Nonidentical Doppelgänger

He moved his index finger circularly on the top of his coffee mug. He wiped off the excess water with a tissue. His fingers cuddled with her hair. He then dipped his index finger in a chocolate-brown paste and smudged it at the corner of her eye. Then he slowly dragged a straight line through her eyelashes and moved that halfway downwards to the blanket. He looked from a distance, and then from his right side.

"It looks good…a shy girl, huh?"

He didn’t look back at the door but answered without any excitement, "No, attentive.”

It was his childhood friend Tim. He could never pronounce Tapabrata when they started their primary school together. He used to call ’Tapab’. Tapabrata’s mother was very particular about her son’s name. She used to get very disappointed even when their teachers pronounced or spelled it incorrectly. One day, she called him with a small hand gesture. She gave him a candy box and said very politely in her husky voice,"Call your friend Tim…Okay? Not Tapab! Bujhle? (Understood?)" 

Since then, it’s always been Tim.

Once their physics teacher laughed and called them both,"Oh, these two... nonidentical twin brothers from another mother...come here, did you solve the equation?"

His impression was quite true, but it stayed the same only for some years. They then had similar likings, similar results, similar toned-athletic figures, and similar hook-up lines for girls. But now, Tim likes only business discussions, and his friend still buys video games; he still looks like a charming boy, whereas Tim now looks more like a grumpy man; Tim had an arranged marriage last year, and his friend is still single. In their college days, many times they fought over one girl, and mostly Tim won them with his queer smartness. Tim would always say with a grinning smile, "Picking up girls on treats! Buy them what they like….that’s it!”

Now they’re both executives at a same company.

Tim said in his old flirtatious tone, "Where did you see her?"

He opened a side drawer. He laid out a small piece of laminated paper on the table and said,"See this…" 

Tim took that from the heap of colours and brushes. Tim loudly read a passage, "If I say he is here, it would be an absurd claim... and if I said he wasn’t here, it would be pretentious. Let’s say he was here, and my hair felt him... Perhaps I heard him, perhaps he gave me the slightest hint…Hmmm no… He wasn’t here... He was there in those folds of my blanket. I felt something in my eyes, and in the blanket folds.

-Midnight, Date: not important, '23."

Tim looked up and asked, "It looks something like poetry with so many ellipses. Where did you get this...hmm…?”

"From the magazine shop, it was in the fold of an old magazine," he said smilingly.

"Mane? Janish na eta ke?" ("What do you mean?" You don’t know who she is?)

He shook his head slightly.

"And then you made this your inspiration and started painting?" Tim asked.

He nodded again.

Tim rolled on the couch with a loud laugh and repeated one phrase while coughing, "Bloody artist!"

He continued his work on the eyelashes. He was still smiling.

Tim then said, "And what about the authorization meeting?"

He threw a small, crumpled, empty colour tube at the table. He started talking while wiping his hands on a color-drenched napkin, "Yes, wear formal, put on a fake smile, listen about my stolen software, and clap for the thieves. Sorry, but I’m..."

"Who’re thieves? That was a misunderstanding. And buddy, that’s not the way... Forget that… You could slip into depression. Look at your eyes."

"Misunderstanding? Really? You know Tim. I consulted the advocate, threw court notices on them. You know everything. What happened?  The team apologised in court. Nobody could gauge their loss and my win. And even you scoffed. And they smartly made little changes to the code, named it differently, and ultimately still that thief is using my core...my software."

"But…"  Tim tried to say something.

"I know you call me oversensitive, but tell me, if it were you, what would you do?"

Tim stayed silent but frowned angrily.

He continued, "But you could never be on this side." Right Tim? You're always on the other side."

He inserted a pen drive in his rose-gold MacBook and moved that towards Tim.

Tim saw this room and himself. Tim was trying to pull a drawer. He was struggling with a small pin. He could finally rotate the lock. He cracked open that drawer. He took out some files and sat with this laptop. The green-coded lines were moving up rattlingly. Tim had been secretly practising hacking methods since his school days, and he had the swiftest ways to open any locked laptop. This also took a few minutes. He quickly pulled out a shiny black hard drive.

Tim’s eyes could see his childhood friend’s reflection in the mirror. But Tim hid his glance carefully. There were a few seconds of dead air. Finally, Tim spoke, but in a snappy tone, "You have a camera in this room...You never told me."

Tim’s childhood friend smiled. He said, “Well, I should have…right? But now let me connect the dots. The rest of the work you completed in my office on my exhibition day, right again? Somewhere, I always knew it was you. When you first stole my project in college…when you lied to the college girls that I was on meds for schizophrenia. Remember that designer girl with a little tomboyish look? She told me that on our farewell. And when you argued about my growing shares in the board meeting, it was always you. You covered yourself up, telling me you were doing it for everyone. You chewed water for some minutes in your mouth. You do that when you lie.”

He continued, but his voice had a slight elitist tone, “I saw this footage after the court case. My mom installed a hidden camera to save my paintings because somebody stole three pieces during a house party. And should I guess... hmm… that somebody was also you? How much did you get from those, huh? Forget that...have some treats with that money. Let’s come back to this point. Okay wait…lets announce, here you go, my best buddy came out of his shadow.”

Tim stood up and adamantly said, "Yep, I did. It could have been a waste with you. Sometimes you paint for days and forget about reality... I can manage this better."

"Yes, you can manage, but you can’t create. Simple difference. You don’t know this software has many parallel processing systems. And each needs a separate updating task with some complicated ’my ways’.

He continued, “I thought to give that automatic updating system before the launch but you didn’t give me that time. You stole that much before the major work. But you know what? I have everything ready... there.”

He pointed to the painting.

Tim stuttered, “But how…”

He smiled, "I'm sorry hacker… I can’t tell you. Go Tim, enjoy one more month with the software, because after that it’ll ask for updates. This company will never get the profits from this thief.”

He rubbed his hands and calmly filled in the gap between them with a chair. He said, “You know what, today I tried to hold myself back from this filth. But…”

Tim moved forward, but he stopped him with banging sound of the chair. He took up his phone without looking at Tim.

He said loudly, "Watchman, I am sending you a picture. I don’t want this man ever in my apartment."

And he searched Tim’s photo and sent that to the watchman with Tim's full name.

The night was shutting down with its last yawns. He slipped slowly into the cushion pile on the couch. He messaged his lawyer, "Want a meeting."

He gazed softly at his canvas. The lampshade light hit her pupils. He looked into her new dark eyes and whispered quite confusingly, "As if she is here...”

And again he said, “Did you too get a night like this, my nonidentical doppelgänger?"

He took a pointed brush and moved his wrist carefully to the canvas corner. He wrote, "Some new lines, Date: not important, ’23.”