Navsindhi Dabbe
“..Darta hai, dabbo ko aage karta haii,” the girl screaming this could not have been more than seventeen years old. Clad in a red top, black jeans, tote bag and the fiery spirit of the revolution, she raised her voice at the sea of towering metallic figures in front of her.
The figures had brown-skinned faces with varying lengths of facial hair across the group. They all seemed to have the same face with ever so light differences. Differences so subtle you wondered they were a sort of cruel joke at society’s dance with identity. These men were containers of metal, wrung together with cable wires, microcontrollers and a plug extending to the clouds. Some biomass slapped on top of them and saffron kurta and a white pajama to cover their modesties. There was a single rectangular light panel suspended on all their foreheads, the kind of indicator light you would see on a robot vacuum. Currently it stayed off. To the revolutionary girl there was no awareness of what the light being switched off meant. And neither did she or the few other revolutionaries behind her anticipate the color of the light.
SD held onto the girl’s shoulder as she stood up to the Sindnoids before them. Their collective was only 8 members strong because dissent had died a thousand deaths in the last decade and taken dissenters as martyrs; history documents the literal and the spiritual.
Atrocities were auctioned in open and oppression knocked at 7 out of 10 doors yet the crime SD and Sharmila — the red top girl — stood for was, for the lack of words to describe it, unforgiving. It didn't let people sleep. Those were way more than 8 in number but after the Sindnoids — or as the citizens called them, Navsindhi Dabbe — came into rotation a couple of years ago, the courage to be on the street dwindled terribly. There was no pushing them or breaking free from them. Professional sprinters could not outrun the intelligently moving titanium legs of a Sindhu nationalist humanoid.
SD relaxed her grip on Sharmila. Not that holding onto her with dear life would matter if the sindnoid decided to forcibly remove any of them. Their gentlest of maneuvers could break your bones. It was this reality that gave them confidence to just stand there, looking passive. They had looked carefully at all eight of the dissenters wanting to reach the parliamentary grounds when they first arrived and then moved on to just stand and block them effortlessly. In those few seconds, their images had been circulated across the digital system of the state and the state had identified and categorised each one of them. The tireless agents on the network dug through their whole life leading up to that moment. Profiles were made of them across social, political, psychological and even across physiological areas and they had been ranked on their hostility. They knew that Sharmila has asthma, had a minor bipolar episode when she was 14 years old where she pushed a peer who would not stop talking about a goddess she had recently read about. They knew her aversion to broccoli, the creators she followed and each like, comment and reshare she did from the age she logged into a social media platform about the State, its operations or its machinery.
They even knew the kind of categories of pages SD liked to visit in Porntub, what made him ick and what got him off. They knew Samir and Jojo, two of the other eight, were in a secret relationship that none of their peers or friends knew about. They had been communicating with each other via a duplicate version log file committed weekly on the version control repository of a State sponsored web application supporting International Stock Exchange bids. What Samir and Jojo did not know was a team had been assigned to social engineer them out of this illness of men wanting to sleep with other men. This was the State’s representation of benevolence; a last attempt at bringing these wayward men into natural order. A beheading would follow at failure. After all, the state can only be so forgiving.
The State after scanning Nisha and Sunita — other two sisters of the eight — were, in the initial seconds, a bit confused. These were sisters with a youtube channel of forty lakh subscribers that produced upto 10 cooking tutorials a week. A couple of god fearing middle aged women who were dedicated and proud members of the digital workforce. Every fourth video would include a special mention of the supreme leader and they would ensure to have a huge picture of their revered bare chested god and smaller image of a saree clad goddess in an elegant pose. But the next scan gave them the RCA of their presence. Sunita’s son stood holding her hand. This anti-national had successfully misled his mother and his aunt by corrupting their thoughts with the lies of injustice and oppression. He had sown the seeds of rebellion and harvested hatred against the benevolent and compassionate State.
The last face scanned was comforting to the State. Lucky Singh was a stooge, a patriot in disguise. The State had planted thousands like him to play along with the revolutionaries and to keep them in check.
“Jab jab Naru darta hai, Dabbo ko aage karta hai” — Naru here was a floating placeholder. It represented whoever sat at the top. It did not matter that Naru did not call the Humanoid Enforcement Directorate and ask to begin a coordination with Capital City Police Force to deploy these robotic kurta warriors, the iron nationalists, on the road leading to the State’s House but he created a society where this was a piece of cake. The theocracy which the State embraced, the oppression and inequities Navsindh’s society beared may not have been designed by Naru but he codified it. Whether he saw it as an overbearing responsibility or his lifelong passion may define him in history, but as Sharmila and her revolutionary gang battered on with their sloganeering, one would only see the fascist and nothing beyond.
SD looked around and spotted a news byte going on a few metres to their left. It was State news, shooting content to curate for the evening primetime show. They would start by discussing 8 ordinary citizens and turn them into traitors and enemies of the state by the end of the show. The tale would be of greed, deception, control, power, foreign influence and anarchy. Sunita’s son would be branded a thought terrorist. Samir and Jojo would be outed and their entire social life would crumble. They would be fired and their company will be fined and coerced into bidding for State affairs. 70 percent of Navsindh lived in abject poverty but the primetime news anchor would scream and ask how a sane person would ever question the givings of Saint Naru. They will do an expose on SD’s Lower past. A liberal professor had written the petition to convert SD from a Lower to an Upper. These representations had a lot of subdivisions but being an Upper was the only thing keeping the Sindnoid from opening fire. They would say on the show, “Look at this man.. Just look at this man. He has been given the opportunity of a lifetime, of a lifetime. He could have been shot, no no, actually you know what, you know what, he SHOULD have been shot,” the anchor would look straight at the camera with disgust on his face and scream, “A clear reinforcement of the idea that a Lower can never ever be an Upper. The NATION WANTS TO SHOOT” he would keep staring straight ahead at the camera whilst animations flooded the screen.
There would be exaggerated visuals of the commotion followed by broken public property and infrastructure to drive certainty of their ill doings. Half of the Uppers would know they are fabricated but would never care more or less. What they would not show, what their 30 percent target audience is not interested in, is that the demonstration by the 8 citizens was for a six year old Lower girl who was assaulted by four saffron Upper men from an organisation with complete state backing.
“Jab jab Naru darta hai, dabbo ko aage karta hai,” screamed the group again.
The passive brooding nature of the sindnoids changed abruptly. The indicator on their foreheads suddenly lit up in orange. They stared right at the eight citizens and started moving towards them, beginning their effort to detain and displace them before the heads of state moved from the parliamentary buildings and entered this road.
“Saifu abhi,” Sharmila gestured at SD and they both beamlined to a huge mango tree in the vicinity. Sharmila hugged the trunk as SD used an infinitely shrinking polymer joined on two metal bolts connected to a titanium alloy chain. The underbellies of current society swore by it, they said no humanoid could break it.
The sindnoids caught six out of eight before they reached the mango tree. One ‘noid looked at the chain and went for it while the other went to grab Sharmila from behind. SD was already being dragged into a nearby detention vehicle. He shouted his nare at the top of his lungs, looking at Sharmila, the presence of solidarity implicitly understood.
Sharmila closed her eyes and hugged the tree as tightly as she could, hoping the chain would hold. The next minute, she felt gushing heat in both her wrists. The kind of startled you become when you suddenly wake up from a nap you took while sitting upright. It instantly changed to unbearable pain that shot through both her arms to her neck and down her spine. She felt it at her toe tips, her pelvis and she noticed it was extremely irksome in her neck. As she opened her eyes, she saw red. The sindnoid had pulled at her from behind. She had been ripped off from the tree like a bandage. Both her hands ended at her wrists now, a visceral image of blood, bones and muscle sprayed everywhere as she looked down. On the tree, attached to the chains were her interlocked hands. Bones protruding from the two ends and blood dripping down. The gold ring, a last gift from her dead father sat snug on her index finger. She cried and screamed for thirty seconds before abruptly passing out.
The two sindnoids paused in space, as if thinking. They thought for few seconds and reached a satisfactory conclusion. This dissenter, soon to be proven anti-national, had procured illegal materials and tried to bring harm to State property. Excessive force even though not preferred became a necessity.
SD and the others were let go after spending the night at the immediate detention center. The next day, they were moved to a reeducation center. The benevolent state and their forgiveness.