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Interview

Posted on June 16, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

She moved the microphone and wondered for the thousandth time that day, why she was doing this. From her brief tenure on the college campus she had learnt that it was difficult to distinguish between the students beyond a point. It was easier to just pin them to a type card and typecast them. The girl with the microphone made mental notes of how many nerds she scored in a row or she tried to remember what the second guy in a string of macho ‘movie stars’ looked like. She never succeeded.

It was a job and even though she was on a college campus she found herself longing for the time she had spent in an old age home. The people in the twilight of their lives had the invigorating stories and opinions. The ass-munches with the too much testosterone that they wore as a badge they called attitude…not so much. They were just exhausting.

She finally understood why her producer had insisted that she interview a hundred student per college, at the very least. It was like talking to the many heads of a single organism. There were no unique answers to the questions she had begun reciting like an autobot and was convinced that her interviewees possessed little more than the most basic herd intelligence. It troubled her to think that these sheep drove cars, solved complex equations and exhibited an alarming keenness to mate. She hoped all the girls had the number of a good abortionist on speed dial because it truly terrified her to think of what the next generation of the confident Indian would be like. She said as much to the friend who called during her lunch break. As her head finally got too heavy for her to hold up she sighed, “This is not why I became a journalist. I have no faith left in the human race.”

Her friend made some noises about it getting better and that she had to remember that it was only a job and that it would not be called work if she had too much fun doing it. She nodded without responding to all that was said and when it was appropriate to do so, she disconnected. Then she waited for her cameraman to finish the idli-sambhar he was wolfing down with great relish.

When it was time she took a moment to let the stiffness in her lower back leave her before they trudged back to the college campus. On their way in they exchanged smiles with the principal who was also returning from his lunch break. The watchmen were familiar with their faces and had even struck up a conversation with the cameraman. They didn’t seem to think too highly of the students either and had their own suggestions about how she should approach the piece. She told him to set up their post-lunch rig facing the chemistry lab and wandered off to collect her thoughts.

It was a piece about Indian youth and what they believed in and was slated to appear alongside other programming the channel was planning to celebrate sixty years of Indian independence. Even though her piece was enjoying a long lead time, she felt like there was no room for her to prepare. Hour after hour of footage rolled and she didn’t hear anything that would make the viewers sit up and take notice. She didn’t know how it was possible for an entire generation of students at one of Mumbai’s best known colleges to go through theirs lives as students without having any opinions that mattered.

That’s when she noticed him. He had the lean physique of a swimmer or an athlete and the facial hair and spectacles of a scholar. He had hovered around the periphery when she first began her interviews and even though she’d noticed him on several occasions after that, he always seemed to disappear when she went looking for people to interview. He din’t immediately look like all the other students she had interviewed. There was the Slut, the Hot Girl, the Cute One, the Stud, the Roadside Romeo, the Wannabe Movie Star (male and female), the Blowhard, the Lip Smacker (who made it hell to listen to the audio on playback) and the Idiot. Ninety percent of the respondents in the three hundred-plus interviews she had conducted fit into one of these categories.

There were some who treated the interview like their audition for a talent show and she had to exercise every iota of willpower to refrain from punching those people in the face. She looked away for a moment, certain that the bearded one would disappear but when she checked again he was still there. She reached for her notes and consciously took her eyes off him, giving him another opportunity to pull his disappearing act but when she got to her feet he was right where she had last seen him. So she walked up and started her spiel, “Hi, I’m working on a piece about Indian youth and their opinions about sixty years of independence. I was wondering whether you would consider answering a few questions…?”

He fixed her with intelligent but intense eyes, like he needed the eye contact to make up his mind. When he nodded she mistook his response for a negative and it was only when he followed her to the spot where the camera had been set up that she realised that she was getting her interview.

“Do I sit here?”

She nodded, “This is Vikas, my cameraman and he will mike you up.”

He sat in silence and allowed the cameraman to do his dance around him, winding the wire this way and that until Vikas handed him the little lavaliere and said, “put this inside your shirt.”

He did and Vikas eased it up over the open neck of his shirt and clipped it between the first and second buttonholes. Vikas slipped on his headphones and said, “Give me a level.”

“What?”

“Say something.”

“Oh, hello, hello, mike check, one two three.”

Vikas nodded at her, “Ready Akhila.”

She popped over to peer into the eyepiece and there he was, slightly to the right of the frame. She looked quizzically at Vikas because he had placed everyone else in the centre of the frame. He shrugged, “Looks better this way.”

“This whole setup we’ll shoot like this?”

He shrugged.

She made a note in her diary, they would have to alternate the opinions from this setup with the ones where the interviewees were framed in the centre so that the piece didn’t come off as unsettling on a subliminal level because too many of the off-centre segments were edited together.

She sat down in the chair her ass had grown extra familiar with over the past few days and smiled, “Start by telling us your name.”

“Aveek. Aveek Kumar.”

“Hi Aveek, my name is Akhila. So tell me, what does independence mean to you?”

He didn’t respond immediately, didn’t seem to have even heard the question. She hoped he wasn’t one of those people who froze when they realised they were on camera, “Aveek, what does…”

“Nothing. It’s a dead word.”

“Can you please elaborate?”

“We are not really independent. This is all a lie. Nobody is really independent.”

“Are you sure about that? I think I am independent. You look like you are here of your own free will.”

He blinked, “I’ve seen you trying to get people to answer your questions about independence. It appears that you are doing this job because it pays you a decent salary. That is not independence, that is slavery.”

“That is definitely an interesting viewpoint.”

“Like I said, independence is a dead word. There is no free will. Everything we do, you, me, my parents, your neighbours…it is all prompted by the actions or expectations of others. You wish to become a journalist or an actor or a lawyer because of the people you look up to or because of the people who can bring influence to bear upon you. It’s the parents who buy a toy stethoscope for their child’s first birthday and teach him how to use a thermometer before they teach him how to swim or ride a bicycle. It’s the interviews given by film stars who allow camera crews into their living rooms so that impressionable young people can covet that lifestyle. Nobody thinks about the consequences of choosing a career path.”

“So are you disappointed by the progress the country has made?”

“This is not progress a country has made. This is the extent to which it has been allowed to grow by people with vested interests, both from within and without.”

“So in your opinion, what is the solution?”

“This.”

He was holding up a device that looked like a pen.

“I don’t understand.”

“Blunt force trauma. It doesn’t change anything but it shakes people’s foundations for a few minutes.”

“I’m not sure I understa…”

He clicked the button at the top of the ‘pen’ and in the background, the chemistry lab exploded. Dark clouds of smoke began stalking the sky and she couldn’t believe her eyes or catch her breath enough to be able to speak. The wailing voices of the injured began to filter out through the roar of the flames within. A few people were inching forward towards the oily smoke when a secondary explosion knocked them off their feet and shattered every window on all three storeys of the building.

With great effort Akhila recovered her breath and whispered to Vikas, “Tell me you got that.”

“Yes, yes.”

Unbeknownst to either of them, Aveek, had disappeared in the confusion.

The police would find the bushy beard in a trashcan not too far from where the interview was conducted. None of the students who were shown the video seemed to recognize the young man on screen as having been a classmate. Investigators weren’t able to get a usable fingerprint off the lavaliere and it would take over six months before they were able to narrow down which sets of prints (from all the ones they collected off every available surface) belonged to the terrorist.

Akhila quit her job as a TV journalist the day she was cleared of any complicity in the attack.

One week later she received a note through the mail slot in her door, “Now you are really free to find out what you want to do with your life.”

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