This season’s harvest had a jackfruit that weighed fifty kilos. As heavy as a woman. It had taken him two hours to peel off the rind, separate the bulbs and deseed them. And Muthumaran was an expert. He was eighty years old, and he had been farming jackfruits most of his adult life. He was willing to bet his farm there was no one better at it in the entire district. He was covered in jackfruit slime and sticky fibre at the end of it, despite all his skill and care. That was just one jackfruit. The single tree it came from had yielded a hundred and fifty other monsters, though none had topped fifty kilos. They were all big and heavy enough, for all that. He had to pay twenty seven people, and they had to work nonstop for two weeks to get in and prepare the entire harvest from his 25 acre farm. It was hot, sticky, bothersome work. He had a peeling machine, but that was all it did – peel. The bulbs still had to be separated by hand.
Two weeks later, they were still at it, but now they had broken the back of it. It felt like his own back was broken too. It was the end of another long day, and he was lying bonelessly in the massage couch, waving his tired hand feebly in the air to scroll down the newsfeed on the wall screen of the living room. He was too tired to read anything serious. A commercial interrupted his feed. It was for a probot. Personal Robot. The commercial said probots were really, really good at peeling and processing jackfruits. Muthumaran knew the commercial was meant only for his eyes. And maybe other jackfruit farmers like himself. The web knew everything about everyone, and no one really knew how. Well, the people who built it probably did, but he’d read somewhere they were constantly surprised by how clever it all was. This did not inspire confidence.
Probots could do anything, everyone knew. Muthumaran didn’t like the idea of a robot wandering about the place, though. They were supposed to be autonomous, meaning they did just about what they liked, within their ‘operating boundaries’, whatever that meant. The operating boundaries was fine print, and Muthumaran interpreted that as an excuse for the robot marketers to get away with just about anything. Probots had been around for several years now, and there had been no reports of anything particularly horrific. They hadn’t killed anyone, or even wrecked a home in a malfunctioning mood. But Muthumaran felt it was only a matter of time. A probot was thrice as strong as a strong human, could move much faster, and could think faster too, in certain ways. This was asking for it, Muthumaran felt.
Now the jack robot, which was the probot people’s name for the probot targeted pointedly at Muthumaran, could peel and separate the bulbs, and if necessary deseed them, a forty kilo jackfruit in 5 minutes, the commercial claimed. Muthumaran knew that a probot could do this. They were superhuman. But he still had doubts. It would have to work so fast to do this that its hands would be a blur of motion. He’d like to see it.
“You should ask for a demo,” said Muthulakshmi. She spoke mechanically, without expectation, as she sat in the other massaging recliner in the room and watched the wall screen. Muthulakshmi was his wife. She knew he would not ask for a demo. She wanted a probot and Muthumaran had already said no, as often as she’d suggested it. She had been asking for months, ever since her friend Janaki had got one to help with the housekeeping, and then bought the cooking upgrade. The upgrade was just a code; the probot could already cook, it knew how to better than Janaki’s husband, who was a passable cook, but it chose not to until you paid for the upgrade. Which was not cheap.
Muthumaran was no miser, but a probot was expensive. It cost twice as much to rent as his EV, which after all was a robot too, though it did nothing but drive itself. And that was only for a monopurpose probot. The multipurpose ones cost a lot more, with huge monthly fees for the ‘capability ugrades’. Muthuraman could remember a time when you paid just once for a gadget, including repair and replacement parts. But everything was a subscription these days, like those software and video streaming services. A probot was a ‘platform’ and a ‘service’, not merely a gadget, they said. Think of the probots as employees, with a monthly salary, they said. No one was content with taking your money once, they wanted to turn you into a milch cow. Muthumaran shook his head. No, he would not become a cow.
***
A week later, when Muthumaran shuffled into the kitchen for his coffee, after his afternoon nap, there was a stranger in the kitchen. It took him a moment to realise it was a probot. He was still trying to work out how this could be, when the robot handed him a cup of coffee, and said, “Good evening sir, I hope you will find the coffee satisfactory. This is the first cup I have made for you. I suggest that you allow me two trials to get it perfectly right. This is the first trial.”
The robot was about Muthulakshmi’s height, who was five feet three, and humanoid, with regular, ungendered, unremarkable features, neither beautiful nor ugly. It had a light coffee complexion, a somewhat oval face, a small nose, brownish eyes, thin lips, and a rounded chin. Its body was slender without being too thin, and its limbs appeared to be well knit. It was clothed in a single grey featureless garment, like a continuous wrapping around its torso, limbs, and legs, excepting its hands and feet. The latter were clad in what seemed to be soft moccasins.
The robot appeared to be waiting. Then Muthumaran realised it was waiting for him to taste the coffee. He did. It was good. Surprisingly so. He nodded. The robot appeared to interpret this as approval, and turned away, walking towards the kitchen counter. It walked like any human, no jerks or mechanical whines. But then robots had been able to do that for a while now.
“I’m making pakodas and kesari for evening snacks, sir,” it said. “I hope that is to your liking.” It spoke like a human too, except that it was difficult again to assign a sex to the voice.
“It’s only for a one month trial,” said Muthulakshmi, quickly. She had slipped into the kitchen while Muthumaran had been staring at the robot. “There are no obligations. And it has two modules for the trial, housekeeping and cooking.”
Muthumaran transferred his bemused stare to her. He absently sipped his coffee. It was indeed very good. He found himself thinking about the pakodas, the mouthwatering smell of which was now filling the kitchen. ‘Evening snacks’ were a rare indulgence. Neither Muthulakshmi nor himself were big eaters, and they were usually still digesting lunch in the evening, with no room or inclination for snacks. But this was a welcome change. He shrugged. This wasn’t costing them anything. They’d return the robot well before the month’s trial was up.
The kitchen had a back door that opened on to a patio with a table and chairs, and a view of the half-acre vegetable garden and the forest of soaring jackfruit trees beyond that. He took his coffee to the patio.
***
“I found out about the costs. Fifty grand rupees for the housekeeping and cooking modules,” said Muthulakshmi. “And another seventy five for the jackfruit processing module.”
“Seventy five!” said Muthumaran.
“It costs more because it’s a professional module. They say it’s skilled labour.”
Of course it was skilled labour, thought Muthumaran. It was craft, not merely labour. And seventy five grand rupees was what he would pay ten people for a single harvest. They would each process at least 200 jackfruits for seven and a half grand rupees. Would the probot do ten peoples’ work? Five minutes per jackfruit? Why, it could do twenty, thirty, or even fifty people’s work. But how would it keep clean? He’d like to see it, he thought again.
The trial month was about to end. And they’d decided to keep the probot. They were hooked, yes, but they liked it. Why had they waited so long?
***
A drone delivered the jackfruit processing kit for Jack. It was a slime-proof overall, and what looked like a set of knives, some of them strangely shaped. Jack was what they’d decided to call the probot they were ‘employing’. They had to call it something, and Jack was as good a name as any. Muthulakshmi had suggested Jackie, but Muthumaran had vetoed that. Jackie had too much personality. They should guard against, what was that word, yes, anthro…anthropomorphising the robot.
Muthumaran led Jack to a pile of peeled jackfruit. These were from one tree that had fruited at an odd time. They did that sometimes. Jack was wearing its jackfruit processing overalls. It – Muthumaran resisted thinking of it as a he or a she – picked up a 30 kilo fruit with one hand, fished out a knife from a pouch around its waist with the other, and ran it around the jackfruit, seemingly without effort. The fruit opened like a flower. Jack placed it on the sheet spread out on the ground, squatted before it, exchanged his knife for a pair of smaller ones, and then its hands became blurs, just as Muthumaran had expected. Five minutes later, there was a neat pile of bulbs on a tray beside the pile of jackfruit.
“How did you do that?” said Muthumaran.
“I have recorded it, I will send the video to your message stream,” said Jack. “I will slow it down to half speed,” it added helpfully.
Muthumaran watched it work for twenty more minutes, and then left to eat lunch (which Jack had made before it began on the jackfruit).
***
Two months later, they added two more modules to Jack, gardening and hairdressing. Muthumaran had objected strenuously to the last one, but Muthulakshmi had simply ignored him. She was ten years younger than him and still saw herself as something of a beauty. She had lustrous black hair, thanks to a nanogloss coating for which she’d paid a fortune at a beauty salon in the city. Jack could do magic things with her hair, she said, as if that precluded all debate.
Three days later, they discontinued the gardening module and replaced it with a nursing module. Muthulakshmi had slipped on the patio, possibly on a jackfruit bulb, fallen and broken her left leg. The hospital had sent a probot. It was a teleproxy for a doctor. It, or the doctor who was acting through it, it was hard to say which, said it was a moderately serious fracture. It would need Muthulakshmi to keep mostly to the bed for a week while the variable pressure cast and targeted calcium nanosules healed her cracked tibia. So Jack stopped tending to the garden and attended to Muthulakshmi instead.
Muthumaran had not dared suggest that they replace the hairdressing module instead – it would have upset the invalid, and for all his spiny exterior, Muthumaran loved her well enough and was more disturbed by her fall than he cared to admit.
The nursing module was in the ‘highly skilled’ category, and cost even more than the jackfruit module: a hundred and fifteen gr. But it was worth every paise, Muthumaran felt. Jack made everything look so easy, and he, it, was so efficient, Muthulakshmi was walking around at the end of five days, even earlier than the doctor had said.
On the morning of the sixth day, Muthumaran was making coffee for himself and Muthulakshmi, while she walked in the garden, with a hand on Jack’s shoulder. He watched with quiet satisfaction through the kitchen window.
Then he started, because Muthulakshmi stopped Jack and pulled him into a tight hug, in the shadow of a giant jackfruit tree. He was more surprised that Jack returned the hug. Was that part of the nursing module?
They had put off having children, year after year, and then it was too late. They had considered adopting, but then they’d put that off too. He wondered if there was a ‘child’ module, and if so, how much it would cost. He smiled wryly to himself.
***