Seven Shades of Grey

by Vivek Mehra

  beautiful_eyes: yr a liar vik … if u are not here to take a woman to bed … u are lying about it …

  VikSin: hey listen how can u say that?

  beautiful_eyes : cause I know a few married men and they can’t keep their pants on long enough and u are just another one of them

  VikSin: you know I pity u … u do have a warped sense of reality here.

  beautiful_eyes: u think so vik? People say I am very good looking … tell u what come to Delhi and tell me that once u see me, u don’t want to roll in the hay with me?

  VikSin: I can tell u that right now, I can get enough flesh in Bombay, don’t need to come to Delhi to try that out.

  beautiful_eyes: scared of me vik? Tell u what, if u honestly tell me that u want to take me to bed, I will let you …

  VikSin: forget it beau ... guess u still living in a warped world … I have heard some weirdos from Delhi log on and I guess u are one of them.

  beautiful_eyes: u scared of saying yes vik?

  VikSin: I am not scared of anything

  beautiful_eyes: do I scare u? I have really beautiful eyes, lovely hair, and a lovely face classical aryan looks, am sure u would like that vik… am told I am really great in bed too

  VikSin: I really am not interested beau. Guess I will go now, thanks for chatting

  beautiful_eyes: running away already? Don’t worry I am in Delhi so wont come and bite u.

  VikSin: nope lady not running away from anything but don’t want to talk to a person as warped as you, bye

  I was angry. There was no other emotion that possessed me; anger was it. I switched off the modem severing my umbilical cord with cyberspace. I sat back and stared at the chat module still sitting on my computer screen, dead as a doornail now, the root of my anger when it was alive. It still had a menacing tentacle reaching out to me by its mere presence on the screen. In disgust I switched off my computer and leaned back in my high back chair, seeking comfort in its soft and familiar contour, not like this creature that had hit on me venomously on the Net. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  *

  The clock in the waiting room seems to be lost to me. It just seems to move like a pregnant ox, torturously slowly. The barbers‘ refuse still adorns the table in front of me, my ample buttocks having made a comfortable contour in the hospital-smelling, antiseptic-reeking, artificial-leather chair. The air conditioning is the only thing playing to par making my life in the room a little more bearable. My eyes continue to will the door to open and me to be initiated into the unfamiliar lodge of ‘daddyhood’. Nothing happens and I am not angry today, as I was angry that day. I remember I had closed my eyes to understand why I was angry just as I shut my eyes now, to relearn what had fired my emotions that day.

  *

  A couple of minutes of shuteye in the cool walls of my office and my rage started to abate. Rationality tried to edge anger out of my mind.

  Why was I angry?

  Was it because I was accused of being a cheat? I had been accused of many things in my life and yet never was I this angry. Then what was it?

  Was it because I was appalled at an Indian woman accusing me or was it an Indian woman hitting on me? It could play some part in the anger but could not be the root cause of it.

  In the past, there had been just Marilyn that I had chatted with. Before her only guys seem to chat and that too only those who were as ignorant as I was about the Internet. The few women that I did get to chat with went scurrying for cover as soon as I mentioned India. All of them had been from the West, mostly the States. I guess it made sense that they look for people closer to home to chat with. Whatever their reasons, I just did not get to chat with women for very long before they politely or impolitely left the chat with me, Marilyn being the honorable exception. And now here was this creature I merely knew as beautiful_eyes. That was the difference! I felt my pet emotion getting ready to flirt with me.

  Confusion!

  This time I was in no mood to flirt. I dismissed all thoughts about the chat and plunged headlong into my work and stayed there for the rest of the day. That evening I got home and discussed it with my confidant and advisor, Dolly.

  When I told her about beautiful_eyes, she laughed it off saying that someone was merely using the Net to mess my mind. I just did not buy the explanation but I did keep my mouth shut about it.

  Later that night, while smoking my post-dinner cigarette, my mind wandered back to the chat with beautiful_eyes. I forgot about the actual incident and focused on the issues that had raised their ugly heads earlier today. A woman who believes that all married men cheat on their wives cannot be an isolated instance. It made me think.

  Do all married men do that?

  I had never cheated on Dolly although a few opportunities had crossed my path. What is this desire that possesses a man to have sex with a woman, with every sari or skirt that happens to swish by? All women are basically the same when their clothes are off, barring the change in their breast size, I guess. And yet men cannot seem to get enough of them. At just 34 was I getting old and senile or was something else happening to me?

  I turned to the book I was currently reading, written by a Western doctor who, while living in India, had been exposed to a few mystics.

  ‘Sex is the gift of God and its basic function is procreation. On a higher plane, for humans it is a tool to connect to the Supreme Maker’, he wrote.

  On the Internet the first thing one comes across is the literally thousands of sites devoted to sex, some more explicit than others. A quick look at the visitor’s counter, located at the bottom of the page, usually gives a five-digit – and in some cases even six-digit – figure reading. This means that a lot of people visit these sites. It is true that, as a teenager and one who spent his late teens in the States, I was fascinated with pornography. The twenty-odd women who had crossed my path taught me a lot about understanding the mind within the sexy body.

  I remembered that the first few articles written about the Net in its early days focused on its sexual content. Pornography was the first subject that got people hooked on to the Net. For the first time a human being could sit in front of a machine and play out his or her fantasy. There were interactive sites, which only got more explicit with time. From free access as a subscription was added the sites became money-spinners for the popular ones. The evolution of sex on the Net was fast-paced and furious.

  The women who came in and then went out of my life – long before I logged on the Internet – had broken a lot of conventional barriers in my mind. The biggest barrier that came crashing down was the one about a woman’s virginity. A woman that I almost married while still finishing my Masters Degree in the States had lost her virginity almost six years before she met me. She had lived with her boyfriend for a few spring breaks and had definitely had sex with him. It was hard for me, coming from an orthodox Indian background, to accept this fact. But then the love I had for those green eyes (yes she had green eyes) was so overwhelming that everything else did not matter. It is another story that she left me after a relationship of two years. She is still single and I wonder why! I guess it is her life and she knows best.

  So why this obsession with sex?

  Was I breaking another barrier here?

  In my quest to find out who I was, I had been reading some revolutionary writers and had been trying to understand what their words meant to me. As I read, the cobwebs in my mind started disappearing. Sex is like any other desire. Hunger, greed and envy are close relatives of sex, in the fact that they are all nothing but types of desire. This woman who was only known to me as beautiful_eyes was a completely new phenomenon to me. Convention dictated that men were aggressive and always tried to lead. But here was a woman, using technology at its best, and aggressively hitting on me. Women were starting a new revolution whose effect would be more than the liberation movement of the Seventies. A woman could now sit in the security of her home and still scramble someone’s brain thousands of miles away, ac
ross geographical locations, cultural boundaries and political demarcations. Technology was coming of age and there was no way that I would remain a passive bystander.

  My reading material did not include much about the effects of the Internet on the lives of the common man, but I knew this much: the effect was there, and time would reveal how profound it really was.

  My pet emotion, confusion, had deserted me by then. Clarity her stepsister had taken over. I think confusion is the consort of women and one that women love to let loose on men they love. My woman was about to follow suit. It was as if she wanted me to dance with her, flirt with her and make slow passionate love to her. Just as I was getting comfortable with clarity along came my wife, confusion in tow.

  ‘Do you really think this person is a woman?’ With such an innocent question did she place me in Confusion’s hand before turning to head back to the safe sanctuary of her kitchen, a huge grin plastered on her angelic face, long before I could blurt out a reply.

  ‘Honestly? I don’t know,’ I muttered after her.

  Now here was an interesting twist to the tale. There was a lot of wisdom in the question and one that made me think.

  With the progress that man made in this century conventional means of venting ones feelings were thrown out along with the day’s garbage. We as humans had advanced by building bigger and not necessarily productive things, in the process harming our own psychological balance.

  Confusion!

  In the earlier days, things were simpler. A man went to earn the daily bread for his family, his woman at home keeping heart and hearth flaming. Then men fought two world wars and a few smaller ones, women went to work and marriages went to divorce court. The very fabric of society changed. The hippies came followed by bra burning liberators. What was simple became complicated and the world seemed to adopt one major emotion.

  Confusion!

  Among all this upheaval and turmoil, the World Wide Web spread its tentacles silently and efficiently.

  A woman could now sit in the comfort of her home and express herself without the fear of reprimand from society, without anger from her husband if he did not know what she was up to, without being dishonest to her daily life if she juggled her time wisely. She could vent her feelings to a stranger and remain a stranger to the world. Her secrets were locked up in her heart and the massive server that housed chat programs. In a way, the Net performed an exorcism on troubled souls.

  This woman could be a man trapped in a man’s body, or a man trapped in a woman’s or she could be a mere woman. She could be an introvert in reality and an extrovert once she adorned the garb of a chatter on the Net. She could be a soul that has been tormented with ghosts of her past or present or could be one believing the ghost of her future was just waiting to trash her present.

  This taught me a valuable lesson and thankfully in my infant days on the Net. I learnt that not everyone was what they showed themselves to be, just as in real life. The place they try to make in cyberspace is probably one that was impossible in real life. I would never know for sure, my thoughts were just a sparring exercise with the truth, at best. I had to remember that I had to leave room for such souls to find whatever it is that they searched for. And like all perfect humans I was doomed to forget this.

  Naturally, I was condemned to repeat the same history that time made me forget.

  2. A Kolhapuri Mirchee from Bhopal

  Kolhapur is a medium-sized town in the state of Maharashtra. Mirchee in the local language defines hot green peppers. Bhopal is a similar sized town in the Central Indian State of Madhya Pradesh.

  Kolhapur is famous for its textiles, its temples and the fiery flavor of its Mirchee. One bite and the palate needs the services of a fire engine. The people lead a simple life, weaving intricate designs on their handlooms and setting their palates on fire with Mirchee.

  Bhopal too is a similar town with a sprinkling of businesses keeping it afloat. The city is famous for the quintessential Indian mouth-freshener Paan, for Indian sweets and for the character of its people. Just like Paan imparts a crimson red to a hitherto colorless spit, the city colors the character of its residents. These Paan chewing, red-spit spitting people have a unique and harmless way of twisting the truth. One particular incident stands out clearly in my mind.

  Once on the second day of a train journey, Bhopal station arrived at around 2:30 am. I was rudely awakened by a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitoes feasting on me. In the distance, I heard the voice of a newspaper seller. ‘Aaj ki taaza khabur (Today’s hottest news)… India wins test on fourth day.’ I was intrigued. The Indian Cricket team was going through a rough patch and I knew we were pitted against the mighty Australians. The match had been evenly poised the previous day and it would be nothing short of a miracle to win it on the fourth. I tried to get back to sleep when the voice yelled again. This time the news item was different. ‘The Prime Minister has lost the vote of confidence … the Lok Sabha has been dissolved’. What was that?

  I did not even think a vote of confidence was being taken in the Lok Sabha, the Indian Lower House of Parliament. Well strange things have happened in just a day, I thought. And then the voice made another startling announcement. ‘Famous Actor… shot and killed by gangsters.’

  I just could not hold myself back. I was out of my berth faster than a jackrabbit with a fox on its tail. In the minute that it took me to get on to the platform and thrust money in exchange for the newspaper, my mind was a whirlwind. I almost regretted being on the train when so much was happening in the country. A hundred thoughts went flashing through my mind and yet I was focused on acquiring the paper.

  There was a gaggle of curious passengers, a crowd already thrusting money at the vendor and others racing to join in. I clawed my way out of the crowd that threatened to engulf the vendor, my newspaper firmly clamped by sweaty fingers, my free hand swimming against the tide. I reached the comfort of my berth and switched on the reading light. The first thing I noticed was that the newspaper was in Hindi. I groaned. Hindi being the national language and one taught extensively in schools I could read, albeit not as fluently as I read English.

  I first tried to scan the newspaper for those headlines that had made me buy the paper in the first place. Nothing! I then tried to read the headlines in detail, straining to comprehend the language, when I felt a sullen silence descend on the platform. I figured the newspaper vendor had sold his wares and hence retreated to wherever newspaper vendors went after they sold their morning stocks.

  I re-read the first major headline and found it strange. I could almost swear that I had read the same headline in the previous day’s English edition. I flipped the pages and saw more familiar and old headlines. I thought to myself that maybe the Hindi editions received news late and hence I was reading some old along with some new news. The more pages I turned the more the mystery deepened and just then the train tugged at its reins, shrugged its shoulders so to speak and slowly left Bhopal station behind. It was then that I glanced at the date of the newspaper. It was dated the previous day!

  I could not help but laugh at the fool I was made out to be. The newspaper had cost me next to nothing but I marveled at the marketing skills of the vendor. He had used the situation to his advantage and made a sale of something that was virtually impossible to sell. It was this ingenuity that seemed to flow in the taps of Bhopal that brought me a life long friend on the Internet.

  ‘Is anyone above 35 in this room?’ the message flashed on my computer screen.

  It had been a few weeks since I had first met Marilyn. Just the previous week Yahoo had announced the setting up of Regional Rooms in its Chat program. This gave one a better chance of meeting people from the same country in the vast expanse of the Internet. The first few days, there was just a sprinkling of people in the India room but slowly the numbers began to grow. I made sure I spent at least some time in the Indian room in the hope that I got lucky and met someone from the same city.

  I checked the p
rofile of the ID that had typed the message. It stated that the owner of the ID was a woman, thirty-five years of age and very married. The first thing that hit me was the honesty of the profile. I was impressed by the fact that a woman had boldly stated her age, her marital status and that she was from India. I opened a private chat window and sent a message to the woman that I so far knew as Delta2000.

  VikSin: I am barely 35 does that count?

  I typed.

  In a flash, she responded.

  Delta2000: Hi!

  And we were on our way.

  *

  I wish I were on my way to my wife’s bedside right now. I would love to hold her in my arms run my fingers through her hair whispering sweet nothings in her ear. I would love to hold my baby in my arms too and do what fathers did with their newborn. Instead, I looked at my faithful companion, the pregnant ox-like clock that had barely made any progress. My eyes stared at nothing on the white-plaster walls, and the barbers’ refuse still glared back at me, almost challenging me to pick it up. The hospital-smelling, antiseptic reeking, artificial-leather chair hugged my bottoms just a bit more. It was probably choking under my weight and of course, I had no sympathy for it; after all, I had better things to do. My face always smiled as if on autopilot whenever I thought of my Bhopal ‘girlfriend’, the one that wanted to know if there was anyone above 35 in the room. And to her thoughts, I let my mind go.

  *

  In our very first chat we got to know a lot about each other. She was born in Kolhapur, grew up in Bombay and was married in Bhopal where she hoped to live and die - A Kolhapuri Mirchee from Bhopal.

  She had two sons - a sign of success of her fifteen-year-old marriage, a loving husband, a well paying and mentally satisfying job. She loved Punjabi food, loved Punjabi men although she was not married to one. We had fun that day, taking small digs at our respective backgrounds, learning about each other, our friends, our lives in cyberspace and the one we lived in the real world. We both knew about Pager and we both added our respective IDs to our respective lists. We both promised to chat regularly as we were in the same time zone. I also got to know her name, Reshma.