The Beginning

The good thing about heavy rains was that it washed away all the blood. These rains did not fall on the streets. Or on any kind of solid land. It fell on water. Seawater. And on the walls of the buildings. The only stain was that of water. Fresh drops mixing into the brine below was a visual effect attempted by designers long back. Water was not always blue back then. It was often black, with a few splotches of red. Vast stretches of undulating green met the eye from the top of skyscrapers. That we managed through those times speaks of our tremendous will-power and technological strength. Often those two were the same thing.

The boats often tossed up food parcels smeared in blood. You never knew who was lurking round the corner. There wasn't food inside them really. Not food the way my grandparents or even my parents understood it. These were pills. Pills of different sorts. I wont go into the details now. But they served the purpose. One had to have the ability to discern between the different pills. Between the dope and the nutrition. For the addict of course, the dope was the nutrition. The distinctions blurred beyond a point. The pill I preferred was one called ACL. What this little dark brown ball of powder did was pretend to be alcohol. It wasn't, of course. But to an entire generation brought up on ACL it didn't matter. It was our alcohol. And we swallowed it with a certain artistic pride.

In those days H used to be regular visitor to my floating palace. We were convinced that during one of our long philosophical journeys the seawater would carry away the building. H was a philosopher. Maybe that took away his evolutionary advantage. But he was the kind of nihilist I liked. Not the brooding type. But rather optimistic. He genuinely felt that our homes needed to float away. The grasp on land was an illusion we needed to abjure. We would only be free when our decaying homes got carried away by huge sea-waves. Then amidst the sharks and giant squids the human animal would find real freedom. The exact contours of this freedom H was never able to outline. But detail was not his forte. He was more the kind of philosopher who presented a blurry larger picture not really of the future but of his own fantasies. I valued his friendship. It was rare. For he provided an old-fashioned kind of leisure. That of conversation.

If you dove into the water below, you would chance upon the remnants of a civilization. Mostly cars, heavier machines, smaller buildings which drowned long back, and if you traveled deep enough, you would see the blurry texture of what was once called a street. But no one did it then. Diving into the water, 'going down' as it was called, was a taboo. The Past was a taboo. We didn't need it after all. Even when people died they wanted to move upwards. The ancient Zoroastrian funeral was a fashionable thing nowadays. For it also provided a kind of boring spectator sport. The vultures had of course evolved in some strange ways. They devoured the corpses faster. It was becoming prosaic, and it was time for something new.

I remember, that day H and I discussed the boy who decided to bleed to death on the slanted slab of concrete right outside his front door. One of the prominent cults was one that stood for Bloodletting. One of those regular reactions to modern medicine. This was a kind of protest. Where the thirteen year old boy bled to death in front of a camera from numerous points in his body and all the while moaned in pleasure. This was a kind of personal apocalypse. A slightly unfair reaction some conservatives might say. H flitted between different viewpoints, unable to decide whether he condemned such loss of life in a time of low fertility or celebrated the act. But I had decided inside already. It didn't matter.

The thing is, the blood didn't remain. It mingled into the water and then sped away. Into the ever deep, dark ocean. It wasn't the rains then. It was the water that washed away all that blood. The seawater that formed canals of globalization for us. The seawater we looked at. The seawater we loved.