FIRST: Prometheus

PROMETHEUS

By Ajay B. Patri

Ajay B. Patri
National Law School of
India University

I was watching the whole time. I saw everything. Nothing escaped my attention. If I may say so myself, nothing could have escaped my attention. Pride, my dear, is a folly I have long suffered from. Pride was the cause of this entire affair. Surely you will not begrudge me the right to be a little proud of myself now, even though I may not deserve it in your eyes. I am old and I think I might need that solace, however meagre it may be. It will make telling this sad, miserable tale much easier to me. And I know, in spite of our differences, you do not hate me so much as to cause hurt. You were always much too sensible to let your emotions get the better of you. I wish I was too. But forgive me, I digress. You deserve the story in its entirety and I will try my best to give it to you. Please bear with me.

I saw him as clear as day, just like I see you now. I always kept an eye on what he did. Sure, he helped me in the war. But remember, he was not one of us. My intentions were honest; I didn’t want to lose anymore. I wanted to sustain our new realm. I am sure you will understand this; I know I can get your sympathy here. I also know that sympathy will not exonerate me. I am guilty. I always have been, one way or another. But I want you to know everything and then decide. Maybe being guilty in a completely different way will change how you think of me. And that, my dear, makes a lot of difference to me. I am asking a favour here, I know. I am not sure I deserve it but I hope you will grant me this last wish.

That is how I knew what he was doing. By spying on him. By not trusting him. Another of my character flaws. I know I am not perfect. I never was and it shames me at times that people worship me. Or used to anyway. Guilt, my dear, is a poison that kills you slowly. It has stayed with me all this while. You must know that I never had it easy. At the end of this story, I hope you will understand my position.

` So, yes, I knew all about his creation. And what a creation it was! I must admit that I was envious of him. Yes, me, the all powerful one, envious of someone else. You must be surprised to know I am even capable of such an emotion. But I was more than capable of it. I was consumed by it. It affected whatever ensued and in so far as it did, I am completely guilty. I have no defence. But then I want you to know that I was not motivated entirely out of spite. That I suffered from all this too.

His creation would have been useless if he hadn’t resorted to thievery. They would have turned on themselves, the blackness in their hearts knowing no reason and no enterprise. They would have been driven extinct at their own hands. I saw it and I knew it. And he knew it too. I do not know when he realised it. Maybe he knew it all along; the steps he would have

to take to bring his plan to fruition. Maybe he realised it quite late and his act of thievery was just a desperate attempt to prevent his work from getting spoilt. It does not matter; not to the telling of this story anyway. This story is about me. There, my dear, my pride still lurks beneath the surface. There is no way I can tear it out of myself; and believe me, I have tried.

It was important that his creation sustained. It was too precious, too precocious an attempt to be discarded. There was absolutely no need to create them but once they were formed, destroying them would have been cruel. Yes, I say cruel. I daresay you can threaten me with being the same. I wouldn’t have a reply to that; yes, I have been cruel at times, unreasonably so at times. But please listen.

So there was only one way his creation could have been rendered useful. I could have done it myself. You will ask me that; I have no doubt you will. I could saved us all that trouble and that theft could just as easily have been a gift. But I didn’t.

I couldn’t. My pride played an important part in it all. I couldn’t openly sanction his work; it would have led to chaos. I was the king and a king needs to set boundaries. A king needs to be harsh at times. I had to assert my authority then. And the only way I could was by showing that I was displeased. I could have stopped him right after he created them but I waited. I admit I wasn’t exactly sure of all my options then. I quite simply didn’t know what the future would hold. The fates kept that hidden from me.

So, yes. I let him do it. I let him take the fire right from underneath my nose. This must be quite beside the point but you must realise this also made me look bad. I was portrayed as weak, as someone who could not control his own possessions, let alone the world. But I let it happen because it was crucial that it reached them. Crucial that they learnt the knowledge that has held them in good stead over the millennia. They have made mistakes too, I will not deny that. They are by no means perfect. But the knowledge they got also gives them the sense to realise they are wrong. That is the knowledge that pierced my being, my self, that day. And it has been a constant reminder ever since that I have erred. Time does not soften the pain that knowledge causes.

If I was arrogant enough, and I fear that I am, I could then claim some credit for their existence even though I did not create them. I am sure you will not approve of it. I agree with you there, my dear. The credit should belong entirely to the person who has suffered ever since. And yes, he has suffered because of me.

Once his actions were complete, I couldn’t just stand back and marvel at his creation like everyone else. I would have liked to do so; I had done that even as he had moulded them. But after it was all over, I had to be angry. I had to be the arrogant bastard that myths say I am. There was no other way that I could have maintained the peace of the realm, my own prestige and position as well as the continued survival of the humans. People forget that I did not destroy his creation. History always focuses on the more gruesome aspects of the incident, not the ones that were good. Such is their nature. I daresay they get it from us.

So, there I was, the one who had been made a fool of. The villain who overreacted to the actions of the person who had supposedly made a fool of him. Were my subsequent actions harsh? They most certainly were. But his punishment had to be a reminder to everyone that I was supreme. It had to be severe enough to act as a deterrent.

You might accuse me of double standards now and with just cause. I took those steps that ensured I did not get hurt too much. He became the fall guy. All these eons, I have tried to justify it all. Telling myself that he should not have defied me like that. He should not have gone ahead and created them without approaching me first. Maybe I should have stopped him before he created them. There are a lot of maybes and ifs and buts involved here and I am guilty of each one of them.

But I genuinely believed in what he was doing. My involvement at that stage could have changed everything. It is ironical, I believe, that I lacked the courage and the belief that I could create a better person than he could. My pride deserted me then. And my curiosity prevented me from interfering and completely stopping the process. These reasons are all I can offer you. I know they are not enough but I hope you can see my side of the story a little better now.

He got the worst deal out of it, I must admit. He will suffer eternally, physical pain, pain of the flesh that he created.

But I want you to understand that I suffered too. I lost face; I lost a lot of love from a lot of people for my actions. People will forever worship him as the one responsible for their existence. I am resigned to the sidelines as a person who unfairly punished their creator. I will never gain their respect for whatever good I have done, which furthered their existence or otherwise. I will forever be scarred in their memories by this one incident which they hold dear. I will be the eternal villain; a vain god they worship out of fear and not love.

But there is something even worse that torments me. It is the truth and the guilt it brings with it. I wish every day that I can forget it. Or change it into something else. But even I am not capable of altering the course of time. I will forever live in knowledge of what I have done and all the hurt I have caused. You must know that nobody else knows about this. I owe it to him to keep the truth to myself. And even more importantly, from him. He should never know that I knew. Let that ignorance grant him any happiness it possibly can. I see no other way of alleviating his pain.

A king is not infallible. But being a king lets him tide over this hurdle. That is the way it is. You, in your infinite wisdom and reason, know this already. We have seen this with the humans too. We are no different. We can be no different.

And that is what I wanted to tell you. It is not much of a story. There is nothing fascinating about it because we have seen it happen around us all this while and have grown used to the thought that we are impervious.

In the end, we are but puppets made of clay too.

SECOND: Endoftheworldman

Endoftheworldman

By Bedavyasa Mohanty

Bedavyasa Mohanty
(National University
of Juridical Sciences)

The year is 2033. In many ways the world that you used to know has descended into irredeemable chaos. Beneath me lies a broken city; rusted and rotting, not unlike an Orwellian dystopia or a post-apocalyptic video game. I see the sun hurrying across the sky with practiced bravado and twilight beginning to creep across the dark crimson clouds. Tall skeletal hunks of twisted metal that once represented the pinnacle of our civilisation cast long shadows across dark asphalt roads that are littered with rusted automobiles lying abandoned, forgotten. The world wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always like this. But my past is a shattered mirror and more than once I have cut myself trying to piece it together. I have stared at the shifting image inside the glass for so long that I no longer remember what being whole feels like and the scarred abomination staring back at me is the only picture that I have of myself. When I was younger, the world was a far simpler place. Most things that people did and the reasons that motivated them made sense. But religion changed everything. The belief in the will of an invisible deity and the imposition of senseless commandments on the naïve masses had plagued mankind for almost as long as it had existed but it was only at the turn of the 21st century that mankind developed the capacity and appetite for the systematic extermination of its own species. We should’ve seen it coming; someone should’ve seen it coming. But it’s too late for conjectures and what ifs now, the past like all great tragedies of life is a gaping hole. The more you run from it the bigger and deeper it grows, its fringe gnawing at your heels. Your only chance is to turn around and face it. But that encounter with long suppressed demons could destroy you or make you invincible. It could drive you mad or set you free. I decided to turn around and now I stand on the brink, staring down into a bloody hell, watching my beliefs burn and smoulder in an infernal fire and I grimace at my practiced absence of regret or remorse. I have spilled blood this night and the night has only just begun. My name is David Lake and my eyes are open for the first time.

From a purely objectivist perspective of existence, there are only two great miseries in life: not getting what you want and getting what you don’t want. Personally, I believe that the latter is the more dangerous of the two because not only does it herald disappointment and dejection but it also extinguishes hope. A hope that someday, not very far away, things will change, that life will revert to normal. This thought surprises me; I had never been one to dwell on things. It was against my nature and my profession. A profession where the only choice you had was a binary one: either you pull the trigger or you don’t. I nestle the AMT Hardballer in my hand feeling the weight of the gun as the familiar grooves of its grip cut into my palm. It feels like an old friend. I see the man tied to the chair stirring as he slowly regains consciousness. He looks up at me with kind eyes and smiles. “Is this what we’ve come to David?” The man’s name is Frank Shelly. He is my employer and my oldest friend; my only friend. He is also my wife’s murderer.

When the world had been ravaged with Jihad and all of the western Governments had collapsed, Shelly had sought me out. He had claimed that for a new world order to be established, the old order had to be cleansed and only then could mankind’s newest age rise from the ashes of the old one. I had never believed in the old order and had little faith in the new one. You see, in Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty and morality. The same goes for earth. But I had cleansed his world for him and he had made me rich. Now Frank Shelly was the God of what remained of the civilised world and I was his dextera domini.

“Think of all that we have accomplished David. After decades of bloodshed and destruction, the world is finally quiet. Are you willing to throw all that away for the sake of a single woman? You are about to make the same mistake that she did David; this is bigger than any of us. Peace always comes at a cost and without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing. Endure it David, endure it as you always have.” I pull the hammer back and his smile disappears. Everyone smiles with an invisible gun to their head. “You’ve thought this through haven’t you?” he says. “But tell me why. You’ve always known the price of this revolution. You brought it about David. Can you live with the burden of knowing that you sent the world back into the state of chaos that you helped save it from? Is she worth that much to you?” I breathe in, and think about what he has just said. I try looking into the depths of my mind searching for the small voice that would tell me that my revenge is justifiable on some conceivable moral scale. I hear nothing. For a moment, though, I can see her eyes, blue as the clear sky on the most beautiful day of your life and what I have to do becomes so much clearer. Shelly’s voice breaks the silence, “It’s over David, let this one go. The stakes are too high. Killing me will not bring her back. Forgive me David. For the sake of the thousands that depend on us, for the sake of the Crusade, forgive me.” But I am no crusader, I’m no hero, I’m no believer. What I am is an organic being of pure, unadulterated, seething rage. I feel like putting a bullet between the eyes of God, I feel like tearing down the Venus de Milo and setting fire to the Starry Night. My wife was dead and her killer was still breathing. This wasn’t over. I level the gun and slowly pull the trigger. The hammer snaps back down and time slows down to a crawl. I imagine life turning into a series of comic book panels as the bullet throws itself out of the business end and the head of the man tied to the chair snaps back. The bloodstain on the white marble floor of Shelly’s penthouse slowly flows out, taking shape like a violent new continent. I let the weapon slip out of my hand and it falls to the floor with a loud clang! I breathe out and let my thoughts wander over everything that had led me to this point. There is sadness in my past but there is little about it that surprises me. Choices in life are a thing of the future, things that always lie ahead. The past is nothing but a straight line. There are never any two ways about it. If you had made any different choices in life it would have been a different person standing at a different place asking a different set of questions. I had no regrets in life save the death of a woman. That had been my cartoon moment, when the coyote steps over the edge and gravity gives him a moment to realise his folly before the plunge. I had imagined that killing her murderer would bring me peace. It hadn’t. But then again I didn’t deserve a happy ending, never had. I had led a monochromatic existence with my senses cut off from all feelings except a sense of what needed to be done. Now that I had done what needed to be done all the other greater feelings of grief, despair and regret come crashing down in the same moment and I realise that my way of living life is the smartest option.

I had never meant to change the world but I had ended up doing it any way. People like Shelly had believed that if you took disintegration far enough you could bring about a new form of integration. And so, little by little we had taken the world apart and now with Shelly gone we had no idea what to do with the pieces. But maybe this was how it was always meant to be. Maybe what makes the earth feel so much like hell is our expectation that it should be like heaven. But the truth is, everything is flawed and everything changes, even the things that we considered constants in our civilisation like Jesus and Capitalism gradually disappeared and will soon fade from memory. If people choose to believe in a power higher than themselves then it falls onto the non-believers to ensure that that higher power is flawless and beyond reproach. That is what my wife had believed in and maybe even more than vengeance, my actions tonight of putting an end to the crusade that celebrated the sound of fire alarms and gunshots was my way of paying homage to her memory. My world is a strange place. In it we are the playwright and the bit players but what drives the world is an idea because ideas are the only things that have endurance on this ever changing planet. You may call me an inglorious mercenary or write me off as villain in the grand scheme of things and you won’t be too far off the mark; but the truth is while the world needs dreamers to give it a soul, it also needs realists to keep it alive.

THIRD: The Many Ways to Flap Your Wings

THE MANY WAYS TO FLAP YOUR WINGS

By Madhav Khosla

Madhav Khosla
National University of Juridical Sciences

You’re looking at Christiania. A place with a name far prettier than it deserves. It’s not a very large place, Christiania, but it’s plenty big enough for people to want to chop it down the middle, 50-50, 60-40, 70-30 and even fuck off it’s mine. If we look a little closer, zoom in just a bit, there’s a young man at a political rally although he doesn’t look particularly happy to be there. He’s tall, medium build, two day stubble and recently cropped hair. Standing there, he turns a large coin over between his fingers. If you look closer it’s an off-white dealer button from a not inexpensive poker set. He doesn’t quite understand what the event is meant to be. It’s not really clear to anyone. He’s putting a great deal of effort into looking effortless. Everything about him screams that he doesn’t care about you or anything really. Or at least it’s been carefully put together to make you surmise as much.

Our young man is standing in the midst of a park, with a stage set up a couple of hundred yards ahead of where he’s standing. He sees the men on the stage, in expensive navy blue suits and sober ties, the women in brighter coloured shirts and lighter gray suits. All of them with fake smiles on their faces. Every last one. Ignoring everything that was around them, all the evidence of their every failure, they sat there blowing their own horns. You know exactly who the head honcho is and you know it immediately. The big cahuna, the apex predator, the chief, or rather the commander in chief. El Presidente. He’s just a little more smug, his smile just that little bit wider and little bit faker and he’s just that little bit more responsible for everything gone wrong. But what really sets him apart is the swagger. Amongst this distinguished and celebrated bunch of self-promoters and egotists, this man is a narcissist of rare distinction.

Our young man doesn’t like this. Not a bit. He focuses back on the dealer button. Feels it’s weight in his hand and turns it over again, feeling it almost slip out of his hand as it slips on the smooth edge of his pull over instead of gripping on his not-quite calloused palms. He takes a few steps forward, meandering just enough to the left, the right and back to the middle to make himself appear aimless. He takes another few steps and starts thinking about last night’s poker game. Dealing the cards across the table, practiced motions of his hand, first the dealer button slides from one person to another, then the cards to that chaps left, and then to everyone else. Most people think of dealing as a chore, Charlie loved it. It gives him a sense of control, not direct control, nothing as devious or dramatic as rigging a game of poker with his friends was going on. Even with his mind on all the fucked up shit around him Charlie still wouldn’t regard sharking his friends out of a few bucks as the lesser of as many evils as you’d care to name. No, he had indirect control, and that was enough for him, a say in the process. Whether he knew how that would pan out or not, Charlie always wanted his say and however small it was, to Charlie, it was always a Tornado.

He focused on the staggering progress of his thumb over the rough bottom of the button, every hitch significant for some reason. He looked up at the sky to see an almost cloudless autumn afternoon. Rain wasn’t going to end this farce. Charlie’s thoughts turn to his walk over to the park that day. There was a wall of TVs on display at a high end electronics store flashing phosphorous images of protests, police brutality, and scandal after fucking scandal. Tax-gate, back-gate, Front-gate and who could forget the infamous slamming of the door in the President’s face by his own wife, the appropriately titled, Gate-Gate. He just couldn’t reconcile all that imagery with the fact that they were still standing up there, with their smiles far more constant than their morality and a damn sight more fixed than the buildings they put up.

Charlie’s mind goes back to the walk over, walking with his thin black earbuds pushed firmly into place, the volume as high as he can take it, disaffected slouch affected to perfection, jeans unfashionably ripped at the ankles, not the knees and a blue shirt plenty nice enough to appear out of place on him. He was walking a couple of paces ahead of his sister and her friend, uninterested in their talk of music he despised and people he didn’t know. Charlie stops in his tracks in front of a store and looks through the window display, straining to see past it and into the store itself. He couldn’t walk in, that would mean he cared about it. And that wasn’t Charlie’s style. But still, he kept looking, somehow managing wide eyed wonder and an obsessive compulsive’s attention to detail in the same, focused gaze. Damn right Charlie cared, and damn right he wanted. Not that he was allowed to, nor did he allow himself to. Albeit for completely different reasons.

His sister’s friend stops and says “ Did you see him stop at the boutique? I told you he had good taste!” She says the last bit triumphantly, only to hear sister dear reply, with a not at all faint sense of pride, “Well, we have to share some genes though don’t we? But he’s never let any one know of course.” Her friend looks puzzled, you can tell because her face does exactly what TV tells you confused people do and she asks, in a manner TV tells you confused people ask, “But didn’t Charlie want to be a butterfly?” “Yes but only because his father wouldn’t let him” said a man’s voice. They both turned forward to see Charlie facing them, with his infrequent, but pleasant grin, making these two girls turn red, Charlie turned back around satisfied and for the moment, vaguely distracted.

Snap back to the present. His hands are running over the flattened dome top of the button, running through the engraved letters, thinking about the hand that fate has dealt Christiania. On one hand there’s the government, buggering its own people for shits and giggles. On the other there’s the opposition baying for blood and a chance to do the same. They’re at each other’s throats and for longer than he’d care to admit, Charlie’s been feeling both sets of icy fingers around his neck. Back to the dealer button, it feels heavy in his hand, a comfortable, significant weight, like it has a purpose beyond Charlie’s itchy fingers.

He’s a well read young man, our Charlie in an off-beat, hipster sort of way, lots of Pahlaniuk, Nabokov and Hemingway, smatterings of older and newer depending on what caught his fancy, how he got there and when. So he’s a chap who’s aware of the benefits of anarchy and has a sense of right and wrong, it may not be his sense, but at least he has one. He’s dealing with it though, as best he can. Charlie’s a big boy. He’s also an unhappy one. Not just with the self satisfaction of the four and more horsemen of the apocalypse on stage, but with what they’ve created. A state in decay, the land of opportunity, now the land of opportunism.

Charlie’s glaring at them, they’re not even fifty yards away now, taking in what’s around him Charlie completely lost track of where his feet were carrying him, he dwells on that for a second, but not even the minutiae of his own existence can pull him off point for more than a moment. He’s had enough, his rage is effervescent, he aches, yearns, needs to retake control, to be a force of nature more powerful than the reset button on an old Nintendo. Despite his better judgement he looks back towards the stage and he doesn’t blame the crazy hobo on the corner with the “end is nigh” sign. Except it isn’t nigh, it’s here.

He looks up again, realizes that his rage as much as his feet has carried him to this point, he’s felt powerless. That’s what this is about. Yeah, things are bad, but plenty of people have it worse. He’s sat at home been told how to dress, how to cut his hair and how to be a better Charlie. He’s gone out into the world and wished that he’d been just a little more Charlie. He can deal with his paymaster’s ignoring his needs. He’s willing to forgive the women who ignore his existence, He’s even willing to accept that the world may one day strip away what’s left of his relevance. One of the few things that has always comforted him is that he’s part of a mass that’s in control of its destiny. If not direct control, then at least like the dealer in a poker game, there’s a relevance to their actions. He will not tolerate the discourtesy of those actions. He’s been hearing rumour of elections being rigged since he was a child, outrage and investigations and it’s always come to naught. Well now he’s been listening, and he sees that he’s spitting distance from the stage, the podium, the pantheon. Whatever they want to call it.

Rage consumes our Charlie, in a way it’s never done before. People turn to look at him. He’s white hot and all consuming, he’s quite a sight. He’s never been and he doubts any one has ever been this confident. He’s never had too many doubts, but this is an absurd feeling of control. It’s almost mythical, and so exhilarating it feels a little evil. But all the same, he knows he’s no force of nature. He’s known men who are islands, men who are idle and even the occasional ones that would rock you like a hurricane, but never one that was in and of themselves a tornado.

He smiles to himself, not like before, there’s nothing pleasant there. This is malevolent, glinting and satisfied. He thinks to himself, well maybe I’m not the butterfly you thought girls, but I’m flapping. Charlie winds his arm back, the dealer button, heavy and perfectly rounded in the crook formed between the index and ring finger on his right hand. His arm swing forward in perfect trajectory, the button spinning sidelong, and turning end over end. It’s not exactly a majestic arc, but then it’s a functional weapon, mean to create the image, not be the image. And he smiles as he looks around and realizes only a few people around him have cottoned on to what just happened. People both sides of the isle, some extreme and agitated, others moderate and trying to make a break before chaos breaks out. And then he looks forward and upward, at the stage, admiring his handiwork. It went and hit bug Cahuna smack dab in the nose. He couldn’t have hoped for a better result. He saw blood gush down, red, crimson, somehow metallic and unquestionably menacing. Charlie sees people from the lot that’re in power rush down in a rage at the other lot laughing, he sees violence break out and he sees it falling into complete, beautiful chaos as he’s being pushed from all sides, surrounded, engulfed and overwhelmed.

He’s happy, people are terrified and scrambling, different people are going native. Most are just going completely mental, but Charlie’s happy. This isn’t what people do in a civilized state, but then it’s been a long time since this was a civilized state. He’s being pummelled, beaten, bashed. He wonders for a moment if his assailants know he started this party. Doubtful, but possible. He doesn’t care. Blood, flows down, but it’s not menacing, it’s redemptive. His head’s going fuzzy but Charlie’s enjoying it, he’s fading out to black and he thinks to himself, if you can’t be the tornado, you might as well be the god damned butterfly that starts it.