Do you ever look at your own hands and wonder what’s wrong with them?

and wonder what’s wrong with them? Among the more vivid
embarrassments of my life, ones that insist on staying relevant

in the mind’s passive engine, is a failure of mine to connect
a flash drive to a CPU in a jam-packed lecture theater, the professor

assuming I had completed the menial task successfully, waiting
for the icon to show up on screen to begin his presentation. A friend

sensing my trouble, volunteered to help and slotted frictionless
the candy bar of a machine, much to my dismay, right into its

port. This was a decade back in engineering undergrad, when I was starting
to understand machines, when I was starting to understand my body,

when I was starting to understand after a brief limerence here,
an infatuation there—there is no understanding attraction. My hands

here too: sites of turmoil, the wrists in lonely prayer in my hostel room
wringing the only four lines of verse I knew in Sanskrit, the palms glassy

with Goa’s beady coastline sweat when I wondered why I was always sinking
in love and never quite falling in it, a voice from the medulla tickling my

nape when the one I liked sauntered into class, the voice offering a nippy
hymn in resignation to the turbulence of fast youth: oh dear, here we go again.

The same voice, in an entirely different context, rears its squeaky head—here
we go again—when my phone refuses to charge. At the only Apple servicing

center in the state, I wait in the queue for a couple of hours, reminding
myself it is fascinating how so many folks are having trouble with their

iPhones at this very instant in their lives. After the executive has a look,
he asks, your battery is done, do you want to replace it? When I ask if I have

a choice, he slides slyly across to me the latest model: you can always
buy a new phone. He almost winks. I almost snigger. At home, I clean

the possible buildup of invisible debris in the phone’s lightning
port. After a heartwarming surge, the new battery gets stuck

at 47%, leaving me uncompensated for the day’s hard
work. How sad that a machine manages to break

my heart. Such hope for validation hinged on this hardware marvel,
the software running through its guts and bones honed every hour

by engineers working in another hemisphere—it’s obvious
evidence of our accomplishment as a species—but to distill fixation

from achievement is something that hasn’t quite intrigued us
the same way. The phone suffers as long as I do. My species will

suffer long after I have stopped suffering. Breaking news pops up
on my phone—ALERT: NASA predicts record global flooding

due to lunar wobbles. My phone battery heats up a little
and underneath I presume, the sea-level rises a little. How this dark blue isle

of an old battery must have aged, little by little, over so many years. Any
daily variation unremarkable, the cumulative ordained to be

fatal. I used to prefer a cocktail called Apocalypse over tequila shots
at a favorite bar on karaoke nights, believing it made my voice less

melancholic, more mellow. Now, I’m tired of that word.
I haven’t been to a bar in two years. My father has

never been to one, or so he says. I watch him drape
a wound on my mother’s knee with a band-aid. Reinvigorated,

while cooking she adds extra cornstarch to the chickpea
curry. She knows I like the gravy thick. The next morning,

I wake up to a cloud in the window, disintegrating
while passing. I glance at the battery

bar on my phone, blinking blood
red, almost drained out. Remembering

the slots open today for booking my parents’
vaccination appointment, I leap for the charger.