PASSWORD

Sreekumar K.

     There was nothing that you didn’t know about Mishra, I mean Praveen Mishra, and most of it you learned well before seeing him. He himself talked a lot about his personal life, his view of life and his way of life. He was a programmer, an atheist and a rich leftist.

     But then there was one thing which not many people knew. Where did all his money come from? He had a sizeable income and he paid his taxes religiously. What was his real source of income? He hardly worked for companies and had no one working under him. He was free most of the time. His software called e-vaccine from which he was officially earning all his money was not selling at all. No one had found it useful.

     I knew how he got all that money because I was the one who gave him most of it. None of his customers were on record. Not even me.

 Mishra, as you would have suspected by now, was a professional hacker.

 I met him years ago through a friend. His wasn’t such a known name among the e-circles in those days. I was doing market research for an about-to-abort software company and I badly needed some reliable data. Gone are the days when market researchers walk around or make other people walk around with checklists and pencils. Most of it is available on the net, or you can get it done over the net. If nothing works you can approach a hacker to download chunks of business e-mails and rummage through them and get what you want.

 I was told that Mishra could help me in downloading and sorting any amount of mails.

     It was true. He was amazing. Punctual and business-like. I got what I wanted. Later when I started my own firm he was my main resource person. With his help, I was able to prepare readymade profiles of any market segment of almost any given population. Companies paid me well. 75% of it went to Mishra. Still, I was left with more than what I needed. We never had a written agreement. But we agreed strongly with each other on a lot of things. We disagreed more strongly with each other on a lot of other things.

     One thing we differed strongly with each other was in the arrangement of our offices. Mishra’s office, a small room, on the third floor overlooking a busy street, was always neat and tidy. It was literally paper-free. He had the same wallpaper on all his computers and he used blow-ups of the same as real wallpapers. It was an aerial view of a metropolis at night. He would have been trying to state that the world inside a chip is like a metropolis with its traffic, junctions, blocks, gates, bad sectors, good sectors and areas affected by cancer or whatever new atrophy was there.

     Mine was different. Totally different. Except that it was also on the third floor of a building. Oh! Sorry, mine was on the fourth floor.

     We also had different political views, loved different movies, music, food and vehicles. This made our conversation possible. Otherwise, he would have been quite reticent. I had no idea what all things he could do. Being with him was like being with a sage whose powers were unknown to us, but who could scare us all the same. I knew that he set goals for himself and work hard towards attaining them. I don’t even play football.

     His wife had left him for a dear friend of his a few years ago.

     Though I was a trained social psychologist, I was no match for Mishra when it came to insight and acumen. All I could do was to give him more and more raw information from the field. I could never satisfactorily answer all his questions. But I enjoyed all our discussions.

     Recently I have observed a certain slant in his interest to human relationships. He started talking about romance, a subject he had always avoided. He never told me the background of his doubts on the subject. First I thought that he had fallen in love or was about to.

The first time I noticed it was when he asked me whether I had read Erich Fromm on Love. I had.

He borrowed the book from me and after that every now and then he would bring up the subject of romance. Most of the time, he would wait for an appropriate opportunity to talk about it. I knew this from his body language. He behaved like a five-year-old boy who had just played ‘house’ with a younger girl. Sometimes he would not find a proper context to talk about love. Then he would bring it up abruptly and then feel nervous about it. I noticed that he had downloaded from the net so much about love.

     I knew I was right. If this man was not in love no one was.

     I watched him in parties, sneaked into his mails (using his own software), and monitored his movements. Before this he had kept no secrets about his personal life. His ex-wife had become a widow. Was he patching up with her? Or else who would take a fancy on this 58-year-old recluse whose only interests were computers, money and charity?

     Yes, that is one thing I haven’t mentioned. Most of the money he made went into charity. There were always letters addressed to this perennial Santa Claus thanking him for the help rendered or gifts received. He was not so anonymous in his charity work. As his philanthropy became more known, he was more and more pestered by those in need. He had no difficulty in saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and it was his final word in either case.

     Now why would such a person hide his affair? Is it an undesirable one? Perhaps a very young girl? Some orphan he had helped?  I had enough of it and I decided to confront him openly.

     But I didn’t have to. He would have sensed something, for he himself brought it up.

“Gautam, you may think I am an eavesdropper, or even worse, a peeping Tom. True, that is how I make my money and I cannot afford to have any respect for other people’s secrecy or privacy. I myself don’t keep many secrets. The only secrets I keep back from you and others are the professional ones and secrecy is the very nature of those things. If I don’t keep them to myself, then they won’t be worth keeping at all. And I am willing to sell all my hacking secrets and the tools for a handsome amount. But those who are interested can’t afford it”

“Is this what you wanted to tell me?”

“No, it is something else. Generally, I don’t read other people’s e-mails, though I do download them for others. But I chanced to come across this one. A string of mails between an unmarried young couple. I have the whole correspondence in one folder here. It is very large. Too long and too frequent. The boy’s name is Chandra and the girl’s is Padma. There isn’t much about them in their profiles. Only that both of them are still students, their hobbies are reading and music and that they have part-time jobs. They are from different cities. They met each other once or twice, but the romance started very slowly, only after they had exchanged a lot of e-mails.”

“Mishra, you are not saying anything exceptional or even interesting.”

“I am not, I know. But there is something unusual here, at least for you and me.”

“What is it?”

“Gautam, they are not real people,” he made it sound like science fiction.

“Mishra, I am sick of this. There is nothing unusual here. None of them on the net are real people. Nobody reveals his identity. Cyber criminals like you and me get away because of that.”

“Oh, you got me wrong. They are real people.”

“Now that could be unusual. How do you know they are real people?”

“Gautam, it is hard to explain anything to you. You should read these mails.”

“I am not interested.”

“But this is an assignment. And you can charge me anything.”

     What is this? Has he gone mad? Is he drunk? Does he regret having taken from me the whole three-fourths of my earnings and wants to give back some of it?

 “Gautam, I want you to prepare a psychoanalytical profile or whatever you call it on this couple. I find this quite interesting.”

    Oh! My God, what is wrong with him? He has been reading the e-mails of this couple for almost a year and now he wants me to read them. As if it is not enough, I am to prepare their personality profiles for him so that he can enjoy his peeping better.

“Are you planning to blackmail or nail them for something?”

“Come on, I am not that dry. And even if I wanted to, these people are not real.”

“Mishra….”

“OK, I will explain. How do you know you are real?”

“Bye Mishra…. I haven’t done my day’s crossword yet…”

“OK, I won’t ask you any more questions. Now listen. You are real because I can touch you and feel you with all my senses.’

“Thank you. It’s the nicest comment anyone made on my body odour”

“Now, if we met only on the net, I can still send you a hard mail in your address and find out whether you are really Dr. Gautam, Research psychologist…”

“Of course there are ways of circumventing that. I can employ a secretary and pose as Brad Pitt or Britney Spears. Or even Obama. No, I don’t like him after he returned.”

“But still there is always an address and I can track you down in most of the cases. However, the relevant point here is that you will let me know your postal address after a few e-mails or I will ask you for the same.”

“Yes, now you are interesting...”

“We exchange the postal address because, though we are netizens and eke out a living by being like that, we have depended on our hard mails and identified with our postal address for too long to be perfect netizens.”

“Double Jeopardy, habits Die Hard, Matrix Reloaded …”

Both of us had this habit of quipping with movie titles when conversations got boring.

“Sort of. But a postal address refers to a geographical area, a place you can visit and live in. It exists even when you are not there.”

“But Adi Sankara says…”

“Sankara is dead. You can visit his tomb if you have his address. I am talking of real life.”

“Quite interesting. Are you planning to visit Chandra and Padma and be the best man at their marriage? That is really nice of you.”

“I may, but for now let’s think about ourselves. We still value the patch of earth we stand on. We have come a long way from the territorial behaviour of the primates and the settlement instinct of the ‘gatherers’. But we still love our good earth, so to speak.”

“Pearl S. Beck, right?”

“OK, you’re well read. Gautam, listen. They say only very few people can afford to have a piece of land in the days to come. We will all be Jews. Migrating birds. By 2050 there will not be enough space for all of us on this earth.”

“Are we migrating to cyberspace?”

“Yes, in a few light years. What? You nitwit, if cyberspace is space light years should be time. See Gautam, my point is the reciprocal of that. Did we invent the cyberspace to prepare ourselves for this emerging situation? Is it a kind of terminal we ourselves created to stay in before we figure out which way to go?”

“Like that one at JFK? Tom Hanks was wonderful.”

“Stop it. You don’t realize the seriousness of the situation. I suspect that we were becoming territorial in a different way. Living in flats was our first step in this direction. Everyone living above the ground floor has actually built his castle in the air. Now we are taking a quantum leap. In a knowledge-based world like today’s, your mind counts more than your limbs. So all you want is an abode for your mind, a domain if you prefer. And an e-mail address serves just that purpose. My suspicions are confirmed by the e-mails between Chandra and Padma.”

“They haven’t told you where they are from?”

“Worse, they haven’t told each other where they are at present. But I am sure they are real people. This is an entirely new generation. They take the cyberspace for real and their e-mail address for a real address.”

     Now I had a doubt. Was he pulling my leg? Did he cook up all these e-mails to sell me his new philosophy about virtual reality? He had a criminal mind. Criminals always loot their own house before they go for their neighbour’s. Did he read all those books on love to write these mails?

“But, Mishra, it is real.”

“How?”        

“See, when you talk about a postal address, you call it real because you are talking about the macrocosm. An e-mail address is also real. Only that it is at a microcosmic level. You can zero it down to a few gates or whatever you call it.”

“But actually you can’t. Assigning a material existence in the microcosmic level to an e-mail address is next to impossible. And then it is not a tangible entity like a grain of sand in your courtyard. It is only the programmed behaviour of a few chips.”

“So is your postal address. Tomorrow someone else will live there and your letterbox will behave differently.”

“Still….. I don’t know. I don’t want to force my ideas on you. But the way these young people take things for granted and the infinite capacity within ourselves to adapt to new realities surprise me. Now ‘new realities’ is a funny phrase in itself. What do I mean by new realities? Are there old ones? Are there many? Is it possible?”

“Mishra, I share your anxieties regarding the way these fools rush in where we angels fear to tread. I am as old as you. But other people always have a sense of reality different from ours. It’s hard to put up with the fact that we are living in different worlds. But we are.”

“That is nothing new to me. My wife and I slept on the same bed but we lived in two different worlds. Proper communication happened only after she married someone else. But this is a different situation altogether. Chandra and Padma are living in the same world, but it is different from the world shared by you and me. Cyberspace has come to dominate so much the way we think and finally, here we have a young man and a girl passionately in love with each other, sharing their worries, their dreams and their hopes and not wanting to know or letting the other know anything about their real whereabouts. They just don’t see that their world is unreal and fragile.”

“I think it is an unnecessary worry. Our world also is unreal. Moreover, see how we take our own reality for granted. I know my wife is at home now. My sense of reality tells me that she is in the kitchen, cooking for the kids. But she may be practicing her guitar lessons. Many of the stars we see died a long time ago. And officially your money and mine come from programming but actually, it comes from hacking. As for the fragility of the cyberspace, we depend so much on their world that if theirs is fragile ours is equally fragile. Cyberspace can be rebuilt, but not our world.”

“But Gautam, it is not about the end of the world that I am talking. I am talking about the transition that happens to the sense of the reality of the entire humanity.”

“I understand. My question is: what is new?”

“What’s new! I can’t explain further. Read these emails. They may tell you something. And I would like to have the profile by next Tuesday. Can you do it?”

“In four days? I won’t even finish reading them in four days.”

“OK, take your time. But keep me posted.”

*     *     *      *      *     *     *     *    *    *    *    *

 

     Mishra was very keen about my progress. He asked me to explain my strategy the very next day.

     Four days later Mishra came to see me. I showed him the progress of my work and he was happy about its reliability.

     I was planning to use a double simulation. This is usually used in cases where only the conversations between the subjects are the only available data.

     First, I deconstructed the mails into factoids. Then, sorted them out as stimuli and responses. The responses were further earmarked as male and female. At this stage, there were a lot of neutral ones. These would be used as concurrent items. All stimuli are, by hypothesis, questions from the analyst. The male responses were chartered out and a rough profile was prepared. This was bridged using neutral responses. The same was done for the female subject also. The rhetoric questions were mostly considered as both stimuli and responses and were used to clarify doubtful points.

    Then an internal duplication was done. Each profile which was written in the words of the patient was interpreted using psychological tools for analysis and reconstruction. This is a creative phase. Most of it is based on intuition rather than logic. With known subjects, you can extrapolate the results with further evidence. In this case, it was not possible. It was a very engaging work. At times I wished I had the intuition and the insight that Mishra had. But then, he was not trained to do this kind of work. More than training it needs a thorough awareness of ‘types’ and other practical knowledge which is possible only through long-term fieldwork. Mishra was a klutz when it came to working with people.

     Mishra was very happy to receive the final picture. He said it was a portrait. We went out and dined well. He paid me handsomely. In fact, it was the biggest cheque I had that year.

    He never bothered me with Chandra and Padma for over a month.

    I was starting to wonder whether he helped them get married.

    What was he doing with the profiles I supplied? Was he still reading their e-mails?

Hence, it was a surprise for me when he told me that he had rerouted their mails. Each person’s mails came directly to him. It would not reach the other person.

    Mails began to pour in from both sides and Mishra sought my help in analyzing them. They were all too predictable for me. A strong and passionate one, potential virals if posted on a Facebook page. Both of them were wheezing and gasping for breath. Each word had a strength of passion, the like of which I had never heard or read anywhere before. What do they read nowadays? Back to Shakespeare and Byron? Their names appeared on other sites too, on bulletin boards on the net, and on all kinds of search devices.

  Mishra was not very happy about what he was doing. Often he looked very tired and guilty. I had never suspected he could have a sense of guilt in him. He wasn’t punctual anymore in his work. His eyes were sunk, his face was taut and drawn and he stayed up late and he drank more and more. Talked less and less. Yet he was very systematic. He documented all our discussions on how the lovers were behaving as they groped for each other in the big bad dark digital world. They were waiting for the other’s response like people outside operation theatres waiting for news from within.

    In fact, one attachment of a mail showed a moving ECG. The next day Mishra also went for his routine ECG. He said it was disappointing. No luck, he said. He said he wished he had a bad report.

     Was Mishra waiting for their passion to drain away and their love to wane? If that was the case, he was thoroughly disappointed there too. They were much more passionate than ever. Was he trying to teach them a lesson about the fragile and the illusory nature of their world? Then they were bad students and not learning any lessons. Instead, they used every measure and device and strategy they could to trace each other. Neither of them expressed any regret that they were not careful enough to get the other person’s address or even the phone number. They were sure that they could turn the net inside out like a shopping bag and find their partner somewhere in there.

     Mishra would have thought he was losing the battle. He was looking very sick and impatient.

“This is a match, Gautam. They only have to give up their hope for them to win each other. The moment it dawns on them that they had made a conceptual error about their existence, I am going to link their mails again and give their world back to them. It will be a story they tell their friends, their children, and their children’s children. It will be a case in evidence for others like them.”

     No such nonsense. They didn’t give up and one night Mishra rang me up.

“Gautam, I have got cancer.”

“What, Mishra? What are you talking about?”

“Mishra, it is true. I have got cancer on my hard disc.”

“Oh, Mishra, you scared me.”

“I know what you mean. But this is worse than that. A lot of data is missing. Most of them are damn confidential and I don’t have any backup.”

     True. Cancer could be more fatal than a virus.

“Do you know where I can get a new disc? I want a replacement tonight.”

     I told him to wait and rang up a supplier and demanded a spot delivery right then.

     The phone rang again in twenty minutes.

“Thank you Gautam,” Mishra rang off. He should be hard at work, racing against time. Usually, he never puts his phone down when he calls. I do that, though hours after I wanted to.

     I called him back after two hours. He was very busy. He had replaced the disc. He was trying to reclaim the data from the old one. He was also searching through all his CDs and piecing them together.

     After an hour he called me.

     His voice was low and I had to ask him to speak louder. I thought he was sleepy. No, it was his remorse.

“Gautam, I think I had done a horrible mistake in rerouting their e-mails. I am talking about Chandra and Padma. I can’t link them back. I have my old hard disc in my hand. Their world is tucked in somewhere there. Too tiny for anyone or anything to reach. Or maybe, it has already been eroded by cancer. Unless I can transfer the information on this one to the new one, I can’t re-establish their link. What should I do?”

“Mishra, go to bed. It is too late. Nothing can happen in one night. Take rest and work on it tomorrow morning. I am sure you can do it and these things always take their own time, no matter what we do.”

     By 11:30 I had another phone call.

“Obviously, I couldn’t go to sleep. I am still working on it. We are very old people, Gautam. Sitting up all day has given me some pain all over my back. I wish I had remarried after she left me. It is very hard to massage your own back. Now I will have a bath, take a cup of tea and go back to work. See you in the morning. You know it is very frustrating to work without the right tools.”

     The phone rang again at 1:30. I didn’t pick it up.

     Nothing happens in one night.

*       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

 

     It has been a week since Mishra died. That phone call at 1:30 was not from him. It was his servant trying to get more help. It was a coronary attack, from overwork. He had had a bad report and like a typical school kid, he never showed it to anyone.

     Today, looking down from this balcony, the city looks just like the wallpapers Mishra loved so much. A blown-up microchip.

     On the streets, impulsive vehicles are racing and overtaking, colourful lights are coming on and going off.

     Blocks and blocks of dark buildings encasing darker secrets. Traffic jams holding sequences of impulses. Gates, junctions, half adders, full adders.

     Layers and layers of existence.

     The traffic came to a standstill. People crossed from either side.

     A young man, weaving through the crowd, crossed the road, met a girl on the other side, held her hand and crossed the road back bringing her to the other side.

     Now they are walking hand in hand along the pavement.

     Chandra and Padma.

     It is easy to see they are Chandra and Padma.

     The evidence is clear and unmistakable - they are lovers.