Virtual Reality

Fiction

Bleu, a painting by Joan Miro, Spanish artist

“How did I get pregnant? We only did it online, na?” Sheila repeats the question and Raghav looks out the window once again.

Vehicles are plying with the usual hurry and impatience on the network of flyovers outside the most reputed hospital in the city of New Delhi. Standing in a VIP room on the seventh floor of the hospital, Raghav can see the flyovers and the vehicles. He can also see the parking lot of the hospital crammed with all sorts of cars and bikes. A crowd of patients and their relatives wait outside the hospital.

Raghav had rushed to the hospital as soon as he got Sheila’s phone call. That was past midnight. “The highway patrol cops brought me here,” she told him on the phone. Her car had dashed against a divider. She must have been drunk as usual, Raghav thought.

Sheila works with a national newspaper and her duty ends somewhere around midnight when the paper goes to print. Raghav used to work for the same paper until recently but started his own online publication and quit the national daily which he accused of having sold itself out to the government.

“Idealist, eh?” Sheila mocked him when he decided to quit the paper.

Self-respect, Raghav wanted to tell her. But Sheila was already too drunk to understand self-respect. Her evenings were usually spent with a group of young journalists who regarded themselves as ‘avant-garde’. They thought mixed metaphors and sleazy puns were the signs of progressive journalism. They also thought that news was just a commodity to be sold like any other commodity in the global market.

“Life is an intoxication to be savoured,” she said once to Raghav when he expressed his dislike of some of her ways. Somewhere in a remote corner of his heart Raghav felt a longing for that dark side of her. A thirst to drink life to the lees.

She liked him too. She did flirt with him sometimes. Even after he quit the paper to start his own online periodical. She flirted with him on the phone. Her flirting had a strange charm; it was a mix of childish abandon and seductive gravitation. He wanted to love her but she was like the butterfly that knew only to flirt with flowers.

When her car hit the highway divider, she called her chief editor. The patrolling cops discovered her lying stretched in the reclined driver’s seat and talking on phone to the chief editor of the most patriotic newspaper in the country. She handed the mobile phone to the cop and said, “Follow the orders.” Within minutes she was in a VIP room in the busiest hospital of the city.  

“Nothing serious,” she says and Raghav listens. “Only a dented rib. And this pregnancy thing which they found out now.”

Raghav didn’t say anything. In spite of being an experienced journo, he didn’t know what to say. He often thought that he was a misfit in the profession. Where would he really fit in anyway? He didn’t know.

“You be my husband for now,” Sheila says.

“What?” Raghav is not really stunned. He knows Sheila too well to be stunned by any of her demands.

“Just to sign the MTP form, man. After all, I’ve flirted with you online pretty much, hai na? Be a virtual hubby, yaar.”

Raghav becomes a virtual husband. The hospital does not require any proof of marriage but only a signature. After all, they are dealing with two journalists of the most nationalistic newspaper of the country.

“Why didn’t you ever warn me, you retard?” She asks when the signed papers have been taken away.

“Warn of what?” Raghav is dismayed.

“About the need to carry a couple of condoms in my bag.”