Like the Queen of Hearts, I too have often believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. And sometimes as many as sixty! The count of sixty, however, is reached only if you permit me to reckon the middle of the night as ‘before breakfast.’ My ability to willfully suspend my ability to disbelieve is phenomenal in the wee hours. My imagination, too, is most active when I awaken with a start from some deep dream in the middle of the night. Let me make it clear here that I am a fussy sleeper. I wake up if a mosquito flies past too fast. I wake up if there is a distant roll of thunder. I wake up if the headlights of a car shine too brightly through the curtained windows. I wake up if some passing angel sneezes or swishes her robes too loudly. I wake up if a neighbour decides to grind batter for idlis and dosas at dawn. I wake up if some distant train whistles before steaming off into the night. And I wake up if my phlegmatic phone clears its throat preparatory to ringing, even though it decides to put off ringing – at least for the nonce.
Then I lie in bed, tossing and turning, and imagining the sixty impossible things that I need to believe in before breakfast!
It is in the days before Diwali that my imagination gets taxed way beyond its batting average, because I awaken more frequently with the blast of crackers. There was a time, long long ago, when crackers burst all night long right from Dussehra onwards till Diwali. And we managed to sleep through the noise night after night as peacefully as any innocent babe. But with the frequent bans on fireworks and crackers in these past several years, loud explosions during the day or night have become rare. Each cracker that goes off with a bang is unexpected and startles the birds sleeping in the trees and me sleeping in my bed in equal measure.
In our time, we were normal children. Naughty, noisy and a nuisance for everyone. We badgered our parents to buy huge quantities of fireworks which we lighted in the days approaching Diwali, till a certain ennui set in. Then we looked for ways to add zest and excitement to bursting the remaining crackers. Indeed, we found many ways to spice up our fireworks. Throwing a ‘bheel patakha’ that exploded on contact at an unsuspecting passerby often added that extra thrill. Rudely startling Ramu Kaka while he was dusting bookshelves was guaranteed to evoke a howl of protest. Exploding crackers in ‘matkas’ and enclosed spaces like a stairwell added an interesting whoomp to the blast, but that too became monotonous after a while. So we explored still newer techniques of bursting crackers to add excitement with a dash of the forbidden – what the cooks these days call ‘tadka’. A friend once burnt his fingers, trying to burst the cracker while holding it in his hand. On another occasion, my friends and I tied a ladi – a string of crackers – to the tail of a stray donkey and lit it. The cheeky devils that we were, we derived great pleasure in seeing that poor animal jump in fright and confusion. Of course it was an evil thing to do! Of course we deserved a good hiding for it! So of course we were thrilled because we did it!
The children today are a fortunate lot. They don’t have to search for more exciting methods of bursting crackers. Crackers themselves are the forbidden fruit. The bursting of the banned crackers requires no additional ‘tadka’! The children have to only find ways of bursting crackers without being caught. It is for this reason that children sneak around in the middle of the night to light the ‘atom bombs’. The result is the random explosions that I hear in the night, startling me in much the same fashion as Ramu Kaka used to be. I then lie awake, trying to anticipate the next desultory explosion. But there is never a succession of blasts or a plan or a design. Even the direction is not the same and I am left imagining the different possible and impossible things that I want to believe in. My imagination keeps running riot, simultaneously in different directions! I wonder whether the solitary bomb that exploded was lit by a child or an adult. I wonder which diabolical child stayed awake till half past two in the morning to light the fuse of that one cracker that he had? Was it a young boy who exploded that last cracker? Or was it a young girl? Or was that blast nothing but the sound of a motorcycle engine misfiring? I wonder whether the crackers were set off by some stragglers of some wedding procession. I wonder if that mousy woman living next door had finally gathered enough courage to shoot dead her philandering husband who had come home past midnight with lipstick yet again on his collar?
It must have been sometime while I was not looking that the frightening new world arrived. A frightening new world designed for nerds and software engineers. A frightening new world in which old fogeys like me have no space. They call it the digital world. But I didn’t dig it. No Siree, I didn’t dig it at all!
In this new world, the fact that I am digitally handicapped was brought home to me not just occasionally but repeatedly. Day in and day out. And sometimes at night too. I was regularly proved to be a digital dunce by some things called PINs and OTPs. I always thought that PIN stood for Pain In the Neck, and OTP is the short form of ‘Olloo The Puttar’ – a term I now use for any cocky youngster.
In the frightening new world, I was confronted by the dreaded PIN or the OTP at every turn. I needed one or the other or both for getting a blood test, for permitting a friend to enter my residential complex, for getting my car serviced, for hiring a cab, for receiving a parcel in my own home that was clearly marked for delivery to me, for receiving a pizza that I had ordered and paid for and even for taking my own money out of my own bank account for my own use!
I found it galling that I needed an OTP for paying my phone bill. Why should the phone company bother to confirm that it is really I who was paying the bill? If someone else wanted to pay my dues, he was most welcome to do so. Why should I have any objections? And why should the phone company object as long as they are getting money? But no! The phone company wanted to be absolutely certain that it was ‘Dear Mr 99 XXX 123XX’ who was paying the bill. My name was certainly not 99 XXX 123XX. Yet I was, and am, addressed in this manner quite often. I really fail to understand where the ‘XX’ comes from. I have seen the XXX on rum bottles and fully appreciate that. I have also seen the XXX on video films and dare not confess that I fully appreciate that too. But does my name contain any X’s? Not when I last looked at my birth certificate.
It is the same with the income tax guys, except that they address me as ACXXXXXX3X which, if you noticed, is a different set of X’s. Earlier I used to think that these blighters’ sole objective in life was to somehow make me pay tax equal to or more than my income. But then I knew better. They not only wanted my money, but they also wanted to make my life miserable by insisting that I provide them OTPs – for paying tax as well as for submitting a statement that I had paid the tax. This pricey behaviour in the olden days used to be called looking a gift horse in the mouth.
The creature called OTP ambushed me every so often, and sometimes unexpectedly when I had, mistakenly, thought I was on the straight home stretch and that life was uncomplicated. But there it was, the OTP lying in wait – even for stuff like registering a complaint about my fridge. Worse still, sometimes there was not one but two OTPs! The fridge repair company sent two sets of OTPs or PINs or whatever to me, with instructions that I should give one number if I were satisfied with the work and another if I were not. I consider this practice to be bloody sneaky! Furthermore, it is presumptuous on the part of the service company to think that I am incapable of yelling at their mechanics if they render less than satisfactory service.
There was a time when the Phoenicians’ greatest invention – called money – could buy you anything. No longer – not in the frightening new world! The cable guy, the airline people, the cooking gas company, the online sabziwala as well as his cousin – all demand a digital transfer for which I have to use something called a debit card. This is a fairly uncomplicated exercise for the non-digitally handicapped. But for someone like me, it was as difficult as the labours of Hercules and the labours of Hercule Poirot combined. I did not understand how it was humanly possible to squint at the telephone screen, key in the hundreds of digits of the credit card, expiry date and something called the cvv, all in a minute or less without fumbling. With my stubby fingers and shaky hands, I sometimes hit ‘7’ in place of ‘8’, or 1 in place of 4, and sometimes the screen got ‘timed out’. Sometimes I needed to change screens to read some OTP but then I could not find the earlier screen. After several futile attempts, I usually gave up.
I often wondered whether there was any activity or field of human endeavour that might remain immune to the dreaded PINs and OTPs. I got convinced that it was unlikely when I received an invitation to a wedding reception in which the card included an OTP for the driver’s dinner.
This ubiquitous nature of the OTPs and PINs made me wonder how my presswala managed. I did not know who helped Ramu Kaka, or his aged uncle in the village. I know Ram Bharose, my night-blind driver, has not renewed his driver’s licence in the past ten years because he does not know how to apply online. My maid lived in constant fear of being accused of being an illegal immigrant because she never could apply for an Aadhaar number. I soon realised that I was not the only person terrorised by the OTP and the PIN. There were others too out there, equally if not more grievously suffering.
Then one day, out of a deep sense of empathy, I asked Badar Mian, the cobbler who sits at the crossroads, whether he too was a victim of the OTPs. He gave his crinkly smile and declared that the OTPs had provided employment to his son, Babboo, who he said now runs a cyber-cafe. Except that Babboo’s ‘cafe’ consisted of nothing more than a small table and stool that he placed on the pavement by his father’s side. With a laptop and something called a dongle, the youngster offers a variety of services ranging from updating Aadhar numbers to renewing driving licences and other complicated manoeuvres which no doubt requires an unending procession of OTPs.
In a flash, I solved all my problems! I appointed Babboo my ‘OTP Adviser’. Babboo and I have worked out a cosy system according to which he is paid a retainer plus a piece rate, without my needing to feed any OTP anywhere. He is happy and I am ecstatic. Now whenever I need Babboo’s expertise, I just lean out of my window and shout OTP (for Olloo The Puttar). And the OTP promptly comes to my apartment and slays all the demons that come a swarming after me for OTPs and PINs. Once in a while, I need to go to his ‘cyber cafe’ because his computer and Wi-Fi connection are faster than mine. So, if you find me squatting with the Olloo The Puttar by the roadside – half on the pavement and half off it – do not worry. It is me just filing an income tax return or paying my house tax or ordering a masala dosa or renewing my subscription to some old-fashioned periodical like the Reader’s Digest.
