Mohan Ray

There was once a time when people made their way to the grave, had their ashes sent to the Ganga, found themselves in another realm, another life, or nowhere at all. What would you believe if I told you that a second chance of life would soon be at your doorstep, but one in which you would never leave the life you lived at all? To live life forever, to never die … it may appear like the science fiction of the last century, the happenstance of a coming one, something everyone from the ancient Egyptians to Silicon Valley residents has dreamed of. But to live a life that never ends would not be so easy.

In case you were not to believe me, let me tell you the story of a Mr Mohan Ray.

I must add that his name was not in fact Mohan Ray. Mr Ray was born as Jagmohan Singh, a righteous Sikh man who was third generation Mumbaikar, a remnant of a Partition story from the Sindh turned Mumbaiwalla, a proud father, and grandfather, who loved his children, loved his wife, loved his family, and not much anyone else. Dadar was his home and nowhere else, though his three children moved to New York, London, and Sydney. They were all bankers, all investment tycoons, all shadows of their father, who they loved to hate, and hated to love.

Did Mr Singh love money? No, not horribly, though one had to remember, he came from a different time, he saw people crushed under the hovels lining the railway lines by the passing trains, and his childhood neighbours were the same ones whose descendants washed dishes at hotels in Prabhadevi or sold vada pav on the street. As for him, he would come to live in a two-bedroom flat worth crores overlooking the sea, he would come to have grandchildren who were of five different nationalities, he would have a full and happy life, until he died.

How he died is no mystery. One day he and his wife Mira were happily watching their soap operas, and Mr Singh felt like taking a nap, and Mira ma’am watched her serials for an hour, then she noticed it was nearing five and her husband had not awoken, she went into the bedroom, and his posture was off, his mouth was too open, as were his eyes, and that was when Mira Aunty came up to his neck, checked his pulse, and realised that her husband was dead. How she wailed, how she screamed, how she tore off all sorts of sheets that did not need tearing until the maids came, and the ambulance, and the coroner. On May 21st, 2012, Jagmohan Singh was pronounced dead. A body was taken to the gurudwara, a man was mourned, ashes were made from his body.

Yet, long after the 2020s, a man named Mohan Ray lived. He had the same facial features as this Jagmohan Singh, a face wide and rounded like an idli, save for the nose pronounced over the batter, save for the sizzled marks over his cheeks, but his body language was no longer Indian. No one would look at the cut of his hair, the sheen of his skin, the tone of his mannerisms, and think he had anything to do with India at all. He was no longer able to wear a turban, and he had three rings over his fingers, and he wore sunglasses over his head, and he managed several artists, all of Punjabi origin, in the city of Toronto.

The truth was that Jagmohan Singh was one of many private investors in a virtual interface which would connect the living into robots.

The models were identical replicas to the people who had paid for them to exist. The moment that any of the investors or builders or celebrities who paid for them died, their personalities were instantly uploaded into these artificial beings. It must have been a bizarre thing for Jagmohan Singh to feel that his arms were not working, feel that his vision was blurring, feel that everything inside of him was leaving, and then to suddenly wake up, as if he had been a dream for eighty plus years, inside of a body that looked like his, but felt nothing like what being human felt like. It didn’t help that he woke up surrounded by doctors and scientists, his body strapped down to a bed. He was gasping and groaning, taking the last round of breaths his stroke had denied him. He, like any person in the midst of strangers, tried to tear off the straps, screamed in a mix of Hindi and Punjab at the people who were around him, and he cried, from the confusion. The counsellors tried their best to comfort him, but they were speaking in a very different style of English, and no matter how much their pamphlets and speeches had explained, it was very different to have decided on a whim to agree to an artificial intelligence experiment, and to actually live through one. He had not exactly signed up to this. He wanted to live forever, but not in Toronto, under an alias, as a Canadian citizen, far away from the people whom he loved. He had wanted more time with his children, his grandchildren, his Mira buggi. And instead, it looked like he would never be able to speak to them again.

Mr Singh, being the product of a medical experiment meant to never go public, had trouble at first adjusting to daily life. He had to take on a moniker, one which took advantage of his fair skin and completely hid his cultural identity. He was now Pat Robinson, and the body which they had made for him used the body language of the land Pat Robinson was from. Without any sort of conscious effort, Mr Singh found himself nodding at the random things strangers said, made small talk about the weather, and found a wide swathe of hockey knowledge in his database. The accent came easy to him because it was programmed into his database. He had a satellite map built into his eyes, so he would always know where he was, and would never get lost.

But Mr Singh slowly felt that he was learning to think beyond his programming, more as a Canadian due to the humble ways time in a land affects your way of thinking. He was becoming more willing to tell strangers he was bewildered and hurt, he had a propensity to smile more, and the life he was consigned to, forced to live in a small apartment, completely alone, became more and more comforting with each passing year. His main source of socialising would be with his counsellors, the scientists, anyone related to the experiment. At first, he would give them the pet-names of his grandchildren, tell them about his life, but as time went on and they didn’t share a single thing about them, he merely asked about their day, listened to their small talk, and let them leave at a quarter past one.

Let us not forget the many times Mr Singh wanted to call his people. Mr Singh had become part robot, but he was still human at heart. He occasionally overrode the programming and called people who annoyed him a chootiya, and once in a while he found that he felt a severe headache, even though his body had no head in the anatomical sense – he was as much wires and data as he was memory and emotion. He missed his family so much, but he also knew he was very much dead. Enough years had passed since his saved mind was linked to a computer that his Mira darling could have been dead herself. And, if he did make that phone call, that utterly God-forsaken phone call, what would he have said? In his life, Mr Singh was very much a person who planned out every and any conversation before it occurred, but it felt impossible to tell the love of his life that he was living on, but in the body of a robot.

He compensated for his emotions by placing many missed phone calls with his relatives. His android body had the capacity to mimic many accents and languages, though with an element of a computer voice translating from an interface, and so he was certain that when he called his dear daughter Sanya in New York, she was convinced he was part of a mortgage scam, which was the same reason his daughter Mona in Sydney hung up after ten seconds. His son Darvesh in London seemed to enjoy the chat and was willing to tell the stranger random facts about his life, such as he was getting a divorce and he was trying out sex with men and all sorts of drugs and he was the happiest he had ever been. These were all things that made Mr Singh cry, but not for any issue with the way Darvesh was living. He was coming to the realisation that his children were as lonely and damned to self-destruction as they had been when he was properly alive, and he had done nothing in his years alive as a father to help them. He thought of the advice he should have given when he was their father but found that he was as inept at saying the right thing as Pat Robinson, the Canadian stockbroker no one wanted to be hassled by. He stopped calling them after some years when he realised they had truly moved on. He never called his wife. He never placed a phone call to India.

Over the years, despite the frequent visits, despite the humdrum life, Mr Singh found ways to leave his house, to accept the complete solitude, and develop an ability to chat, live in the artificiality of his new life, and truly embody the spirit of someone else – and thus become Mohan Ray. It started when he was walking through a Punjabi store outside of his apartment and finally gathered the courage to respond to the person who had been serving him for many years in his mother tongue. Certainly to have seen such a white collared Canadian looking man speak so fluently and with such heart brought the loudest of laughter in the uncle, but he most likely assumed he was speaking to a firangi who spent too many summers in Amritsar, and as the conversation progressed, and the uncle realised that the words were genuine, that the vocabulary and command was not that of a foreigner, but of someone who really knew the language, the uncle was puzzled. He asked a lot of questions which Mr Singh could never answer. He left the store and never came back, but at least he felt truly as though he were Jagmohan Singh.

Mr Singh was quite talented at music, something which he had never been able to explore due to the poverty of his early years and his family’s need to quickly sprout into a wealthy social class. He sang the mantras he would sing in his old age to give him peace, until one day when he realised he liked the sound of his voice. He tested his songs once on the metro, and the people did not make the disgruntled faces often made at beggars, he could tell they smiled and bobbed their heads along because they liked the sound. Mr Singh was in as much of a city of opportunity as Bombay, and one that equally accepted Punjabi songs. He took on the name Mohan Ray – a combination of a shortened version of his real name and homage to Satyajit Ray. Given that he had the body that passed as white, he became a hit in the Punjabi entertainment industry, getting lakhs of views for his videos and selling lakhs of albums. He was invited to all sorts of shows by the diaspora, and he ended up befriending many celebrities, both from India and from Canada.

Would it be possible to say that Mohan Ray forgot his first life? He perhaps felt a slight guilt that he had kept such a big secret from his entire family from the time he had researched about the program itself, and then made the decision not to tell anyone, not even his own wife. When he got to the other side, when he became the thing that he had always wanted, he had realised from experience that he hadn’t wanted it at all. There is a part of us which always covets the other side – to be rich, and in a rich country, to be able to do whatever we want, and with whomever. The Jagmohan Singh who coveted this lifestyle certainly slept around as Mohan Ray, travelled around the world, bought yachts and planes and all sorts of fancy luxury goods he’d have never imagined owning as a humble grandfather from the uglier part of Dadar, but he never had a family again, never set foot in his motherland again, never had the feeling of a full life again. He took to drinking and experimented with drugs, but it had no negative effect on his new body, he tried to live a year of his life in a different country, but twenty years passed, and climate change was starting to make the world uninhabitable, and Mohan Ray wasn’t even ten percent into his life, if even that.

Centuries passed. Certain countries were lost to erosion just as others were lost to the sea. Certain parts of the world branded themselves as religious holy lands that only people of a certain religion could enter, just as lakhs of people died unnecessarily, to heat exhaustion, sudden hurricanes, and new invasive species.

Mohan Ray lived because he ultimately had no choice in the matter. Other androids joined him – most of the ones who survived were android in some way. They would talk about how much Indian versus African versus Caucasian heritage they had, what their favourite places to teleport to were, and how much money they had through the selling of something that was once called bitcoin, but they mostly bored Mohan Ray as if they were the regular talentless human beings he was born and brought up around.

Time kept moving forward, Mohan Ray didn’t age, and Mohan Ray didn’t know how many of his great-great-children even survived.

But no matter how much time passed, no matter how much the world changed around him, Mohan Ray only knew one thing. He missed his family.

It took his centuries to do it, but he found a way to return to Bombay. The teleport machine left him right as he wanted, right by the ruins of what was once Dadar station. Time had not been kind to Bombay. Most of the Western suburbs and the South were underwater. For whatever reason, the central suburbs survived, but no one lived there. All that was left were the abandoned train tracks, the fallen-apart store facades, and the skyscrapers which still stood long after the humans who made them perished.

Mohan Ray found his building, and he found his apartment. The furniture and possessions were gone. The goldish paint had faded into a demolished grey colour. The floors and walls were covered in dust. There was no proof that any one had ever lived there, but Mohan Ray knew everything that happened within those walls, from the television shows his wife would binge watch to the dramatic arguments he would have with his children when they were teenagers.

There was no bed or cot in the home anymore, but Mohan Ray found a space for himself in the dust, and he lay there. It felt so good to smell what his homeland smelt like. It felt so warm to remind himself of how early he’d have to wake up in the morning for work, the sounds and sights from the train as he’d take the express back home. He thought of his favourite desserts, he thought about the special ways his wife would play tricks on him to get him to go shopping with her. Mohan Ray lived these stories in his mind over and over again. He knew he would have to get up at some point, but he was okay if that some time would be hours or even days later.

Mohan Ray had made a wish to be immortal, and he knew that wish shamed him, but as he stayed at his home for the first time in centuries, he felt for the first time that he did not regret his decision. Of course, he would not wish immortality on anyone, and he knew many of the others who had paid to be androids wished the same. At the same time being back at his home made him realise something else very important about the circumstance. It was not his immortality that had been the problem but the way that he had lived his life afterwards, not for family, not for others, but for himself.

Mohan Ray rose up from the dust. It had taken him three hundred years to realise it, but he was going to do something with this gift technology had given him. He was going to try to figure out a way to improve this world, if not for his children or loved ones, but for those creatures who had to survive on this planet, live on it, and make an attempt to call it home despite it being barely inhabitable.