This phoenix did not rise
by Kartik Krishna
[ fiction - may 05 ]
August 23, 2050
Under a pewter sky, the rain begins to fall, spottily at first, pit-pat (even the sound of rain seems truncated these days) and then in bleak torrents. Today is much the same as yesterday, and the day before (does anyone remember a monsoon without storms nearly every day?)... This morning, I saw a few eagles - or at least I thought they were eagles, but these seemed smaller and darker, like some morbid hybrid of raven and buzzard; black chickenhawks or mutant falconets. Like a skein of geese, they wheeled, unblinking, seven times around my 12th storey apartment: agni-pradakshina, or fire-circumnambulation, in Hindu marriage, the bride led clockwise around the fire. But I have never been married, nor can I be kindred with any sort of fire, and the birds seemed to look for vents, windows of opportunity through which they might swoop and feast on the waking dead.
Below, the silent legions of beggars, eunuchs, cyber-demagogues, poets, Buddhist cultists, harlots, are beginning to file into their mandatory batches and rows, some groups claiming the parapet ledge, others at their feet along the promenade of Worli sea face: a human chain two miles along the coast to the mosque of Haji Ali. There they sit in lotus positions, grim-faced, as if posing reluctantly for a high school photograph. They do not call out, inveigle, or ripple out circles of enticement in any way; the sound of the sea behind them, like water rushing down a giant drain, or air soughing through God's windpipe, will pre-empt their voices forever. Megaphones are used here, but purely by bus conductors, pimps for their hooker buses, soliciting passengers to clamber on, bang, exit. Chalo, chalo, where do you want to go, Opera House, Churchgate, anywhere, just climb aboard and justify these damn steel boxes, will you... Not that they need to beseech the swarms on the roads and pavements; the buses are already chock-full with contorted limbs, flying hair, sullen faces.
August 24, 2050
A few days ago, a congregation sat directly across my building. No ear-splitting propaganda, no beteljuice-and-spittle ranting, but a quiet, ordered gathering of people with laptops. The speaker addressed his audience via computer; he'd set up a special chatroom expressly for them, and waged his war from his cyber-pulpit against the filthy rich, the "real" felons of society. The audience emerged bleary-eyed, edified - and bankrupt. As he held them rapt, his minions had accessed their bank accounts through the net, and shrivelled them dry.
And the upper caste beggars. They sit in their favelas or at highrise corners, waiting to be shooed at by their prey, but merely shifting a few spaces here or there. A massed mutiny of mendicancy, at every cove and cranny. Their instruments are begging bowls no more, but second-hand laptops and mobile phones, primed for a new day's work, most of which will consist of extortion from the rich (even the laptops are products of this) via email. Our popular phone and net providers, VSNL, are in cahoots with these modern-day Robin Hoods. Ever since the fine line between hackers and beggars blurred several years ago, and private phone calls and emails became readily accessible to these wise men on the streets, the elite have turned victims of blackmail. Nobody knows whose mail will be dipped into next, and yet, curiously few are willing to revert to private postal services or closed-door meetings. The ultra rich still take chances with their secrets, possibly because they can afford to, or justify this extortion as the spreading of wealth, a lessening of the disparity between haves and have-nots. So, new weapons, same wars. Same old story.
August 25, 2050
For some reason, today's crowds have chosen to cluster around an anchorite-mage as he performs the mango trick, ignoring poets and authors mutely peddling the defunct form of the book, unmindful of the newly emboldened Buddhist sects, and the chiaroscuro games played by silent whores (hopscotch by day, Scotch and hops by night). From my balcony, I can see concentric circles - like the lotus phalanx protecting the warrior Abhimanyu in the Mahabharata - around this saffron-swaddled hermit as he plants a dry mango stone in a little hole, covers the spot with cloth and chants mantras. When the sorcerer has produced a sapling at least a foot high with a cluster of fruit on it, he simply walks away, leaving a stunned throng. The phalanx dissolves, people trickle away, still agape, to their next diversion. The mango trick - now known to world mythology as a first cousin to the Indian rope trick.
The watchman of our building is a not-so-proud descendant of Jung Bahadur (or so he claims), the Nepali king who colluded with the British to suppress the uprising at Lucknow in 1858. One of the near witnesses to the mango act, the watchdog, scoffs. "A real magician/sanyasi would take less than half an hour; this guy had one whole hour, and his mangoes tasted of the sewers."
The prostitutes here are perfunctory, easily outnumbered and outmanoeuvred by their opulent sisters who own laptops, and therefore, the laps. So some sit and preen, some play, hoping some Muppie on a recent trip from abroad would pick them up as cheap exotica to be flaunted to friends and colleagues. Interestingly, the term Muppie originates from the 20th Century word Yuppie, which referred to the young. Today, we have middle-aged upwardly mobile people, since the upper middle class young have already scaled pinnacles and if they do descend, it's out of sheer boredom, merely to whisk themselves up again. But then again, these low-grade hookers can always rely on a member of the teeming majority, they who still travel three hours to work every day and don't see their wives for huge tracts of time.
August 26, 2050
Marrow white sky, cobalt streaks like strobelights on blue ribbons... Exactly six months since the closure of Subterra, the underwater highway linking two suburbs, Worli and Bandra. A misnomer from the beginning, the name was perhaps approved as it lent itself to a Hindi phrase, sub tera, everything yours. About a hundred yards to the right of my building, where a helipad and then a garden once existed, people lined up their cars for the three-hour ride: an excruciating two hours for registration (passport check, proof of vehicle ownership, proof of residence, employment, among others), one for the actual journey: a trip that was supposed to prune the conventional 1 hour highway journey by half.
Briefly, my first and last ride through Subterra:
Outside, the police enforce lathicharges on derelicts and tatterdemalions who hang their clothes on Subterra's dry outer walls, raining blows on them on the premise that the bright tatteredness of underwear may distract commuters into accidents at 20 km per hour. The ground slopes gradually off the Worli sea face esplanade, cars descending at snail-pace. Where the slope meets the tunnel - another roadblock: ticket counter.
"Bandra, please." Below the City of Laughter, in the perpetual gothic twilight of its wormhole, I'm given a ticket to Bandra by a ticket vendor who looks like Mahatma Gandhi doing his charity bit for the day. There is only one place we can go, yet we have to spell it out, as if in penitence, mollifying suburban gods.
Another half-hour, and I'm into the main tunnel, whose walls are the mucky grey of sea and sky. No sea creatures worth their salt would care to fin this close to asphyxiating doom. What swims about us instead is medical refuse, a junkie's dream bobbing, weaving in various hues of faeces and slime. Here are the toxins defecated by the factories that have spawned next to Bandra's slums; here, I envision their cylindrical columns of smoke frozen perpetually against the sky, undeterred, unmarred by philosophy or romance. Perhaps a hundred years hence, these factories would still spew their ash though there would be no humans left to feed them, these modern volcanoes, nature's idiots. Most street-corner astrologers can't or won't prophesy more than a week into the future; they say they can't see through the smog.
Fifteen minutes and a few inches along, there's a traffic jam, a tumult. People are getting out of their cars. I traipse towards the babel. I'm repeatedly solicited by hawkers hardselling their dreams: leather shoes, outré keychains, summer clothes, imitation jewellery, cheap watches. The sea is an unrelenting grey haze; a small group has converged to stare at it. I press my face into the wall. Nothing. Maybe someone playing a prank. I'm on the verge of retreat, when it arrives. Bulbous and bone-white, a face that was once human, alive. It is the severed head of a young boy, though how young is impossible to tell from the bulging whites of its eyes, undulant, ragweed hair, cheeks bloated as if he were perennially on the cusp of spitting out water. The head is sucked in and out of sight, like some freak circus act (yes, I recollect what a circus is despite my 78 years). I walk back to my car, praying for a quick reprieve, an immediate decongestion of traffic.
This tunnel of love was shut down indefinitely a few months after this trip when three passengers died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The construction experts, or constructivists, had not taken into account the fact that vehicles moving at low gear spume more deadly exhaust than normal. (My 50-year old Maruti Zen should have been disqualified instantly as it is possibly the only such antiquity plying Bombay roads.) I can't wait for the government to construct a reverse roadway so denizens of Bandra can travel to Worli amidst the sights and sounds of an exhausted, sterile nature.
August 27, 2050
Grumblings in the sky today, like belated echoes of the bomb they used to blow up Hornbill House, home to the Bombay Natural History Society. A rather puerile instance of human nature desecrating mother nature, wouldn't you say? 'They'? Nobody knows, nobody cares who they are anymore. I have a BNHS calendar that limns the beauty and majesty of the elephant, in painting, sculpture, and real life. With the passage of every month, I'm more convinced about the strength and splendour of this magnificent creature, which has now joined the mammoth in the graveyard for extinct species. When the bomb went off (and the report could be heard across the city), I half expected the calendar to burst into flames.
So that was the salient feature of August 15, 2047: a hundred years of Indian independence. One bomb, thirty lives, several artefacts ground into the dust. Uncharacteristically (since the Phoenix usually rises), celebrations were subdued this year. The silent majority did not sing songs of verve and invulnerability; perhaps the stray thought saray jahan se accha, (once our national song, remember, comparable to Deutschland uber alles), didn't even brush across their minds, and who would castigate them for it.
Last evening, I went to a street-wise astrologer. One of my few quirks - even the old need to know when their lives will reach fruition. I was smoking a Folderol, and asked him how much he would charge. I favour these old worldly seances because I can do commerce with the currency of my time: paper notes, not plastic toys. He named a price which might have constricted my heart permanently if I was one to be afflicted by words and numbers. I asked him why he was asking for the moon and the stars. He replied, poker-faced, that he just couldn't see through all the smog into the future, and therefore charged extra for swarthy over-exertions, straining of the clairvoyant gut. Before I left, he gave my cigarette a pointed glare.
The world is a smoking pot. I was watching a bus go by the other day, and it suddenly excreted cigarette butts. I realised that a couple of people may have thrown their butts out of the vent near the rear wheels, but at that moment, I could've sworn... You've heard of the new cleanliness drive by the mayor (does anyone care who's in power anymore?). His decree is BIAS - Bibs For All Smokers, irrespective of class. There is a not-so-subtle class system, an ego system, within the rank and file of smokers. Watch these Maratha youths, their preening machismo, as they leer practised leers at the young and ritzy and Hollywoodised in their Lamborghinis.
And that superior tilt of the head, diminution of eyes into slits, the long exhale of smoke that cuts through the haze and makes the possessor/wielder see his omnipotence clearly. Me, I'm a smoker too, and like the others, belong to the upper stratum of inveterates who hate the greens, the acolytes who fill their mouth with ciggy smoke, puffing their cheeks out as if it were a new mouthwash to be rinsed with. But we of the long-rooted Brahmin class can also hate one another if necessary; the class system in smoking is democratic that way, it allows one to shift prejudicial basis smoothly and efficiently.
August 28, 2050
Today I received a letter, hand-written, from a long-lost girlfriend, delivered through a common friend (postmen have been besieged or kidnapped in these parts). My ex-girlfriend now works the opera house in Vienna, which means she gets to pre-programme, with her own hands, an electronically recorded concerto (Strauss and Handel are still her overwhelming favourites) every week for a few musically inclined businessmen, starch-collared executives, stock market professionals. Come concert time and they occupy the first two rows as the piano plinks and plonks in demented isolation, its keys falling and rising like octaves. The rest of the music - violins, cellos, percussion - is pre-recorded as well. Of course, all the members of the audience wear virtual reality helmets and sway in tandem with their favourite dead composer as he plays for them. On days when the VR machine refuses to function or nuttily reveals Mozart masturbating on the piano, the opera house uses its backup: a monolithic snarl of electronic entrails - a grotesque ink-black metal squid that does far less than it professes and merely spits out a watery hologram.
Tamara, my American friend, is tired of playing "in lieu of ghosts, to ghosts." She fondly recalls the jaunts we made to the traditional opera house after bicycling to the graves of Strauss and Beethoven to seek benediction of some sort, and to make love on the dew-soaked grass, our minds conjoined in those elysian moments by Beethoven's 5th.
August 29, 2050
Some of you have written to me asking what I do with my time. Well, I start and end my day with hi, a/s/l/v? (age, sex, location, vital statistics?). My social life is chat. I'm sure there are underground quasi-militant groups that still promise "real sex, real flesh". Do we need it? Online, I can be anything or anyone... a behemoth of the last century, Arnold Schwarzenegger, thawed, revivified after a tryst with cryonics. Ha, sex! When our soi-disant guardians of morality couldn't suppress or expurgate it, they merely reversed the game and gave the net carte blanche. The net sounded a death knell for sexual intercourse the way no church or temple bells could do in their time. Do you have the time or need to go out? Isn't it too crowded, polluted, noisy... scary?
Here's a snip from a conversation I had yesterday.
Me: Hi, a/s/l/v? (vital stats, a relatively new addition to age/sex/location)
Him/her/it: 24, f, Vietnam, 36/24/36... with help, of course... tee hee.
Me: Ha ha. I like your honesty. I'm 27, m, Washington D.C., 42/28/29... without help.
Her: Wow, now that's the kinda man I wanna cyber-date.
Me: I like your sense of humour too.
(Pause)
Her: Actually, believe it or not, I'm not here trawling for guys.
Me: Really? Well, neither am I.
Her: J
Me: J
Her: I'm a peroxide by proclivity.
In case it gets too hot in the room, a fire extinguisher lurks outside my door, with the legendary legend, "Crash glass open to get extinguisher." Anyway, this preamble is but a prelude to the real thing... VR sex.
The cops now patrol cyber-cafés to enforce the use of helmets while driving - during virtual sex sessions of course. With their gadgetry, they also monitor overspeeding (50 kmph is high treason), petty arson and theft. But all they truly regulate are their own bank accounts, fattened by the ruling crime bosses - politicians, the mafia, businessmen, cyber filmmakers, cyberpimps. The beggars.
August 30, 2050
I disinterred this portion of an article from a fusty store-room last night. The Times of India, 22 January 2002.
Bombay is a lonely, slumbering giant, snoring in tandem with the pulse of its ancient deity. Mumbadevi, the original goddess of the original people, the fisherfolk, is often suggestive of Kumbhakarna, the mythical Hindu god who slept for months on end before being awakened for combat by the smell of food. The redolence of apathy is strong here - as is the pollution - and if one's not cautious, lassitude can wrap its gnarly tentacles around one's spirit and squeeze it softly into an everlasting sleep. In the people of Bombay, there is a carefully sculpted insensitivity. They eat, work, sleep, live, die, with intermittent forays into temples and movie theatres. The rusty machinery of the land is rarely wound up. As it groans on sluggishly, every human being and cow on the road walks on in an unvarying stupor. Like clockwork, the rickshaws and buses and trains work their day/night shifts. Shantyhouses co-exist demurely alongside more graciously-built highrises, the best of upmarket suburbia and weatherbeaten tenements neatly flanking the roads; literally a McDonald's in the midst of slums. At street corners and shops, unshaven men loll about all day, discussing politics and cricket. Bombay's varied ethnogenic quilt reveals itself through names of places (Victoria Terminus, Nala Sopara), through poverty and pollution, through the eyes of the bucolic multitudes, the lumpen middle-class, the biggest film industry in the world, the proud old-world rich and the nouveau riche, all going through their paces in time, merely repeating history, never changing it. This is the city of open sewers and potholes and fetor and happy rats; whether a Pied Piper comes or not, Bombay's effluvium will spurt into the 21st Century, and this putrescence will be our children's legacy, buttressed by a technologically perfect and immunised heart.
The writer is possibly obsolete by now, but his or her idea of the previous century leaving a spoor of slime across this one seems to be alive and kicking. Despite fermenting garbage, choked sidewalks, blinding neon, our poorer country cousins are drawn to us as if by gravity. Yet, all we do in our cyber chatrooms is spew bombast, much like that of yesteryear. Perhaps Bombay is Bombast, like Exhaust of vehicles is our own Exhaustion. We give as much importance to transmigration of the soul as to the chaos of ecomigration. Today, advertising equals animosity; take, for instance, this recent hoarding headline for a brand of cigarettes:
The eleventh commandment of smoking: Hate thy neighbour (especially if he smokes anything but Folderol).
Bombay is now officially the most populous city in the world - narrowly beating out Mexico City, Sao Paolo and Tokyo - with 25.1 million in its cradle. And our politicians are still busy christening the city. Last month, Mumbai was re-transmuted to Bombay for the fourth time.
(Aah, Bombay, erstwhile Mumbai, erstwhile Bombay; the only sense of progression the government fostered in its inhabitants was by retrogressing to a previous nom three years ago, on the eve of hundred years of Indian independence. Nearly 55 years after being named Mumbai, Bombay's dwellers struck a chord of realisation in its government that their minds would not alter centuries-old nomenclature, even if roads, stations, government departments were all de-Anglicised, Maratha-fied.)
August 31, 2050
I am a writer. These are my daily columns - usually brief compared to their antecedents, but these are the days of honeyed sound bytes, (I have constant online rows with my editor since I don't pander to the 'honeyed' bit) and I survive on the money I get, plus the little nest egg my father left me. Anyway, I am not accorded more cyberspace, since everyone wants to be a columnist and the net is gradually being throttled with information - not exactly the microcosm of our expanding universe, like they said it would be. I even recall a few nethead Nostradamuses declaiming the abolition of nations, of nationalism. But log into any chat room and observe for yourself the ironclad boundaries, the hairsplitting, the constant questing to know from where the other person emerges, lives, his or her skin colour, racial denomination. As long as the mind is a reservoir of fragmented geography, of national pride and ethnocentricity and xenophobia, no technological breakthrough can ever unify.
Newsclipping (not to be confused with newspaper-clippings of course, which have gone the way of the pachyderm) of the Day, for our humourists:
A group of environmentalists are holding 12 nuclear weapons hostage, claiming they will detonate each one over strategic cities of the world, as described in a short story by author Zafar Rushdie, who envisioned a madcap scientist attempting to combat global warming with nuclear winter. Furthermore, they claimed they were now nuclear pointillists, after a fashion.
Yesterday they celebrated Janmashtami as usual. In case you don't remember (this one's for you, trivia-seekers), it's the birthday of the Lord Krishna. Did you know they actually used to form human pyramids, and the last person to climb up would break a pot of curd suspended 15 feet above the ground, in deference to the myth of the lord who loved the sweet stuff. Yesterday of course, it was a tad different. Bands of teenage marathas, swords in sheaths, war turbans askew, did battle on computer screens. They had cyber-contests: the one who clambered up the fastest and broke the pot without slipping or being deliberately shrugged off - won. And the winner, a certified chromehead, a grinning by-product of a profligate electronic generation, got his reward in the form of a state-of-the-art VR kit. Happy Janmashtami.
Teenage marathas in cyber-bars... Marathas were among the original inhabitants of Western India. Hardy peasants, theirs was one of the most democratic religions in the world. Once farmers, now gameboys. Oh for the the good old days when youths cracked open pots a few seconds before they fell and cracked their skulls on the asphalt. An ascension with death. I think that's what we all may need to do, to survive, evolve. Moult out of our inane skins, trapped and digitised, as we are idiotized, within these hollow heavens.
