2045

I walk to the window of the classroom — the room which evokes nostalgia and dread — and watch the torrential downpour outside, which greets me with an ominous warning. A regular for two months now, the pre-monsoon shower has exceeded the normal monsoon haul. The air is unusually cold for Mumbai in May and has come at the heels of the hottest summer in history. Somehow, I feel more people are out in the street than normal, in the cold and sickly air, despite the downpour.

The ground floor of this building, which used to be my old school, is waist deep in water. I look at the pillars which go all the way down to the foundation and up to the roof, pillars which have stayed wet for a month now and the capillary action and gravity making them magically wet on this floor without any water. I wonder how long they will stand.

The room is filled with people who were trying to get out of the rain outside, but slowly watching the boundaries between outside and inside fade away, watching the walls getting eaten up by this slow cancerous seep like an invisible monster from the Chamber of Secrets. I look at it, then back at my friend, we exchange glances acknowledging the omen. At that moment, a bunch of new people come in, all wet and shivering; we make some space for them and try to make them comfortable. One of them, probably a decade younger than me, looks deathly pale with illness. I rush to find the doctor who was taking some rounds earlier.

My friend sits down mildly coughing, with a bleak and forlorn look in his eyes — eyes that tell a story of pain and suffering. His usually radiant facade has over the years given full rein to hard lines and stone coldness. He has lost all his hair now and the pallor of his skin is perceptible despite his dark complexion. He tries to find a place to sit between rows of quibbling mothers, wet blankets, sickly children and deathly stares.

I find the doctor and entreat her to have a look at the newcomers. I am now just wandering in the corridor, wishing to get away from the faces and eyes of pain and suffering, and happen upon a room which I haven't been in before. It is smaller than the classroom, with fewer people, and an odd bunch at that. Sitting cross legged on the floor in the traditional pose of meditation, is a Buddhist monk. A young lady of perhaps thirty stands near the only window in the room with an oddly calm look on her face. An American couple huddle together on the floor and try to make themselves comfortable. All of them foreigners, uprooted from their homes and in the midst of a story which they had not anticipated being in. I walk to the window to get away from the claustrophobia of the narrow corridor and maybe calm myself a little. The lady is mildly startled on seeing me. I look into the small mirror near the window, into a gaunt face with heavy shadows under the eyes; dark wrinkly skin slowly starting to hang loose, but still stretched over the facial bones, a face of death. I try to reassure her with a little smile, but she sees something in my eyes, something I'm not deliberately putting out there, but something visible nonetheless, and takes a step back. I look away from her then, through the window and into the past, thinking of those naysayers and deniers of a bygone era, of those to whom a two degree rise meant nothing; of those who buried their heads in sand and went full steam on their relentless goals in pursuit of an imaginary castle.

She takes a step ahead and looks out the window again, with her calm demeanor returning. Her tranquility washes over me as I see a large willow swaying in the deluge, with wide branches that bend and dance to the rhythm of the wind; whose roots hug the earth with the practiced ease of a million years and keep its trunk steady and practically motionless.

Cover art by John Towner