The Video I Sent to Two People

The floor outside the lab had been mopped and nobody had put the yellow sign out. The bucket was still there against the wall, with the mop standing in it, and the tiles were shining all the way to the noticeboard.

Manav came round that corner the way Manav comes round every corner. Fast, and slightly sideways, with his bag on one shoulder and a packet of biscuits in his hand.

What happened next took about a second and a half. It was, without any question, the funniest thing that had happened at that school in two years.

His feet went. Both of them, together, straight out in front. His arms went round twice like a man trying to start a very old aeroplane. The biscuits left his hand and travelled the whole width of the corridor. And then he sat down, hard, in the exact middle of the wet patch, with his bag landing neatly in his lap.

He was completely fine. A wet seat to his trousers, and nothing else. The packet of biscuits lay against the far wall with three biscuits out of it on the floor.

And Manav laughed first. He sat there in the puddle laughing so much he could not get up. Aryan had to pull him up by both arms. Then the two of them stood in the corridor, absolutely helpless, for about a minute.

Aryan had filmed it by accident. He had been filming the wet floor to send to Kabir, as a joke about the school flooding again. Manav had simply skidded into the shot.

He sent it to two people that evening, from his bed, with the phone flat on the pillow. Kabir, and Ishaan.

That is the whole of what he did. Two people.

By Wednesday it had a caption on it. Somebody had put white letters across the bottom, in the font everybody uses, and the letters said WATER PARK, with a little blue splash after it.

By Wednesday evening it was in the class group. Aryan had not put it there.

By Thursday there were three versions. One slowed down. One with a sound on it, a cartoon slide-whistle going down. One that had been cut so it played the fall over and over, seven times, in a loop.

By Friday Manav had a name. It went round the corridor and the yard and the bus like water finding a crack.

Nobody chose it. Nobody sat down and decided it. It just arrived, the way weather arrives. By Friday afternoon two boys from another section said it to him at the water cooler. They had never spoken to Manav in their lives.

Splashy.

For the first week Manav still did it himself. Bag off, arms out, down on the floor of the corridor. He would do the arms when somebody said it, and get the laugh back, and it was still his.

In the second week he stopped doing the arms.

In the third week Aryan watched him come round that same corner outside the lab. Slowly, on the dry side, with one hand out near the wall. The corridor was not even wet.

Aryan deleted the video on a Sunday night, sitting on his bed with the lamp on and his bag still half unpacked on the floor.

He deleted it out of the gallery. He deleted it out of the deleted folder as well, the one that keeps things for a month. He deleted it out of the chat with Kabir and the chat with Ishaan. It took a while and he was careful.

It changed nothing at all.

It was on Kabir’s phone. It was on Ishaan’s phone. It was in the class group, and in two other groups he was not even in. It was on the phone of a boy in Class 8, because somebody told him it was. Aryan does not know that boy’s name. There is nothing at all to be done about a boy whose name you do not know.

Forty phones, roughly. Probably more. There is no way to count them and no way to reach them.

On Monday he said sorry to Manav by the cycle stand, badly, with his hands in his pockets and his bag on one shoulder.

Manav said, “It’s fine, yaar.”

Manav said it in the voice you use to end a conversation. Then he asked what had happened in the maths test. Aryan let him change the subject.

They are still friends. They walk to the bus together, past the gate and the tea shop and the dog that sleeps on the step. Some days Aryan forgets about it completely for hours at a time.

His gallery has a gap in the grid on the eleventh of August, between a photo of a dog and a photo of somebody’s homework on a desk.

The class group is still going. Somebody put the slide-whistle version in it again in November, for no reason, and eleven people laughed.