This is going to be a lark, Ravi thought, as he ascended the ancient grime-smeared wooden stairs, slightly out of breath. He wiped his glasses and brushed aside the stray hair sweat-glued to his forehead, glad to be at last out of the searing noon glare. A silent sarcastic glee rippled across his face as he considered the position; after all the time spent idly mulling over the prospect and slowly putting things into motion, he was finally going to meet the man behind the toys.

Although he couldn’t specifically recall the first instance he had come across the toys, they weren’t what you could imagine to subtly slide in by your peripheral vision. Or so he thought, though most of his acquaintances didn’t actually notice till he pointed it to them, finger wildly waving as he tried without success to hold back the repeated gales of gut-straining laughter. They were simply hideous.

For the purpose of description, they were coin-operated toy rides for children. Most of them purported to be various animals, though sometimes what species they represented was a matter of pure conjecture. He could not believe that any human hand could fashion something so devoid of the slightest shred of craftsmanship. It was as though the minds and hands of the makers were disparate entities, even at cross-purposes. What added to the hilarity was the macabre way some of them functioned. The Blue Kangaroo, for instance: the passenger was seated in a hollow where the kangaroo’s pouch would have been and a link chain lashed around him/her as the ride went slowly up and down in a most bizarre mimicry of the original’s jumping motion. So totally S&M, he had chuckled to himself several times later, raising the annoyed curiosity of his journalist colleagues in the Business Times office.

That was the most outré specimen, but there were scores of only slightly lesser oddities. That again surprised him, how popular these toys were getting. He could recall a time when he’d spot them only at a few out-of-his-norm eating joints, where they formed a part of the overall tawdry chic ambiance that appealed to the archetypal zombie ‘family crowd’, likely stimulating the same nerve centers that generated joyous anticipation towards the evening’s worth of brain-dead TV serials. ‘But they’ve since spread out of their ‘native habitat,’ he smilingly mused, and it wasn’t often now that any restaurant or general hangout place he went to didn’t have a couple of the leering automatons in the background. He’d see assorted brats crawling and jostling around the rides, their wide-mouthed grins more indicative of insanity than any sense of delight. It was almost disturbing… except that it was so hilarious.

He had become interested enough to make casual enquiries about the toys. They came from a single source, he knew even without asking, because they all bore a crude scrawl that said “Bharath”. Bharath was perhaps the proprietor of the firm that made these things… or maybe the painter who dreamed up and executed the unworldly color schemes that added the final mark of lunacy to these creations. That comes later, he thought; he wanted to know why the owners considered installing an eyesore like that. With the tawdrier joints it was easy: this would buff up their credentials as a ‘family place’ while still keeping the requisites for men to get sloshed and make insufferable boors of themselves. Then there was the extra money from the tokens the stupid kids forced their equally stupid parents to repeatedly buy for them, to sit yet again on a logic-defying mount. But some of these places were otherwise reasonably classy.

The first step to his picking up the trail of Bharath’s toys occurred when having dinner with a long revived acquaintance. Dinner was a discounted affair because the acquaintance knew the proprietor’s son Vikram, who actually managed the place. Vikram joined them briefly during dinner. Apart from a discount ticket, he turned out to be a pleasant meal companion, if you allowed for his tendency to openly lech at his female patrons, and Ravi mustered the will to casually ask him, “ Just why do you have these unsightly toys in your joint?” Vikram made vague noises about kids and ‘family atmosphere’, but Ravi thought it doubtful because they formed a negligible part of his clientele and imagined that the toys might even be putting off some of his regular customers given how they stood at odds with the decor. It was also not likely due to any personal attachment Vikram had for children because, just before he joined them, Ravi’s acquaintance was telling him about an incident where Vikram had nearly run over a group of school kids and was only sad he had not been drunk enough to completely lose control and “smear those little bastards across.” Ravi thought it might have something to do with the last remark Vikram had put out, “…and it didn’t cost me much.”

Ravi made enquiries at other outlets and was fairly surprised. These places had not just got the toys cheap, they had got them for next to nothing. Whoever was behind this could have had the toys made from unusable scrap metal by one-armed mentally-handicapped convicts and he would still be making very little money on the deal. Bharath seemed a monumental fool. But the important thing was that he was a story worth going after.

Of course, not many people shared Ravi’s views. His editor hadn’t even bothered with the pretense of a full hearing before dismissing the idea outright. His colleagues, while earlier amused at the cackle-laden descriptions of his findings, became discomfited with what appeared to them an unhealthy obsession. Some of them were young parents, and to consider what amused their kids in the light of a tasteless oddity obviously didn’t appeal. The others maintained that it was “too silly and childish” a topic to pursue. Ravi was himself not sure where this would lead. But, he thought, it’s in any case a damned sight more interesting and amusing than recording the same old corporate horse-shit these assorted PR guys seem so eager to pour into my ears.

It was some time however, before he could follow up on the matter. Things had grown quite hectic at the office, what with the budget being presented and all the associated analysis and quote-hunting to be done. The little time he spent outside of work went mostly in salvaging a few moments of sleep, at home or in the train. Even after his schedule became more relaxed, Ravi found Bharath surprisingly elusive. Each of the outlets where the toys had been set up had a different contact number and none of them worked. The people there didn’t seem very concerned. From their point of view, they’d gotten the rides for a pittance, and most of them had recovered their cost within a few months. Apparently, once in an odd while, one of Bharath’s people would come to service the rides; and they’d never had a maintenance problem, so the lack of a working phone number wasn’t a pressing issue.

But that apart, there seemed an inner reluctance to discuss their dealings with Bharath; as though they were afraid of some shadiness being revealed in the course of enquiry. “In truth I think it’s because they’re embarrassed of him,” Vikram said as he downed his third beer with the air of one who has barely wet his tongue. “This Bharath is a retard who thinks he’s some modern day Chacha Nehru, bringing joy to the children of India with his asshole toys. He calls up sometimes on the hotel phone to ask if the children are enjoying his rides. Shit! If I wasn’t getting them cheap I’d bugger him proper. As it is, I literally fall asleep while he’s babbling on the line.”

I highly doubt I am going to fall asleep over this, Ravi mused, making his way to the room that served as Bharath’s office. This office was placed on the upper level of an old-style two-storied building, the sort you would only find in the city’s lowest economic milieus. Coming in from the blinding day, Ravi found the unlit closed-in passage claustrophobic and almost impenetrably dark. He stepped across with a gingerliness that revealed the hollow of mild trepidation in his gut. Sunspots spawned and collided in Brownian patterns across his vision, and at some points he was almost tempted to sit himself on the floor till he felt better. But he soldiered on till he came to the room at the end of the passage. The door bore no nameplate, and it was only by squinting at the number scrawled in chalk on the adjacent wall in the dim fluorescence of his wristwatch’s glow function that Ravi confirmed the address. Assuming that is the right address, he thought, recalling the frankly inexplicable circumstances in which it had come to him.

The atmosphere was one of silence and desolation, and Ravi was unsurprised that his hesitant knock (the electric bell didn’t work) nudged the door in, indicating it was ajar. As he sidled into the room, the dimness of the passage evaporated and through a window in the side wall, the noon poured in once more, instilling in Ravi a small sense of relief. Like a vampire hunter at sunrise, he chuckled to himself and set the thought aside to face… Bharath.

Bharath sat behind a desk in the middle of the otherwise naked room. Again there was no nameplate or sign on it, but Ravi instinctively knew. It was as if Bharath had coalesced into the exact form Ravi had imagined: Middle-aged, balding, overweight, with soft, almost translucent skin covering his jowls, and an expression so insipid it may well have been described as a void. The eyes were large and saucer-like, semi-lidded, and filmed over with a nacre that from one angle made it look like he might just burst into tears, a thought Ravi suppressed quickly for fear of guffawing uncalled.

Without a word or change in expression, Bharath hinted at Ravi to sit. As Ravi lowered himself onto the cold rust-scarred folding seat, his mind went over the ensuing formalities – extending the handshake, pulling out his press-card, rattling off the usual interview spiel; but he did none of this. As if held in a cocoon of amorphousness he sat unmoving, vaguely trying to lock on to the rhythm of his own breath… waiting for a sign from Bharath.

“It… is all… for entropy.”

Ravi started, holding down a sensation of nausea and dislocation. In the ordinary course, this would have been hilarious in a meaningless way, but there was something about those words and how Bharath had uttered them, as if they were at a complete disconnect, and only by the merest chance had occupied the same space. Time stood still or passed unmeasured.

“… for entropy,” Bharath repeated, with no change in tone, no flicking of those glassy, soulless eyes.

This time Ravi felt sucked in and submerged under a wave of confusion. He saw himself in a TV showroom of the sour-smelling seedy variety, facing a wall of sets. They were dust-covered, boasting flimsy makes and unheard of names. Going by the aggressively gregarious nature of the voiceover, they were screening an ad. It showed two children in hospital gowns, placed in adjoining glass cages. One of them marched nonstop along the sides of his cage; the other sat in the center singing and yodeling in the most off-key manner. Around the cages, a crew of doctors stood in surgical costume, pointing to and grinning most affectionately at the camera. More than anything, it looked like an ad for a mental asylum for children, and though Ravi tried hard to get past the jarring treble-heavy tones to focus on the voiceover, it was as though every set was broadcasting it in a different language.

“… for entropy”, Bharath again said, as if at the end of a long expository spell, and Ravi was back in the office. He concentrated his gaze on Bharath as his mind scrambled to find words for his mouth to form. His thoughts were sunspots, moving in aimless, conflicting drifts. Like a litter of newborn mutant babies painfully slithering out from a womb, words surfaced: “Entropy… entropy… chaos… chaos… children… entropy… chaos…” Something about the inflection of the word “entropy” when it formed in his head after “children”, a subservient, almost worshipful tone. What is it? About how there’s entropy everywhere but something special about the entropy in children? What’s with this entropy shit anyway? Ravi strained to put some perspective to the madness, but it was if any effort at concerted thought crumbled and dissolved before it could really form.

And what was it about the man? Something… his face, his voice, his eyes… essayed a lack of personality utterly beyond any norm; as if Bharath had never been born but… His voice conveyed that especially, as though a million constituent voices all disparate, ranging, like the colors of a spectrum, from booming whispers to incredibly shrill shrieks, had blended into one impeccably toneless sound. The way his lips moved, a reel of unconnected mouth gestures projected as a shoddy mime of speech. And for all that Ravi kept telling himself “This is NOT fucking Lovecraft,” there was just something about those unblinking filmed-over eyes that suggested eldritch.

“… for entropy,” Bharath said, Ravi had lost track now how many times. He knew it was again a kind of dream, but only because a part of his mind reminded him that he was still with Bharath. He saw himself in a cinema hall. It was huge in a way even the old-school cinema houses weren’t. There were thousands of seats all arranged in tiered rows, like one half of an amphitheater. The massive hall was packed to capacity but, surprisingly, there was only a dull murmur from the all-male audience, which, save Ravi, was composed of the blue-collar worker that normally frequented the cheap screens. At the bottom of the hall was the screen. It seemed diminutive given the size of the hall but Ravi could see everything clearly from his seat. The opening music coming distorted out of aged crackling speakers, the film began to roll.

Ravi couldn’t believe what he was seeing on screen. Although they featured the same set of characters, the scenes appeared to be shown all out of order, with numerous jumps and blackouts attesting to the same. Each episode came across at complete cross-purposes to everything before and after it. None of the campy mis-productions by Kanti Shah and Joginder and their like could hold a candle to the incoherence of what he was now seeing. But this was not amusing at all; it was bizarre in a way that disturbed him. The rest of the audience however didn’t seem to share Ravi’s concerns. They unabashedly cheered all the scenes, and with each successive cinematic moment, their applause grew more frenzied. It was as if they had discovered an elixir of on-screen enchantment, an undisputed masterpiece.

In keeping with the dream Ravi saw himself, without any sense of transition, outside the film hall. It was near dark and he seemed to be in some really far-flung suburb, from where it would take him ages to get home. He noticed a fair-sized clutch of pavement-dwellers up ahead, children amongst them; and what he saw next completely shocked him. The urchin boys were vigorously fucking tawdry life-size inflatable dolls. The urchin girls were forcibly lowering themselves onto the exposed phalluses of the older males. Ravi felt a wave of tasteless popcorn and bile rise to his gullet. Just then a BEST double-decker bus packed with police constables screeched to a stop near him.

And Ravi found himself back in the theater. The lights had come on and he could see the cops bursting in through the entrances, lathi-charging the audience. People got up in droves and ran pell-mell. Ravi sat glued to his seat in terror. All about him was pandemonium and the screen showed a burning print. As he looked past the crowds and the confusion, he saw alongside the oily green paint-reeking walls, rows of Bharath’s toys, each pulsing and rocking to its own insane rhythm, all together a cavalcade of chaos.

“That friend of yours, what was his name again? Ravi!” Vikram said by way of an epilogue, like the eleven empty beer bottles standing testament to his evening. “He had come to the hotel the other day. Didn’t even take a drink, weird fellow. He was constantly watching the brats riding on those idiotic toys. He’s not a pedophile, is he? Because even some of my friends in the business told me that a guy was watching the rides at their places, and the description fits this chap. I recall, some two months back, he was even asking me about that Bharath bugger who makes these toys. So anyway, I asked him how he was doing and he gave me some shit about how earlier he could never remember the dreams he had, and now he could not forget them at all. I think he was, you know…” Vikram here tapped the side of his forehead, emitting a combination belch-smirk, and hinted at his man to close the place.

Bharath’s toys stood in the darkness, catching stray breeze, each rocking to its own beat.