From Etu with Love

by Preeti Madhusudhan

[box] What if humans are no longer what they actually are? What if there is no earth but only E-2 or Etu or Earth-2? What if ‘Love’ is no longer a word that exists in that planet? What if one of the inhabitants discovered the word ‘Love’ by sheer accident? ‘From Etu with Love’ is Preeti Madhusudhan’s answer to these questions. Preeti’s story is her take in conveying the essence of Spark’s July 2011 issue themed ‘Tying the Knot – Weddings and Marriages’. [/box] [box type=”info”]MONTH: July 2011

THEME: TYING THE KNOT—WEDDINGS AND MARRIAGES

CONCEPT: The most celebrated and perhaps the controversial part of a person’s life. We explored weddings and marriages in this edition.

FEATURED PERSONALITIES OF JULY 2011: Maniyarasan Rajendran, Associate Faculty, NID, Ahmedabad Oormila Prahlad, Cartoonist Usha Shantaram, Artist. For the first time, we featured an artist, a photographer and a cartoonist as our ‘Voices of the Month’, projecting ‘Weddings and Marriages’ through their work. July 2011 also meant one and a half years of publishing Spark. To mark the occasion, along with the issue, we also brought out our first print-on-demand book titled ‘Sparkling Thoughts’ – an anthology of the interviews and columns featured in Spark from January 2010 – June 2011. We consider it one of the important milestones in Spark’s journey. [/box]

The Enes glowed with a dull gray light. This was its color by design, the standard display mode unless willed otherwise by the humanoid perceiving it.  The apocalyptic outcome of the Fifth Petroleum War or PW5 had all but erased the earth of its war-ravaged, gaunt life-forms. Whatever could be salvaged was deposited in a space capsule that landed in a dwarf-planet in the Kuiper belt. From a space-capsule to a self-contained, shy nation, Etu had grown steadily. Etu, E-2, Earth-2.  Enes, NS, Neo-Stratosphere was designed to stimulate earth-like visual conditions to acclimatize the first batches of the humanoids that were doubted to have more than just traces of the human DNA, to the un-earthly though life-preserving atmosphere of Etu.  The governing council at Etu monitored and guided all the inhabitants through their embedded identification chip that could be accessed by and manipulated by the council. No one thought of it as manipulation, as the inhabitants were blissfully unaware of that word. Certain words were deleted from the dictionary that was uploaded in the chip of the first inhabitants, to obliterate painful memories of their home-planet that might impede the growth of the fledgling Etu.  Words with a negative connotation ceased to exist. One word in particular was vehemently shunned by the founders: Love. The word and the emotions associated with it were thought of as central to the agony of the humans.

A dull feeling of foreboding filled Flora as she looked up at Enes again. Today was her wedding. She wiped her moist hands on her overalls again. She willed the Enes to glow a “Peppy Pink” to match her overalls. All of the 2.5 million inhabitants of Etu and the visual media including newscast-display boards and advertisement billboards,  had received a message earlier that morning from the Central System- Ceeyes, with specific instructions as to how to perceive her and telecast her image. Unless they were directed in certain instances as to their perception and behaviour, the inhabitants enjoyed the rare liberty of visually correcting their environs to suit their mental make-up. Though they were in a state of eternal bliss, not having a frame of reference except for the catastrophically savage images of planet Earth, they were afforded the option of the cosmetic over-ride switch which also fell in line with their theology of “All that looked well is well”. So the Enes, while being a “Peppy Pink” to Flora could be a million other shades to the million other inhabitants.  Iro on the other side of that housing colony dressed in a complementary blue overall was flushed with excitement. He was as Peppy as “Peppy Pink,” he told himself. He willed the Enes glow the standard factory-Steel-Gray. He did not want an effusion of enthusiasm from above. His adrenaline-meter registered a “top-of-form” status in all the relevant intra-web-links and the next instant, his message screen was flooded  with offers from sports and recreation society notices.

“Not today,” he mentally deleted them all, setting aside the message from the Ceeyes with information on Flora, in a personal folder at a special reserved corner at the bottom of his medulla-oblongata. He had read it a few hundred times since he received the message seven days back. He had immediately been thrilled (and his screen sensing his palpitations and endorphin rush had puked forth a profusion of advertisements for resorts by the sulphur lakeside, plasma procreation cocoons and the likes) and had looked forward to the hour with mounting eagerness. He knew the drill. He had had a week to train a colleague to take over his position in the agency and make provisions for liabilities and commitments like library material, on-going research, pet-life forms or robotic-servants. The chosen couple would be transported to a secret location for two months in which time they would procreate and return to their former lives. The female would deliver seven months thence in a Ceeyes hospital, leaving the infant in government care and return to her former occupation. No mess, no emotional attachments and associated fuss. The Ceeyes raised hundreds of such infants every year training them in abilities suited to their capabilities. No one knew their parents or children.

Flora worked at the Ceeyes Archives. She had access to literature the existence of which the Ceeyes itself was unaware of. By sheer coincidence while browsing through census related literature to help her design a new statistical system for her housing block, she stumbled upon an old book with essays on the negative growth rate of a place called Finland on Earth a thousand years ago. Buried among scores of unknown words that required laborious references to a manual dictionary that had not been uploaded on their IC, were repeated references to a word called Love.

There was an ominous ring to the word. Some residual human emotion stirred from underneath the layers of IC imprints and millennia of genetic bleaching.  The Ceeyes picked up on her uneasiness and had proposed her wedding in a flash. Till a few seconds before she had read of Love, she would have nonchalantly gone about the business of temporary disengagement from her immediate society that a wedding at Etu required. Not so now. In the seven days that led to her wedding, she stirred and fretted and puckered and pouted, causing a visible ripple in the static around her. The word seemed to mock and leer at her, to pounce announced from dark crevices and nooks. Something human, rebellious and ingenuous was taking life in her. The Ceeyes, uncertain of how to infer her increased hormonal reading and palpitations, pumped in the prescribed medications for hormonal imbalance and myocardial infarction into her every night when she docked in to re-charge.

Flora had made up her mind over breakfast and the resolve had strengthened with each step she took toward her unpredictable future. The tiny but virulent virus of self-assertion, the sense of “I” that the founders of Etu had supposedly eradicated, had taken root in her being.

As Flora and Iro met at the entrance of the Ceeyes Wedding hall, the Peppy Pink and Steel Gray dissolved and they forgot the Enes for the first time in their lives. They saw each other for what they were. They saw their children in each other’s eyes.

Preeti Madhusudhan is a freelance architect/ interior designer living in Shanghai with her husband and six-year-old son. She is passionate about books and is an ardent admirer of P.G.Wodehouse. She inherited her love for books and storytelling from her father, a Tamil writer. Preeti is trying to publish her maiden novella in English. 

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