ISSUE 37

It was summer, the month of June. The heat was fatal, almost apocalyptic. Even 2276 metres above sea level, in the lap of Himalayas. Most seas were not seas anymore. They were waterless pits with unfathomable depths. They were pits where young and old took their lives, quite frequently these days. Who was young and who was old? You could not look at anyone and make that out anymore. People’s age had started to get determined by the number of vibrations and rings they heard in their heads. Wikipedia stated, ‘Phantom Vibration Syndrome or Phantom Ringing Syndrome is the perception that one’s mobile phone is vibrating or ringing when it is not ringing. According to Dr Michael Rothberg, the term is not a syndrome, but is better characterised as a tactile hallucination since the brain perceives a sensation that is not actually present.’ People were hallucinating. Young and old were hallucinating. Fifteen-year-olds were reported to be hearing vibrations up to 150 times a day. On the other hand, fifty-year olds were reported to be hearing up to only 5 vibrations a day. Measured in vibrations, the young were old. The old were young. The young died early and the old lived till they heard up to only 5 vibrations a day.

Nothing much seemed to have changed in India in the course of the decade since I left. Vibration sickness was spreading faster than binary fission in amoebas, but people cared even less than ever about what other people did, albeit they cared about their own premonitions and how to doom a fellow citizen’s life with them. It did not matter that I had returned with a PhD in the art of harnessing photography as a social practice. It did not matter that I was in the process of documenting the lives of the victims of the vibration sickness in Tokyo on film, where the impact of the Phantom Vibration Syndrome had been most rampant. Neither did it matter that I had authored two photobooks and got them published in two different countries. What mattered was whether I had started to eat beef by now and why I did not speak with a posh British accent. Living on this side of the world was a constant reminder that human life was a suppressed narrative. Even in the middle of such a major epidemic crisis which people in first world countries faced as much as the people of developing nations, it felt better to be a human in some countries than others. Human solidarity was not evenly distributed across the universe. Nothing was, actually.

The first case of Phantom Vibration Syndrome in Shimla was recorded in a Tibetan restaurant which is no longer in business. A middle-aged couple from somewhere in the West sat in a corner of the restaurant waiting to dig into the Indo-Tibetan version of wonton soup. One of them stopped with the chicken momo slightly askew on the fork, its journey towards the mouth halted midway with what people assumed to be heart failure. Her girlfriend Helen reported that the victim Winnie would often say that she would hear her phone ringing even when Helen was not calling her. Winnie claimed this was evidence of love, but Helen admitted that this was very overwhelming as they had only been dating for a few months back then and she did not want to be talking to Winnie all the time. So they fought over it. Helen now rued her ignorance. Not in her most distant dreams had she thought of moving to Shimla with Winnie only to find her dead within a month of their arrival. Helen was a widow in search of a housemate now. ‘A bedroom with a window available. Mountain view guaranteed if your eyes are ready to see through the concrete jungle that the window overlooks. Not advisable for people with vibration sickness because I cannot stand the sight of someone dying when they are a fart away from eating a delicious chicken momo,’ read the advertisment on the Internet.

Something similar happened in one of the hipster cafes on Mall Road. On a table occupied by three millennials, two women from the West and a man from mainland Himachal, the man offered one of the women a sachet of salt. His kind offer was not received well as the woman, responded in an accent with accentuated consonants and a hint of bogus mockery, ‘How can you eat it like that?’ Nobody at the table foresaw that those would be her last words. Millennials were middle-aged people by that year (no, they were not old, they were really middle-aged), so no one jumped to the conclusion that this could be a heart attack. Everyone knew. This time, everyone knew that the sickness was slowly taking over.

One evening, I found I had pencilled in my journal to meet Kabir. We had, a few moons earlier, set up a meeting. I knew I was supposed to be seeing him sometime in June after his return from Bangladesh but had forgotten the exact date. Even though I often visited home, I had not seen him in four years. That year, he was in the pink of health and the peak of his mountain-biking career. I had tried my best to keep track of all the world records he had broken during these years, and had noted all the things he was the first ever Indian to do. All my friends in different cities in different countries, whereever I had lived knew who he was and all the amazing things he did. Everyone granted that Kabir was indeed cool enough to date me. Everyone, except Kabir, obviously.

Our prospective meeting was supposed to be a platonic encounter where we would brainstorm ideas on drafting a report on the death of teenagers in Shimla for Omniwire, a journal based out of Dublin, Ireland that was recording stories of the victims of Phantom Vibration Syndrome. Kabir had a Zen-like air about him, reflecting some characteristic of the 15th century mystic poet he was named after. Maybe mountain biking had taught him some endurance lessons which made him too sturdy and patient for real life. Kabir was one of the very few people I knew that year who accepted death like death was, without sugar-coating it or talking about it in a godly manner. He was the race director of the most popular mountain biking race in the country. This year’s race had recently taken place and a few teenage riders had died of vibration sickness. I was happy, rather content that Kabir agreed to share those stories and co-write the report for Omniwire. I was also happy that our meeting was not going to include alcohol. We would indulge in smoking carcinogenic components and talk in a manner that would make us appear as a man and woman with no feelings for each other as we stuffed ourselves with egg dosas at the Indian Coffee House. I could have somehow tried to make the meeting even less lethal by taking out the smoking of carcinogenic components from the equation and leaving it in the hands of unadmitted feelings only, but Shimla had run out of its organic smoking components like marijuana a few years ago. It was illegal and expensive to export it from neighbouring states. It was something no longer in our reach anymore, like our lost love.

The teenagers were most susceptible to vibration syndrome. It was believed to be so because of their early exposure to electronic devices. I had not grown up as a teenager brimming with the urgency of someone always stoned on cheap instant coffee. Teenagers these days appeared acutely caffeinated even without significant coffee consumption. They are tired from having to stay so active all the time in order to keep the vibrations at bay. Their eyebags droop and their eyelids are heavily swollen all the time. Parents had stopped giving cell phones to their children but how much could they restrain them in an era where everything was driven by technical means. Hundreds teenagers died of the vibration sickness each day, most of them freezing in time as if they had come in contact with electric barbed wire on no man’s land between two disputed countries.

My parents died together in a road accident. My Papa was behind the wheel while they were returning to their summer home in Shimla from their village in Punjab where they mostly lived. I was halfway through my PhD and decided to finish it as I had no one to return to in my own country. The irony of my parents’ death was recorded in my own life’s parallel narrative. I was rambling in Dingle, a small town in Ireland for a shoot. When I received the news, my driver was on a detour through a narrow trail to show me how feeble human existence was at the mercy of the Atlantic Ocean. I considered it unwise to move back to India as I could not bear the sight of fake mourners flooding my house and taking a fine photobook on their way back from the massive collection that I had hoarded over the years from different countries I had visited. I was able to fund the rest of my PhD with the remainder of my scholarship and the money that came from selling off the farmhouse in Punjab. After I finished my PhD, I tried living a bizarre artistic life in London. I ended up landing a job as a documentary photographer at an Arts Council funded visual art project. I was producing a lot of art and four months into my job was able to rent out a studio of my own. Because my heart was elsewhere or at many places at a single time, I never married nor moved in with any of my lovers. It was much after the untimely death of Ma and Papa and only during my first year as a real artist outside a university when the vibration sickness became a real thing that could cost you your existence. I remember complaining about my own vibration sickness to Ma the year she died when nobody knew what this actually was. She shushed me by saying it was all in my head and nothing more than a hoax.

II

Kabir did not tell me what he had done or if something had happened to him. The afternoon of the day we were supposed to see each other, I received an email from him saying he would not be able to make it since his arrival in Shimla had been delayed by a few days. It read, ‘Alisha, sorry for this but it is unlikely that I will be able to make it to Shimla today as planned, or anytime soon during the upcoming days. Dhaka has not been kind, and I have not tackled the ruckus properly so far as I should have. You are there for a good while, I will see you soon. Ta!’ He did not tell me what the ruckus was about or what was he doing in Dhaka, but I trusted him. I always did. I would have to take care of the Omniwire article myself. I could not bring myself to write those days because the demons that made me write had been silenced by new unwelcome demons. I was twenty-seven, but I was hearing as many vibrations as a seventeen-year-old did. Even the sound of tearing a single sheet of paper bothered me as if someone was battering a metal sheet in front of me with a hammer. I had failed to decipher when things went astray. I had never been a person who clung to their phone or laptop. Rather, I always clung to my journal and camera. I had no one to text regularly or to talk to, on the phone or in real life. It could have been possible that less reliance on humans in my day-to-day life had made me seek solace in a world of make-believe, and that’s why the vibration sickness had hit.

In the process of collecting bits for the Omniwire report, I stumbled upon a very interesting text by J G Farrell called ‘The Hill Station’ which was published posthumously. In the year 1970, a writer of Anglo-Irish descent drowned in the waters of County Cork, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript and some rough notes on the backs of old Weidenfeld envelopes. This man who modelled one of his earlier novels on V S Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas recorded an unforgettable fable of Victorian Simla. The book talks about the fall and rise of Colonial India, capturing it all in the perplexed snapshots of a liberal outsider. Thousands of miles away from my homeland, this Irish man had evoked the memory of my most loved Indian town multiple times. Farrell reminisces of a Shimla that must have ceased to exist as soon as he must have written this: ‘Nowadays the railway goes all the way up to Simla, but before the turn of the century it stopped at Kalka. The rest of the journey, some fifty-eight miles of it up into the hills, still had to be accomplished in a two-wheeled cart drawn by a couple of vigorous Kabul ponies under the auspices of the Mountain Car Company, as it was called … a devastating last lap of your journey if you were coming to Simla to repair your health.’ What I had found valid even after a hundred years was the count of cemeteries in Simla. There were four back then, in Farrell’s Simla, two of them had no space for graves anymore, and the remainder of the two was filling up quickly as well. People no longer cared about how were they taken care of after they died. This was perhaps because so many people were dying each day that it was hard to keep up with one particular means of human disposal. I had suspected I would not be able to get Kabir’s statistics any time soon so I decided to shift the central idea of my report to the burial preferences of the parents of hundreds of teenagers who had died because of the vibration sickness and if their preferences were paid any heed by any municipal authority. I had wanted to finish this report before I froze in time, for good.

I did not have the slightest idea of why people still came to find enlightenment in the Himalayas. Not even a particle of dust was at peace here. Farrell well knew, like his character Mr Lowrie, and wrote, ‘Of course, as Mr Lowrie well knew, people preferred burial at a higher altitude where it was cooler and where the countryside reminded them of home, and he was not the man to argue with the whims of his clients. But still, looking at the ghostly passengers assembling on the railway platform to be ferried onwards by the Mountain Car Company he could not help but pick out those whom he would have liked to divert neatly into the cemetery at Kalka, thus sparing them and everybody else the nuisance and fatigue of their long climb into the hills.’ It was no longer the case that people would prefer to die in the mountainous air and be buried there. Our Shimla was as hot as the deserts of Rajasthan, nearly a hundred years after Farrell’s version of a town with suitable weather and everything rosy. We had run out of water altogether almost two decades ago and purchasing was out of the question because of the skyrocketing costs involved. Stealing was still an option. Shimla stole water all the time. But only the ministers and bureaucrats did. The common man could not – even stealing was beyond the common man’s reach. Back during the days when I went to school in Shimla, if someone fainted, that person was offered water. You would be made to consume water, bathe in water, snort water. Years later when people lay traumatised by vibration sickness, there was no water left to comfort anyone.

On finishing my first draft of the report for Omniwire, I wired it to Kabir. I still had a vague hope that he would contribute to it. But I never heard back from him. He was much older than me, a middle-aged man with his vibrations much under control. He could not have frozen in time. I had a sly wish to knock on his door one last time to know what had happened to him but my condition was deteriorating with each passing minute. No quack would be able to count the number of vibrations I experienced each minute. I screamed at the top of my voice all the time to tire myself. I wanted to die in my sleep, if there was any sleep. Nothing happened. I waited for Kabir, for death. Nothing came. No one came. I suffered in silence, in noise.

III

I woke up transfixed in my London apartment with a copy of J G Farrell’s ‘The Hill Station’ on the wrong side of my bed. I was late for work. It was noon and I could not make it now. I woke up to a February afternoon in 2018. I had not been snowed in, not yet. The sleet was trying its best to blanket the entire city. Somehow, I felt good. I felt good about being able to tune into the Winter Olympics on the telly. Kabir had taken the first ever Mountain Biking team from India to participate in the Olympics. I would cheer for him, for them, in silence. I hoped he would get a minute to text me back from Seoul. He has not done so in four years now. If he doesn’t, I will just let my vibrations answer.