a paper baby one day.

And then it happened two summers earlier. She was nineteen at that time. She had just entered college and was studying for a degree in English. Life for her was just a humdrum affair. And then things changed one day. Almost like magic.

~

On the bridge, time stood with Leena. Time convoluted into a coughball of consciousness. Time moved like a bitch, it always does. Time eats, sleeps and menstruates. For time is time, nothing else. She could feel time. Liquid hands tugging at her dress. Away bitch, she cried. Separation anxiety. A man was sliding in through the doorway. Time. He slid off his pajamas, his breathe warm and moist on her cheek. Time. He had only hands, big large hands with which he painted. Squashed the universe into a ball and pinned it onto his neck-tie. What is your name, man with hands? I am Prufrock, people call me Alfred. Thank you. I love food and dolls. She was trying to resist. Time. Bergson’s huge eyes. Sleep on the walls, bells ringing. Loyola was a good man, with claws. Time bites.

~

He dined at cheap restaurants. He had killed his father for killing the old queen. Yet he was timid, with weasel eyes. No, I’m not Prufrock, you imagine. Lips trembling to ask the over-whelming question. Do I exist? Are you real? We’re in love, yes, no, who knows? Tooraloom Tooraloom tay, famous words now. Yes, I remember. Doctor stares into her eyes, what do you see? I’m on a bridge on the Ganges. I’m in the water. I’m with Prufrock under lovely skies. Schizopreneria. Border-line, line, border. The mermaids are thinking, singing, lust for the fleshy curves of time. Who is Rakesh? Rakesh Prufrock, no Prufrock, mon amour.

Remember. White light. Great hand of time. Remember the name. Rakesh Malhotra, CEO, LNT Cement. To be husband. Remember. Another bright light. Lips on omphalos. Engagement. No? Grew up in Lousiana. Not religious, but a good man. Good looking, same scar behind the left ear, see? Prufrock, Prufrock. No. Your childhood pen-friend. Chat-friend. Believes you are the only truth in life.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

Then the accident. Hemorrhage. No, I’ll explain the character. My Prince Hamlet, I’m not dreaming. Believes in art, not a public servant. Grew up under sunny skies and lamp-lit rooms. Fifty almost, but how he turns me on. Met him along blurry lines. Courted women and went to bed with most of them. But loved me the most. We were seated on the wrong side of the room. You could stare through him like glass and see the streets and women flow like arguments. He had the breath of chalk and soul of the yellow fog that rubs its tail in the sunlit breeze. You could feel him wound up like the soul of a bird in the yellow fog and slither out of smokeless chimneys into the city. He was at motion and rest as he filled the room like music...women with braceleted arms and bare breasts in lamplight, had golden hair and spoke like dust. The music flowed through trees, through empty streets and teaspoons of vanishing breath. The universe panted...the universe rubbed her breasts and arms on the naked body of time, the universe spat out a symphony with golden hair and panting lips, across the slender, white fingers of the sea. Infinite, my love, infinite my lust for silence, as flesh penetrates flesh and metal penetrates the soft belly of light, on that baked afternoon in Algiers.

~

You are a bridge, on the Ganges. You’re the quiet centre of harmony. Useless images. Rakesh Malhotra, CEO, with neck-tie and collar walked out. I have had enough, he thought. No more shit. On a cold November morning when he was ten years old, his mother had beaten him for telling a lie. He had cheated on a Maths test and his assignment was cancelled. He had not confessed the truth to his mother. What followed was ten days of silence; he refused to talk or touch food. This was the same obstinate desire to achieve his ends which would later take him to the top. He was already flourishing in his work when he met Leela. Or re-met let’s say. He and Leela were classmates once and more than that- their spending time together on...

Anikesh stared at the paper. Those were the good days. He almost strained to remember. How difficult it is to create her again as he remembered her! The smiles, the strokes, the beliefs, the years. His novel will sell. Sunlight fell across Ashima’s face and he had an overwhelming sense of pity for her. Her limbs lay inert as she stared with lacklustre eyes from her wheelchair, mumbling indiscreetly. Her words have a sense of their own. It was tough to understand her as she was now or she was back in school...let alone trying to give a voice to her inert consciousness. Wild, restless consciousness. Yet words weren’t false; she had lovely eyes, wanted a good job and stable career and...and she believed he was Prufrock. Yet she was unreal, he thought, more so on paper. His publisher had already phoned him twice that day. Puffs of dust went up into the sunbeam in the dark room as he turned the pages of his manuscript. Prufrock he thought. Ashima was right. Her mumbling getting worse. Sound of tap dripping.

Do I dare disturb the universe?

Her lines always. Will be always. Damn that tap that disturbs the silence. Every single word is...enough. Time is water and silence. Red, blue, green. What do you do all day sitting there, said Ashima. Dream. He fancies strange things. Like I’m mad and all that. Ever since his unemployment...Ashima on the wheelchair mumbling. Who is lying? You or I or both? What is the game darling? My novel will sell.

The Story

(This is the first story I wrote for WRiP. Thought I might as well post it here)

And then there was a violent thud which made the room shake. As if the world were bursting open into splinters. Liquid splinters of light and deafening flux of paranormal vision. Music floated into the room like the last breathe of existence. Perhaps it was Mozart. “Perhaps a little too dull for untrained ears”, she mused. But definitely soothing amidst all this madness and collapse.

She could feel her loneliness weighing down upon her. Relentless alienation. She could feel the breathe of time along every hair on her skin. Just like the flowing tongue of an evil sorceress. Perhaps she had a name, she thought. Not that it mattered much to her now. Names were useless in times such as these. Especially when she was having her ‘visions’. She could feel time flow along criss-crossed points of motion within and without her. She was being held out like a transparent being in all her nakedness to the serene indifference of the world. Her body had thus turned into a paradoxical shrine of conflict between shifting states of rest and motion ~ between what she believed was more than one kind of conceivable time. Expanding co-ordinates of time zero and multiple points of simultaneous existence. Every atom in her body, she felt, was alive both to the neutral world outside and her vivid flux of painstaking images.

The clock-hands had twisted themselves and were raining down in the form of liquid daggers. Vertigo of images spun in a mist of red. Horses that speak as they turn into women. Fingers caressing wet glass and navel. The women move like water across the floor and the room moves in a waltz like time. Time now becomes language. Mosaic of trance in glass. Finger sky. Jesus bird. Move. Waltz. Penetrate. Then melt, melt, melt.

The cat beside the window stares at her in disgust. Our universe is full of surprises. Perhaps I don’t need a plot, he thinks. She has been living her visions. Her body twisted in vile postures like a pre-Raphaelite painting as she snaked along the co-ordinates like a moving story. Ok, back to time zero. The women, the waltz, the motion all receded till they merged into a single point of amnesia. Thankfully, normalcy returned to the room. “I have been dreaming,” she told herself, “Or may be I’m dreaming now. But surely, both can’t be real.” “Or may be, “ she cried looking at the cat with twinkling eyes, “you are the one dreaming. In which case, I don’t have to bother much about reality.” The cat looked at her in an irritated manner and then yawned. “I need a plot,” he declared. “I have been travelling from Moscow to London for years now. But not a plot in sight.” “I can provide you with a plot,” she told the cat. “The only problem is I can see it vividly the moment I close my eyes but can’t put it down in the form of language. I can see it all,” she murmured. “The waltz. The women. I can still feel time flowing through my body like a torrential...”

“There you are,” interrupted the cat. “You’ve put it down in the form of language.”

“You don’t understand,” she explained. “There has to be a logic. There has to be a plot. I know all of these images are linked together almost like a secret fraternity but it’s not clear. Who was waltzing for instance- the room or the women or both? Were the women women or horses?Or were the horses women? There are no real, discernable boundaries. They are all messed up. And to narrate a story, I have to plot them along a real time axis. So, do the women come first or the horses? Do I use real time for narration or the time frame of the images. But time then was insignificant.”

“Insignificant questions.” Said the cat with another yawn, “You theorize too much.” “My problems with language are different. “I have been editing and re-editing the sentence “The cat loves the fish””. What if you say the “The fish loves the cat”. Probably it would mean different but how can you be sure that you always say what you want to? Then again, what if the verb comes first. Or you simply say “Loves the the cat fish.” Language breaks down you might argue but doesn’t it sound more beautiful? And more realistic for then your problem of trying to convert memory into language will be solved.”

It was her turn to get bored. “I believe,” the cat said, taking a step forward and whispering with great precaution ,” such a conversion is false as it is always forced. Everything can’t be language. Is it for instance so important to hanker after a relation and a plot? And then narrate logically? What you told me perhaps made no sense but it is beautiful as it is nothing but a reiteration of your memory and vision.” The cat then paused for a breath and opened his eyes to find the woman gone. He felt stupid to find himself talking to thin air. But surely she was there a minute ago, or had he been dreaming? He then recalled the woman in her state of being almost possessed as she narrated her visions. Or was it his vision? Alternate realities. But the poet was the poem and memory was the narrative without language. He had an idea about who the woman was. The music, the women, the red trance and madness will have to be obstinately committed to paper. After all these years, the cat has at last been blessed with a story.