Image credit - pranav

Palani was sitting on the patchy garden in his apartment playground. His hand rested on a glass-cube labelled “Genesis”, written in large block letters on a piece of printing paper. He was looking at the white clouds, the afternoon sun made them glimmer like cotton pearls stuck together. Pretty pretty clouds. But they weren’t enough to take his mind off the humiliation he faced during his presentation that day.

“Practical means working, man. Where is working in this? Show work, take mark,” said Mr Subramaniam.

“But sir, it’ll expand any moment now sir, the particles sir, th... they are interacting with each other exactly as I had predicted sir!” Palani said

“How much mark you got in physics, man?” Mr Subramaniam asked.

“But sir,” Palani said

“You tell man, how much you got?”   

Palani put his head down, he knew that giving eye-contact while arguing with a Physics professor is like skydiving without a parachute.

“... 46 sir,” he said

“For that, this is only too much, you go now.” 

It was true that much of his idea for the Genesis was taken from a TV show written by alcoholics. But that didn’t bother him, he often said that Schrodinger got the idea for his cat when he stood up from his toilet seat and looked at the shape of the shit he’d just taken before flushing. As if that explained all his bizarre experiments.

His previous invention, the Gene-x; a machine that used Gamma-rays to alter the human genetic code was almost a grand success. He believed that it would’ve been revolutionary had his friend, Karthik, not run to his mother screaming Ai aiyo amma, aiyo my leg like a possessed beggar because of a minor injury.

The plan was to cause a gene mutation that formed a sturdy membrane between toes to result in webbed feet. Unfortunately, the Gamma rays cut through his toes like butter, it had something to do with the frequency being 23 times stronger than what was required. When Karthik’s mother confronted him about it, Palani said, with a saintly demeanor, “Aunty toes are mistakes that evolution didn’t care to correct; we were engaging in science. These small accidents happen aunty, he will be fine, don’t worry.”

He was forbidden from building anything within the apartment complex ever again. That didn’t stop him though, nothing ever did. But the words of his professor rung in his head like an immutable flatline, his heart sank like a diaper in a swimming pool. He sat there dwelling on what he could’ve said, as people do while showering, after Twitter arguments.

“Einstein never scored high marks in his exams, sir!” a good line, but he wasn’t sure if that was true. “The great Isaac Newton died a virgin, sir!” this he was sure to be true—he read it in some article online when he was accidentally redirected from the “which rapper is your Doppelganger” quiz on facebook—but quite irrelevant. Still, he savoured the idea of uttering the word “virgin” in front of his professor, he felt like one of those heroes who fought corrupt politicians in romantic movies.

His trance was broken by the mosquitos that only came in the evening to prey on sweaty aunties in churidars and sports shoes. The clouds were now stuck in a dull orange sky, waiting to be photographed. Palani picked up Genesis and headed home.

****

Janani ran up the granite steps to her house and beckoned to her brother, Hari, who was sitting in his sky-blue shorts and banian, peeling Avrekalu. He put on the red T-shirt, on which he was sitting, and went out; there was a doodle of a bus on it with the words “the world is going to hell and I’m driving the bus” printed under it. His father, a driver for the state transport corporation, bought that shirt for him because he liked the idea of his son wearing a bus T-shirt.

The gate was mostly open to that white building; the black mesh gates were tall but non-threatening like a well-dressed IT employee. Ever since they found out that the owners didn’t live there, they spent most of their time in the compound of that house, playing with rocks and running after squirrels with funny names, Kencha, Manja, Goobe.

It didn’t take long for the families living there to notice them. There were only two of them; both lived on the ground floor. The first one, a husband and wife, loved their presence and often called them inside and gave them biscuits and milk and fish and Rasna juice that always had too much sugar. The other one—a husband, a wife and four children, three girls and one boy, the youngest, the cork who finally gave his mother her body back, not entirely though—despised them.

It was a bright Tuesday afternoon—the kind that made clouds glimmer like cotton pearls stuck together—when Meenakshi Aunty took Janani and Hari to the terrace to help her hang clothes. On the terrace, something caught Janani’s eye, past the vast expanse of trees that were only seen from three-floored buildings, two long square metal pillars perpendicularly arranged, one came from the ground stood straight and the other slept horizontally on it. There was a large block attached to the back... or the front of it, she couldn’t tell, and it was rotating, sometimes clockwise and sometimes anti.

She showed it to Hari who said that it was a weapon that protected the Earth from aliens, a ray gun. Janani had her own theory; she said it was a giant clock showing time to people who lived in the sky. Eventually, they settled on "a giant clock that showed time to the sky people and also fired laser beams against aliens."

They decided that it was of utmost importance to keep an eye on the device every day. So, they did, in two-hour shifts. Protectors of the Earth. They made careful observations and noted it down in a complimentary black-hardbound diary. If the binding was hard, the business was serious.

“machine spins slowly at first then fast”
“it didn’t start at the usual time today”
“no spinning happens when it is raining, rain affects working” 
“it spun halfway to right and then halfway back and one full circle from the left side”.

But that day, something was different, Janani broke protocol to call Hari.

“So, what is it,” Hari asked his sister as they climbed up the stairs of the white building.

“I don’t know, it looks like a black bindi above it,” she replied, she’d written that in the observation diary too, “a black bindi showed up”.

A Black bindi that ate the sky.

“And it came out of nowhere?” 

She didn’t reply, it was easier to climb stairs when you breathe through your nose. When they reached, Hari noticed that the bindi was slowly growing in size. They sat down, the diary on his lap, “maybe that’s the alien ship,” he said, “maybe”.

Soon, many bindis began appearing all around the sky like round stars. It was an inverted night, bright sky, black stars. The bindis spread rapidly and began merging, each like an inkblot. They were both very scared now but soon it wouldn’t matter. There was thunder that made it seem as though the world was inside the stomach of a giant.

Hari sat cross-legged with the diary on his lap, Janani cross-legged in front of him. The sky fell to the earth, the universe folded itself six times like a freshly pressed bed-sheet and vanished.

****

Palani put Genesis on his computer table and dusted his hands. He smiled looking at his creation.

The Genesis was a glass cube, the size of a cat’s coffin, with stainless-steel reinforcements at the corners and a valve on top to secure it and maintain a vacuum. It consisted of deuterium isotopes—a stable hydrogen isotope—placed very close together at the centre of the vacuum chamber. From what he had read online, the universe, when it burst into existence, was too hot to form elements—for about 12 seconds—but it did have the ingredients for making them, so it must’ve come from somewhere? What if it was always there just waiting for the right conditions?

Since deuterium was what formed that first hydrogen atom. He bombarded it with EMR to increase its temperature. The theory is that when the deuterium disintegrates from the high temperature a bigbang will occur causing space to be created in a vacuum.  

There was something at the centre right now, when he inspected it with his picoscope, the particles looked like balls of wool vibrating. But he could just not show if those particles were in space or if they were just in an excited state. Show work, take mark. The silicon atoms from the glass also interfered with observing the centre so he unscrewed the valve a little but immediately the particles inside began compressing onto each other. Oh shit oh shit oh shit he quickly tried to screw the valve back but as vacuum broke the particles escaped with a shockwave, shaking everything in the room. Palani sighed, ah you idiot! it was raining, “what if the world is inside the stomach of a giant?” He laughed.

It was thundering outside as though the world was inside the stomach of a giant.