Chapter 6: A Brief History of Gang Violence
To understand gang violence, one needed to go back to the day Anand and Kartik became friends.
In his first year at college, Kartik had no friends except for the systems guy at the lab. Anand was one of the batch’s most wanted football players. They were lab partners in the computer lab, where their poor college had allotted one computer for two people and one printer for thirty computers. It was the end of the semester and they needed to take print-outs of a semester’s worth of experiments. It had already been two days since the rest of their class had submitted their journals.
The college dot matrix printers were taking their own sweet time, and the internet had been disabled for all the student computers. Bored out of his mind, Anand noticed that every machine in the empty lab was playing The Matrix code screensaver. Frustrated by the printer’s speed, Kartik mumbled, “This is how the machines will win the war.”
— “Whoa! That was scary.”
— “I’m serious. This AI revolution won’t be some big shitty war. They will get us hooked and then just stage a slowdown. Our lives will go to hell. We’ll either kill each other or ourselves or just accept them as our lords and masters. In all honesty, I don’t mind being a slave to technology.”
— “Okay, you’ve given this a lot of thought. That line scared me because of this Matrixy setting we are in.”
— “Haha! I seriously don’t get why this screensaver is such a favourite. Whenever they set up a new computer, students change the screensaver to this.”
— “But what a full power movie though, right?”
— “That is true.” Kartik spun around in his swivel chair and said, “Hello, Neo.”
— “Who are you?”
— “I am the architect. I created the Matrix. I’ve been waiting for you. You have many questions and though the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human…” They proceeded to do the full scene.
Five minutes later, the same lab with the same whirring processor noises, the same flickering lights and the same faint smell of socks became a movie scene. Anand used one of the chairs to lift-off as he jumped sideways to dodge a bullet and simultaneously fire one.
Twenty five minutes later, the boys had invented slow motion Chair fu. It is a lot like Wire fu except you use chairs and you move very slowly. The Chair fu practice for the day lasted till one of the chairs collapsed inwards. They re-did the chair so that it looked like it was whole and put it in a corner. While that had called for an end of day’s play, the chair fu experiments continued every time they were left unsupervised in the lab. They replicated great action movie sequences. Soon enough, they were doing it anytime they were hanging out and were bored.
When Anand had started dating Veena, chair fu had seen a hard time. In their few encounters with women, they had learnt that women did not like action movies.
Veena and Anand stopped seeing each other only on dates and started hanging out a lot more. That means Veena, Anand and Kartik started hanging out a lot more. Afraid that the stupidity of chair fu would drive Veena away, the duo abstained from any slow-motion action sequence.
Anand and Kartik stayed strong till one day in the eleventh month of the Anand-Veena romance, Anand got comfortable. He got vulnerable. That day Anand and Veena were hanging out at Anand’s. Kartik was on his way there from a date that had failed²¹.
Anand’s face muscles had started to hurt from all the smiling and grinning. But he couldn’t stop being that happy. He was a little tipsy, a little high, and with Veena. So when he opened the door to a sunken-faced Kartik, Anand could think of doing only one thing to cheer Kartik up. Slow motion begins. He took a knee and punched Kartik right in the stomach. Kartik made ripples of energy from around the punch with his fingers. Then he flew backwards till his back hit the wall behind him. Slow motion ends.
Veena saw that and stepped right behind Anand. She grabbed his head between her palms, twisted it sideways and made a clicking sound with her tongue. Anand collapsed to the floor. He looked up at Veena and knew he’d found love.
When he tried to get up, Veena tsked and added, “You need to be down for at least two minutes when you die.”
— “That’s a great idea! Every time you die, you respawn only after 60 seconds.” Kartik forgot all about his bad evening.
— “Whatspawn?”
— “It’s a gaming thing. When your character in a game dies and then reappears, it’s called respawning.”
So Anand stayed dead for a minute and Veena and Kartik continued talking — about his day, about her day and about all the people they’d like to shoot including themselves. That was also the first time, Kartik was scolded for having the Anjali obsession. That was also the first time Kartik and Veena had had a proper one-on-one conversation.
‘Gang violence’ had been called many things. Seher had called it the gang’s superpower. “It makes us more than just mortal. It makes us immortal.” Anuj hated everything about gang violence. He called it “bullshit”. Then he became a convert, a zealous one at that. Kartik believed, “It keeps us well-trained and agile, individually and as a team, just in case the system collapses someday and we are left to fend for ourselves.” Niyati called it the trust exercise of their ensemble²². Veena called it gang violence, so everyone called it gang violence.
The next major development in the history of gang violence was the mid-conversational firing. This was before Niyati or Anuj had become a part of the gang. Seher was the first person to draw a weapon and fire it at someone in the middle of a conversation. Before this cataclysmic event that altered their realities, gang violence was reserved for that uncontrollably mirthful stage during a meeting of people under inebriated conditions commonly referred to as a party. When the first victim of the mid-conversational encounter, Kartik, argued how that didn’t work, the other three passed a ruling that it didn’t matter when, where and how you were attacked. As long as you were attacked by a certified gang member, you had to react accordingly.
When Seher’s next boyfriend Anuj was granted the certificate of membership (which basically meant Seher was allowed to bring Anuj to members-only hangouts), the game saw the worst of times.
The first time Anuj heard the rules he said, “This is bullshit. You can’t just make rules by which we have a conversation.” As an appropriate response, the entire gang clicked their thumbs backwards, pointing two fingers each at Anuj and emptied an entire magazine of nine bullets each. The first four or five shots, Anuj kept fighting the concept but eventually, he caved and then collapsed onto the chair.
When he woke up, he swore revenge. He even dabbed a finger on one of the invisible bullet holes and stared at his invisible blood with angry eyes as he did that. The next few weeks were a nightmare. Anuj would walk in holding invisible weapons in or with both his hands and start firing. Sometimes, right before he walked through the door, he’d send the gang a link to the description of the weapon and the hurt it would cause. Only so that they could react correctly.
He did an AK 47, two semi-automatics (one in each hand), a bazooka, a flame thrower and some more. The flame thrower had been particularly hilarious. On being torched, the entire gang stood up, screamed and spun round and round on the same spot with their hands up in the air. Everyone but Seher committed to being torched. She just spun without screaming or raising her hands. She said, because they were in love, she couldn’t suffer pain from being torched by Anuj. However, she would still perish to ashes. Ahmed, who was refreshing everyone’s drinks had a tear in his eye when the majority ruled in her favour. The AK 47 had been boring because every time the gang would resurrect, Anuj would fire a blanket of bullets at them. At some point, they just took their drinks with them and sat on the floor.
While Niyati had mostly been better at dying than killing, she was the one who solved the Anuj problem for good. On a Sunday afternoon, she walked to the bar and explained to Ahmed the concept of an invisible syringe. When Anuj showed up at their table, both his hands heavy with some invisible weapon, Ahmed stepped right behind him and mimed injecting something into Anuj’s jugular. Meanwhile, Niyati had convinced the DJ to play Zeher hai ke pyar hai tera chumma from Sabse Bada Khiladi right at that moment. So when it all happened just like she directed it, she got up and started dancing to the track. Anuj had no choice but to drop like a house of cards. The rest of the bar booed the song. Some cheered it ironically.
Gang violence had been through multiple upgrades, some good ones which stayed, some terrible ones which were retired. One of the better ones was when the zombie rule was initiated. If two or more people shot you simultaneously, and one of them invoked the zombie rule, you had to respawn as a zombie. After which, you stayed a zombie till your next drag from a joint.
²¹ Mostly because inside his head, Kartik had been drawing a comparison table between Anjali and the girl he was out with. Although, he was kind enough to use fuzzy logic while filling the table. But that’s another story, which we may or may not have to go through all over again depending on the circumstances or how they affect any of the key cast of this party special.
²² According to Actorography, for any ensemble to survive, it needs a trust exercise. An ensemble is a gathering of like-minded people who hang out with each other a lot.
