We are like that only. We praise villainy; we prostrate before villains; we prefer villains; we poll for villains and then we put them on the covers of our magazines. Villainy Wins! Three cheers for villains! Look at yourself, look into your head if you have one of your own, tell yourself the truth if you can. And tell us who’s your preferred one. Tell us it’s not a villain. Or The Villain. The one who swept the polls and the one you put on the cover. Villains are, often who we secretly want to be but haven’t the trick or the temerity to become, isn’t it? Everybody likes a villain, the one you can’t become but would want to. Oh, what power. What privilege. What a thing of pride. To be TheVillain. To exude villainy, to be the centre of the aura that everyone’s apprehensive to even approach. You walk and everything around scatters away, a magnetic repulsion. What a thing to be. And why not? Why be shy? Badi baat hai, not everybody’s cup of tea to be a badmaash, or mug of coffee. Villains are a thing; you don’t get them every day. How long has it been since Mogambo? Or any such with a hat for a face and a knife for a nose? But they are not like that anymore. They are different. They don’t have to wear hats or brandish knives. They simply say things. And sometimes they don’t say things. And that is how they come to be known for their villainy. Sometimes they also do things, who knows, they must be doing things, but they do those things in such a way that everybody knows they have done it but nobody can tell for sure. You know one when you get one. Villain, I mean. And when you get one, well, well, turn pussy, get into the well and pray Tommy Stout doesn’t come around to pull you out. It’s the truth. Why not say it like it is? The fellow is a villain, and it isn’t easy being around one.

More so when we have nothing to match him, and so he rules the street, or gali, or para, or pradesh, or the entirety of who we are. Admit it. Accept things as they are. Go. And on your way in feel free to salute and scrape. It’s a good survival strategy, endorsed by our elders. Paani mein reh ke magarmachchh se bair? Not easy to take on a magarmachchh, in the waters or outside. Magarmachchh hi magarmachchh se bair le sakta hai; we know, we have been told, the story of our times, isn’t it?

But to be a magarmachchh? Want to be? Like that? Feared and loathed? Assumed awake and plotting even when they might be genuinely snoozing on the excess of a gory meal grabbed, chewed up by reeking teeth, and gulped down that reeking gullet? A creature that repels more things than merely trust? A creature that is, well, not exactly what you’d want to set out to be, right? I mean, you’d still want to be called Tiger. Or Lion. They are beasts of prey too, they grab and gulp and they too never brush their teeth. But you’d still not mind Tiger or Lion. But magarmachchh? Yes? No. That settled then, not magarmachchh. Not like this one.

But what is one to do? He’s there. Everywhere. All the time. He can’t be missed, or be given the miss. He is watching you, surveying your behaviour, assessing what you might deserve, a snap, a bite, a killer blow with a whiplash of that jagged tail, what? Have a crew that can take him, put him away? No? Then it may be simpler; consider yourself fortunate, you’ve been spared a scare. And a few scars too. But you are lucky not to have to contemplate any competition. Now don’t lose time, hurry up and secure your future. Give in. Give up. Sing the sordid song of sycophants and be done with it. All shall be well once you are on the side of the villain and the villain is on your side. There will be no more anything or anybody to be afraid of because you have become part of the horror, friend of magarmachchh.

The nests were always going to give. The birds were always going to weigh them down. These birds. Such birds. Such a slur on birds. We shall come to them. Eventually. We shall bomb their wings and torpedo their feathers. We shall fling on them the weight of mountains so they may be forever buried. Once and for all. Or we shall command the skies to fall, swoop down on their wings of fiery cloud and end their flight. Forever. We shall come to them. We shall come to that. Things that fly, bird-like things I mean, have a tendency to go beyond reach and begin to do their own thing. That’s a danger to us, the tendency to have a mind that does its own thing and a body that flies beyond reach. That must be stopped. Forthwith. Clear the airspace, it is ours, no enemy craft allowed; trespassers will be shot. Do not believe that nonsense about cloud cover. Clouds cover nothing; clouds only reveal. Rain, for instance. Or lightning. Or sun. Or sky. The game of clouds is not to cover things, it is to lay things bare. They move. They expose. They are forever moving. They are forever exposing. Ever seen a stationary cloud? Ever been able to nail one to whatever lies above in a way that it becomes a fixture? Let us know.

Meantime, shore up some self-respect and figure out what can happen behind cloud cover and what cannot. Waise, these fighter-jet-type things, you know, nowadays they can tear into sound and light and the rest of it, so one must wonder where cotton-wool clouds stand in that category. Imagine an engineered shard of reinforced metal and fibreglass at those speeds. Then imagine clouds. Then imagine cover. I am tempted to imagine more than cover, as it happens. I am tempted to imagine coverup. Beherhaal, jo bhi ho. Birds will be birds, we need to be Us, now more than ever. Birds of steel or birds of style, they can both turn misguided and beyond our control or manipulation. This thing called flight, it is not such an acceptable thing.

Which is why, you may recall, when I mentioned birds, I mentioned them in a particular and well-meditated way. Soney ki Chidiya-waala Bharat, I said. And people got me wrong, which is not unusual. When I say we are a democracy, people think I mean it for everyone, whereas I only mean we, as in me and my shadow. When I say I have done in seven years what they could not do in 70, people start saying: but you are only undoing things, not understanding that undoing is also an act of doing. I am undoing. Wait till your turn comes, you shall be undone too, tell me how it feels.

So, where was I? Haan, soney ki chidiya. I meant the bird that has been put to sleep. You know why they need to be put to sleep, these unruly flying things cutting the sky to ribbons with no direction or discipline. Look at this one. It has been hung upside down, claws braced against ionosphere.

Look at how. You see that thing swinging by its neck. I cannot figure what this thing is. Is it a manual? Is it some explosive device? It is an explosive device attached to a manual on how the device must be triggered and exploded. I cannot tell. We are looking into it, investigations are on, experts are at it. First information reports tell us, psst-psssst, it may be something called a CoolKit. It looks innocent but it is actually a killer contraption. It floats in, unbeknownst, under all radars, cloud or no cloud, and pulverizes everything in its vicinity. That’s why they call it that: CoolKit. Looks cool but it’s a kind of kit. You know, kit. They wear them when they set out to do that. I am too terrified to mention particulars. This bird had a CoolKit. This bird had to have it. Look at her, the sight of her. Soney ki Chidiya, the bird we put to sleep. The bird I promised.

Excerpted with permission from Salt and Pepper: Dispatches From a Fractured Republic, Sankarshan Thakur, Seagull Books.

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