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Photograph


I was born at about 8 PM on April the fourth, in the pleasant summer of 1994; the night was calm and the four walls of my birth place imposed a thick blank darkness about me right from the birth. My mother’s umbilical cords wound around a thin cylinder; I was the 24th to be inseminated by the index finger of a nineteen year old pimpled primate. Before me, the others were put to sleep in sets of clearly delineated columns; around the cylinder, they all crooned about in good health. Our embryonic development was constrained between two rows of perforated umbilical cords. I distinctly remember, at the time of my birth, a great blinding flash of light pierced through me; it lasted for less than a second, but it was the most harrowing time I have had.

You might be wondering why our mother ‘Kodak’ was so utterly circumspect; to understand this, I must, with your permission, take you down the path of evolution. In the olden days, a specialised primate ‘photographer’ peered through the well camouflaged tent; he stood with the fingers of his one palm curled around the bosom of our women kodaks and…..you must forgive me, I wish to skip the details. Suffice to say that the modesty of our women required nothing short of a thick leather canopy shielding them from the obnoxious, overly ambitious and pushy virus ‘sun’. Most of the members of our Kodak clan, in those days were inflicted by a disease; even a small glowing hair strand of the virus in the vicinity at the time of insemination cost the lives of progeny. Unlike other curable diseases, this virus deformed the embryo at the time of insemination and there was nothing to it but live with the malady. Some of us were left with a hue of yellow that fogged us, some with red tapering lines that ran along the length of our person, and still some with absolutely dizzying myriad of rainbowish conflagrations.

But, we have evolved; now we no longer fear the virus as the great grandmothers of our clan did. In fact we have rather dispensed away with the cloaks altogether; our mothers inseminate in public; where once only a specialised surgeon was required, now any primate with an index finger can perform the operation. Call this evolution!

In my embryo, I bosom the images of 12 primate children – six in the back row, five in the next, and one chubby seven year old girl with pigtails in the front. In the background is a dilapidated house; its wooden windows hanging limp and mud walls porous and naked; red tiles of the roof dangerously inclined to cast an obscure shadow on the door-less gaping hole. Clones of ‘me’ are now living their own mature adult lives separately. On the backside of the original me, a bald headed cantankerous male primate with long feet, scribbled ‘24th April 1994’ and locked me inside a colony. This colony had about fifty houses facing each other; a thin film of polythene held our backs to the hard white walls. We, the 26 siblings occupied the first 26 houses; the rest of the colony was empty at the time of our arrival. We greeted everyone with the same unchanging set of faces; lives lived under the weight of futility of survival. It was an environment of dejection that gripped us until one day when the new faces arrived. There were so many of them, there were more people than the rest of the houses in the colony. Some had to crash at our places; some got to crash in the rooms behind us, some in the rooms before us making it officially their home.

Procreation was frugal – Kodak mothers’ ability to rear children was limited by the length of the perforated umbilical cords; some with bigger wombs could accommodate 42 embryos, but the majority had wombs the size that could accommodate 26 embryos. It was a painful time for the mother; if it fell in the hands of a professional primate, all the embryos would come out to be healthy, bubbling and charming. A practiced hand would keep away from the bewitching virus; with the back against the virus’ glowing head, a skilful primate made sure that the virus’ effect if not brought to a nought, at least stood mitigated. However, by the time I was born (1994), naïve primates were in charge of the operation; so the number of deformities were on the rise again.

The old granular sepia tinted clones of the great grandmother times (till the nineties) by the very nature of being handled by the specialised primates, resulted in little deformities; they were housed in laminated glass houses and neatly ensconced up the high raised walls of royal palaces; we were the privilege of few; our clan resonated with the royal munificence. We were celebrated alongside the princes and queens of royalty; many of our houses (with the clones inside) were bequeathed from a generation to the next amid much fanfare; our embryos referred to as ‘negative reels’ by the primates, were a thing of antique beauty.

However, from nineties up until the first half of the 21st century, a sudden change seized our clan as a great rug is seized by a primate housewife. Just as the housewife raps the rug in air ridding it off the dust, we were rid of the royal spark. Multiple clones of the same embryo were produced in factories as dim as the early surgeon theatres of the great grandmother times. The singular charm of privileged and laminated housing of originals was lost; silly clowns flooded our colonies, it was difficult to differentiate the clones from originals. Social cohesion was affected, for the factories had the ability to produce virtually unlimited clones; bitter animosity raged between us; the clan was no more sacrosanct, it was anything but that. This led to a certain reverence for the embryos, for an embryo was the ideal ‘platonic’ entity and every other clone was a regressed projection of the ideal. But this meant nothing and did not help, for an embryo was of no use to any primate; they exhibited likeness and showered affection on clones. Embryos were revered in the temples like a clandestine cult, never the objects of desire, only the objects of reverence.

In the present time, year 2010, any nincompoop and nitwit primate can make clones of us; the clandestine reverence to embryos is a thing of past. There are no embryos anymore; our Kodak mothers these days inseminate phantom embryos – ones that don’t exist. A limitation of the past times- length of the perforated umbilical cords – is no more a cause for concern; clones are everywhere, copies of copies are made. Every day, a human primate is inundated with us clones in such great numbers that in order to maintain distinction, he has learnt to distinguish between a crystal clear clone and a rather fuzzy one. We are now identified by the number of cells we are composed of; the primates call our cells ‘pixels’. We now inhabit the phantom machines; our mothers, some of them are permanently sealed to these phantom machines; post insemination, from a phantom embryo, we the copies are ‘saved’ on these phantom machines. Primates all over the planet affiliate with us clones; we are ‘shared’ and the images we bosom ‘tagged’ in a jiffy.

A laminated heritage of originals inseminated by special primates, produced under thick protective cover of modesty has now reduced to copies of copies of clones of phantom embryos inseminated by poorly educated primates.

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