•8:15 PM
Seen a ravaged city, overrun
by tempest and then forgotten to ruins? A city, once beautiful now uprooted
by the night and cut open like a cadaver to obliteration? My city, on the
throes of drowning, yet clinging to life by its threads, looks desolate and
devastated like a night zombie that suffocating breathes living but drags half
dead by its streets.
I lost count of the days since
these floods came, lost track of time too. Someday I presumed it was still
Monday, while the calendar marked a Thursday. There were no reasons to herald a
morning for days together, for a city that had not slept for so long now, awake
in fright of collapsing homes and missing families, awake in anticipation of
the unknown worse, awake because every institution had long gone to sleep, the
system being the first to flee. I lost track of time, for it no longer mattered
if the hands of clock moved between morning to noon or after it, time had
ceased to be the sand of an hour glass, turning into a seemingly unending flow
of sinking events, of boats that never came to rescue, of walls that no longer
held, of roofs that caved on to families, of water that was enough to drown but
not enough to drink, of time that became a tide and kept flowing over us.
I lost track of identity, of who
we were in this melee. Who was I struggling by the shore to wade over what once
was a road, a garden, a wall, a bustling street, an embankment that now ceased
to divide the river from our homes? Who was I pleading to unknown oarsmen, the
boatmen who spoke my language on other days, but turned deaf today, the aliens
among us, the herders of luck and life? Who were the ones stuck in homes of
deluge, the faceless crestfallen, the marooned without a name tag and class? Who
were those brave hearts, running all along water and earth, saving the unknown,
un-acquainted, some of who then lost their own life? Did they seek the caste,
religion or status of those they saved, redeemed, accompanied, and shored? What
identity did those crying for help carry, what profession, what religion, what
sect, what belief? Or maybe nothing of this mattered now, nothing of this
identity remained intact, nothing of it was carried along. I lost track of my own
identity, over ravaging waters that treated everyone with equal scorn. I lost
track of their identity, those who pleaded for dear life, those fleeing but not
too far, those fleeing but not intact, those who burned their intricate wood
carved ceilings for strangers to stay warm, holding on to islands on their
attics. I lost track of you, who watched all this from the other balcony, from
the other shore, for the distant shoreline, from the farther dwellings over
your TV sets, for the farthest mainland where each one of us, the marooned and
the starving, were supposed to be grateful for your benevolence that never
reached us. Over all this I lost track of our pathways; from where did we start
and to where do we go now?
Today again, seemingly umpteenth
time, I drove across my city, to shed a few more tears among its stinking,
sinking ruins, to walk a few more steps among its abandoned alleys. The few
souls that did dare venture this evening ran hurriedly over broken
demarcations, lost road signs and heaps of rubbish, as if escaping some fearful
demon. In the dark of an unlit evening the malls of exhibition crossing looked
like tall metal caged ghosts, grayish and brooding, hanging their heads in
perpetual shame, those had gleamed in neon of a bright evening in the recent
past, now hanging like relics a shameful defeat. Over the bridge to its right
leading to the city center, an odd streetlight glowed over eerily empty roads,
the oddity of this street light creating dreadful figures over chalk like silt
on these roads; roads that stood abandoned even by ghosts near Lal chowk In better days, I thought these columns of traffic diversions were there to guard the night lights of my city, but now that those
lights had been stolen these menacing traffic diversions have fled too.
On the Residency road, somewhere
by the corner of desolately abandoned shops, a solitary billboard light blinked
in pale sickening yellow, like the last sighs of a person who refuses to let
go, even while having been abandoned on his bed to a cursed fate. I stopped and
looked back towards an unending stretch of this road that was dissected by a
dark long shadow of once what was the clock tower, a deeply contested place between the traffic and street vendors. I imagined the not so distant evening lights, the
sparkle of life moving slow over illuminated shops, receding bright tail lamps
and converged cartwheels by road corners, where spice and fish was served with
laughter. Now the dim long shadows of the once clock tower created ferocious
faces in this dark, scaring away all even the moonlight.
Over buses of the transport yard,
the storm had left markings like lines of age, each grey line for a new high of
the deluge, each layer of silt like an unwritten warning note. Each piece of thrash hanging high over floors
or once impenetrable now part collapsed walls, became a reminder of what we had
been offering nature for decades, which was now to become its return gift. Rows
and rows of muted shutters stood like mourners in a queue, in grayish brown
imprints like forgotten faded bar-codes of a warehouse, awaiting redemption in
the middle of an endless nowhere. I imagined, how on earlier days, scores of
people would be rushing home late, trying to grab the last transport over
shouts of destinations, overlapping over brightly lit roads. Today there were
no destinations to catch, no voices to call, no homes to rush to. There were just
strange shadows of dark streetlights stumbling over each other on a lightless night,
long shadows those chased the scary solitary traveler.
By the bend of M.A road a lonely
man scurried on the left, then suddenly darted to the middle of the road,
undecided where to go. I stopped wanting to offer him a lift, “where do you
have to go?” I asked. “Not decided yet” he replied shaking his head and moved
ahead to the right side, carrying a pace that seemed unsure of distances. He
too, like my city, had lost way.
They called it the bride of
evening, adoring colors in hanging lights. Now ‘Sangarmall’ looked like a
mortuary, where the flood had buried a debris pile. Its rows held some faces,
hiding in dark, as if ashamed of their befallen fate. Endless arteries of dark
roads seemed to lead to darker unknowns; the roads those seemed so familiar
till recently had become so unknown today. In the strange dark of these roads,
grey shadows seemed to chase each other, over street bends, empty squares and
grim looking pavements. The police station at Khanyar, was silent leaving the night to play on these empty roads. Neither a whimper, nor a baton
would dare the stillness of this nebulous night. I wonder if the security forces could have made a call back home seeking the welfare of loved ones, or even if these soldiers had a proper supper in such tough times, while everyone else fended for own lives.
This year autumn has burned early
to my city beloved, leaves that were green and lively to fall, turned desert
brown early on. The autumn gold now lay to dust, of smoke and ash in water lit
fires.
From a sunk city.
