Durga Gulati discovered more selfies in her new mobile phone than she remembered clicking. One look, and she knew she hadn’t taken them. Together, the selfies were a weird, fascinating trip. Literally.
The mobile phone was a birthday gift from her mom, Mansi. Ranjit, her Dad, gave her a leather-bound collection of Oscar Wilde’s stories. She tossed it aside for later. She called Anukriti and Avanti over to see her new phone. The girls were her best friends since pre-nursery, second only to Sibyl, who stopped licking her forepaw and purred. Other girls were less friendly because Durga was an exceptional one.
She relentlessly topped class after class. Ranjit hoped she would prepare for IIT-JEE; out of Ranjit’s earshot Ma said that Durga could be a fashion model from Mumbai to Milan. Sibyl had no opinion, just the occasional dead lizard as a gift. Bolstered by her parents’ opinions and unencumbered by sibling rivalry, Durga Gulati was destined for great things. She had no weight issues like some classmates. She wished she could dance like Faith Pongener, but her parents agreed that she had to focus on the future.
Durga was aware of the growing attention of boys. Girls had gazed at her for as long as she could remember, though their motivations varied. She was initially shy about the attention. Then she was irritated by the focus on her glossy hair, her high cheekbones and her guileless smile. In time she believed these compliments to be true. “I might even be a Goddess,” she told herself. Sibyl mewed in deference.
Durga excitedly showed off the phone. It was not an expensive brand favoured by NRIs, celebrities, or technology writers; but it was also not a Chinese knock-off favoured by many boys in her class. It had ample memory and storage. Sibyl sniffed at it, pawing the screen, which came alive and made her whiskers twitch. Durga downloaded Instagram; she needed an online name.
“You can have a psychedelic name,” Anukriti said. “Like ‘dandeliondurga’ or even ‘DurgaDaDrug’.”
“Don’t use your own name,” Avanti said. “There are probably millions of Durga signed up already. Plus, you don’t want any creeps stalking you.”
True. Anukriti had thrice deleted her Facebook account because of hackers.
Durga finally typed __3ngin33ringg0dd3$$__: “Engineering Goddess”.
“Yeah, yeah, we get it.”
The first photos were of Sibyl, whose orange-and-black coat became vibrant, and close-ups of her puzzled yet cautious eyes. One photo caught Sibyl yawning, the cat’s sharp teeth and pink tongue looking sinister. Sibyl eventually grew bored and wandered off.
Durga’s next shots were solo. She perfected her selfie, with a tilt and pout that the Internet might dub “hawt”. Anukriti told her to look a bit to the left, and Avanti told her to look a bit to the right. She couldn’t decide on a kick-ass pout or a coy pout. Finally she settled on smiling while making a horizontal V-sign near her eyes.
Avanti and Anukriti jumped into the next batch of photos and Durga selected a couple to instagram as “Selfie with besties”. They were ecstatic.
The next morning, Durga awoke and looked at her photos. She couldn’t take the phone to school because it had a strict policy against mobiles, despite many parents having petitioned for their use on security grounds. The school instead put a metal detector at the gate to catch and confiscate the phones. So before Durga left for school she perused the photo-gallery and found an extra snap she could not recall taking.
In this photo she and Anukriti and Avanti had aged.
Durga threw the phone onto her bed. Sibyl jumped up in alarm.
“What happened, Durga?” Ma called out. Durga must have yelped or shrieked.
“Nothing, Ma. Just being silly.”
Durga picked the phone up again and looked at the photo. They definitely looked like old women. At least 30. What kind of filter did that? She checked Instagram, but found nothing to suggest such a filter. She returned to the selfie.
The three girls were no longer pouting. Each had a grin that mystified Durga until she remembered aunty Snigdha, on her father’s side, who occasionally landed in scandals that her parents ensured Durga never heard about. (Her cousin Mahi said that everyone was jealous that Snigdha aunty had a different boyfriend every six months.) Yes: the three girls had Snigdha aunty’s grown-up grin.
More surprisingly, they were wearing saris. The crepe was snug around their full busts; Durga felt body-horror looking at a meatier version of herself. It did not matter that her friends looked plumper or that Anukriti, in fact, had a bun instead of her currently streaked hair. She threw her phone down on the bed, again narrowly missing Sibyl. She had to tell her friends, though they would freak out seeing themselves as domesticated housewives twice their age.
She began deleting the photo, but stopped. When she returned home she would scrutinise it.
It was a wasted school-day as Durga could not focus on any class, even the one with Nilanjana ma’am, as she could not get the spooky selfie out of her mind. How did it end up in her phone? It was obviously photoshopped, but who did it, and how did they get it into her phone? Maybe there was a hidden special-effect in the phone that morphed random clicks.
Was there? Durga realised, in an uncanny moment during Biology, that the photo had no effects. The more she mulled it the more she was convinced it was authentic. It was of the three friends, and it was not altered.
It was as if they had aged for the instant of the shutter opening and closing. Only that instant. Or as if the photo had arrived in her phone from the future.
Yes. It was a photo from the future.
Didn’t her parents always tell her to focus on the future?
She told Anukriti and Avanti to come over after school. Her tone conveyed gravity, so they landed up late afternoon. Wordlessly, she opened the photo.
“Hey, these aunties look just like us, lol,” Avanti said.
“Wait a sec,” Anukriti said. Then she shrieked.
“Durga, everything okay?” Ma called out.
“Yes, ma,” Durga said, shushing her friend.
“These are us?” Anukriti asked.
“I don’t remember dressing up like this,” Avanti said. “And when did my boobs become so big?”
“That’s what’s been bugging me all day,” Durga said. “We didn’t take this photo. It isn’t us, but I think it is.”
“What are you saying?”
“I think this photo is from the future.”
Avanti fainted. Durga fetched water from the kitchen while Anukriti studied the photo. Sibyl sniffed Avanti’s head.
“At least the other one is not as bad.” Anukriti said.
Durga helped Avanti up and put the glass to her lips. “What other one?”
Anukriti showed her another of their selfie, this time looking even older. Durga dropped Avanti’s head, and the glass on top of her.
The girls looked as old as Sagrika aunty, who was 40-ish and divorced. Their make-up was garish, their haircuts prim, their lipstick prominent. But unlike in the other future-selfie, they weren’t wearing saris. They wore tops with jackets. They had stylish jewellery. Their teeth was pearly, if slightly yellowish. They beamed confidently into the camera.
Also, they were outdoors, in a foreign country with classical architecture and crisply-attired people in the background. They were on holiday.
“This is also from the future?” Avanti asked, ignoring the spilled water on her.
“But different.”
“Perhaps from a different future,” Anukriti said.
That was possible, if indeed the photos were coming from the future. Durga knew that the future was indeterminate and took several paths. You chose your own path from a variety of futures. Perhaps the phone was showing them snapshots of alternative lives they could lead.
“But how do we know how to avoid the future of the saris-selfie?” Anukriti asked.
“Yeah, I want to one day vacation in Europe,” Avanti said.
Durga shrugged.
“Why can’t we get WhatsApps from the future?”
“See if there are any other photos.”
Anukriti swiped and swiped, and just when Durga thought it was just the two selfies, her friend gasped. On the screen were three babies: the one on the left resembled her own baby pictures. There was a kitten in the photo, in the same orange-black combination as Sibyl, tugging at her dress’s bow.
“That looks like my baby photograph,” Anukriti said, pointing to the baby in the middle.
“That one looks like the baby in my photos,” Avanti said.
“Meow,” Sibyl said.
It was not an alarming photo, for the babies looked bonny. It was an impossible photo, however. Avanti’s family had moved here from Bangalore when she was three. Even Anukriti’s family earlier lived with her grandparents across town. Their parents were not friends, though friendly in a formal way — the aunties suspicious of the others’ daughters. And though the kitten looked like Sibyl, she was born at least five years after this improbable photo would have been taken.
Durga glanced at her friends and swiped forward. This time she stopped at a selfie of three aunties. Their hair was still dark but they seemed to be filling out and had crow’s eyes. Perhaps they were in their fifties. They wore floral shirts and smiled through bright lipstick. But that was not the striking part.
The aunties were holding up a thin, flexible mobile phone and pointing to a photo that made them laugh. Durga pinched the screen to enlarge the image and got the shock of her life. She saw herself, Anukriti and Avanti staring out of the screen-within-the-screen, looking exactly as they did now, even the same clothes. Like a mirror that did not reverse their image.
“Maybe if you pinch the screen out some more, we can see what the girls in the phone are holding up,” Anukriti said.
“The resolution isn’t high enough,” Durga said. “No point in pinching it out any further. But you can guess what those girls are looking at.”
“I don’t get what those aunties are laughing at,” Avanti said.
“Maybe when we’re middle-aged, everything will look sad-funny.”
“Perhaps Sibyl is jumping in and out of that vortex of photos,” Durga said. “I should rename her Schrodinger.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
Durga swiped ahead, finding one strange selfie after another.
Avanti getting married: the selfie contained no groom, but instead a second bride. “We must have cut out the two grooms at the sides,” she said. Her friends momentarily studied her before continuing to swipe.
Durga with Sibyl: The cat was frozen in a mid-air leap. A closer look showed the left hind leg on a base. A chill ran through them. “Taking Sibyl to the taxidermist is not a bad idea,” Anukriti said. “After she’s dead,” she hastily added.
The three as elderly women: They had greyed except Avanti, whose hair was a yellowish-white. They were withered, their boobs melting into their paunches, yet looked cheery. “Ugh,” Avanti said.
A solo Sibyl shot: looking directly into the camera. “Look,” Avanti said. Flanking the cat were three sets of smiling teeth, hanging in the air, as if from invisible faces.
Just Durga and Avanti now: both sad, holding a small portrait of Anukriti in a silver frame. Nobody spoke.
The three girls: in what appeared to be a dorm. Though still young, they looked ragged and ravaged, their hair a mess, their faces blank, their bodies emaciated. They did not smile.
“Enough,” Durga said, closing her phone. Avanti and Anukriti were quiet. It had been a journey to a bunch of strange places, and, anyway, it was now time to go home.
After dinner, Durga cleaned Sibyl’s litter box. It stank up the corner of the tiny cloakroom because she had not cleaned it for a week. Sibyl watched, a bit annoyed but also grateful.
She placed her phone on the windowsill and, after she was done clearing the litter box, found it lying in a puddle. She sniffed — it was Sibyl’s pee. “Eww,” she cried and ran to the bathroom to wipe it clean. It still smelled of cat-pee. She ran the water in the basin and added some soap, intending to wipe the phone. How to get inside the die cast or the ports? In her panic she dropped the phone in the water.
She retrieved it immediately but it had gone blank. She wiped it dry, but still it did not power back on. She began to cry. She put it under a fan, hoping to dry it overnight.
Durga got into bed, but could not get the selfies out of her mind. She tossed and turned. Two hours later she tried powering the phone but to no avail. The next day, Ma took her to the service centre at a nearby mall. The technicians opened her phone and showed them the water inside. It was ruined. No data could be retrieved. Better buy a new phone, the technicians advised.
Durga was inconsolable. Mansi was overcome with pity so she bought a replacement, the same model and specifications. But Durga sensed that no phone could replace her old phone, and its magical powers were lost forever. She took several photos with Ma, but no other selfies showed up.
Anukriti and Avanti sympathised. “But to tell the truth, I’m happy it’s gone,” Avanti said. “I couldn’t sleep last night, seeing myself with yellow hair.”
“Me neither,” Anukriti said. “I kept thinking of our junkie-selves.”
“Junkie-selves?” Avanti said. “I thought they were rehabilitated...”
“Okay, okay,” Durga said, not wanting that sentence completed. “It’s alright. We know we have lots of crossroads ahead, and choices to make.”
“That’s even scarier.”
“But we have a clearer idea of the roads we want to take. That’s more than what most girls have.”
Her friends agreed. Durga reflected for a second and wondered: what if the phone had not fallen into the water? Would she have controlled it, or would it have controlled her? How exceptional was she, after all?
Sybil let out a loud meow.
Aditya Sinha is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming crime novel The CEO Who Lost His Head (PAN Macmillan)