Some stories start with a secret. Some lives too. Secrets have the power to make people descend into madness, but what if madness is what is actually sanity in this insane world? We live in a world in which everyone is crazy in a different manner, and those who are sane descend into madness to preserve their purity, to defend their secrets.
This is the story of a boy who had a few secrets and who once let himself lose at a claw machine so that the ones he respected could keep their respect. It turns out that the ones he respected didn’t deserve his respect at all, and now, all grown up, he misses the teddy bear he lost at the claw machine. But that teddy bear would never come back, nor would the time when he could play on the claw machine with the confidence that got lost with the teddy.
The past held secrets, and the future held promise, and the gods who once protected the weak became mute spectators of secrets getting defiled and futures being burned down. The claw machine at the hill station still waits for him to come and get a teddy, but he is hoarding gasoline to burn down the worlds of those who deprived him of the teddy bear, defiled his secrets, and burned down his future.
It’s not a story of revenge, and neither is it a story of madness. It is a story of what happens when gods become impotent. It is a story of a kingdom descending into a realm of madness when it is ruled by the incompetent and the criminally insane. It is a story of benign secrets getting defiled by demons.
The boy opens his storeroom and sees the canisters of gasoline he is hoarding to ultimately burn the whole thing down. A kingdom that has turned into an asylum, and kings who have been castrated. The kingdom has fallen, and the boy sits in his basement waiting to pour gasoline all over it and burn it down. Those who were meant to protect people now rape them, and the boy knows that it’s not the kings who should be castrated, but them.
The gods might not regain their power, the kings may not regain their vitality, but fire remains. It remains forever to purify. The teddy in the claw machine watches the boy with blood-streaked eyes. It’s not about secrets anymore; in fact, it never was. It is about purification, and the ritual involves fire.
The impotence of gods demands sacrifice, and the boy revisits the hill station in his head, in that particular arcade, where he inserts a coin in the claw machine and grabs the teddy by the neck and pulls it out. The teddy has waited for this moment for long — to come out, to meet his real master, to get tied to his back, and to go on with a canister of gasoline and a flamethrower to each and every building that prevented him from meeting his rightful owner.
