It was a routine day at work and just as I was leaving my office for the day, the receptionist walked around her counter and handed me a package. “This was just delivered by a courier boy – he said it’s already paid for”. I noticed the words ‘Amazon.com’ and ‘Prime’ with the familiar arrow on the brown box. “Thank you Anjana.” I did not think twice before accepting the package from her. It is routine for packages to be delivered to my office because our house is locked during the day while we are at work and the kids are at school. I could not recall when I had last indulged in an online shopping spree; it was quite likely that my husband or kids might have ordered something.
I tossed the cardboard box into the back seat of my car and drove home. It was a cold, foggy winter evening. Winter vacation had started and my kids had chosen to go over to my parents’ place for a week to spend Christmas with them. My husband and I were looking forward to a few days of late mornings and dinner dates. I reached home, unlocked the door, and carried the package in. I placed it on the kitchen counter while I brewed myself a cup of ginger-tulsi tea and hunted for some cookies or cake to accompany the hot beverage. Armed with my dose of warm healing and energy, I switched on the room heater and settled down into the cushioned dining chair to enjoy my cuppa. I toyed with the package – it was addressed to me. Surprisingly, there was no sender’s address. I got a knife and sliced through the duct tape on the box. There was another cardboard box wrapped in blister wrapping. I rattled the box and could feel something solid moving inside. It was quite light and I rolled my eyes as I thought to myself “Another wristwatch! What a waste.”
To my surprise, when I opened the second cardboard box, there was no watch inside but a cubic, transparent, acrylic container. The top had hinges and a latch while the bottom was painted black. Inside this container was a light blue, dome-shaped thing fixed to the black-coloured bottom plate. The dome did not entirely look solid, it was jelly-like and wobbled when I moved the box. There was a hint of glitter in the dome and I thought there was a dim glow. I’ve seen paperweights like this. What could it be? I placed the acrylic box on the dining table and looked at the cardboard boxes again – some instruction manual maybe? I noticed there was a thin acrylic stick, about four or five inches long inside the second box. Also, there was a little slip of white paper. On it were printed the words,
100 gm Sadness
What? I mean even if this was a misprint, I could not come up with a single word that could replace ‘Sadness’ and still make sense. Was this a joke? And who was playing it on me and why? I sipped my tea and bit into a crunchy cookie before flicking open the latch of the acrylic box with my right hand. As I opened the lid, I felt a whiff of cold air emerging from the box. The blue dome glowed and an electronic female voice said, “Hello”. I was quite surprised. Had this package been delivered ten years ago, I might have reacted more strongly. But now, with hey Google, hey Alexa, hey Siri and the woman in the car GPS being a daily part of our ‘smart’ lives, all I thought was, “Another talking gadget.” Out of idle curiosity, I mumbled, “I suppose you must be hey Sadness”.
Pat came the reply. “Yes. I’m Sadness.” I couldn’t believe it. Sadness?! As a rule, I avoid talking to gadgets as much as possible. But the kids were away and I was alone.
“So, Sadness, what can you do? Can you play music? Or will you tell me the weather forecast?”
“I can make people sad.”
“Really! How do you do that?”
“If you touch me, a cold sensation will envelop your body and you will become sad. The longer you touch, the higher will be the dose of sadness that will enter your body.”
“Oh! I didn’t know sadness could be transmitted like that. How does that happen?”
“It happens because of the unique nano-material with which I have been constructed. There is a special mixture of sadness-inducing hormones and peptides stored inside me which get transmitted when someone touches me.”
“Wow!” By now I was so flabbergasted that the weirdness of the situation completely escaped my notice.
“Why would anyone want to be sad? Who made you and what did your creator think? I mean, who would make a product that nobody wants to use?”
“I work both ways. Just like I can transmit sadness, I can also absorb sadness. There is a special tube in this package. If this tube is applied to a person’s nasal or oral mucosa, it will absorb the sadness peptides from that person’s body and store them inside me.”
Just as the enormity of these words was sinking into my consciousness, the doorbell rang. I could see the headlights of a car in the driveway and knowing it must be my husband, I quickly put all the packaging away and stashed the box in one of the kitchen cupboards. My husband is one of the paranoid types and would most likely consign this thing to the garbage bin. I’m more open-minded and curious, so I’ll first check it out and then chuck it if it’s useless.
We went out to a specialty Pan-Asian restaurant and ‘Sadness’ went completely out of my mind. At bedtime, I suddenly remembered the events of the evening. I casually asked my husband if he’d recently ordered something online and he replied in the negative. I googled ‘nanotechnology’ but fell asleep before I had finished reading the Wikipedia page.
My typical workday kept me away from ‘Sadness’ until teatime the next evening. At my age, caution and safety rank a notch above curiosity, so I wasn’t in any danger of touching ‘Sadness’ to find out if she (going only by the electronic voice) was telling the truth. So, I asked her if she was made only for humans.
“The sadness hormones and peptides are universal, across species. They are common between plants and animals, insects and elephants, mice and humans.”
“Hmmm. What you say could be right, but how do we know that an insect or plant is sad? I’ve never heard bees laughing or the money plant boohooing.”
“If you don’t believe me, why don’t you try?” Now, for a person who strays clear of talking to gadgets, accepting a challenge from one rather cheeky and talkative gadget was strange indeed. But I guessed that was the only way to decide whether I would keep it or throw it away. So, I went to the kitchen shelf and picked up the Lucky Bamboo plant. I knew a twinge of guilt for experimenting on this helpless being. I opened the acrylic lid and touched the slim leaves of the bamboo to the blue blobby dome, all the while careful not to let any part of my skin near ‘Sadness’. The glow intensified and after about five seconds, I disconnected the two.
“Sadness, how much dose has been transmitted?” I asked, clueless about how the dose of sadness would be expressed.
“12.78 Daltons.”
Not comprehending a bit, I continued, “What can I expect to see now? How will the plant change?”
“Usually the leaves start drooping within a day and the plant will die off after about a week after such a high dose.”
“That’s unacceptable!” I almost shouted, thinking about how our pet dog was on my list of prospective guinea pigs for this experiment.
“Don’t worry. Use the tube. Make a small cut in the stem, apply the tube there, and connect with me. The sadness will be sucked out.”
I waited for a day to see for myself and sure enough, the leaves of the bamboo drooped as if the plant was going to die despite there being enough water in the bowl and no change in temperature or light. I did as ‘Sadness’ had advised and the bamboo was hale and hearty again.
I understood that this thing – the blue blobby dome called ‘Sadness’ could be really dangerous! If anyone, like my forever curious children, inadvertently touched it, they were in grave danger. At the same time, if someone used it to remove sadness, it could cure a lot of people and make them happy. I decided that the correct place for this was a psychiatrist’s office. A lot of people with depression could be helped if I could convince a psychiatrist that I was not crazy and had a gadget that could remove sadness from people and wanted to gift the gadget for the greater good of all. While one part of my mind was busy thinking about which psychiatrist I could approach and how, another part was reminding me to clean my own household and surroundings of sadness before giving it away.
“So, um… how much sadness can you transmit or remove?”
“Didn’t you read the label? I am hundred grams of sadness. I am half full, which means that I can transmit fifty grams of sadness and absorb fifty grams right now. Obviously if I transmit more, then I have more space to absorb and vice versa.”
“But you quoted the dose of sadness in Daltons.” I said, thinking I had caught an error.
“1 gram is equal to 6.02214 X 1023 Daltons.”
“That’s a lot of sadness!”
“Enough to kill every human on the planet”, confirmed ‘Sadness’.
“I’m truly scared of you. Can I return you to your creator? I don’t think you should be in my house, or anywhere else for that matter. And I can’t imagine why you should exist in a laboratory either.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me?”
“Yes, never been surer. We’ll manage our lives with whatever sadness we have. I can’t imagine what will happen if you accidentally spill out of that box. Please go away or tell me where I can take you to return you or destroy you”.
“Please take me to an open space, open to the sky that is. And make sure no one is around to interfere with signal transmission.”
I thought for a minute and knew that the terrace was just the spot. I ran up the two flights of stairs and walked onto the terrace, tightly clutching the acrylic box in my hand.
I placed the box on the floor and stepped back. After a few moments, a blue shaft of light emerged vertically upwards from the blue dome and I thought I saw a similar light coming down from the sky. It all happened in a second or so and there was nothing.
‘Sadness’ had vanished into thin air.