Frogs

Fiction: ‘Their office was fixed in time, no different from any other office: the neat partitions, cold furniture, and glass, glass, everywhere. Like a simple rule to add two numbers, the office was never going to change. Only the folks playing table tennis seemed ephemeral, like shapes made of fumes.’

-  Jigar Brahmbhatt

Only few days short of the deployment, my manager Parul told me to put in extra hours and make sure no pending work assigned to Hari went past the deadline. Hari had been missing office for two days until a police officer came looking for him, confirming Parul’s vague notion that he had to be in trouble when he stopped answering her calls.

I sat facing the GM’s cabin and lifted my gaze now and then to catch a glimpse of the activity inside. It looked like a typical meeting, during which Parul would update the GM with progress and issues, which he listened to with concerned nods, before responding with practiced impassivity that the deadline could not be altered. The project being in its finishing stages, he needed a meeting almost every morning, which is what it looked like Parul was doing—only that this time, the sight of the police officer with them was jarring.

Naturally, I was curious, as was the rest of the office. All eyes from the bays scanned the cabin in which something of great secrecy was being discussed. Hushed voices offered theories. There was suppressed elation in the air. The joy of fresh gossip.

When Parul came out of the cabin and rushed towards me, I was prepared to be asked few questions about Hari—when did I last see him, and suchlike—but she had something else in mind. “Be ready to discuss Hari’s bugs.” She had excused herself from a police officer for this? Perhaps, her cold manner could be a front to hide that she was worked up. I was not expecting her to be chatty, but I at least hoped for an expression that suited the circumstance. Concern, annoyance, or even a remark like: Look what Hari is doing with us!

“Parul, is he dead?” I asked as she was heading back to the GM’s cabin.

“I hope not.”                              

“Well, then what?”

“You need to finish your tickets and take on Hari’s. We will take stock in the evening.”

“Was he abducted by aliens?”

“I would tell you if I knew na? Why would I not tell you!?”

She stood looking at me, a frown trying to settle on her forehead, then suddenly she turned and went back to the GM’s cabin.

Some more back and forth, nodding of heads, shaking of hands, and then, the police officer left.

Soon after, the GM gathered all of us to make an official statement. “As you might be aware…” he began. Hari’s wife had approached the police and filled them in on the details. Hari had left her after a big fight, the biggest they had ever had. The leaving part was not a first for Hari, but when his whereabouts remained unknown after a day, there was no other option but to reach out for help. Did he do something stupid like get under a moving bus? “We’re not sure,” the GM said, “because no such incident was reported. And thank God for that.” The GM was sensitive to the fact that fights do happen in a marriage, and things can turn ugly. In all probability, our dear colleague would get back to us once he starts thinking straight. “Wit is the first thing to go into the dustbin in such a state,” the GM mentioned in passing and wished that Hari was okay. The police, since they had registered a missing person complain, had to do some work but they were convinced that it was just a case of an angry husband venting out by behaving irrationally, and there was nothing really to do or worry about until the smoke settles. “We will remain empathic and not encourage gossip,” the GM said in closing. 

All through the speech, Parul stood alongside the GM with her hands folded, shifting her weight from one bellies shoe to another. When our gazes met for a moment, the look in her eyes changed. She had had her own troubles at home, troubles she’d shared with me in the past, including the night she had to spend at a friend’s house, after a fight with her husband.

Sometime later, she came to my workstation. “Why did I not see any status email today morning?”

“I was working till late.”

“You should have definitely sent one if you knew you’d be coming in late. Are we to keep guessing about the progress?”

“I missed… I was tired.”

“Five minutes is all it takes! The GM demands a tight watch over the progress. He was asking why there was no email.”

“You could have covered me. And he can always know the status when I come in. I mean, what’s the big…”

“Don’t tell me what to do. Learn to be less negligent!”

I could sense that email was not the issue. “Parul, we are both upset. More so with this Hari situation. But I mean it. I cannot take his bugs.”

“Why!?”

“What do you mean why! We are at Thursday already…”

“Wit is the first thing to go into the dustbin in such a state,” the GM mentioned in passing and wished that Hari was okay. The police, since they had registered a missing person complain, had to do some work but they were convinced that it was just a case of an angry husband venting out by behaving irrationally

“Use the weekend!”

I had already kept the tracker of Hari’s tickets open so that I could gauge the amount of work pending from his side. With my hands on the keyboard, I stared at the tracker, but instead, found myself looking past it, wishing for the next few days to be over soon and this crazy bulk of work already behind me.

“I have requested the GM to shift the deployment to Tuesday,” she said. “He will talk to the client. So, we have Monday now… but that’s it.”

I remained quiet.

“There have already been many delays,” she continued. “Getting it done is a big deal this time. We lose the client otherwise.”

“Hari and I had to do a lot of research to develop the modules, Parul. No wonder there are these bugs… Every feature release has had a tight deadline.”

“So is the competition, as per the GM.”

I was quiet again. Cribbing was pointless. That’s service industry for you. The company had lost a big client at the beginning of the year. That project alone took care of everyone’s pay check. It was quite a blow and many small projects were rapidly accepted to make up for the loss. Even though Hari and I had never worked on a medical imaging product before, it landed in our lap thanks to a Sales Guy’s tall claims to a healthcare client. What they wanted was a web app that could read large volumes of specialized medical files, known as DICOM, and run them past a library of medical predictions. It would be a big deal if we made it happen, and Parul had, as per the GM, “the best guys in her team.”

So here we were, hustling. I divided all the bugs in two flawless categories: my bugs and Hari’s bugs, and planned to fix all the easy ones first. It would not be difficult to tackle 90% of them by Friday EOD, but there were four major ones, all tricky as hell that required the quietude of a weekend to think through, and all four were in Hari’s code. It was unlike him to write scripts that caused timeouts. In fact, Hari had trained me with lots of patience, overlooking my early naiveties. “Make the user wait,” he’d always advised me, “and you are in trouble!” Perhaps, the bugs itself were a proof that something was not quite right with him.

A short while later, Parul returned from the canteen with two cups of green tea. Offering one to me, she reclined on an opposite chair, her petite form fully sunk-in. “I am not up for it!” She said in a mock-accusatory tone. I could sense a change in vibe. She had mellowed down. She slurped on her tea for a while, then said, “How dare you think I don’t cover for you!?”

Despite her sometimes-difficult nature, we had formed quite a camaraderie. The difficulty mostly resulted from her unreasonable bouts of anger in situations that could otherwise be handled with patience. But when on a tea break or out grabbing lunch, Parul would start with short effusions about her married life that would turn into monologues. All I did was listen, and it is precisely for this trust she sought in me, the kind typical of long-term colleagues, that made me ignore her occasional outbursts. I was her confidant during those breaks and would in turn talk about my girlfriend, or muse on a bad day about the nature of our busy lives.

Once back in office, however, she would get back to being formal. There is personal and there is professional, and never the twain shall meet.

I wanted to ask her about Hari, if she worried about his marriage. Instead, I said, “Why did the GM say that gossip won’t be encouraged?”

“So that we can focus on work.”

“That is obvious, but why did he explicitly mention it?”

“I have a whiff… but am not sure.”

“Come on… What does the police think?”

“What you heard from the GM is all we know. Hari is somewhere, angry coz of some tussle with his wife and… hopefully safe.”

“It’s sad.”

“I know. But he’ll be back.”

“I hope he gets back tomorrow.”

“I hope he is here now. But it may not be as soon. I’m sorry that you have to bear the brunt.”

Parul went over the testing plans for D-day once again with the QA team on the desks next to mine, and then, continued working on her laptop until late into the evening.

“Didn’t you have to pick your daughter?” I asked.

“I have told him to attend to it today.” She never called him by name, and always with a hint of bitterness. .

“Go home, Parul,” I said. “I’ll manage. I won’t miss the email tonight.”

It was her signal to pack up for the night, too. “You better not.”

An hour or so later, Sam from IT team called me to his workstation. Everyone in his bay had left, and when we were alone, he told me that he was going to show me something about Hari—as long as I would keep it confidential.

An hour or so later, Sam from IT team called me to his workstation. Everyone in his bay had left, and when we were alone, he told me that he was going to show me something about Hari—as long as I would keep it confidential.

“So, our friend has a private Instagram profile,” Sam said. Sometime about his tone didn’t bode well with me.

The private profile was named Ricardo4U, which was locked. Sam had used an online website that helped enhance Instagram profile pictures. It revealed a shirtless Hari with his chest glaringly clean-shaven, moustache neatly trimmed, and the mirror behind reflecting brownish butt-cheeks peeking out of an underwear. His eyebrows were raised in wonderment, as if in newfound awareness of his own sexiness, which is the kind of a stupid look you cannot find in any portrait in human history, other than a selfie.

“So, he goes by the name Ricardo… clichéd don’t you think?” Sam said.

I was as surprised as anyone would be after seeing a colleague in the near nude. “How did you come to know about this?” I asked.

“The firewall tracks everything you do. He has visited this URL many times.”

“How dumb of him!”

Yet another proof of his troubled state. “Just so I know…” I began but couldn’t keep my thoughts together.

Sam could sense where I was getting at, and offered a response, “Even if the firewall doesn’t block a site, it keeps all sorts of statistics. Everything you do on the office network is traced. It’s the employer’s right, in a way.”

Hari’s profile appeared more shocking the more I thought about it, because the profile picture provided a flavour of the other photographs he must have posted, that too for the gratification of complete strangers. It was so unlike the Hari I knew—the Hari who was generally shy and liked to keep a low profile around the office. I smiled and shook my head.

Sam couldn’t suppress a chuckle, “What the fuck he’s up to, man!? I thought I should tell you, coz we are friends with the bugger,” Sam said. “What with the police and all, he’s in deep shit.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“I had to tell the GM about the profile.”

“Why would you do that?”

“He wanted me to look through his browsing history and report anything peculiar… Dude, I only report serious breaches to the management. I really didn’t want to make a show of a guy accessing his Insta. But it could help clarify the motive… suggests more than mere domestic quarrel to me.”

“Anything else you found?”

“Tirumala came up often in his recent searches, that pilgrimage site, and he had accessed IRCTC a day before he stopped coming. Do the math.”

“But it isn’t a guarantee that he must have gone there.”

“And good luck to him to get confirmed tickets so easily!”

In a start-up like ours, where not many restrictions are imposed so long as work is produced on time, where YouTube and social media aren’t blocked, where the stiff policies of an MNC are yet in the making, there is still someone whose job it is to keep track of the instinctive impulses of the employees. I only became truly conscious of the fact at this a moment, that Sam—with his neat goatee and a friendly smile—knew a lot more about me than I would have him believe through regular chitchat. If he ever felt like pulling a Freud on me, all he had to do was consult my google searches and produce a list of all my innate desires.  

“Could you have guessed Hari swings both ways?” Sam asked.

This new fact flew in the face of everything I thought I knew about Hari, but I was not as amused as Sam. I could easily envision Hari as a quiet, nerdy bisexual, which would have suited his generally restrained demeanour, but his profile picture suggested something unexpected, designed as it was to draw too much attention.

Sam was right in a way. What the fuck was Hari up to!? To think that he had to not only sustain a marriage, but deal with the constant stress of hiding this other side! He came across lonely, although his absence may have coloured my feelings. His profile picture had unmissable shades of desperation—a kind of forlorn reaching out.

“He is fishing online, for company,” I finally said.

Sam laughed. “Like the rest of us!”   

I continued fixing one bug after another, until well after midnight, bathed in mild pianistic droplets of Chopin’s “Nocturnes”. To take an occasional break, I would stand up from my seat, raise my hands in a good long stretch, and listen to the vague tinkering sounds the office made in the dead of the night, as if repairing itself from all the damage and overuse of daytime. It was difficult to ignore the sounds, which were mildly creepy. With not a soul around, the office looked much smaller than usual. I took walks to get some blood pumped in my legs and buttocks, and spied into an office in the building across from the closed glass windows.

He came across lonely, although his absence may have coloured my feelings. His profile picture had unmissable shades of desperation—a kind of forlorn reaching out.

“He is fishing online, for company,” I finally said.

Sam laughed. “Like the rest of us!”   

There were employees playing table tennis with notepads, using the joined edges of two adjacent tables as the net, their loose ties dangling in all directions. Their office was fixed in time, no different from any other office: the neat partitions, cold furniture, and glass, glass, everywhere. Like a simple rule to add two numbers, the office was never going to change. Only the folks playing table tennis seemed ephemeral, like shapes made of fumes. In a completely dark building, just that one floor was lit, as in a dream. There was merriment I couldn’t hear but sense.

I was glued to that sight for a long time and it numbed me down. If I were to leave my office for good, would I know where else to go if not to some other office? Would Hari know where else to go?

A buzz from my phone brought me back to the present. It was a message from my girlfriend: no later alligator tonight?!!!

She was five years younger to me, was in her second year as a copywriter, and lived with two other girls in Powai.

Crazy busy, I wrote back. My little monster not sleepy yet?

She dropped an annoyed emoji, and I countered it with a colon followed by a round closing bracket, which I preferred over an emoji because it was enough of a smile for my needs. Even if I were busy and occupied, all that she expected was a sweet goodnight message, something to show that not only I cared, but that I wouldn’t forget her even in the midst of chaos. And if I could regard a distant table tennis match, then I could most certainly send such a message.

I had had a history of goof-ups in this department, and it had also led me to ponder, after many It isn’t working complaints from her, whether failing to meet such concerns as she expected from me suggested my inability to love? Even now, she was only one careless message away from getting inconsolably mad.

I decided to tread carefully. Don’t you dare start the latest Stanger Things alone!

Blue ticks, but no response.

Clarice, come on! I followed up.

Her name was not Clarice. But I had used it once, in the privacy of an embrace, pronouncing with the cold inflection of Dr Lector my desire to do things with her cheeks. I had imitated the pressure Anthony Hopkins applies on the word things in the movie. It had amused her so much that the name stuck.

Blue ticks again, no response.

The next day, when we went for our evening tea at Anna’s, a nearby café that was our usual haunt, Parul seemed to be in a foul mood. She had used the afternoon to visit Hari’s home. She said that Hari’s wife was deeply disturbed and it was irresponsible of him to leave without a care in the world.

I chose my words carefully, hoping to not reveal too much. “Hari may have been nursing his own wounds,” I said. “We don’t know what’s going through his head.”

“One has to deal with it!” Parul said.

“It’s difficult.”

“You cannot leave your partner hanging in some mystery!”

“Did she tell you what happened?” I blew over my cutting chai, even though it had already cooled down considerably.

She thought for a while and said, “It’s personal”.

In a way, it was better. Because I didn’t expect Parul to tell me what Hari’s wife had actually told her. Was she aware of his private profile? Was their fight even remotely related to it? And even if that was the case, would she confess all without any hesitation to Parul?

I did not allow my curiosity to get the better of me. Instead, we munched on Parle-G in silence. Outside of office, away from the regulated compulsion of work, the mind wandered more than it should. “People always tire each other out, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I just said.”

“You speak out of some feeling. But you don’t really know,” she sounded annoyed.

“And you do?”

I instantly regretted my decision to blurt out.

“It’s a lot of work,” said Parul, “and it doesn’t always work out but well...”

Parul didn’t say anything, though a smile was struggling to sprout on her face. It not only surprised me, but the echo of what I had just said sounded ominous. I felt that, as if in avoiding to articulate my assumptions about Hari’s marital situation, I had stumbled upon an unregistered truth about my own relationship.

“Listen, I mean, all I meant was, that sometimes it looks futile.”

“Futile is a strong word.”

We went quiet again, before Parul asked, “All good with your girlfriend?”

“Oh yes. We went to see the Caves last Saturday.”

“Nice.”

Even though Parul had left it at that, I felt like saying more. It was involuntary, like one’s lungs clearing out stale air, “The ferry ride was fun,” I said. “We climbed all the way up. I started telling her about what I had read. I told her about the three-headed Shiva. It’s something of a wonder. The face in the middle represents the non-dual from which the male and the female sides manifest… But… But I could she was getting bored. It was the middle of the afternoon and too humid inside the Caves. We didn’t have anything else to talk about… and then I got bored while talking. Then it seemed like we could have done without the trip, not because the Caves looked absurd, but because the whole vibe was losing its… What do you call it?” I stopped to search for a word. Parul was staring straight into my eyes. “Juice? Yes, the vibe was losing its juice, I guess. Like something had dried up real bad.”

Parul didn’t say anything, though a smile was struggling to sprout on her face. It not only surprised me, but the echo of what I had just said sounded ominous. I felt that, as if in avoiding to articulate my assumptions about Hari’s marital situation, I had stumbled upon an unregistered truth about my own relationship.

I chuckled, a hysterical response perhaps, and then both of us started laughing.

“There’s nothing wrong with you guys,” Parul said.

“I am talking generally. Like… entropy. Things always go towards disorder and to maintain order is tiring is all.”

“Listen. I was too young when I got married. But it seemed right back then. Now that I think about it… Well, let me just say that sometimes I fancy an encounter. Of the wildest kind. So there!”

I hadn’t seen that coming. “Okay,” I said.

The rain intensified by the time we began heading back to office. Parul was quite cheerful by now. She opened her umbrella and, noticing that I wasn’t carrying one, said, “Not sharing!” I walked beside her for the six hundred odd meters with my hands shoved in my pockets and my head dodging the faint water bullets.

Once back in office, Parul took status of the fixes so far and asked Hema from the QA team to try breaking the code and see if it stands the test. “You working tomorrow, right?” Parul asked, but it was more a reminder that I had to work on Saturday to catch up with all the bugs.

“I will be done with my bugs tonight,” I said, “and take on Hari’s tomorrow.”

“Take a break if you want. Start fresh tomorrow. Up to you.”

“I’ll see. I might leave early and go to Andhra mess for some spicy dinner.”

“Do that.”

But I kept working. Later that night, I stumbled upon a peculiar piece of code in one of Hari’s modules. While it did not interfere with the business logic of the application, which is to say that it remained invisible to any user looking at the UI, the code kept producing endless strings of output behind the scenes.

“Which leg moves after which”—this was the curious line.

It was filling text files over text files ad infinitum on the backend server. For a novice coder, this could be seen as harmless fun, but I bet Hari had considered the possibility that if kept running, only in a matter of days the code would choke the server memory and hang the application.

What was more disturbing was to look at the same line repeated, as if in some eschewed manner it conveyed Hari’s state of mind.

Which leg moves after which!

I repeated the phrase in my head, and I kept working.  

Back to my room, I fixed a bowl of Maggi and washed it down with beer. Then hit the bed and scrolled through my phone. It was past 2 am when sleep found me.

Only an hour or so later, accompanied by a sensation of having turned a side, I was awake again. It was perhaps the erection, because I started craving for Clarice’s mouth. I wanted to feel her flesh close to mine. I pushed my face into the pillow and my groin pressed itself against the mattress. The urge had an immediacy about it, a critical emergency. It felt like I would go mad if my body was not rubbed against another soon.

Clarice was just a phone call away and yet I was feeling helpless. It was an unknowable craving that reminded me of a past, a time far before Clarice. It occurred to me, but someone in my head simultaneously denied it, that the body I wanted was not that of Clarice. It belonged to no one in particular.

It did not even have to be another body.

Annoyed at being stupidly spent, I stayed spread on my bed and observed the chaotic disarray of my bedroom. It seemed as if things had piled up without my being aware of them. It is hard to explain, but it looked like someone else was deciding what stuff I’d be surrounded with, like someone was buying those things and dumping them in my bedroom while I was busy working.

I switched on a documentary about melting Himalayan glaciers. Unable to focus, I felt a sudden urge to reach out to Clarice again. The room had grown lonely. Knock knock, I wrote to her.

The ticks never turned blue. She must be fast asleep.

I spent the remainder of the night tidying up, trying to achieve control, not over my days or my desires, but over my room.

I woke up late on Saturday and went straight to office. Finishing all of Hari’s bugs except a single difficult one, I decided to call it a day because I felt exhausted. Clarice was not reachable through the afternoon, which had me worried. I tried calling her again as I left office but the call didn’t go through.

Clare where are you? I messaged. WhatsApp continued to show a single tick. I spent the evening driving around on my Activa.

My office was located in an industrial park in Navi Mumbai that was adjacent to old chemical factories, rows and rows of abandoned buildings, beyond which were marshlands. While the highway that connected the park with the city’s residential node was usually busy, it spawned a quiet unsuspecting road that led to the deep end of these marshlands, on both sides of which was just barrenness. Driving on this road, far away from the bustle of the city, from all the anxious simmering that went on without coming to a full boil, was nothing short of a meditation. I drove towards the farthest point, parked my Activa, and watched the city being reduced to a postcard.

This is the spot I will retire to when the Himalayas finally melt, I told myself. I won’t carry anything except some peanuts and wait for the waters to come rushing towards me. Perhaps I’ll even ask Clarice to join me.  

She called an hour later when I was having dinner at the Andhra mess. This was an old eatery in the nearby Ghansoli area, which doubled back as PG. Bedding and meals for five thousand bucks a month. Not bad if you are a bachelor and want to make it big in this dream of a city. Yours truly had stayed here for few months many years back and loved, not so much the humid rooms, but the food, which made me come back for it time and again.

“I had gone to Karnala bird sanctuary,” Clarice said.

“All of a sudden?”

“The weather was beautiful today, perfect for a trek.”

“Was it?”

“For the early risers, yes.”

I ignored the jibe. A fellow customer took the table on my right and was about to begin eating.

“How about tomorrow?” she asked.

“I have to fix one last bug tomorrow. Come on over now. Do something in the morning while I finish my stuff...”

“Let’s keep it tomorrow noon. Will crash soon.”

I got back to the rasam-rice on my platehot over my tongue. I had accidently bit off a red chili. I turned to the man on my right to pass the water jug.

His normally clean-shaven face had grown a clumsy stubble, the untrimmed moustache still holding its own. “Hey man,” I said with a glint of recognition, as softly as I could with my burning tongue.

Hari didn’t appear surprised and threw a light smile.      

I was struck quiet for a full minute. After hastily gulping down water and assuming a careful concern, I finally spoke, “We are missing you back there.”

He nodded. But he wasn’t eating, his hands rested on the sides of the sambhar-rice plate and his eyes were fixed somewhere on the table.

“Eat,” I commanded.

Hari seemed lost not only in the way he appeared, but in his eyes as well, as if stuck on a waystation confused about which bus to take to get back home. He took his time with a morsel and asked, “You come here often?”

Clarice was just a phone call away and yet I was feeling helpless. It was an unknowable craving that reminded me of a past, a time far before Clarice. It occurred to me, but someone in my head simultaneously denied it, that the body I wanted was not that of Clarice. It belonged to no one in particular.

“Once a week or so,” I said.

“Doesn’t the sambhar taste funny?”

“Isn’t like how it used to be for sure,” I said.

“It is the only thing I routinely crave for anyway.”

“Good to have something to crave for,” I said, even though I could have easily said nothing.

“I have been thinking about hunger a lot these days.”

“Yeah?”

“Like it is the only bodily need that will never die.”

I thought about it. But I couldn’t feel it the way Hari could. So, I inquired about a more pressing matter at hand, “You were here all along?”

“I didn’t know where else to go.”

“And your… Your wife isn’t aware…?”

“I should tell her, right?”

“To make her stop worrying at least.”

“I thought of dropping a message, but didn’t want her to come looking for me.”

I may have frowned because Hari got defensive; his voice sounded as if one word had to drag the next along with great effort.

“I can’t stand anything except being on my own,” he said. “I have a jam in my head I have to unclog.”

I began to speak but stopped to give it another thought. Anything I would say to show concern or make him feel good would only be a sort of obligation. I continued eating the curd rice that was cooling my palette. Under the table, I quietly pulled out the mobile from the left pocket and sent a quick message to Parul.

Hari with me. Andhra mess. Ghansoli.

“I found a strange loop in your DICOM viewer module,” I turned back to him.

He tilted his head slightly towards me, and asked softly, “What loop?”

“Which leg goes after which… something like that.”

Hari’s resting expression went through a sudden rush of surprise. His eyebrows went up a little and his eyes slightly widened. Soon, however, the expression fell back to the inexplicable defeatism I had found him in. He remained quiet.  

“It will choke up the server memory…” I said.

“That was never the intent.”

“I know. But what were you trying to do!?”

Hari seemed lost not only in the way he appeared, but in his eyes as well, as if stuck on a waystation confused about which bus to take to get back home.

“Are you working on my modules now?”

“The deadline, dude.”

“Oh yes… sorry you had to…”

“Fuck it! But explain that loop.”   

“Man, I wouldn’t… I don’t know how to talk about… I don’t know how to begin explaining…”

I waited for more. He took a long pause, as if mentally forming a better response.

“There is this poem I came across… about a centipede,” he finally said.

“A poem?”

“A centipede is walking and an idle frog asks which leg goes after which. It has many legs and they work intricately.”

“I need more.”

“It’s a wonder to see those legs in action, really a wonder. The frog is only teasing I believe…”

I turned towards him by twisting my body around the waist, and it looked as though Hari was no more than a pile of something, barely holding himself together. One gentle push was all it would take to dismember him.

“But in trying to respond to the frog the centipede got confused and could never walk again.”

“I don’t get it. Why would it get confused?”

“Because its walk is a very complicated mechanism. All legs in an unforced coordination. Everything in harmony.”

Parul responded on my phone. On my way.

“But that’s the design, right?” I turned back to Hari, now getting a little agitated by his behaviour. “Like the way we walk. That’s unforced too for my money!”

“That’s true, but it is also automatic. The centipede isn’t really aware of how each leg is behaving, which one goes after which one…”

“Aware of it until the frog reminds him?” I asked.

“The centipede is suddenly overwhelmed that it was capable of such a feat.”

I could hardly pay attention to Hari’s abstract concerns, unable to keep his near-nude picture out of my head, which was in total contrast with the Hari in front of me. The part of Hari that took that picture, the part that created a private profile for whatever indulgence he sought, was an abyss that I could only hover from above to make assumptions at best. Instead of arriving at an approximation to appease my own curiosities, I offered him a detached regard. “The frog is the culprit?” I asked.

“No,” Hari said firmly, “no, certainly not. The frog is just a circumstance… that’s what I have been thinking about… the frog is just one of the many possible breaks in the centipede’s… what do I call it... velocity.”

“Velocity?”

Suddenly, Hari grew animated, almost disturbingly so. “All our motions... Get up, eat, go to work, come back, eat some more, go through the motions of love, the motions of raising your kid, the motions of going on a holiday… one leg after another in an almost mindless rhythm, like watching one reel after another on Instagram… we just need to make sure that there is no frog around the corner to make us see that its mindless! And there isn’t just one frog. There’s a horde of them…”

I was bemused. “I don’t quite get it… But perhaps, this is more than a poem for you…”

“I am trying to print a list of all my frogs… but it’s tough, man it’s so tough… I was so frustrated I don’t even recall writing that loop… These frogs… they are like bugs, not of computer programs but of the human systems.” He stopped speaking and held the table as if anchoring himself against an approaching storm. He looked at me with scared eyes, his body shaking a bit. “It’s pass, it’ll pass… I feel like running away…”

I felt a deep worry for him. “Let’s get some air, Hari…”

“Get up, eat, go to work, come back, eat some more, go through the motions of love, the motions of raising your kid, the motions of going on a holiday… one leg after another in an almost mindless rhythm, like watching one reel after another on Instagram… we just need to make sure that there is no frog around the corner to make us see that its mindless!”

We washed out hands and stepped out. My Activa was in the parking lot in front of the mess. I asked Hari to sit on it, but he felt like standing.

I wasn’t clear whether he planned to stay holed up in Andhra mess until he had thought himself through whatever that bothered him, but I had sabotaged his plan by accidently learning his coordinates. He was still overwhelmed, but had eased down a bit. I did not want him to go back to enunciating his abstract concerns, so I tried to distract him. “Hari… Do you know how they came up with the term bug for software defects?”

He looked like he was mustering courage to stay attentive.

“There was this woman called Grace Hopper, back in 1947. She was working on a Mark 2 machine that kept giving errors. While inspecting, they found a moth stuck in the relay. Think about it! An actual fucking bug!”

Hari’s face broke into a light smile, “Funny.”

“You bet! They still have that page with the moth stuck on it in some museum.”

Hari kept smiling. “Are you able to work on my bugs?”

“All but one. The viewer script keeps hanging as the volume increases.”

“I would help, but am in no position to code right now.”

“That’s okay.”

“I will get through.”

“You will get through,” I said. Then carefully added, “Maybe, you just need to confront it, you know.”

“I am doing that,” he said.

“Not like this, not on paper, not as if it is a mathematical equation. You should talk to your wife.”

“What you think is not the problem.” For the first time in our conversation, he kept his eyes on me for longer, in a mellowed but firm manner.

On a whim, I decided to change the topic. There was an ice cream shop nearby. “Let’s grab an ice cream!” I said, with make-believe cheerfulness.

Before he could respond, Hari expressed surprise, and I turned just in time to see Parul rush towards us. She planted a slap on his face, an act so sudden that it startled us all—including Parul.

Parul began to cry, and put her index finger at Hari’s chest. “This is not done, Hari. You cannot run away like this. You had your wife worried like shit.”

Hari, still digesting the shock, looked at Parul. In no time, his stern gaze softened down. Parul reached over to wrap him in a hug.

We brought him to my place, and made him comfortable on the only sofa in the living room. I poured him a glass of wine, only to find that he was already stretched out on the sofa, snoring. Perhaps it was the comfort of our company that did the trick.

We let him be and sat drinking wine in my bedroom, Parul on a revolving chair and I on the bed with my legs crossed. She seemed a bit numb.

“Why did you charge at him like that?” I put it as carefully as I could.

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe it is what he needed instead of all the talk?”

“I am not a shrink to think all that,” she said and hugged her legs and rested her chin on her knees. “I didn’t know I had that in me.”

“Concern for Hari, you mean?”

Later I told myself that it could not have been something as insignificant as a smile. That that small gesture alone could not have been the only cause. Whatever it was had to be cooking all along. I was not sure about her, but there was no way I could peek inside my interior and isolate that already-plump fruit of desire, let alone pluck it.

“This… whatever that made me slap him, I didn’t know I had that in me.”

“Hari said that we are like programmes,” I offered by way of explanation.

“Programmes?”

“We ought to go on running smoothly, but we run into what he calls ‘frogs’… they are like bugs, but for humans. He is figuring out how they work. I think he is very confused right now.” The implications of what Hari had said was at the fringes of my thoughts, half-formed like a mirage, but nagging still.

“He’s an idiot,” Parul said. She was in no mood for where I was going. We stayed quiet. I played a slow Leonard Cohen number. We let it linger because it was much better than any words we could come up with.

When it was over, she asked whether she could choose one. We continued to say nothing and kept drinking. When she played “Awaara Bhanware” from the movie Sapney, I raised my eyebrows and said that she was unearthing ancient relics like an archaeologist. She threw a faint smile, “I am hearing it after ages. I performed on it in tenth grade.”

“Nice,” I said but it was no more than a whisper.  

“I was happy then,” she said. “Very happy.”

“Because you were young?”

“Because I did not know that time was always running behind my back.”

The one in front of me was not the Parul I knew. In that moment, I understood clearly that there are many Paruls, like there are many Haris, like there are many everyone. And this one touched me.

Her eyes grew moist. It could very well be a small grief from childhood suddenly resurfacing, a reminder of innocent times. It could also be some tears still left in her after the slap—the shocking way she had owned Hari as her own.

She sobbed quietly. I sat there looking at her as solemnly as I could, having put my wine aside. Something in her seemed to have cracked open. We stayed like that for a long time. None of us had played another song so there was a heavy silence around us. Then she looked up at me and attempted a smile.

Later I told myself that it could not have been something as insignificant as a smile. That that small gesture alone could not have been the only cause. Whatever it was had to be cooking all along. I was not sure about her, but there was no way I could peek inside my interior and isolate that already-plump fruit of desire, let alone pluck it. The only way I could make sense of it was to think that there was something in her struggle to smile even if she could not. I stood up and, lifting her up without any resistance, held her as tight as I could.

I kissed her forehead. Our breathing intense, the need to press her yet closer was unbearable. Then, unsure and trembling, my lips went for hers, and then hers were all over mine. Our mouths had an inconvenient struggle to find the right overlap. Then she found a way to settle it, to take my lower lip in her mouth and suck it like a fruit drop. It wasn’t long before she tore herself away from my embrace and moved to the other side of the room, covering her forehead with the palm of her right hand. I am sure it was her right hand.

“What a night!” She said, and left.

Moments later, when I felt I could move again, I shook my legs to life and rushed out of the apartment. I pressed the elevator button out of habit but instantly decided not to wait for it and stormed down the flight of stairs.

She was waiting for her cab near the main gate. When she saw me, he raised a palm up, as if to suggest, Let’s talk later. She looked drained.

When I returned upstairs, Hari was waiting near the open door of my apartment.

“I am leaving, man,” he said. “You will not find me at the Andhra mess anymore. Please tell my wife that I need to find…”

I went past him, hardly listening, to step inside my apartment.

“Thanks man, for…” Hari said. I did not wait for him to finish and closed the door behind him.

Spread out on my bed, I dialled Clarice’s number. I needed something firm to hold onto, if only her voice.  

***

When not busy with his software development job, Jigar Brahmbhatt is either working on stories or reading fiction for The Bombay Literary Magazine. He loves to travel and divides his time between Bangalore and Gujarat. You can find him on Instagram: @jigarbbhatt.