Kashi

Here Varanasi, Banaras and Kashi are used for the same place. Enjoy the story!!!

Yoshida hung up the call. The old woman on other side sounded trustworthy. It would be his first work trip. He was excited to explore Varanasi. “Paxton Calling”, phone rang. He picked up his best friend’s call.

Paxton: What up my man!

Yoshida(excited): I am going to Varanasi for a work trip.

Paxton: Man, we are 19 years old, we don’t go on work trips and where you would find money for food and lodging to help yourself in an unknown city.

Yoshida: It was one of those paid work things where one has to just reach to the place and food and accommodation would be provided by the owner; as in I am going to Varanasi to help an old aunty in maintaining her ancestral house and in exchange of this, I would be getting basic necessities till the period I am staying and doing work.

Paxton(disappointed): Oh, then why you didn’t you tell me about it, we could’ve gone Banaras together.

Yoshida(sighed): Yeah, I forgot.

He said this and hung-up leaving Paxton sulking.

He arrived Banaras from Imphal, his home town. The owner was present on the station to pick him up. She explained him his daily duties - to help her in maintaining her ancestral mansion for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week for 5 weeks and he would be provided basic necessities in exchange of his work.

He quickly became fond of his work and started enjoying Kashi – its calmness and invisible spirituality of Ganga River.

One day during cleaning the attic, he came across a 3 feet tall structure but it was oddly light. He found it strange because the structure’s exterior seemed metallic to him and on inspection, it had a solid body. He asked the lady about it. She told him that it was a toy statue that her uncle gifted her on her 20th birthday; it was a replica of how she looked when she was five. About statue’s solid body, she said that it had wood and iron wool stuffed making it light albeit having a solid body.

The lady gave Yoshida Rs. 3000/- as a stipend for his hard work of 5 weeks in the evening. He was delighted as it wasn’t expected of the owner to give him any money. With a happy conclusion, his work and a joyful time ended in Varanasi.

In Imphal, he studied BSc in Statistics at a local college. After three years of completion of the undergraduate programme, he cracked SSC CGPE for the post of Junior Intelligence Officer-I in Intelligence Bureau (IB). He was appointed to internet surveillance department. His daily duties included to check any suspicious activity on Internet across Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand and inform the suspected individuals to his senior in form of an excel sheet.

One fine day during his daily routine of internet stalking, he discovered that an individual was constantly browsing articles and blogs regarding US Mexico conflict and World’s biggest organised gang syndicate ‘El Gato’ leader ‘Pedro’. The suspect was browsing this for consecutive 12 days. He pulled excel sheets of past 12 days and found that the suspect was browsing from same network i.e., had exact same I.P. address and the device location showed a familiar address – it was the address that he had visited 31/2 years ago.

He informed his superior about it and insisted on being the team to go to the site. His superior allowed him as Yoshida knew the location.

A team of 3 IB officers were sent to Banaras. Nostalgia covered Yoshida’s mind throughout the journey till the device location. On the location, the grand mansion was still there and the device location matched that of the mansion. The only catch was that there was a big Kanupriya lock was hanging on the gate and by the looks of it, it seemed to them that no one had touched it for a long time.

They asked neighbors and nearby shop owners regarding the mansion owners. They replied in negation. Yoshida asked about the old lady to few neighbors; they told him that she sold the mansion 1 year ago and settled somewhere abroad. With disappointment at their hand, they were ordered to come back the very next morning.

The other two officers went to a relative’s house in evening but Yoshida wanted to relive old memories. He went to Ganga Ghat. It had the same serenity which he felt 3 years ago. After a boat ride in Ganga River, he enjoyed bhang (a milk-based beverage infused with nuts and marijuana).

It was a full moon night and the water glittered like pearls due to moon, Yoshida saw a familiar face leaving the ghats. It was the old lady – owner of the mansion.

She was walking as if she had achieved salvation. But she was walking to go someplace hence Yoshida started to follow her. He followed her till she reached a one room shop. She raised the shutter and didn’t bother to put it down. He decided to go inside and confront her considering her suspicious behaviour. He went inside. It was empty. The lady just vanished it seemed. Till then he was high/intoxicated due to bhang consumption. He took a sigh as he thought all this had been a side-effect of bhang and stood against a wall in the shop. But it was unable to hold his weight and a dark alleyway became exposed. He was shocked. He decided to go in the alleyway as it might lead to the old lady.

At the end of the 500m alleyway, he found a door. He opened the door and found himself in a known place – the same room in the mansion where he found the statue three years ago. There was no statue in the room but a silhouette appeared at the dark end of the room. It was the old lady. Yoshida was startled.

He asked the lady about her suspicious behaviour, the alleyway connecting the shop and the mansion. She replied- “Yoshida, sometimes things are not as they seem.” Then Yoshida realized that it was the lady who was browsing those things on internet.

He was high so as a reflex to flee and save the life but to display his authority as the IB officer, he told her to surrender. The lady then opened her iPad and showed it to him – there was a research paper by some Princeton University students mentioning a fully sentient artificial intelligent robot. And the lady revealed that the statue was the world’s first fully sentient artificial intelligent robot. Yoshida didn’t get the info revealed to him. Upon noticing Yoshida confused, she explained that the robot was everything that one imagines when one think about robot which is that it can feel emotions and make decisions on its own.

The lady started telling her story to Yoshida – she was a PhD student of IIT BHU and got a chance to research at Princeton University. In Princeton, she and her teammates worked on the robot and achieved the complete sentiency of a robot. She was working on it but her teammates along with her mentor at Princeton unsuccessfully attempted to steal the technology because the country who would have such advanced tools, would lead the future. She ran from Princeton to return to her home country. Her mother had a mansion in Banaras. She came to the mansion and left her studies and decided to live a calm life with her mother. But her mother died after few years hence she went into depression. In her lowest point, she found the once forgot robot and tried to sell the robot so that she would at least die rich, if not happily. She contacted the USA secretary of defence via dark net. After she provided concrete proof of the robot, the secretary agreed to buy the humankind’s most technological advanced entity. She asked to wire 50million USD to a Swiss bank account of hers as an advance payment and kept a condition that she would only sell the robot if the US would use it to kill Pedro – world’s most organised gang leader.

Yoshida broke her monologue by asking why she wanted to kill Pedro. She replied, "Chaos". Due to depression, she turned into a sadistic. As a remedy, she tried for companionship by hiring Yoshida by creating a fake opportunity to manage the mansion. But when he discovered the robot – the bane of her life, she distanced him from her for his betterment.

The lady continued – the secretary was constantly asking her for the delivery of the robot but her mood flipped, her intentions changed. She ghosted the secretary of defence, USA and as their conversation were happening on dark net so there wasn’t any way to identify her.

She relaxed for few days but then the thrill for something exciting compelled her to continue the mission of killing Pedro on her own. Yoshida asked why she wanted to harm Pedro? She replied, ”I do not have some deep motivation, it is just that if world’s greatest gang leader dies, then order of world would certainly change; something electrifying would occur”. He then asked if she was afraid. She replied, “what is there to be afraid of? Life is nothing but a series of interesting events.” By saying this, she for the first time called the robot and ordered it to walk Yoshida to the ghats. Yoshida was shocked by how real and well-mannered the robot appeared. He had forgot why he came to the mansion in the first place.

The robot started moving towards the alleyway by holding the index finger of Yoshida. When they reached to ghats, they sat on a step leading to Ganga River. He asked the robot what it felt about the old lady’s future. The robot replied that the lady would be okay as she had planned the night that day. The bhang also had psychedelic drugs mixed by the lady to the shop owner as she had seen him and his team when they arrived in morning. Then Yoshida realized why he was feeling weird as this was the first time, he had felt something unique after consuming bhang. He passed out quickly.

His eyes opened upon hearing a man chanting Gayatri Mantra on Ganga ghats. He reached to the lodge to his teammates the minute he gained his consciousness completely. The team arrived to the shop but the wall had a brick wall, it seemed that the wall had been there for years. When enquired about wall for the second time to Yoshida, he narrated the complete incident that took place the previous night. As soon as the story reached that he had consumed bhang, they just brushed it off completely and started walking to the lodge.

No one believed him.