relics of clay

hope often comes home with a bruised face and broken bones

Like all old parables, this too starts with a dream. The hospital bed is cold and uncaring. It’s stiff with indifference. I can feel my hand against the icy bedrail. The familiarity is nauseating. There’s a razor blade on the nightstand. With the hand that’s not intubated, I quickly pick it up and hide it in the warmth of my palm. I look outside. The corridor is too deserted to notice. A nurse suddenly appears outside the door. She’s filling up injections. She’s going to come in. I slit my wrists and watch the crimson drip off of the face of my palm like the measured IV feeding into the veins of my other hand. The bed feels warmer. I’m cold. The blanket is too soft. This is the perfect spot. I can finally rest now. Hope the nurse comes in sooner. Like any modern retelling, this dream is recurring.

Early morning. Fluorescent classroom. Marble floor reeks of chemical disinfectant. Tiny handrests on broken chairs. Classroom represents an atom, mostly empty. It’s April. Too hot. No, it’s May. Yes, it’s May. Too many dreams last night to sleep. Prof. Panda is apathetic to insomnia. He’s teaching Process Horizons in Artificially Intelligent Systems. He says, like it matters: A process horizon is how far ahead you look when planning or predicting actions in a process—AI systems use this while determining which step to take. For example, solving a maze would be a ‘definite horizon’ process because there’s a set goal with a limited number of steps, using some chatbot is an ‘indefinite horizon’ process because there’s no set goal and it continues indefinitely, and driving an automated car is a ‘receding horizon’ process because it is performing in real time with the horizon shifting back with each step. The buzz of the light harmonizes with the hum of the fan. I give in to the seduction of sleep. I am in 6th grade again.

I used to be in the sixth grade a while back—a while not long enough to be distant but just long enough to brag about the nostalgia. The insurance of banked nostalgia didn’t seem to lull the mind of a 12-year-old, though—nothing did except the thought of growing up. When we retrospect on lost time, we often sell youth short for wanting to be expired so quickly. Honesty is most sincere alone, but naked only while introspecting. So, when you put yourself in the same Ben 10 shoes for a minute, euthanizing childhood wasn’t always as dreadful as it became with age. “Growing up” wasn’t a verb to a child trying to run away to a different life; it was a noun—a place, to be more precise. You didn’t grow up; you got there. And kids have a habit of running. Growing up, to us, used to be a Definite Horizon Markov Process because we felt that there was a goal we were supposed to reach at the end of this walk with a limited number of steps. When the process is over: Goal State Reached. Towards high school, it started dawning on me that even though the steps are numbered, Growing Up might be a Receding Horizon process because I know I’m getting there, but when—I honestly had no clue about. Now, I know it is an Indefinite Horizon process. Maybe.

His name was Gauransh—an Ansh of Gauri. Obviously, we weren’t familiar with nomenclature religiosity, so we just tended to call him Lauda (it’s dick, but angry). Well, Maaz started it—we just followed his lead, as we often did. My psyche is just a glittery wreckage put together by broken people in hopes of finding a piece of their own. Some of them stole some bits. Some of them broke a little. Everyone knew what they were doing, as did I. No one knew it more than Maaz—which makes me think, how much do you have to hate yourself to make every ounce of your being about reserving a spot in hell? And where does all that hate come from into the heart of a 12-year-old? Maaz’s reasoning for his term of endearment was: Gauransh’s face. I remember being too embarrassed to ask Maaz what it meant. I knew it was a cuss word referring to genitalia—though I wasn’t particularly sure if it referred to a penis or a vagina. His extrapolations on the joke didn’t help—“His lips look just like the opening, don’t they?” It made sense when Maaz said it. He was the only kid who smoked in 4th grade, after all. I’ve never really been the brave hero that Joseph Campbell dreamt of while reading Gita. My spine is not weighed down by any true morals, either. I read about revolutionaries that stood up and died for a cause. I idealize their vigor with the passion I constantly fail to instill in myself. When age had not set on my soul, I used to wear a tilted hat and call myself Bhagat Singh. As decency shackled whatever spirit I pretended—or used—to have, I traded the hat for a paper ball and chain. I don’t see any sense of identity in martyrdom anymore, only dust. Sure, I’ll die too but I don’t think it’ll ever be for a word. Actually, if I were to ever die for something, it’ll only be for death. Maybe some rest. Maybe some coffee. That final rest of no expectations. That’ll do.

My qualms with existence stem from my vain attempts to solve the perpetual state of being an atheist, not just being. Atheism, like growing up, was a verb that I practiced with great consistency—not too dissimilar to any religion. A consequence of being such a zealot of logic was an angst imprinted on my youth like an expression of self. I belonged to a generation that pulled pigtails during morning prayers while condemning some humans as less than cattle and strays. I found myself resigned to this angst like a fly in a Venus flytrap. Like the fly writhes in the gooey insides of the plant, only to accept the finality of being digested — I, too, began my rebellion by extinguishing all hopes with the lull of routine. Look past the glue-huffing fog of moral greyness and the nihilism that teachers (in some cases, parents too) beat into our existence—you had a generation so starved for a messiah, they settled with chewing on rock to show off their enamel. Maaz liked the shade of red that compass holes left on skin, so Manav would gladly volunteer. Maaz believed in dohzakh more than he believed in god and yet he lived the way he did because he knew there was hell destined in his blood. It was just a matter of sooner or later. He chose sooner. Every day.

Sudden chemical odor awareness. Voices drone in and out. Tubelight’s buzzing too loudly in my face. The fan makes too much noise. It’s not even moving. It’s hot. My forehead is misted. Eyes heavy. Eyelids heavier. Prof. Panda tells us that all our actions can be reduced to Markov Decisions. That’s the hallmark of success (actually, I’m not sure if he said success or sexless, busy making out). He compares Markov Processes to his favourite shloka from Gita:

Karmanye vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana,
Ma Karmaphalaheturbhurma Te Sangostvakarmani

Which literally means:

You have the right to work only but never to its fruits.
Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.

In simpler words than those: you can only control your action, not the reward. So, Prof. Panda put, you can only consider the actions and take an expectation of the result by aggregating the sum with the transition function—of course, the Gita doesn’t say that, but it’s sort of implied. Engineering professor dabbles in part-time philosophy. Everybody can see the smile. I hear him insist the second line of the shloka refutes the Markov processes because it instructs us to not perform our action in hopes of the reward and neither resort to inaction as a matter of course. But, he says, Markov Process can’t tell virtue from value. So, if doing nothing has the optimal reward — do nothing. They operate on the principle of choosing actions that assure maximum reward. This dichotomy of pursuit and practice immobilizes the fracture in morality that’s suffered as a consequence of being concerned with the fruit of labor in a culture where labor should be fruitful enough. His mic is too loud. This is where I missed my mark for being Campbell’s Hero and settled for being a Markovian Drone. Shouldn’t be here. Just one slow blink. I’m in sixth grade again.

It was a sharp, cold morning. There was never an inn for spring or autumn to lay rest. Our world was either scorched, wet or frozen. Forgotten. In-betweens and nuances were reserved for more important towns and their literature. We inherited absolutes. This much I remember. I remember it like a thin razor against my face. I remember it because I remember the cardigans. And I remember the blazers. I also remember the smell of mist-wrapped dried leaves burning, but I’m not entirely sure if my mind’s conjuring that up for narrative’s sake. Manav was drunk, I remember. He had snuck in some of his dad’s cheap rum again. I was too nervous to take a swig, and Maaz — too religious, so we just let Manav not be sober. Again.

Maaz had his friend circle about him like a queen bee does workers. Each of us had a role centered about making Maaz’s life a little easier. I only had to pass him my answer sheet during exams, so I suppose I had the softest square on the board. Maaz also had a fondness for my abrasive sense of humor. Something about the infringed callousness of it made him feel at ease. I guess it was the cheapest bargain I could strike with being a moron.

One day, Maaz showed up to the school with a deep cut across his face. A red mark that began at the top of his nose and extended itself linearly to his earlobe. We still traversed the day on the laconic pride of our borrowed apathy. Irregularities can only come into foresight by some means of noticing—so we pretended not to. In the zero period, just before home time, the class teacher asked Maaz what had happened. His preteen eyes suddenly wore the dejected embarrassment of an adult. A man whose lifestyle had suddenly been called into question. Maaz looked her dead in the eye and said: You like calling people’s dads, ma’am. That was it. He was our martyr, or doomed to be at least. Maaz would reserve Gauransh for all his menial work and personal amusement. Sometimes, he would call him his personal harijan. There’s a weight to that word that I don’t think either of us ever really understood. I don’t think Gauransh Malhotra did either.

That frigid day, in the zero period, Maaz was having fun with Gauransh like the gods did with Sisyphus. He was making Gauransh sharpen his pencil by the dustbin. Each time, Gauransh would come back with a sharpened pencil—Maaz would just break the nib and go again. It didn’t help that Maaz kept making loud suggestions about Gauransh’s family—the kind that makes you chuckle if you don’t think about it too much. After what may have been the seventh time, Gauransh decided to take a stand for whatever was left of his dignity. He broke the pencil like a soul and threw it across the classroom. He called Maaz an asshole. Maaz flared up and said something along the lines of "You know that’s where a Lauda (penis) goes." Seeing this made me think of a bee finally use her stinger. Gauransh threatened to call Maaz’s dad. He said both Maaz and his mother would be reduced to pulp by the time Gauransh hung the phone up. Stinger in—tragic. Finally, with the last ounce of adrenaline still pulsating through the veins of the bee, he took his bag to sit elsewhere. The silence just made me desperately fetch for the perfect joke. My humor was clouded with hesitation that came as a mix of not getting the right moment and being slightly terrified of how quiet Maaz had become. The thought of Gauransh never being our friend again left my intestines a little twisted too. I didn’t really miss him as a friend. My apprehension was rooted not in Gauransh’s absence, but the vacuum left in its wake. I was just more concerned with the possibility of being made the new perpetual butt of the joke. Maaz’s new personal harijan.

Hand slips. My face falls. My palm’s wet. Must have been drooling. Prof. Panda’s voice doesn’t linger. It echoes. Regret, he says. Regret, mathematically, is just the measurement of how much better one could have done had they known the best strategy from the start. An artificially intelligent system doesn’t just choose the average way to go. There’s two ways to go about a problem, he continues. You can either minimize the maximum regret. Or you can maximize minimum regret. Theoretically, Markov Decision Processes can have zero regret. That’s not realistic, though. It can only ever be really zero if the process is infinitely simple. More abstraction will make the process more complex. This added degree of complexity reflects reality. Thus, you can also vary and limit regret—it can’t, mathematically, ever be extinguished. Everyone’s on phones. Prof. Panda’s teaching the front row. I’m at the back. The buzz of old furniture. A lullaby. Sixth grade again.

When the bell for home time rang, students spilled out of the classrooms like water does against a strainer. We tended to disperse last, as glue hangovers would mean vertigo, particularly during crowd surfing. That day, Maaz ordered me to close the doors. Maaz’s violence came packed from the same place his tiffin box did. I knew it’s best to hold one’s tongue in critiques of old family recipes. So, I closed the doors. Gauransh was half my size, and I was half of Maaz’s. A second-degree murder wasn’t far-fetched. That would have been a waste. I stood by Maaz’s side, taken over by some amalgam of concern for Gauransh and loyalty to Maaz. This loyalty wasn’t some machismo exhibition of canine comradery. This feeling was forged in blood—of others, more often than not. Once, when a kid had made some comments about my dad — I responded like Hemingway to Faulkner. We were both left smeared in his blood. After I refused to apologize, the teacher dished out such a generous serving of slaps and bruises—spoon-feeding me any punishment slipped her mind. I was embarrassed stepping out of the building. My emotions had outcasted me from the innocent corridors of piety. I noticed this cheapening judgment reserved for the likes of me. Sure, it’s okay to cry. The kids who were punched in the face for doing so are conditioned differently. They’re monsters. Maaz, however, was cheering with the squad. He hugged me like I needed it. I felt so proud. Peace is just riddled with indifference, he told me. The only true intimacy lies in violence. True violence is never inflicted; it’s shared—like supper. Thus, the most honest expression is not of love but schadenfreude. The boy who wet himself in front of a classroom became a conduit to filter an emotion of shared expression for the rest of the kids. Togetherness, then, has never been about love—just complicity. There’s no collectivism about peace. Violence, on the other hand, is shared like bread at table. I remember wondering if that’s how he saw his mom and him too, just having a family dinner.

We circled around Gauransh like vultures about a dying fowl. Maaz and he stood face to chest. Gauransh, who was already small, hid further in, praying to Maaz for forgiveness. If only Maaz believed in redemption, he would’ve knelt a long time back. Gauransh admitted he made a mistake and would buy a whole new box of pencils for Maaz. His adrenaline had worn out quicker than Manav’s liquor, who suggested that Gauransh shouldn’t have commented about Maaz’s mom. Gauransh took this as an opportunity to lunge at Maaz’s feet—begging. His hands were small like Maaz’s once had been. Maaz gently asked for him to get up and undid his pants a little. Gauransh stopped. All of us did. Sometimes, time waits for an instant before setting on the next moment. It may be an accident. It may be the death of a loved one. It may even be both those things simultaneously. But it’s never love, that’s for sure. This, nevertheless, was mine—the first one, at least. The obliviousness that weighed this moment down didn’t mask the stench of repulsion it misted across our faces. Maaz undid his underpants and quietly asked Gauransh to jerk him off. Gauransh only chose to weep in response. Manav sobered up like a politician. Nausea aged me years. The sensation wasn’t just the consequence of seeing bush for the first time. It was of certitude. The realization that my life will indefinitely exist in this limbo—wasting within the whiff-range of youth’s miasma and just in the earshot of adulthood’s echoes. Maaz had gagged a speck of time and stuck it indefinitely to the back of my throat like some makeshift purgatory. Maaz yelled at him, “Laude mera lauda hila!” which aggressively translates to “Dick, jerk my dick off now!” Guaransh pleaded. Using the death throes of his free will to just utter a single-syllabled “stop.” Please stop. Maaz yelled at him, "If you don’t do it, I’ll break your head open!" The choice was easier than a whore. Gauransh held Maaz’s dick in his meek, trembling hands like an inexperienced soldier being forced to shoot for the first time — close range. Maaz was a far cry from any swan, but Gauransh bore all labours of Leda. He slowly started tugging at it. Each remnant of my innocence choked tear by tear, waiting for the floodgates to open and drown it whole. There was a relief too. It was the actualization of the fact that my childhood had been birthed to be killed. It was bound to happen sooner or later—it just happened then. In that empty classroom that I had locked.

Maaz and Gauransh decayed and ripened over the course of a minute. Two trees standing against one another underwent a simultaneous metamorphosis. One spring. One fall. There was growth. Blossoms on branches. Dried leaves on the floor. They transmogrified. Thanatos and Eros waging war. One side cleansed. The other suffered a genocide. Thanatos clutched Eros by the throat and tore him apart beneath the neck. Tearing Eros up limb by limb was plucking away any agency he had, even at writhing and flailing. Helplessness is a chore. I saw it practiced like worship.

After a minute of derealisation, I realised Adriane’s thread was unwound far too much to reach the centre of any maze. There was to be no divinity anymore. No vindication for the sightseers either. I told Maaz I heard a teacher coming—only because I was too afraid to ask him to stop. Manav, shoving him, also told him to stop. Maaz quickly pulled his pants up. I unlocked the doors. Maybe it would clear the stench.

I looked back and saw Maaz hugging Gauransh. “How can anyone be offended by their brother?” he said, smiling and pulling him in. In the aftermath of what had just happened, Maaz struck his final blow by claiming that he was, while unoffended, just a little hurt by Gauransh’s words, that’s all. I saw that to a 12 year old Maaz; what happened was just passion and kinship stripped of all vanity. It was—and I saw him eat—supper. Flaws hold beauty not because of the beholder’s meaningless bargains with acceptance but as a product of their own relentlessness. This was Maaz’s dialectic for apologies. Gauransh just nodded and apologized. Mimicking the silence that follows any natural disaster, Maaz admitted if he knew Gauransh would be so hurt, he never would’ve pulled the pencil prank. Gauransh waved it off, saying it’s fine and said he’ll buy Maaz a new pencil box. Maaz shook him and said there’s no need, laughing. Gauransh smiled in exchange. They went out of the class together. Maaz had his hands over Gauransh’s shoulders. I stayed back for a bit.

That day ended like any other. Maaz and Manav took the rickshaw home. Gauransh went back in the bus with his mother, who taught second grade. I had my driver pick me up. Gauransh used to sit with us daily until the school split us up into new sections on the basis of third languages. Maaz, like other Muslims at our school, took Urdu. Manav and Gaurish went together in Sanskrit. I made new friends in French.

Attendance. Present, sir. The light is too loud. Prof. Panda says the only true way to make life an Indefinite Horizon Markov Process is to start a PhD thesis. Front bench laughs. Last bench sighs. But death’s honestly better than that, he quickly adds. Where is everyone? I don’t know where Gauransh is anymore. Manav, I last heard, died in a bike accident. Eleventh grade, I think. He was drunk, I know. Maaz got engaged in tenth grade — right before the board exams. He came to my house to show the ring. I haven't seen him since. I don’t think he ever finished high school. He’s been taking care of his family business. He has a kid now, as far as I know. He must have made a good dad.

There’s a famous saying in artificial intelligence: all models are wrong, some are useful. Shouldn’t utility also make for a better person then? If only I could fall apart just once. Just once should be enough. Just once should fix this. It won’t, I know.