Fiction: Concrete Verticals (Dying City)

Sangeeta Sharma

Finally, her tickets were booked.

Sherry, the 30-year-old IT graduate from IIT, Mumbai, was to fly to Germany in a month’s time. Just last month, she has been hired in an overseas IT company, after a series of interview rounds, online. After the most spirited last round, there was a long haul which had set her on tenterhooks. Already in deep misgivings that the entire selection exercise will prove to be futile, to her great pleasure, last week, Sherry received an email intimation that infused a new lease of life in her.  She has been hired as a senior IT analyst in Berlin, Germany, with a handsome package.

She was sure of not returning to India any time before five to six years hence wanted to complete some unfinished tasks and fulfil her long-desired wishes. It has been years since she had not visited her maternal hometown in Delhi. The sweet-meat and savoury shops lined along the narrow lanes had been beckoning her, of late. The memory of good old days often used to pop up in her memory when her numerous aunts and uncles used to visit granny’s house the same time during summers and the amusement all cousins had together. Running one behind the other in the parks chasing, playing hide and seek, and, on the streets, to buy sweets and confectionary or nearly a dozen excited kids piling over one another in the new ambassador bought by the elder maternal uncle to visit the zoo was all so fresh in her mind.

 Impulsively, she decided to take a flight from Mumbai to Delhi to visit her native place, one more time, before she left for Berlin.

It was drizzling when she got out at the Indira Gandhi International airport waiting near the parking area for the Ola that was coming to pick her up.

On her way, Sherry felt completely disappointed on seeing the changed landscape. She could not identify the old lanes and streets as mammoth glass-fronted multi-storeyed structures were all that she could see. The puny shops were all gone and huge sweetmeat shops, fine-dining restaurants, big showrooms and the jazzy neon jumbotrons dazzled the crowded streets. Sherry blinked and rubbed her eyes in disbelief and mumbled to herself, “I remember that uncle had shifted few years back after he bought a whole floor of 5000 square feet in a new tall building but where’s that old house!”

Her eyes were searching for the windowpanes of her old dwelling that overlooked the main road near the old Hanuman temple but there were no traces left. Everything was transformed and bore a symbol of modernity and advancement.

 She felt disheartened to see that all green patches of the township were obliterated by the new developers. Apartment buildings, elite salons and retail plazas had mushroomed all over. She boarded an autorickshaw to reach her uncle’s abode. Vehicular population seem to have multiplied several times. Merc and BMWs, the expensive brands, were no rarity on the highway.

Appalled at seeing her tall and once-very-handsome dear uncle turn into an old, frail man, she sat beside her bed and inquired about his health, with great concern. Expressing her despair over the changed city, Sherry mourned, “This place is not at all what I came for, uncle. It has changed drastically. The open, green plains and stretches are all gone and replaced by massive showrooms and tall gated communities. I gravitated here to have a last look at our old mansion but all those kinds of cute, age-old structures don’t exist anymore. Only concrete verticals dominate the skyline. It’s the result of a very skewed thinking where contemporary generation is out to flaunt its affluence through ostentatious houses, vehicles, sartorial preferences et al. They have no time to rest, only quest. Quest for moolah, for power.  Unlike the previous era, when people were humble and grounded and believed in simple living but high values.

Today, they throw a damn to the evil consequences this perilous trend is leading the world to. Values like honesty, kindness, helping people in need or caring for the old is nowhere in their agenda for action. The unmindful cutting of trees, offshore drilling, burning fodder and farming livestock have increasingly influenced the climate and the earth’s temperature. But the common man is still unheedful and leading the same kind of neglectful lifestyle.”

The next morning, Sherry woke up to find thick smog enveloping the entire neighbourhood.

The high grey-flannel smog of winter and pollution had shut off the entire city like a closed pot.

“It’s always so since years now during winters, dear, as cold air traps dust, emissions and smoke from illegal farm fires, where stubble left after harvesting rice is burnt to clear fields in surrounding states. A slow-poisoning process set for multitudes!” stated her uncle in a laden voice amid hacking cough.

 She could experience some dryness in her own throat too and could sense that she was not able to breathe effortlessly. As she switched on the T.V. set, she learnt from a news channel that a thick layer of smoke was engulfing Delhi and NCR with the Air Quality Index (AQI) in several areas remaining the ‘severe category’ according to the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). Amid alarming rates of air pollution, all schools in Delhi NCR were to operate online, according to official order. Of late, excessive exposure to severe quality air pollution has become the main cause of respiratory illness among senior citizens and youngsters too mainly because of the entry of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in the bloodstream. 

As she was to take up an international travel soon, Sherry could not afford to procrastinate visiting a physician, who prescribed her a strong dose of tablets with a syrup. The medicine made her feel delirious during the night and she saw all sorts of weird, fragmented dreams.

She saw herself visiting the yesteryears’ luxuriant gardens resplendent with chirping colourful avians that fluttered in the clean crisp atmosphere and she as a child chasing the multicoloured butterflies that hopped from one flower to another smelling nectar beside a clear-water spring that flowed tranquilly alongside the flowerbeds.

Flying high above the flower-laden gardens, she flew with her wings open under a gentle sun where she inhaled the cool breeze, lungful and the sweet scent of the well- watered grass. Running ahead of all her young cousins with balloons in their hands, they ran giggling one behind another, light-heartedly.

She woke up to a bleak atmosphere and the blissful childhood camaraderie seemed a chimera.

Sherry was to fly off back to Mumbai, the other day. Getting up early from bed, she couldn’t dare to walk out of the house for a refreshing stroll seeing the place enveloped in a thick blanket of smog all over. She started packing up things with a heavy heart.

Her dream of revisiting the sylvan city of 30 years ago remained unfulfilled. The city was dead.

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Special Edition: The Dying City :: Setu, November 2024