Fourteen Seconds

The video was fourteen seconds long and Priya had not meant for anyone to see it.

She had filmed it herself, in the kitchen on a Tuesday evening, in good faith, with the best of intentions, using the good camera angle, in decent lighting, attempting to demonstrate to her older cousin Diya, who was away at university and could only talk on video call, how to make their grandmother's rice pudding. The demonstration had gone fine for eleven seconds, at which point the wooden spoon had slipped, the pot had lurched, and Priya had said a word her grandmother definitely did not know she knew, directly into the camera, with perfect clarity.

The video had not been posted anywhere. Priya had not posted it. She had looked at it once, decided it was too embarrassing to exist, put her phone down, cleaned up the rice pudding, and gone to bed.

She had woken up to four hundred and twelve notifications.

This was unusual. On a normal day she woke up to three notifications, all of them from a group chat with her two best friends that ran overnight because one of them lived in a different time zone. Four hundred and twelve was not a normal amount of notifications. Four hundred and twelve was a problem.

Diya had thought the video was funny. Diya had sent it to her university flatmates. One of the flatmates had a large following. The flatmate had posted it with the caption THIS CHILD and a laughing emoji and tagged it cooking fail and within six hours it had been seen by half a million people and within twelve hours it had been seen by considerably more than that, and by the time Priya discovered what had happened while eating breakfast on Wednesday morning it was too late to do anything about it at all.

"I am going to be sick," Priya said.

"You are famous," her younger brother Rohan said, with great admiration. He was nine and had no understanding of why this was bad.

"I said a bad word on the internet," Priya said. "In front of six hundred thousand people."

"Seven hundred thousand now," Rohan said, refreshing her phone. "The number keeps going up."

"Give me that," Priya said, and took the phone, and looked at the comments, and immediately wished she had not looked at the comments.

She put the phone face down on the table.

"Is it bad?" Rohan asked.

"It is not bad," Priya said. "It is just. A lot."

"Eight hundred thousand people is a lot," Rohan agreed. He pointed his cereal spoon at her. "You are an internet person now."

"I did not want to be an internet person," Priya said.

"Nobody warns you," Rohan said wisely, and went back to his cereal.

She read the comments for seventeen minutes and then put the phone in a drawer, which was not a permanent solution but was a temporary one. Then she took it back out because she needed it for school.

The comments were, on balance, mostly kind. People found it funny. People called her relatable. People said they had done worse in their own kitchens. Several people had made the video into a sound and were using it in other videos, which Priya found deeply alarming. A food blogger had written a post about kitchen disasters and embedded it. A parenting account had shared it with the caption we have all been there, which Priya found particularly mortifying because she was twelve and did not want to be grouped with parents.

Her school found out on Wednesday afternoon.

This was inevitable, she supposed. She was at school. Her classmates had phones. The internet existed.

"I saw your video," said Chloe, in the corridor before maths, in the tone of someone delivering both sympathy and entertainment simultaneously.

"I know," Priya said.

"Everyone saw your video."

"I know."

"Mr. Patterson saw your video."

"I know," Priya said, and then stopped. "Wait. Mr. Patterson?"

"He mentioned it in registration," Chloe said. "He said he hoped you were recovering from your cooking incident. He was trying to be nice. It was very awkward."

"I want to move schools," Priya said.

"You cannot move schools. There is a maths test on Friday."

"I want to move countries," Priya said.

"The internet is everywhere," Chloe said, not helpfully.

She also had to walk through the school corridor, which she usually did without thinking about it, and discovered that walking through a corridor when you are an internet person felt measurably different from walking through a corridor when you were not. People looked. Not rudely. Just with a flicker of recognition, a slight double-take, the look of a person whose brain had matched a face to a thing they had seen online and was processing the information. Priya looked at her shoes and walked faster.

"You cannot move countries," Chloe added. "We have a maths test Friday. Also I would miss you."

"I know," Priya said, slightly less dramatically.

Priya went to maths. Mr. Patterson did not mention the video, which was either kind or a different kind of terrible, because now she spent the entire lesson waiting for him to mention it, which was worse than if he had just mentioned it and got it over with.

The problem with being accidentally internet famous for something embarrassing, Priya discovered over the following days, was that it did not go away the way she had hoped. She had assumed, based on nothing in particular, that the internet would move on. The internet did move on. But it moved on while still containing her video, which sat there in the permanent record of everything that had ever happened, available for anyone to find at any time, forever.

By Thursday the view count had passed a million, which Rohan told her with enormous excitement and which Priya experienced as a specific and growing dread. One million people had seen her say a bad word. That was the population of a medium-sized city. That was everyone in Birmingham, approximately, all watching her spoon slip and her face do the thing it did and her mouth say the thing it said, in perfect fourteen-second clarity.

She spent Wednesday evening doing homework and intermittently picking up her phone and putting it down again. The view count continued to rise in the background of everything she did, a number she had not asked for attached to something she had not intended, gaining momentum on its own without her participation.

She texted her best friend Ananya: have you seen it

Ananya replied: I have seen it approximately forty times. You have become my personality. I have shown everyone. You are famous now.

Priya replied: please stop showing everyone

Ananya replied: I showed my mum. My mum showed her book club. Her book club has twelve members. You are welcome.

Priya put the phone face down again.

Her mother came in to say goodnight and paused in the doorway and said: I heard about the video. And Priya braced herself, because she had said the word, after all, very clearly, on camera, in a video her mother had presumably now seen. Her mother looked at her for a moment and then said: the pot was too full anyway, which was, Priya thought, her mother's way of being kind, and also technically correct.

She had made a list, at some point on Thursday, of things that were bad about the situation and things that were not bad about the situation. The not-bad list included: nobody was being mean, the comments were mostly kind, her family had not disowned her, and it would probably be forgotten in a week. The bad list included: the permanence of the internet, Mr. Patterson, and the specific experience of walking down a school corridor while being an accidental internet person. She looked at both lists for a while and concluded that the not-bad list was longer and went back to her homework.

On Thursday a journalist from a small online magazine emailed her school asking for a comment, which the school declined on her behalf, and her form tutor called her in to check she was all right, which she appreciated but which also involved sitting in a room while her form tutor tried to be reassuring about a situation that involved a twelve-year-old swearing on the internet, which was not a situation that lent itself to reassurance.

On Friday Diya called to apologise.

"I am so sorry," Diya said. "I genuinely did not think anyone would see it."

"Eight hundred thousand people saw it," Priya said.

"I know. I am very sorry."

"Gran is going to find out," Priya said. "Someone is going to show Gran."

"Gran does not use the internet," Diya said.

"Mrs. Mehta next door uses the internet," Priya said. "Mrs. Mehta uses the internet specifically to find things to tell Gran."

There was a pause.

"I will call Gran first," Diya said. "I will explain. It will be fine."

"It will not be fine," Priya said.

It was, in fact, not fine. Gran called twenty minutes later, not about the word, because Gran had been briefed by Diya and had decided to be broad-minded about the word, but about the rice pudding, which Gran had watched the video of and had a great many opinions about in terms of technique.

"The spoon was wrong," Gran said. "You were using the wrong spoon. That is why it slipped."

"Gran," Priya said.

"I will send you the correct spoon," Gran said. "Wooden is correct but the size matters. Also you had the heat too high."

"Gran, I have eight hundred thousand people who have seen me say a bad word on the internet."

"The spoon," Gran said firmly, "is more important."

Priya sat on her bed and held the phone and thought that her grandmother had an extremely healthy set of priorities and that she could find this upsetting or funny, and that one option would make the next few days considerably easier.

She laughed. Properly, the kind that came out unexpectedly.

"Also the milk," Gran said. "Whole milk. Not semi-skimmed."

"Gran."

"Write it down," Gran said.

Ananya called on Friday night, which she did when something important had happened, and said: okay so my mum's book club has been discussing you. Priya said: what. Ananya said: you have become a topic. One of them said you were very relatable. Another one said you reminded her of her daughter. A third one said she had done worse in her own kitchen, which she refused to elaborate on.

Priya said: this is the strangest week of my life.

Ananya said: you have brought strangers together. You have created community. You are basically a public service.

Priya said: I said a bad word while making rice pudding.

Ananya said: yes but you said it in a very relatable way.

Priya was quiet for a moment and then started laughing and could not stop, and Ananya laughed too, and they stayed on the phone for an hour talking about other things, and by the end of it the week felt different, smaller, more manageable, the kind of thing you could tell as a story rather than live inside.

The unexpected thing happened on Saturday.

Priya had been avoiding her phone with varying success, checking it approximately once every fifteen minutes and then regretting it. On Saturday morning she checked it and found, among the usual assortment of notifications, a message from a cooking channel she had followed for two years, a proper channel run by a professional chef with several million subscribers, asking if she would like to do a video with them.

She read the message three times.

Then she went and found Rohan, who was watching television.

"If someone offers you something good because of something embarrassing," she said, "do you take it?"

Rohan thought about this with the seriousness he applied to important questions. "What kind of something good?"

"A cooking video. With a proper chef. For a big channel."

"The one where you said the bad word?"

"That is why they want me," Priya said. "Because of the video."

"Then yes," Rohan said immediately. "Obviously yes."

"What if I say another bad word?"

"Then you will be even more famous," Rohan said. "Also you can practise first."

Priya looked at her brother for a moment. He was nine years old and had an uncomplicated relationship with the world that she occasionally found useful.

She called Ananya first.

"A proper cooking channel wants to do a video with me," Priya said.

"Because of the rice pudding thing?"

"Yes."

"Take it," Ananya said immediately. "Obviously take it. You cannot just be famous for a bad word. You need to be famous for something good as well. It is called narrative arc."

"You do not know what a narrative arc is," Priya said.

"I do and this is one," Ananya said.

Priya replied to the message.

The chef's channel was called Cooking With Patience, which Priya thought was either a reference to the virtue or someone's name, and she had been watching it for two years because the chef, whose name was actually Grace and who was reassuringly normal on camera, explained things without being condescending and made mistakes without pretending she had not and generally seemed like a person who genuinely liked food rather than someone performing liking food.

The message said: we love your video, it's very real, would you want to do a remake with us? No pressure, just an idea.

Priya read this four times.

Then she read it once more to make sure she had not misunderstood it.

She had not misunderstood it.

The filming was, it turned out, mostly fine. Grace was exactly like she was on camera, which Priya had not entirely expected, having assumed that professional people were different in person. They made the rice pudding together in Grace's kitchen, which was much tidier than Priya's kitchen, and Grace showed her the correct technique with the spoon, which was not the same technique Gran had described over the phone but arrived at the same result, which Priya filed away as an interesting data point about cooking knowledge.

"The comments on the first video," Grace said, while the rice pudding simmered, "were pretty kind actually. People related to it."

"Eight hundred and forty thousand people have seen me say a bad word," Priya said.

"Nine hundred thousand by now," Grace said. "I checked this morning."

Priya looked at her.

"For context," Grace said, "my first viral video was me dropping an entire birthday cake on the floor at a client's house. So."

"What happened?"

"They hired me again the following year," Grace said. "People relate to mistakes. It makes them feel less alone with their own."

Priya thought about this while stirring the rice pudding at the correct heat with the correct spoon.

At one point in the fourth minute the spoon slipped and Priya opened her mouth and then closed it very firmly.

"Good catch," Grace said.

"I have been practising," Priya said.

The video went up three weeks later. It was eight minutes long and featured Priya and the chef making a proper version of her grandmother's rice pudding, with the correct spoon, at the correct heat, narrated with the particular dry commentary that came from being a twelve-year-old who had recently had a deeply humiliating experience and had decided to find it funny.

She did not say any bad words. She almost said one in the fourth minute when the spoon slipped again, but she caught it, and the chef laughed, and it became the funniest moment in the video, which had four million views by the end of the week.

Gran watched the video. Mrs. Mehta next door watched the video. Mr. Patterson mentioned it in registration and this time Priya did not want to move countries, because this time it was something she had done on purpose, which turned out to feel entirely different from something that had happened to her.

"You are more famous now," Rohan said, showing her the view count.

"I know," Priya said.

"Does it feel different?"

"Yes," she said. "It feels like mine."

Rohan watched the video eleven times. Priya knew this because he told her. He said it was the funniest thing he had ever seen, which Priya was not sure whether to feel proud or offended about, and then said: the first one was funnier, which settled it as offended.

Gran called the evening after the video went up to say she had watched it and that the technique was acceptable and the spoon was correct and the milk was the right milk, and then, after a pause, that Priya had done well, which from Gran was approximately equivalent to a standing ovation from anyone else.

Priya wrote it down in her notebook. Gran: done well. She thought she would keep that one.

She posted the video herself, on her own account, with the caption attempt two, and linked to the chef's channel.

Ananya texted within four minutes: NARRATIVE ARC. I told you.

Priya replied: you were right. I am not saying it again.

Ananya replied: I am screenshotting this.

Priya replied: please do not.

Ananya replied: already done.

Priya put the phone in her pocket and went to help her mother with dinner.

She used the correct spoon.

Rohan came in halfway through and sat at the kitchen table and watched. He did not say anything. He just watched, in the way he sometimes did when he was paying attention to something he thought was worth paying attention to.

When the pudding was done he said: can I have some.

Priya gave him a bowl.

"It is good," he said.

"Yes," she said.

"Gran would say the same thing," Rohan said.

"Gran would find at least one thing wrong with it," Priya said.

"That is how Gran says it is good," Rohan said.

Priya thought about this. She thought he was probably right.

The End