The Perfect Couplet

31st March, 2006: As I lay on my back smoking my hundredth Marlboro that awful summer day, I realized that there wasn’t much essence to my life. I had thought that being a screenwriter would suit me perfectly – I boasted of just the right mix of madness, cleverness and a more or less ripped-off ingenuity. But clearly, I had been wrong.

Don’t be misled for I am mad, clever and ingenuous of course; but my life didn’t seem to find its calling. There were more than a hundred illustrious screenplays littered around my modest apartment, and a few of my own joined the ranks hither and thither. But unfortunately, those few (for which I had insurmountable hopes and dreams) refused to find their way off the floor and into some filmmaker’s hands. Yes, Mira Nair still didn’t like my humorous ‘indianized’ adaptation (in other words, spoof) of a highly depressing not-to-be-named American film, and no, I wasn’t ever going to win a Filmfare. After managing to convince myself that I wasn’t ‘suitable for Indian audiences’, I decided to go occidental and contact Steven Soderbergh. But apparently, he wasn’t very amused by my outrageously funny desecration of an outrageously depressing masterpiece. Sigh, an Oscar had been just fingertips away.

So that awful summer day, I decided yet again to settle for my fate and continue with my life. I dragged myself off the cold marble floor and had enough foresight to check my reflection in the mirror for any revelations (I had always been fascinated by the whole look-into-your-soul thing, though I never knew how it was done exactly). There were no revelations; my hair was still black, eyes brown; no life-altering ideas zipped across my mind, though there was an extraordinarily unsightly zit protruding from my chin, destroying my otherwise mirror-cracking good looks.

I was beginning to massage the zit with some Erytop when I was suddenly distracted by the successive sounds of quick footsteps, a letter being shoved under my front door, and footsteps quickly fading away. I walked over to the door with uncertain steps, and retrieved the unpretentious envelope, slashing it open rather unceremoniously. The neatly typed letter held within was, without a doubt, the deliverance I had been waiting for.

(This is where, I’m afraid, I must disrupt the flow of this narrative and tell you about a certain screenplay I wrote. My Kind of Fooling was a bitter-sweet tale of love and hate thrown out of proportion by a misjudged April Fools Day prank. Basically, a very ordinary story, told extraordinarily. I told you I was a rip-off.)

Returning to the present past (or is it the past present?), Mr. Frost, my heretofore useless agent in the States, who chose to communicate by letters rather than e-mail, had optioned My Kind of Fooling for around $ 1,000 to an upcoming director, a Vietnamese, who, according the letter, was “simply blown away” by my “odd literary prowess” (the only thing that was odd, was that my literary prowess was odd). I tried to discern a secreted compliment somewhere. But, staying true to much despised everyday dramatics, there must be a “but”.

Just as according to ancient cliché, good news precedes awful news, most devastatingly agreeable letters, have a…well, devastating postscript. As it turned out, this Vietnamese guy was sort of stuck on poetry, and he thought that that was what my screenplay lacked – a “blast of poetry” (herein, I must mention that the phrase in quotes is proof of my agent’s intellectual handicap).

Apparently, he had been a poet in his last life or something of the sort, and he had had a vision (I prefer hallucination) that the film would find itself comfortably placed at the Box Office if poetry was involved. As barmy as the reasoning was, he desired that I find the perfect couplet to sum up my theme, a couplet that could be used as the film’s Tagline, and the film could open and, perhaps, end with it. I had to find it within 24 hours, or the deal was off. Regards, Mr. Frost. (Mr. Frost had, kindly enough, granted me two weeks to produce the couplet, but postal delay had managed to steal 13 days from me – bloody hell.)

I must confess, the idea made me sick to the stomach on two counts. Firstly, I hated poetry in any form. A couplet seemed potentially more dangerous because it sought to do its damage in just two phrases; there wasn’t enough time to prepare. As for seconds, I hated even the thought of mixing poetry with screenwriting, because the two simply could not co-exist. For me, such an amalgamation was, to say the least, ungodly.

Nevertheless, I was not going to let $1,000 slip me by because of some goody-two-shoes couplet. I decided that my life had, at last, found its essence. At that point in time, everything depended on this couplet – the perfect couplet. I took a swig of some Absolut vodka, put on my glasses, stuffed yet another cigarette in my mouth, and sat down at my PC with a determination that astonished even me. It was going to be the Internet and me, hand in hand, for the next 24 hours. And we were going to emerge victorious in this battle against time, this – this tryst with fate.

That was where my troubles really began. I, personally, had always appreciated the Internet’s contribution to daily Indian lives – be it spamming, blogging, gaming, chatting, trading, gambling, or any other suitable waste of time. But, that awful (awful) summer day, the Internet decided to wage a war on me; and it seemed to be backed by divine forces in its dishonorable mission.

I developed a sort of – let’s say virus. First of all, there was the question – What is the perfect couplet for my screenplay? Rhyming? Blank? Classical/Existential/Modern/Crazy? Should I look for something with a deeper meaning? Or would that turn off my target audience? Should I write one on my own instead? Bah! I was a moderately rich and ignorant twenty-something screenwriter, diving head first into the neurotic world of poetry and accompanying chaos. Needless to say, I was confused and terribly unqualified.

To top it off, my PC went berserk, bananas, and completely out of control (I followed soon after). There seemed to be a sort of lapse of communication between the input and output devices as oodles of web pages turned up from absolutely nowhere, and flooded the desktop. German couplets (followed by French, Chinese, and Portuguese ones), somewhat marched onto the taskbar uninvited and I seemed to be well underway to making it into the Guinness Book of World Records for “Most Google Searches by an Unmarried Male”. My eyes began to do a sort of jig in their sockets, and a delightful headache ensued.

After a few hours of furious unarmed combat, I was convinced, heart and soul, that the so-called Internet, the “Web” was something that my PC had spun out of pure spite, to torment me for ever and ever. Couplets swam around my head like drunken fishes. Everything turned into poetry. I began trying to believe that ‘hair’ and ‘telephone’ rhyme, which was the best idea I’d had all day. I had always thought I’d been born mad, but I found myself growing madder and madder.

By eleven in the night (12 of the 24 available hours having passed), I found myself seated in front of my PC in – more or less – a trance. There I was – my eyes glazed, my brain and other associated parts apparently in a coma, but my body as a whole refusing to give up. I temporarily pretended, as people often do in Out of Body Experiences or times of plain mortal exhaustion, to swim out of my body and analyze the scene from above, so to say, objectively. Let’s say this story was my screenplay; that made me the protagonist; and all the tangible/intangible elements around me like my PC, the Internet etc. became the antagonists. My bachelor pad was the background or setting of the screenplay, and my character’s goal was to find the perfect couplet. I ought to have reached the third and final Act by then, so the Plot Twist was due any minute. Yes, there was a screenwriter’s method even to my madness.

Then, I fell asleep.

1st April, 2006: I awoke with a start and a delicate consciousness that I still hadn’t found bloody couplet. I wasn’t sure what it was that I had dreamt about, but a lot of flying, swimming, and ridiculously alive couplets were implicated. As my eyes swam into focus, I was mildly surprised to see that my PC hadn’t shut down. I eyed the screen rather suspiciously and discovered that one web page was still open and blinking obstinately. I yawned, and conceded that I’d rather just humour it, lest all Hell broke loose again…

And there it was – the perfect couplet! Two successive lines of perfection. Plain, simple perfection. I read it only once and nearly burst into tears with an uncontrollable multiplicity of emotions.

My PC, I realized, had been attempting all night to tease me in a manner which now seemed most excessive. I gawked at the horrid machine, hating every inch of it for its obtuse sense of humour. Whoever said machines didn’t think for themselves had obviously been uncompromisingly drunk, perhaps even tortured to say it. I felt fooled, deceived, bamboozled by my very own PC.

Yet, as for the perfect couplet being “perfect”, it really was perfect. Basically my PC, after trying to kill me all night (when did machines get this malicious?), had delivered me a life-saving drug – in verse. It was going to change my life permanently, and I was going to become a better human being. I was going to clean up my bachelor pad and call pest-control. I was going to marry my Oscar and live happily ever after – that beautiful summer morning, I became a realist (in the most idealistic sense, of course), and a humble believer in the inhumanity of all machines.

Oh yes, the couplet:

“It takes all kinds of in and outdoor schooling
To get adapted to my kind of fooling.”
[ROBERT FROST, In the Clearing]

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NOTE: The story is somewhat true, in all its absurdity. It was written for a competition that I did not win, and I was BOUND by the guidelines to include a couplet of my choice, which is what led to all the melodrama. And I'm SURE nearly everyone has experienced the whole man versus machine thingie. *Sigh*...