The credit for my having lived through so many goes to the mannequins in the window.

It was several years ago, when the cliched sour grapes conspiracy theory about card companies exploiting consumers was new to me. Riding the waves of emotional turmoil is always a popular sport with youngsters, and in meticulous preparation for the grand day I had spent the previous three hundred and sixty-four indiscriminately falling head over heels for sundry members of the opposite sex. Had I known the time complexity of the brute force algorithm for locating a significant other, I might have had someone to spend that Valentine’s Day with – but that is a parallel universe, neither here nor there, and then I should not have met the mannequins in the window.

I drove down to the mall for my ritual Valentine’s Day window shopping – a habit I have never discarded; windows on that day are an eyeball-feast for the devoid of date. We may be voyeurs with impunity; not so the paired, who must make distressing deals with devilish banks only to fixate upon a single delicious object, giftwrap it and never see it again.

The apparel store was my first stop. It was, surprisingly, closed, but there they were, the three of them, man, woman, child, draped in the most exquisite fabric I could imagine. The lucky, lucky mannequin family. The familiar sequence of emotions, beginning with jealousy and ending with a well-formed plan to someday see my own face above that collar, played out. When that plan was executed, datelessness would be a thing of yore. And, time’s up. I shook my head, clearing out the flights of fancy, making room for new ones.

Next up, the confectionery. There would be chocolate of all shapes, sizes, colours, consistencies; cakes and ice-cream, swirls of temptation…

And as I turned away, I saw the wall behind the mannequins. It was covered in graffiti. That was new. Graffiti in a store window? The glass was unbroken; there were no slits or openings. I do not care for graffiti at all, as a rule, but when it says, as this did, in bold black shaky letters with the paint still dripping, “TAKE THEM”, anyone would be intrigued.

I stepped closer, pressing my face against the glass. There was more, in smaller lettering, underneath it.

TAKE THEM.
The clothes are beautiful. You know it as well as we do. We are given new ones every week, and sometimes they modify us to fit into them. Hammer, chop, melt. It does not hurt, we are not real. The clothes make us feel alive. We are what we wear. We want everyone who sees us to want to be us. We want to sell the clothes. They are like parasites, hijacking our bodies for their purposes. Sometimes we don’t manage to sell them. Then they go to the rag pile and are thrown out. If we were real, this is the part that would hurt. Take them out of our sight, the store is shut and they will not be sold and we cannot bear it. They are yours, no catch, no fine print.

I wondered who had written it and why, and whether they actually expected passers-by to read it and rob the store. That was asking for a bit much. Most people are upright citizens; they’d never rob a place with a burglar alarm.

The wind rattled the glass. I removed my face from it and rapped on it. It hadn’t been locked properly.

I looked around. I couldn’t see any alarm system.

In five minutes, the mannequins stood there naked, all their deformities on display. They didn’t look particularly enviable anymore.

To this day, I cannot bring myself to think of it as theft. I was just doing them – and myself – a favour. The whole thing was a set-up, I am certain, but to what intent I cannot fathom. I do, however, in moments of incoherence, sympathize with them, for it has been ages and I have found no takers for my heart, and I long for someone to relieve me of it before it shrivels and dies on its own.

There is no catch, no fine print, no user manual, no injunction against destroying it. It is a parasite, and it has fed on me for too long.

The Dilbert blog is usually chock-full of awesome well-thought-out nonsense, the post linked above being a fine specimen. I don’t often use it for anything other than a daily humour dose and mild neural stimulation, because once you start thinking about the sort of ideas suggested by Scott Adams, the path leads to a crazy rollercoaster spiral from which there is no return.

This one, however, caught my attention for a couple of reasons.

My last few posts on this blog have been markedly deviant in style from my normal writing. All about yucky emotions and heartbreak and how the sky is falling on my head; about things I’ve never spoken of to anyone and still have trouble discussing, let alone post on a public blog.

Also, one night recently, in a series of 40 consecutive texts, I described how I’d been feeling like a Jekyll-Hyde coagulate, how I had these two almost equally strong but opposing urges to choose different courses of action. Those texts, by virtue of having been deleted, are probably lost to posterity, but that was the gist of them. One of them went something like “Hyde can influence Jekyll and vice versa so I’m not sure which of them is talking right now.” In hindsight, perhaps I wasn’t just kidding around.

You see where I’m going with this. What if the dual brain theory, defying all ridicule, turns out to be true?

Idiomatic and figurative speech can often reveal a lot more about the true nature of our thought processes than we realize. So we’ve all been “in two minds” or “struggling with ourselves” or heard the “small voice in our head telling us to do Y instead of X”. We have our “internal conflicts”, go against our “better judgement” and justify our own actions to ourselves.

Does “better judgement” suggest that there is more than one judgement? Of course, not everything is black and white, but even in the world of fuzzy logic, if we had to pick one, what could cause us to go with the judgement that had, to use a crude quantitative description, a final score of 0.45 as opposed to the one with 0.55?

I’m not even a biology or psychology student, so I don’t know much about the underlying pathways and reasoning that we use to make decisions. But I do know I have, in the past, used expressions like “trapped in my own head”. While I’m perfectly certain I don’t suffer from multiple personality disorder (that involves episodes of amnesia where one personality has no idea what the body was doing while the other personality controlled it), when I was 12, I once detailed all the different kinds of people I felt like in my journal. Even adjusting for the “masks” we wear in our daily interactions, the “mirroring” process we use to fit in socially, I can’t say for sure that my ideas, beliefs and judgements are always self-consistent. Example: my stubborn refusal to eat meat despite having reasoned out why I should and having tried it once. As Scott Adams points out, we all have such “cognitive dissonance”. Many scientists believe in Creationism, et cetera.

Anyway, as I said, it got me thinking, and last night I tried a self-designed experiment (which, I might add, was completely unscientific and uncontrolled, lacked a well-formed hypothesis and pretty much everything that could have catapulted it into credibility).

The experiment, in all its vagueness, was as follows.

Aim: To test out the dual brain theory.

Hypothesis: The dual brain theory states that the left and right hemispheres of our brains can think independently. Communication between them is facilitated by the corpus callosum.

Background: The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa. Also, one hemisphere is supposed to be rational and one emotional, or something, but I wasn’t too sure which was which. (This combined with my innate inability to distinguish between left and right in less than three seconds helped somewhat in controlling for confirmation bias.)

Procedure:
- First, I relax and try to think of nothing in particular. Then I think about a certain issue that I have strong but conflicting opinions on. (All right, if you have to know, the issue was whether or not I need more love and friendship and emo stuff than I currently have in order to be happy.)
- I cover one eye with the hand nearer it (dunno if it’s left or right), take my phone in the other hand and hit random buttons on it and simultaneously tap the foot on the side of the open eye. This is just to ensure that the hemisphere controlling that half of the body is active. It might have worked the opposite way by engaging it so it couldn’t think about the issue. I’m not sure.
- I ask myself what I think about the issue.
- I repeat this procedure with the other side of the body.
- After doing so, I text lots of people to find out which hemisphere is which.

Observations:
Trial #1: The left hemisphere gave a firm NO and the right gave a firm YES. I just jotted down “this side” in my notebook and worked out whether it was right or left and which hemisphere that implied, later.
This agreed perfectly with the accepted view (which I’ve read about but didn’t remember, though the subconscious knowledge might have resulted in confirmation bias) that the left is the rational hemisphere.

Trials #2-#n: Since I knew which half was supposed to say what, these trials were probably influenced by confirmation bias. I rapidly alternated between the two eyes and my entire perception of life seemed to shift back and forth (and I don’t just mean visually, it was like one eye showed me the depths of despair and the other showed a nice fun okay world where I had everything I wanted). It was freaky and weird and utterly cool, even if I was just imagining it.

Beyond trial #n: I kept on doing this alternating thing but after a certain point it just stopped and the “nice fun okay” view refused to go away. The “depths of despair” haven’t put in an appearance since then.

Conclusion:
This neither proves nor disproves the theory but I’m a shade more inclined to wonder if it’s true now. The “alternating view” may not have had any effect because the corpus callosum conveys information between the halves anyway. [Update: Apparently ocular dominance is different from normal laterality - according to Wikipedia, both hemispheres control half the retina in both eyes. So that probably didn't have an effect.]
Waitaminnit. You know what’s cooler? The people who do ACTUAL CLINICAL EXPERIMENTS on patients to test this theory use the EXACT SAME METHOD. I had no idea about that till just now! Whoa, I feel so scienced up!

Also, after the experiment I had a LOT of trouble being skeptical of this whole theory. (I mean there I was, actually feeling like more than one person!) I had to slowly talk myself back to rationality (“You’re not two people, your experiment was uncontrolled, you don’t have a split brain…”). But that worked out fine enough and now I’m back to being me (as opposed to us).

TEH HEIGHT OF WEIRDNESS.

I switch on my phone, which I’d kept off because the battery’s down and I may need it. Check for messages, switch it off… almost.
No. Switch it off. Don’t think about it. Don’t open that conversation… don’t read it over…

“I can’t help it.”
“You want to talk to her, but you don’t want to want to talk to her?”
“…something of the sort.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I know. It’s like bloody FB.”
“Get over her. Find more interesting people to talk to.”
“I’ve got loads more interesting people to talk to.”

Not just for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.

And what’s that, dorkums? A weepy, traumatized, suicidal five-year-old?

Forget it. You’re experiencing friggin’ withdrawal symptoms. Make an effort to pretend to live. Things usually fall into place when you do that. Beauty’s one thing. You can worship it from afar. Addiction’s totally another.

So for half an hour I tunelessly sing I Will Survive on that balcony. Over and over and over. Even the French version by Larusso, Je survivrai. Until it almost sounds like I’m delivering a monologue, with all the anger and bitterness and pride written into that song. I’m not that chained-up little person still in love with you.

Don’t stay indoors. Get out, have fun – what they call fun – take your mind off it all. Stick a syringe full of morphine into it. Numb the blows from the hammer that’s trying to forge your mind into something you can live with. It’s a small operation, it won’t hurt. Well, except when we rip off the bandages.
Don’t, for sanity’s sake, don’t stay alone. Imagine a friend up if you have to.

I didn’t have to. New York breezily announced that it was my birthday and I had come all the way from godknewwhere to treat her and therefore her captain would be a monster not to let her as well as the rest of the team off athletics practice. All I had to do was remember that it was supposed to be my birthday. We walked to the Metro station. I climbed a random tree on the footpath. We got off at MG Road and entered Lifestyle. Tried free samples of Gelato. Whiskey and cream, Ferrero Rocher, jamun, hazelnut… Visited Archies. The problem with Archies is, cards account for a major share of their profits. I Love You, Miss You, Dear Friend. I quickly moved towards the opposite shelf that held incredibly detailed scale models of the Terminator.
They ate at Pizza Hut. I couldn’t. So Athy Baby and I walked into Ruby Tuesday. Scrutinized the menu, glanced at each other, got up and walked out again. (We tend to do that a lot nowadays. Did the same thing in Punjabi by Nature too. When we’re older, we’ll probably find it embarrassing, so best do it now.) Wandered into a shop that sold Christmas decorations. The place had a warm, sweet smell hanging over it and a carol was playing in the background. I could have gone in circles around the Christmas trees forever, round and round under the fake mistletoe, the fake holly wreaths… Then we went bowling in MGF Metropolitan. I sucked. So did New York, though.

I sent that text after all.

I’d managed it almost all evening. I deserved this indulgence.

Consciousness causes collapse. I am a conscious observer. Therefore, by virtue of observing my own actions, I must collapse my own life into a state of existence. Though, of course, cogito ergo sum implies that I cannot prove the existence of anyone except myself. By extension, I cannot prove the existence of any portion of the universe I am not currently observing.

Great. The universe is limited to a balcony, a few trees and a brick facade. I can see through some of the windows where the curtains aren’t drawn. People moving around inside. But the moment they disappear from view, they cease to be. The fans could be whirring all alone. For that matter, I don’t know that they are people at all, not from the fact that they look and behave like people.

I shut my eyes. One mode of sensory perception struck off. Does that change what exists? Does the cold, solid stone beneath my bare feet exist? I think so. If I could see it but not feel it, would I say it was real? I don’t think so. Tactile feedback, somehow, is more trustworthy than visual. Why the bias towards one sense? Is it just the result of empirical knowledge that the eyes are easier to deceive than the skin? Perhaps. But there’s nothing to say the skin can’t be deceived. Remember the Matrix.

But haven’t I defined ‘reality’ as ‘what I perceive through my senses’? Doesn’t that make the Matrix question moot? Who would say which reality was the deception, whether either or both… I’m slipping away from The Matrix into Inception now.

So if reality is what I perceive, then if I stop perceiving and become a point of consciousness in a sea of nothingness, does that mean nothing exists except me? What about if I become unconscious? Would that mean complete annihilation? Would that mean every time I go to sleep, the universe stops existing?

Now I’m scared to fall asleep. This is not going the way I’d planned.

Okay, I need a different approach. This was too asymmetric. Just because I can’t see inside other people’s heads, I can’t call them non-people. So, all forms of consciousness are equal. And reality is decided by a majority vote.

What if everyone falls asleep at the same time?

I have a duty towards my fellow life forms to stay awake!

All right, backtrack. Reality is objective. Consciousness has no role to play in it.

Reality is a set of equations and rules and conditions, a given state of a system. A bunch of subatomic particles arranged in this particular order. That’s what all organisms are. Parts of the system. Configurations of particles. That’s what I am. Here I am, walking along these steps. There is a set of equations and rules and conditions that fully describes me. Plug those equations into this environment and there is only one way they will behave. There are too many particles for there to be any significant randomness. It’s all statistical. There’s some mathematical law that determines that right now I’m going to lift my foot and take another step. I cannot behave any other way. I don’t have a choice. Or rather, the equations don’t have a choice. Assigning consciousness to myself is like wondering how 3x + 4y = 0 feels when it meets 9x + 5y = 8. All these thoughts are electrical signals. Taking them as proof of my consciousness is like saying the tubelight has dreams.

There is an automaton, a sand-girl, a ghost on the balcony. There is something trapped inside its skull. That something is questioning its own existence.
You know what, that’s kinda freaky. I’d rather just believe that something doesn’t exist. There’s no place for it in an objective reality anyway.

Hey, hold on a minute, will you? That something was me!

Too late.

There is a ball of dust inhabited by sand-people. Within the nervous system of each sand-person, something ethereal may or may not lie chained and gagged. That ethereal thing, if it is there at all, cannot affect how the sand-person behaves. It can struggle silently against forces beyond its understanding for as long as the sand-person remains functional. Or it can watch what the sand-person does and then say, “Oh yeah. It’s doing that because I ordered it to.” Because there’s nobody to question whether it really did give those orders. The time lag is so small that it cannot tell, by itself.

To all intents and purposes, it does not exist. The sand-person does not even notice it.

P.S. I know it’s meaningless waffle. But it does make horrifying sense in a way.

You know what they say. Tell the truth and you won’t have to remember anything. And that, I believe, is the only reason I’m coming clean – it’s getting hard to keep track of what lies I’ve told whom.

So while reading, I’ll ask you to keep a couple of things in mind:

1. While I may appear to be a normal person to some people (I don’t know if there are any such people, but in case), I’m far from it. And I don’t just mean panic attacks, tantrums, fits of depression, self-injury and the like, that you can cure with a pill (though I do have all those and haven’t cured them yet). That… would have been normal. I am so crazy fucked-up in the head that I managed to reason out a counter-argument to cogito ergo sum and spent an entire night worrying I didn’t exist. (I’ll post the argument here when I have time, though most likely it’ll be utter nonsense.) I try not to let people see that side of me – you wouldn’t if you were me, it’s either scary or annoying – but lately it’s been coming out oftener and oftener.

2. You are, or have been, in love, too.

The following are the two stories I’ve told people (well, not actively told, just let them conclude):

I. There was this guy in school I used to like but never had the courage to talk to. Recently, I managed to do it and we started hanging out. But I got way too obsessed with him and realized he’d never think anything of me, so I decided to end it. Now I miss him more than I can describe and that’s why all of this is happening.

II. There was this girl in school I absolutely adored. She talked, walked, dressed perfectly. She was pretty. She had the sweetest voice you ever heard. She could dance. The quintessential DU female. Everybody loved her. How could I not? I wanted to be in her shoes, more than anything. She was one of the few people nice enough to talk to dorks like me. I had her on a pedestal. But we were from completely different worlds. I knew it, and every time I saw her it hurt more and more to know it, until I simply couldn’t be friends with her anymore. So now I’m trying to cut her out of my life and it’s making me sad.

The truth is a sort of mixture of both with some extra ingredients stirred in.

Not a guy. Technically a “girl in school”, but not exactly what you’d imagine. My ninth grade English teacher, all of twenty-eight.
Yeah, I know how that sounds. I know there are a million things I have to clarify at this point.

First, that this is purely a girl-crush. I’ve sometimes wondered if it was anything more, but it isn’t.
Second, it’s a girl-crush and then something else. An obsession I can’t quite pin down.
Third, she isn’t the first. I was similarly obsessed with a fictional character when I was ten. That faded. This didn’t.
Fourth, since I obviously can’t talk of it in any coherent terms, I’ll have to make an approximation. It’s that thing they talk of in music and poetry. It’s that feeling some people get when they look at the Mona Lisa, which enables them to subsequently convince the whole world that she’s the epitome of beauty. It’s probably how artists see their muses. Like when you set your eyes on something and all you want to do is freeze it inside a crystal forever.

There’s just one problem. Those things of beauty aren’t things. They’re ideas. Ideas of things, perhaps, but still ideas. Ideas that achieve escape velocity from the things that give rise to them. Keats knew what he was talking about in those first couple of lines of Endymion. (He proceeded to ruin the effect by blathering on about flowers and trees and sheep.) I say “first couple of lines” because I haven’t read Endymion beyond what was in our CBSE course, but now I’m thinking I ought to.

So anyway, back to ideas. You know what people do when they see an idea like that? They find a way of immortalizing it. That’s why they become artists. If they don’t, then the physical object remains their only connection to the idea. And objects get eroded, mutilated, destroyed. Even memory gets corrupted. So you either carve it in stone (which will at least last as long as you live) or let it disappear. You think about that, about that perfection being corroded – you can’t. It literally feels apocalyptic.
What do you do when you have no way of immortalizing it?
You could do several things. One of your stupider options would be what I did. That is, try to erase it from your neural patterns for good.
There are some things that can be forgotten. Some losses you can recover from. This – well, I feel like I’m murdering Lucy Gray.

Sure, I’ve got other reasons to live. I found that out in this past week, when I thought I’d really, truly scratch into oblivion the very thought of her. Because see, there was this SciAm article that said sometimes with a lot of practice you can recondition your brain. Become someone else. But there’s the rub – no matter who I became, I’d still be human and alive. I’d still see and hear and feel and think. I’d still be surrounded by those ideas and want to place them in a bubble and make sure nothing ever came near them. And I’d go through the same process over and over, endlessly.

It’s not as if my world begins and ends with her. I need fantasy, where things happen the way they want to happen. I need science fiction, where I can believe the stories without thinking I’m deranged. I need the mental demons of PKD, the despairing rebellion of Audioslave, the funny, bittersweet wisdom of L M Montgomery, the hard-hitting irony of C&H. I need the madness of maths and the promises of physics. I need the mental state that comes from focusing on one thing for days on end (maybe that’s what they call meditation… and I always used to mock it). The feeling when you realize you’ve just emerged from a hallucination. The view of Wonderland through the looking-glass. I need them to survive. I need her to survive. To me, looking at her from a distance on a winter morning is like looking round a corner through a gap in a mossy stone wall and finding a secret cave full of butterflies. (No, that’s not supposed to be some kind of weird innuendo, pervs (and for that matter nor is the title of this post). It’s an actual description of a mental image she once gave me.) Closer up, it’s like pointing my telescope at the noonday sun. (Again, no innuendo. Dude. That wouldn’t even make sense.)

I know none of those things are real. But if you try to tell me that, I’ll turn right around and attack your definition of ‘real’ until I morph it into something that covers them.

Every moment spent breathing is a moment wasted, because it means nothing’s taking my breath away.

Okay, I’m done being comprehensible. Why did I even lie about this in the first place? While I was in school, I was afraid she’d take it the wrong way. And now… I guess I’d just gotten used to lying about it.

Point is, this is my survival instinct kicking in telling me to go unblock her number on my phone right now.

This unshakeable sentiment of mine has the logical sequitur that I keep the lights in our room on till a robust 3 a.m. My roomies, both being true early birds, have become resigned to my need for illumination in the wee hours, especially since I stopped combining it with Children of Bodom and The Big Bang Theory at 400% volume on VLC. However, there is a problem. I heartily wish problems would go and find something else to do apart from solemnly sit there and be, but far be it from them to oblige; they seem to believe it is our responsibility to make them un-be.

To come back to describing the problem: the world is diurnal. Classes begin at 8 in the morning. And I have to attend them. I would be perfectly happy sleeping in till late afternoon, but my dream of doing so is always interrupted by the harsh necessity of maintaining 75% attendance. When I moved into the hostel, my parents’ major concern was how I would get out of bed with nobody to engage in a tug-of-war for the blankets and pour cold water on my head.

So I’ve decided to fix my body clock.

I’ve never seen any evidence that I possess any such thing, but acting on the assumption that I’m just not looking hard enough, I set my alarm for a reasonable time in the morning. At first I was pretty excited about the whole waking-up-independently project and even managed to open my eyes to the sounds of Nickelback screaming “Taa-ime… is go-ing by…”. Long enough to switch off the alarm (STOP, not SNOOZE, I have to have more than five minutes!) and miss the morning class yet again. This enthusiasm slowly dissolved into “I have TWO roomies, surely one of them will switch off the alarm if I set it for say 6, because obviously nobody wants to wake up at 6!” But this meant I started oversleeping enough to miss the 9:30 class. So I resorted to “Hey, here’s my timetable, can you wake me up in time for my classes? Even if I shower you with karate kicks?”

Let me be frank about one thing, though: in this world, it’s every procrastinator for themselves. If you think you can rely on anyone else to train in martial arts just so you get your attendance, you’re being overly optimistic.

What I’m trying to say is, I’m on my own. My day begins with Never Gonna Be Alone at 6, reset alarm for 7, wake at 7:30, use “Oh shit!” where others use “Good morning!”, try to figure out whether brushing my teeth is all that important, hunt for something clean to wear, end up pulling a T-shirt out of the bottom of the laundry basket and set off at 7:50, ignoring breakfast altogether. There are ways to improve this performance – sleeping fully dressed, for example: this has some kind of calming effect on the panicked late-for-class mind – but in the long run, I’ll need something less uncomfortable. Some days when I do get up at 7, I feel so thrilled I spend half an hour doing a self-congratulatory waltz (well, I like to think of it as a waltz) around the hostel, so the breakfast situation remains unchanged.

The funny thing is, the total time taken for all the work I have to do in the morning is a lot more than the sum of its parts. All the necessary and unnecessary tasks, on paper, can be performed in 45 minutes flat.

And there are people who can do it.

And if they can, by egoistic extension, so can I.

I’m not going to RIP till the first beats of Never Gonna Be Alone make me snap to attention, wherever on earth at whatever time I hear them. Snapping to attention is an important part of waking up. If you don’t snap to attention, whatever garbled logic you give yourself to justify shutting off the alarm makes complete sense at the time. (THREE meals a day is just too much. Work expands to fill the time allotted, therefore to save time, reduce the time you allot to work. Brushing in the morning makes no sense, the germs have had all night to do the damage they wanted.)

…sigh, who am I kidding? Like every morning so far, I shall R. In complete P. Plan B: Form a protest group of habitual late birds and demand that important classes be shifted to evenings. After all, they can’t possibly ignore us if we’re a minority!

He sounds aghast at the audacity of my declaration. Underneath, a nugget of hope he tries to disguise as professional interest. The sunset is lovely, almost no scattering in the seven hundred nanometre range. I want to freeze the picture forever.

“Yes,” I tell him without hesitation. “I’m going to destroy the monster Heisenberg let loose upon the world. I’m going to finish what Newton began.”

“Don’t blame Heisenberg,” he says gently, and for a moment I am afraid, afraid that he is right. That Heisenberg had no choice, that he didn’t open the cage, that he only tried to enlighten us of the insidious horror that had held us in its thrall time out of mind.

I know, of course, that he is right. And I also know he is wrong. Contradictory beliefs coexisting, my internal logic is a veritable Schrodinger’s cat. If called upon to give my opinion, I will always choose, and it will be as though I never believed in the other. Yet when nobody asks, I am comfortable with both – both, not either – and there is no cognitive dissonance. I know he is right because otherwise, this superposition of states would not be possible. And I know he is wrong because if he were right beyond all doubt, I would be forced to abandon my quest, knowing it to be futile. And I haven’t abandoned it. The reasoning is entirely circular, but no drowning man ever got saved by refusing to clutch at straws.

“Everything is quantized,” he argues half-heartedly. “You’ll never find the perfect dress, the perfect song, the perfect friend because your idea of perfection isn’t an eigenvalue of the wavefunction of the universe. It’s in between two quantum states and no matter how close to it you think you are, you can’t look at it except out of the corner of your eye, because if you do, it will be one or the other.”

“No,” I say, with more conviction than I actually possess. My voice is steady and my eyes are dry but somehow the word contains a million invisible tears and we both know it. “If there were infinite states. If the envelope was continuous. If it was classical.”

“It isn’t.”

“You don’t know that. It could be. If we could create those states… force the universe into a mold. If we could alter the wavefunction itself…”

“How could you be sure?”

There, he said it. The thing I didn’t want to hear. I will never be sure, the uncertainty principle forbids it. If I create the quantum state I desire with precision, I will not be sure it is what I want, and if I’m sure of what I want, I will not be able to create it. Is it any wonder I have spent my entire career bitterly hating Heisenberg, blaming him for the theory that has stood up to all scrutiny?

I want to stare at the sunset always and always, but if I do, I’ll get bored of it in no time.

He must be wrong. He has to be. I look at my watch, at the fading evening. It’s time for him to be altered; he isn’t what I’m looking for. Just a little tweak here or there, almost imperceptible, so faint it all but overlaps with the original. Tomorrow, my neural network generation program will spit out a new person and he or she might be the one.

Someday, we’ll minimize entropy increase to the point of immortality. Someday, we’ll optimize energy efficiency to the point of perpetual motion. Someday, we’ll build a ship that travels at lightspeed and stop that bastard called time dead in its tracks.

Someday, there will be a sunset I love, and the earth will stop rotating.

Just a bubble in the middle of the bustling city. Just another place. Just a college campus surrounded by a glass-spiked wall. Not a universe unto itself.

Somewhere beyond that gate, I had a home, I realized.

I turned left. Perhaps I should have stopped to put on shoes instead of bathroom slippers.

Jia Sarai. Munirka. Nelson Mandela Marg. I should have brought a water bottle, too. I could have taken a bus, but I had no idea which bus. I couldn’t have taken an auto, because I didn’t have the money for the fare. Dust, footpath, crowds, traffic. My Delhi all right.

Poorvi Marg. I knew the way from there. Another half hour, I wandered along. Several buses no. 623 passed me by. Vasant Vihar CPWD Colony, they flashed in orange. Get on, if you can read the sign. I turned away. I had come too far on my own to be tempted; why hadn’t they offered me that ride when I needed it?

The road curved. Everything looked different at night. There were maps, but some industrious soul had covered them with wire netting, rendering them impossible to read. The signboards helped a little, but mostly the memory of having been there before.

Though of course, I had never been there before.

Trees on either side of the road met above my head. Had I left one bubble only to be trapped in another? The lanes wound and criss-crossed. I performed a rudimentary depth-first search, a rat in a maze. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven, twenty-five. Grimmauld Place. I needed the Secret Keeper to tell me it was there.

And it was.

Footnote: The official version is that I had gone there to “celebrate after the minors with a group of friends, group being defined as seven or eight people”. This is as it should be, for the unofficial one does not make a great deal of sense from any angle, in that the actual purpose of the trip – repaying a loan – was shamelessly sidelined till after I’d waved goodbye to her. Then I remembered my wallet was still too heavy for comfort and hurriedly called her back – luckily she hadn’t gotten very far. You, reader, ought to be proud of me for achieving that much, anyway, for I was perfectly capable of not remembering before I got home (in which case I should have spent my whole midsem break kicking myself) and if you’re not, I suggest you sign up for remedial classes in Pride-Taking. It’s a thought, a fine one at that, and may it benefit you no end. Is it not pride of that very category – the unfounded, the baseless, the what-the-hell-are-you-grinning-about – that has pulled off the CWG for us? Speaking of which, aren’t you glad they’re over and you’ll get to read about potholes and garbage cans on page 2 once again instead of unrealistically grandiose things such as flyovers and stadia and the Metro?

To start off, my reasons for being a vegetarian and the counter-arguments:

1. I’ve been brought up to believe that eating meat is “just wrong”. That means I’m conditioned to find the idea abhorrent, which mows down every logical argument in favour of it. It is, however, possible to undo conditioning with a great deal of effort and patience. I’ve un-conditioned my head from a lot of other ideas, like “money is evil” and “losing your temper is okay” and “if I leave a book open too long the words might jump out of the page and become real”. (That last one persisted till ninth grade; when we studied Lord Ullin’s Daughter in English, I was afraid to look up ‘wraith’ in the dictionary.) So if I really wanted to behave rationally, I probably could, which eliminates this reason.

2. My family believes it’s “just wrong”. If I do, I’ll probably be reproached, disowned and ostracized by my entire clan, which is a situation I would prefer not to be in. That, however, is also true for a lot of other things I plan to do someday and have no qualms about. So, while this can be used as a justification to someone else, if I say it to myself, all I get is a silent raised eyebrow.

3. Something feels “not quite right” about it. There’s a huge difference between “just wrong” and “not quite right”. “Just wrong” leaves no room for argument; it’s proof by assertion, which I don’t consider valid. “Not quite right”, on the other hand, means there’s something in my overall philosophy of life which is inconsistent with this; I just can’t seem to pinpoint it. This is the only thing that gives me trouble, so I shall now focus on it in detail.

Which brings me to what I’ve grandiloquently described as my “philosophy of life”. Its tenets are as follows:

I. There is no universal right or wrong.
II. There is only game theory.

Proof for tenet I: you don’t know them when you see them. Anything you think of can be fitted, with a little imagination, into either category.
Proof for tenet II: Math. Any challenges? I thought not.
So that much, at least, doesn’t need overhauling.
The implication is that the concept of ‘right’ is merely the label applied to the best possible strategy in a given scenario (the one that results in the highest payoff). For example, not stepping on others’ toes is ‘right’ because if everyone follows that dictum, they can all stop worrying about their own toes being stepped on and instead focus on how to get the best pedicures. But if everybody else steps on your toes, you’d be expected to step right back on theirs; not doing so would be ‘wrong’ because then you’d be encouraging them to take away your payoff and divide it amongst themselves, which is the worst strategy you could adopt. Well, maybe not the worst, you’d stand to lose more if you took on all of them at once, but you know what I mean.

Now back to the point. Consider that non-vegetarianism is just a watered-down version of cannibalism; the only difference is where you draw the arbitrary line – at your own species, or at all sentient creatures. Before it was proven that all races were a single species, the “it’s okay because they’re inferior” argument was used to justify slavery and genocide. The abstract concept was the same. So what made it not okay to draw the line at your own race? Game theory did. As long as the oppressed community can’t fight back, for whatever reason, it makes perfect sense to exploit it because not exploiting = no payoff and exploiting = payoff. But once they start revolting, if they’re too powerful to control, it’s smarter to just shut up and give them their rights rather than risk resentment and vengeance.

Animals, or to be more precise, non-humans, aren’t powerful enough to launch a revolution for their rights. And it doesn’t look like they ever will be. So it’s game-theoretically okay to exploit them unless you’re one of those extra-sensitive mirror-neuron-rich folks who empathize with every speck of dust (that’s a matter of personal discomfort, like being allergic to peanuts).

But what if they were?

Imagine what would happen if there was an alien invasion and Earth was conquered by another species. (There are tons of books/movies in which it happens, so stop whining and pick one and imagine it.) They could turn us into slaves or guinea pigs or food or torture victims and we’d be powerless to stop them. Obviously, our weapons would be no use against them. But even if we could communicate with them and tried to talk them into treating us as equals, we couldn’t. They’d have observed our inter-species policies and concluded that we were dangerous psychopaths who needed to be exterminated fast. We’d be like fleas to them. Why would they trust us not to turn against them the moment they gave us a sliver of a right? Game theory forbids it. And that’s where vegetarianism comes in – the trump card of the human race. Since we qualify as sentient, we’d be in the same category as them, and they’d feel convinced that our intentions were good and they could allow us to go free. They wouldn’t be bound to do anything of the sort, but at least it gives us a ray of hope.

I know that reasoning has loopholes, but I’m assuming that they’d define ‘sentient’ the same way that we do and that they’d be nice enough to consider our point of view. Of course, if they turned out to be dangerous psychopaths, we’d be beyond help.

So to sum up, I’m veg because I expect an alien attack to occur any second now and when I plead with them to let me live, I want to be able to maintain a degree of credibility.

Wow. And here I was hoping for a rational justification of my choice of nutritional source.

Smiling to myself, I clumsily clamber up the staircase. Well, actually, I remain under the delusion that I’m smiling to myself till I become aware of the number of glances directed at my wire-enclosed teeth, all twenty-whatever of which I am publicly exhibiting, complete with elastics. Freak show. Do you suppose they felt humiliated? Was it a violation of their privacy? Even if it is, why should I care? I wouldn’t have had to do this to them if they’d been all in a neat row. It’s their own fault.

I tried stepping into your world (more like sticking the shadow of a toenail through the door and hastily withdrawing it really, that was all I could manage). I dare you to step into mine.
One step and my slipper snaps. Half a kilometre, limping barefoot on the silent twilit road. If that means I get to talk to you uninterrupted, I’ll still take the long way back.

“She’s from IIT.”
“IIT?” He starts, evidently in awe.

That you don’t mind my being around is the best piece of news I’ve had in years. In my shoes, you wouldn’t have called that news. I do, though. That’s just me and my festering insecurities and utter bewilderment with the world. How does that song go? This is what we dream about, but the only question with me now is do I make you proud? Not proud as in I’ve-shed-blood-sweat-and-tears-to-make-you-what-you-are-and-this-is-my-due-and-even-if-I-haven’t-it-still-is, like half the world is, but as in hey-I-wanna-show-you-off-and-I-totally-can-’cause-you-belong-to-me-and-you-won’t-deny-it. You’re perhaps the only person in my life who’s okay with me the way I am right now and paradoxically, that makes me want to be a lot more. Not in the you-think-that’s-all-I-can-be-I’ll-prove-you-wrong way, but in the thanks-for-everything-and-I’ll-see-to-it-that-someday-I’m-worth-it way.