MY LIFE ON THE SEA-SIDE

At the crack of dawn, I wake up. I lie listening to the familiar sounds of waves lashing at the rocks. From a distance I can hear Janaki calling out to me. In the other room I can hear slight snores from my father. I step out of the hut and a gust of brackish air hits me. Janaki starts signaling. It is late. I hurry in to the kitchen and put some rice for cooking. Janaki is already at my doorstep. I fetch a basket and run outside.

And together we hurry to the seashore.

Usually, Leela beats us to it. And when she gets there first, she haggles and ensures that she gets all the good fish from Gopu. Gopu is the only one who gives us some fish. All the other men have customers from the city. They come early in the morning; when the catch has just arrived.
Today, we are the first ones on the shore. Leela is nowhere in sight. The trawlers have already arrived. Janaki and I wait patiently for them to unload the catch. Today they have red snappers, anchovies, sardines and prawns. As always, the shore is bustling with activity.

Janaki and I finally spot Gopu. When Leela is not around Gopu gives us the fish at a decent rate. We fill our baskets with anchovies and prawns. The prawns are extremely scrawny. But, right now I can afford only the scrawny ones.
With the heavy baskets at our waists, we start walking back. Janaki has to go back home and prepare the morning meal. I, on the other hand, have to tend to my bed-ridden father.

The walk from the shore to home is the only pleasant time in the day for me. I notice some women from my locality spreading mats on the sand, arranging their wares. From trinkets to seashells, they have it all. City-folk come to run on the beach. Some of them even bring their dogs. There is always a group of older people who stand in a circle and laugh. I always wonder why they do that. From the tender-coconut vendor to the life-guards, all of them are slowly coming in.
I reach home. The water in the pot is bubbling over and the rice has cooked. I have to leave for the city in an hour. Before that I have to feed my father and wash the previous day’s clothes.

I suddenly hear this shriek from the neighbour’s hut. I run outside. People are pointing at the sea. Their expressions are cold. I turn around and the sea looks strange. It is as if all the water has swung back and become a very tall wall. In an instant, I know it will come and hit us. It looks like a wall for what seemed like an eternity. Some of the city-folk are clicking pictures with their cameras. A large part of the sea-bed is exposed and is covered with tiny little specks which I assume are seashells. Awe-struck children are filling their pockets with these shells. “No, no! Turn around!”, I scream. But my cries are smothered by the piercing sound of the water charging towards the shore. And with a smashing force it starts engulfing everything. The children disappear, the trawlers disappear, the joggers and their dogs disappear, the coconut trees disappear. My mind freezes. Death is staring me in the eye. All I can think of is my bed-ridden father. I want to run back into the hut. But I cannot move. My feet are glued to the sand. The water is inches away from me. I say a word of prayer and hug the tree near me. And then it hits me. Suddenly everything is black and cold.

I open my eyes. Everything is blurred. My head is splitting. I can see some white figures vaguely. I must be in heaven. Everything is black again. I wake up again. This time I realize I am alive. The nurse tells me that I woke up after two weeks. I am one of the few survivors. Everything is destroyed. I have lost it all at sixteen. My father, my hut, my life.

Narcissus’s unlikely ‘Ark’:

Men argue; nature acts - Voltaire

The birds at home had stopped chirping. The Day, for all the tyranny she had wrought in the form of heat and humidity, looked tired and jaded. She was just refusing to congeal into a cool, breezy evening. The sparrows, having had no luck finding food, looked ill. They would find it difficult to get sleep, they felt. The pigeons and the crows on the other hand, looked excited with their catch. They sat for an evening discussion when they heard a loud thunder. One sparrow looked-up--clouds were tar black--it felt like they had just experienced a monstrous oil spill. The inmates of the garden sensed an impending catastrophe--observing the wild convulsions the trees around were experiencing. It was not autumn yet but the leaves had gone dry and lifeless.

Narcissus looked after the garden. An introvert, he lived alone at home. Being a consummate nature lover, he meticulously looked after the garden and its inmates. He was a scientist by profession and trying to come up with a new concept to control global warming. The news of the receding Arctic ice cap worried him.

He was not a Believer, yet being a culture lover, he had stocked his library with many religious texts. He had just revisited the incident of ‘the deluge’ which he found an interesting piece of fiction. Sensing a wave of melancholy in the air, he came out and looked up. He felt terribly depressed observing the woebegone faces of his feathered friends.

The schizophrenic tenor segued into an asphyxiating avalanche. It felt like a barrage of bullets dropped ad hoc. Little had the city inmates realized that they were sitting on a powder keg all these years. Heavy construction activity had left the city shorn of greenery. Narcissus’s garden was one of the few ‘bright green’ spots in the entire city. The environmental activists had done meticulous work over the last decade warning the State of the need to plant more trees and to avoid indiscriminate construction activity. The Meteorology Department had forecast heavy downpour over the past week. But even they could not have presaged such monstrosity.

The residents nearby were gasping for air running around. Many attempted to drive out of the colony, in the hope of getting better supply of air. Unable to come to terms with the situation, some of them fainted.

Narcissus had an air-proof cabin where he conducted his experiments. He kept an artificial supply of oxygen nearby. It could accommodate a maximum of 20 people at a time. Managing somehow to catch some of his feathered friends, he ran-in and got into his cabin. Sensing that good supply of oxygen was available, he also tried taking a few neighbors in.

Meanwhile, one could see shabbily piled-up bodies lying. Whether there was life left in them, you could not say. Narcissus was able to bring 15 of the nearby residents in.

Meanwhile, the downpour would not stop. The Gilgamesh lake nearby was boiling. The mini-cabin at Narcissus’s home had turned into a refugee camp of sorts. Survivors spent the night exhausted, petrified and stiffened. They could look at each other but were too scared to speak; their minds were not able to register what was happening. Perhaps they were subconsciously trying to welcome Lady Death lurking around the corner.

The night passed. Narcissus was the first one to get-up--awakened by tweeting of the sparrows. He went out, experienced some sunlight. The sun was smiling mischievously at the horizon--as if nothing had transpired! He switched-on his solar powered radio to get some news. His suspicion was true--the lake Gilgamesh had experienced a Liminic Eruption, the massive flood had just followed it. The whole city had only 16 survivors-those in ‘Narcissus’s Ark’

The Deluge

It was a September evening. As we drove on a Gujarat state highway, I noticed deep grey clouds at the horizon outlined by the soft orange hue of the declining sun.
For a hundred or more kilometers I had stared at the thorny grassland, wondering where my father intended to take us. The grasslands vanished gradually and thicker vegetation took over. I asked my father why there was a sudden spurt of vegetation.

The reply was that we were on the fringes of the Gir Forest. The sun was right ahead, we seemed to be driving into it, and it cast oblong shadows on the road. But it got darker. There was thunder and then – it rained.

A rainy forest can be a suitable backdrop to nothing but an action sequence or a horror scene. Or better still – apocalypse.

I let out a scream. The torrent of emotion had to be let out.
That year in geography I had read a paragraph on the Gir Forest, home to Asiatic Lions. I was thrilled. I let my imagination run amok and envisioned Discovery Channel documentaries. I was waiting to boast to my friends – “I went to the Gir Forest!”

Then my dad burst my bubble.

“We are not here for a forest safari,” he said with the authority of a tour-guide.
I wailed and begged him to reconsider. The pleasant pitter-patter of the rain was now louder. Almost like repeated thuds, occasionally drowned by lightning strike.
The driver switched on the wiper and told us that we must cross the forest, the barricade on the other side of the road, before seven.

I failed to notice he was driving “blind” in the heavy rain.
As the Tata Sumo crossed the perimeter of the forest, I wiped the fog off the window. The board proclaimed that we had entered a protected territory, I felt like Jim Corbett. I did not know about the man, but had just read “The Kanda Man-Eater” and felt I could do it too. Children of the videogame era think it is easy to kill, I later concluded.

My father uttered a word of prayer. Crossing the forest was essential. The driver accelerated, splashing water all around, but every few feet he braked. The car’s struggle against the large intermittent pools of water was evident in the hum of the engine.

Through the window the view was mosaic. There were herds of cattle and deer. Their skin looked softer, as if waxed, by the unceasing downpour. I rolled the window a little, just to let a few drops of rain fall on my face.

The smell of earth was overwhelming. I wanted to step outside the car and immerse myself into the moment. Feel the rain and be one with nature.

Just when I was about to pronounce my wish, I smelt something foul. The smell of earth was coupled with that of rotting flesh. The carcass of a cow lying by the road side spoilt the picture, which until now had been perfect. The cow had probably been dead for days..

I closed the window and in a bid to forget what I had seen I looked ahead.
The tar road gave way to a dirt path of mere brown slush. A little further, I saw the carcass of deer, but this one fresh. The goosebumps I had, had nothing to do with the change in temperature. The deluge of various emotions generated automatic prayers in my mind. Like the ones I utter every time I cross the road, “God let me not die here.” And just then I heard a roar.

I screamed, “Papa, why did you bring us here!”

“Just a little while ago you wanted to take a jungle safari,” he told me giving me a silencing glance.

I bit my tongue. Thank God, I hadn’t uttered my wish to bathe in the rain. Is this what Jim Corbett felt like every time a tiger roared, I guess not. My siblings cried because they could sense impeding danger. My parents quarrelled over the chosen path. And me, I thought that someday I could be Corbett.
In my head the forest was no longer something out of “The Jungle Book”. Outside there was water everywhere, the driver joked that we were about to enter “sailing mode”. No one laughed.

The memory of the Forest to me was the stormy sky and the dark premature dusk. Herds of deer and cows, obscured by the rain and in numbers more than my fingers could count and probably running away from an Asiatic Lion. I let myself believe that behind a huge tree or a bush I glimpsed a lion. Later I learnt I never could have.

By seven we had crossed the Forest. It was a relief when we were on actual road again. Just after the small barricade, I saw an arrow directing towards the heart of the brooding Gir Forest, just a couple of kilometres away. The one we had travelled was just the outer circle, a bypass route. Deluge of delusion.

The Deluge

‘The flood is coming.’

Philomena continued to stir the porridge, barely registering her seventy four year old patient’s words. Mrs. Gomez was one of the thirty elderly people under Philomena’s and her husband’s care. Seven years ago, the couple had turned their large seaside bungalow into a home for the elderly. Their only son had just been killed fighting in the war, and they could not think of what else to do with the large house. Even though Milton was hardly ever home during his last years, the emptiness became tangible knowing he was no more. Philomena had been a nurse and her husband, Greg, an ex-policeman, who was always well known for his philanthropy. In a town which seemed to have no dearth of unwanted oldies the ‘Paradise Old Age Home’ became something of a landmark over the years.

‘The flood, Mena! The flood!’

Mrs. Gomez spent her ample free time either reading her Bible or predicting deaths. While this used to alarm Philomena considerably in the beginning, Greg’s constant reassurances soon put her at ease. It was, one had to admit, rather unlikely that they be killed by a massive termite infestation (‘The insects, Mena! They will make powder of our bones!’) or that their long time gardener, Gooch, poison their lettuce (‘Mena, don’t feed me those. That man Gooch, I saw.. I saw him….’) or even that the unusually warm summer was due to the underwater volcano that was slowly getting ready to erupt. The last allegation, Philomena and Greg had a nice laugh about at dinner. One had to admit Mrs. Gomez had an enviable imagination. She must have been a good writer, or perhaps a bad journalist in her better days, before they found her alone and hungry on the beach a year back.

Thinking about that started to make Philomena feel bad about ignoring her attention-starved patient for so long. She took the bowl of porridge to Mrs. Gomez, sat by her side while the latter talked animatedly about her four grandchildren who would visit her in the weekend. They couldn’t make it the past fifty times but Mrs. Gomez was positive that this Saturday was the one.

After helping her into bed, Philomena headed out with Greg for their nightly seaside stroll. Every night the sound of the waves, the smell of the sand and the feel of the shells beneath their feet gave the Smiths some kind of closure, till the wounds opened up again the following day. They usually talked about their patients, wondered out loud if Mr. Kumar would survive his cancer, if Mrs. Clancy was getting into her drug habit again, if they needed fresh bedsheets. Some nights they talked about their son, timid in his boyhood, how Greg said the Army would make a man out of him and how he never came back. The conversations, laced with heavy nostalgia, but forcibly interspersed with daily trivialities often proved overwhelming for Philomena. She found herself drowning in a sea of loneliness, regret and sadness that was so familiar yet still so raw in her heart. More than the loss of her beloved son, Philomena felt for her husband, that stoic man; how much longer could he stay strong? Being surrounded by people more helpless and lonely than themselves did not seem to help.

Philomena was silently sobbing into the strong arms of her husband, when suddenly they noticed a wobbling figure in the distance. She squinted and gasped when she recognized her. It was Mrs. Gomez flailing her arms and running towards them as fast as her arthritic knees would let her. She was wailing ‘The flood, the flood!’
Philomena’s heart resumed beating. Thank God it was just one of Gomez’s eccentricities, and not something disastrous. She turned around, ready to exchange a weary smile with her husband but found his back facing her instead. She adjusted her thick glasses to see why he was staring open-mouthed at the sea. Her blood went cold.

A few hundred feet away was the biggest wave she had ever seen in her fifty five years, rushing towards them. The fear that had instinctively enveloped Philomena’s senses suddenly gave way to a sense of peace. She held Greg’s hand tight and looked into his eyes one last time.

The Deluge

Today they legalised the wombots. It had been in talks for some months now but finally the concerns of the organisations opposing the bill were put to rest. The Right Mirror carried a story which said some members of Mothers by Society were paid in gold.

Nobody knew what implications the bill would have. There was a dire need for an alternative to women. Not women per se, but, their functions. It has been two months since the outbreak of Crake brought humanity to a standstill. The human female was its prime target when Crake flew through air.

On the TV there were live debates on wombots. I remember one burly, old guy, who looked dizzy from lack of sleep, jump at his chance saying why he would prefer a hooker over a wombot any time of the day. A suave guy in a suit and trimmed, neatly combed hair, would then point out how wombots were not only better than human females in the ‘act’ but the obvious fact that women were dwindling like stars from the sky with the arrival of daylight. The old guy missed it every time.  He said he’d know it was fake. To this the gentleman said that they’d employ double blind with even the ‘mediators’ not knowing the fake from the real.

That was a month ago. Today the wombots were set free by Electric International. A team would simultaneously work to escort the existing women out of the trade and harvest their bodies for reproducing human females while others would be subjects for studying Crake. Of course, all that was never openly stated.

Electric International had plans to take buildings and rooms on rent in certain high density localities at the behest of a pseudo government run mostly by members of large private enterprises which stood to gain through the accoutrements of the business and by leasing parts of their infrastructure to Electric.

That was before Harold, the self proclaimed goodwill ambassador of all parties, said anything. There had been plans to provide wombots free of cost under the stated model but then Harold Hammer said that a free commodity had zero utility. He said that if wombots were free, the satisfaction derived would be equal to no satisfaction at all.

And then the growing concern that if the wombots were not as good as human females would not help the plans. It was, then, a placebo in action. People would be charged slightly for the services to induce a sense of value if wombots didn’t come out as expected. It was even better to do that and pass them off as humans rather than as themselves. And that’s what they did.

So, today, they are set free among the birds of human thought. Most of the men are out. Even those whose wives have just died. There had been endless discussions about the drop off points. Endless theories have since been floating around. Some said it was business as usual. A few said it was to check the crime rate (The president’s daughter was kidnapped, raped and murdered). Some believed, “We ARE in the future.” The Right decried eroding morality. The Left preached rationality.  But most, most like me, were indifferent. It had taken my mom and she was never coming back. Dad had always been wayward and could never walk the drink.

With these thoughts circling my head, I moved out of my slow, blue room, picked the leftover pie from the round table by the kitchen, and closed the door behind me. As I left the elevator and approached the main door of our apartment building, I could hear a distant noise; coming from the Final Ground where thousands, or maybe more, were gathering.

Outside, there was dry euphoria floating all around. People walking the streets looked at each other with hesitant smiles. Everybody seemed to be going in the same direction.

After a while we stopped. There were a few, maybe ten helis (the big ones which Electric was known for) hovering over the ground and dropping huge containers. One after another, then more.

One young guy went up to one of the containers, and knocked, as we all looked. And then two opened the latch.

For a moment, the ground became silent. As if everyone had inhaled lots of Oxygen and then forgot how to breathe. Jim would later joke he saw a plant grow an inch.

But then, that moment, dusting off packaging bubbles, a woman came out of that container. She was in pants and a loosely tucked pin stripe shirt, with sleeves folded up to the arms. More than that, she had sultriness about her. There were others behind her who were followed by hordes of droves. It reminded me of a scene from a movie in which the last batch of soldiers was sent among zombies. Here, the ground seemed to be contracting. There was not enough space for all of us. Everybody was pushing the others. Those closer to the containers were going back. The people behind them pushed forward to catch a glimpse. Nobody knew that a few minutes later the 31^st division of Electric would be there, killing for more than kicks.

Up, from the air, they were still dropping containers. The wombots were still flowing out from the mouths of the containers, which looked like newly formed tributaries from a river which originated in the sky, turned into a fall, before cascading and dividing into multiple tributaries. Out of these tributaries flowed streams of wombots. They didn’t move, apart from making way for others like them.

Just then, there was another noise; the noise of wings slicing through air. The 31^st Division was here: two soldiers were manning rattle guns from a Heli-jet. And before anyone could make sense, they started firing. The rate of rattle guns shamed the rate of light. The wombots were terrified too. But there was more space for them now that most of the crowd lay dead. The lucky ones scurried out.

Half an hour into the future, the wombots, with some unuttered understanding, decided to leave the stadium. From outside it looked as if every exit had been withholding a tsunami which was suddenly unhooked. They were laughing and giggling. Some fell, yet stood up with a jerk. Some eyes were closed in blissful laughter. Others were holding their sculpturesque tums which were aching as tears flowed down their real cheeks. They were tumbling, rolling into humanity.

And I believe they still are. That was a few hours ago. Right now as I write this, my Dad sits with a wombot by that round table. And oh, in that movie, like any other, the soldiers won.