The Metropolis

When he woke up, it was still raining outside. The sky was cloudy and purple, the trees looked grey and wet and cramped. Littered with innumerable pot-holes with little pools of brown, muddy water swimming in them, the road looked all worn out and desolate. The narrow shanties that lined it looked restless and edgy like a cornered dog in heat. He looked outside his window. The drains were open and over-flowing. The garbage-dump was now an intimidating pile of all sorts of nasty filth that even the stray dogs stayed clear off. Barely twenty metres away from it was the street-market where everybody brought vegetables. Tomatoes, cabbages, lady-fingers and brinjals all muddy and slushy, being sold there on the dirty road on nothing more than a bare, blue plastic sheet; right there amidst the unbearable stench and blood and feathers from the chicken-shop behind. And people were buying that stuff and feeding it to their children and living as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

He closed his eyes for a second in a silent prayer about nothing in particular. He looked away. As a daily practice he avoided eating a heavy dinner so that he did not need to use the lavatory in the morning. It was a public lavatory that everyone on that floor shared… all four flats and their twenty-three residents. He went to the pay-toilet next to the station. To say it was cleaner would mean that he had enough water to flush his shit when he was done. He generally did not brush his teeth for there was not enough water for it. His living area was a tiny room partitioned by thick card-board material. He shared that small flat with four others. The roof was generally leaking and the walls were always damp from the pipes outside. It was impossible to keep anything dry inside the house, and all his shirts carried the faint odor of moist cement. It was a funny kind of odor, but one which you would not mistake for anything else in the world except moist cement. It made him nauseous and he was now addicted to headache pills.

He left while the sun was still beginning to rise. The rain was now a mere drizzle and clouds had scattered for the time-being. The narrow lane to the station was already abuzz with the daily passengers. It was a daily migration. The local train from the sub-urban areas ferrying millions to the heart of the metropolis’ commercial areas to keep money flowing through its veins, then returning the same people back to their cramped dumps in the same fashion it had brought them… without compassion, without empathy and most of all without dignity. They went forth packed like galley-slaves in those train-compartments bursting out from its seams, shunting along with this tremendous surge of humanity on it that never asked any questions and always had the same forlorn faces. Long and tired and devoid of any life or hope. He was one of them.

Angry and silent and waiting.

‘Any moment now all of this will explode’, the fiery leader of an orange rightist party wrote in his political newspaper. ‘This city cannot let itself be overrun by migrants. They have reduced it to a garbage heap. They have stifled us, the people of this land and they have taken our jobs and rightful livelihoods. It is they who are to blame for this big mess we have all landed up in.’ He folded his Re 1 copy of the newspaper as his daily breakfast arrived. He ate a budget meal at the same cheap hotel everyday. It had filthy tables and lost, immigrant bhaiyyas from Bihar dressed modestly in their baniyaans as waiters. They were always sweaty and their sinewy black bodies looked hardened and over-worked. Their eyes were dead and they used to dig their nose a lot. It was impossible to hold an intelligent conversation with them, as they barely ever understood what was being asked of them on the first instance. He ate quickly and left the place without drinking the hazy water they poured out for him, leaving no tips behind.

The walk to his office, if you could call it an office, was through another narrow lane before crossing along the length of one of the main arterial roads. The way would be choked; man and car stuck together, inching forward together, jostling, pushing, cursing, honking… together. The flyover overhead was jammed with traffic and an inertia of silent rage, crippling frustration and pending chaos and anarchy hung in the stale air. All around were hoardings with strangely smiling faces, screaming about something or the other. Nothing seemed to make any sense, not the snaking queues outside the ticket-counters at local stations nor those at the joke of a security-check at the mall entrances. Everything was suddenly a Big-Bazaar. There was a sale on everything. The hoardings, the intersections, the traffic jams, the sales and the smiles – all amalgamated into a strange oneness celebrated in its morbid monotony everywhere across the metropolis; a symphony of the diseased, an opera of the strange… a land with moving people, millions, each without an address.

He fished into his wallet and pulled out a one-rupee coin. It slid smoothly down the slot on the pay-phone once he had dialed the number on the slightly greasy and stubborn dial.

“Hello, I am calling from Dhanraj Chemicals.” Baba, I want to be a hero when I grow up. ‘Like Swami Vivekananda?’.

“Yes. Collect the consignment from my Godown.” No. Like Amitabh Bachann

“Ok.” A static on the other end made him realize that the line had been disconnected. A few crows screeched raucously at each other on a wire overhead. The rain had stopped. An obscenely bright sun broke from behind the clouds and in a garish display of its vanity, made the wet, almost grey-almost brown road, glisten. Umbrellas looked stupid. You squinted as the glint from the sunlight on the vehicles hurt your eyes. It was suddenly too bright. Too loud and too obscene… well, almost.

“One navy-cut cigarette.’

“Chutta nahi hai saab.” He put the fifty-rupee note back in his pocket and gruffly walked towards the taxi-stand. It took him twenty-seven minutes and thirteen refusals before someone agreed to take him. They just parked their taxis and lazed in them. Everybody wanted a long fare. Everybody wanted an extra buck. Everybody wanted to race and wanted to be the first. Too many people running, he thought to himself. He wished he had gun. He wished he had a lot of things.

Another jam. Another beggar. Another hijra. A painfully young hijra with her curly hair worn long in an untidy braid and the faint beginnings of a stubble crowning her face. Long, shabby earrings hung from ears. He couldn’t listen to what was being said to him. He kept blinking as the hijra felt his face all over with her rough, manly hands. A cheap, faded watch on her wrist told him it was one in the afternoon. The lights turned green. Last of the jaywalkers skipped away from the roads and the watch and the untidy braid were left behind. Another signal, another jam, another beggar… a little girl with a shivering baby in her hands.

He paused. He did not have change. The taxi-driver shooed the kid away. She screeched at him before leaving and called him a son of a whore. The taxi-driver swore back at her, but she was gone. He turned back to explain to him that these people were ruining the metropolis. They swarmed to it in droves from their villages seeking to make a fortune and make it easy. They had reduced everything to filth. They had reduced the dignity of a common man’s hard-earned day’s honest work. They… they… they…

“Just look at the records saab. The jails are full of them. Wonder how they raise their children?”

“Why is the road so jammed? At this time usually its free?” He asked without offering a comment.

“There is some accident up ahead I think.”

In about ten minutes time, taxi number MH-A-781 crawled past the accident site and he saw it. An old man with his face squashed, reportedly by a bus. “The back-tyre went over his head saab. No chance. Spot-dead.” The taxi-driver offered before entering into a rambling about how he once escaped a life-threatening accident situation with nothing more than a scratched car and a few bruises. Everyone has one of those stories to tell. The ones that you absolutely don’t want to listen to because you cannot relate them to the sight you’ve just seen. A man dead… crushed skull, eyes squished out of eye-balls, blood thicker than you’ve ever imagined blood to be. A mangled body still stuck to a mangled scooter. Arms distorted in ways that will give you nightmares for a week. A crowd of people just standing around in sickening silence and apathy…

Some distance and time away, it is the same taxi in another jam. The road is lined with all sorts of small shops selling umbrellas, wallets, incense-sticks, cheap clothes and curios. Hundreds of people walk past them every hour and nobody seems to stop. The shop-keepers all look tired and lost. They seem a part of their crowded displays, like exhibits in a museum, slotted and behind glass-panes… And now presenting our latest exhibit ladies and gentlemen – The Man of the Metropolis.

Nearby a smart-looking church stood on the road. It was not big or imposing or beautiful so to say, but was a handy-little place to go to. A sign outside announced in bold letters, the sermon for the day – “ONLY JESUS CAN TRULY FORGIVE THE SINS OF MAN”

He looked at it for a few seconds, then he hissed “Fuck you” under his breath. He didn’t say another word for a long time. He just sat there – angry and silent and waiting.