The Last Rain
Pravin Vemuri
It poured on Monday. And Tuesday too.
It had been pouring every day since New Year’s Eve. On the sixtieth day Mumbai
broke from the mainland and floated off on the Arabian Sea. Which seemed like
quite a joke on the meteorologists. They had predicted that Mumbai would simply
drown.
The tourists were the first to protest.
They now needed to pay for the extra boat ride or plane ride to get back. Both
more expensive than last year.
But the wind didn’t pay attention. Nor
the sea. The Arabian Sea, in its defense, is a very calm one. It wouldn’t do
much change your opinion. It would just knock on the front door over and over
again in a gentle way. Like it’s saying, ‘Hey how are you doing? Wanna come out
for a smooth ride?’ with reggae music in the background and the smell of sweet
rum in the air.
The trouble started when the elements,
against their character and form, conjured up a storm that pushed the island
further and further out. The international flights got more delayed. Kite
flying took on the aspect of an artform. Sometimes the island jerked so much
that we would fall down right where we were standing. And even though we got
used to it with an improvised version of a Zumba step, it always felt as if we
were getting rushed. More than usual, that is. And, of course, the fish we
caught was of a different variety.
But it got really bad when there was a
twitter campaign to ‘Save Mumbai!’ It started with everyone tweeting: ‘Mumbai,
please turn back!’ with the hash tag #SaveMumbai. It trended all week and got a
billion hits.
But Mumbai didn’t stop. Despite some
girls hooking their twerking videos to #SaveMumbai.
Of course, the newspapers called it ‘Nature’s
Conspiracy’ although the joke on Whatsapp was about how it was all in an effort
to get the city way right of center. (Needless to say, there are just too many
commies in the show business and among the taxi drivers).
Yes, they shipped food in. And
deodorants too..
Then, of course, the big rumor broke on
Facebook that the city was drifting towards Pakistan. That made everyone tense.
Some of the righties started walking right up to any news camera they could
find and threatened self-immolation. And a couple of them even shaved their heads
off. In absolute protest. The army chief flew in, the defense minister and the
prime minster too. They promised to do everything in their power to ensure the
city is protected. Then the hunger strikes started. The actors joined the fast.
The sportsmen too. Which
was followed by the million-people march. About 2 million people walked to
Siddhi Vinayak every day. Barefoot. In the evening they burnt effigies of
every Pakistani they could recall. Most of the time it was Shoaib Akhtar. And
then of Americans too. The intellectuals on TV concluded that it was a grand
scheme to equalise the economies of the two nations. On the other hand, a broad
consensus was beginning to form that maybe there is a true religion after all.
But the city shifted while it was still
raining.
It circled towards Oman and then sped
towards Madagascar. That’s where I got off and took the first boat out.
Madagascar was a fascinating island too.
It hadn’t stopped raining on Madagascar and the cats and then the rats had been
wiped off. It was the third country in the world to lose them both, the ninth
to lose all rats and the fourteenth to lose all cats.
Personally, I preferred a country
without the feline. Although a lack of cats and heavy rain had a strange effect
on people. It made them suicidal. We had people offing themselves at the rate
of sixteen per day. And that’s only in the city I was in.
When the horses died out, Madagascar
began to float too. And not with a sluggish start like Mumbai. Madagascar just
took off so quick, we had to change time-zones.
In three days we were in the South
Atlantic but it had emptied out. The Sandwich Islands had rammed into
Falklands. And from a distance we could hear Brazil split up.
It felt like Judgement Day. Either God
or Skynet had taken over. This was death of the planet or maybe the universe
was collapsing in on itself. Or maybe we had killed the earth ourselves,
ravaged its clean air, water, land and beauty. Perhaps this was the ultimate
gamble of nature. So that it could start again. And launch its next revision. Like
a recursive loop, continuing until it succeeded in creating the perfect species
that would rule it forever in complete peace and harmony. Which has to be Nature’s
core objective, right?
I had such questions and more. So I
went island hopping. In search of answers. Now we had over 5,000,000 islands
floating all over the planet. Some of them still had drones over them.
And it was still raining.
When I reached Cambridge, I started
looking for the smartest man in the world. But whenever I came close, he would
speed away on his wheelchair. I chased him through streets. Through late
nights. Through dorm halls and strange board game sessions. When I finally
caught up to him, he confessed that he was, as the rest of the world believed,
a complete asshole.
So, at his house, we ate boar and drank
mead. And we talked about stories from the older earthen days.
On the other side of the planet, actors
started claiming countries of their own. As did golfers. They skipped from one
neatly created golf course island to the next.
The man in the wheelchair and I drank
for four days and nights. For the last twenty hours, we didn’t even speak. We
just played ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ (my desert island top 5) and ‘Revolver’
(his ‘top 3 albums to carry to the end of the world’) on repeat.
It was still raining.
When we woke up, he told me to go find
answers among the saints or the philosophers. ‘All I can say is that the
gravity may have weakened. Just a tad. And that’s all you need to behave like a
bacterium. To keep splitting ad-nauseum,’ he said while parting, ‘If I were a
sentimentalist, I would tell you it’s happening because the connection between
us and the world has weakened. That the earth is doing to us what we are doing
to ourselves. In a much more rapid fashion and irreparable fashion. The point
of it all...’ And since he wouldn’t stop, I shoved him back into the house and slammed
the door on his face. So close that I heard his spectacles break.
Meanwhile, some islands had formed a
coalition, which guaranteed automatic inclusion of any new ones created as a
result of splitting. They spent a lot of their meeting time just tracking
changes in membership.
Satellite pictures suggested that the
earth looked like it was suffering from a bad case of acne
Around the spot where the Cape of Good
Hope used to be, there were now sixteen pleasure islands that had named
themselves ‘Las Vegas’. Until they got together and decided to number
themselves such that they could advertise correctly.
These islands had everything. Casinos,
brothels, amusement parks, sports stadiums, whole swathes of land to simply
shoot each other with semi-automatics if it pleased us.
They even had a drink they gave you
when you were exiting any of the islands. It basically wiped out a few days of
memories. Such that what you did there, stayed there.
It was on Las Vegas XVI that I found
the Zen Buddhists. ‘You’ve got to party like it’s the end of the world man!’
they told me. They were high all the time. And even when they weren’t, they
looked like they were at peace. In that brilliantly charming way they had about
them.
‘Son,’ they told me almost immediately,
‘We don’t know if it’s the end of the world. But there is an old Chinese
saying: if it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck and it smells like a
duck, you should boil it and make chop-suey.’
I didn’t know what to do with that.
But I decided to stay with them. They
shaved every day. Every hair on their body except their eyebrows.
And so did I.
Every day we partied. We played craps.
We sang karaoke. We stayed up late. We stared at the stars. We wanted the
aliens to come out finally. ‘Here were are now. Entertain us!’ we screamed at
the sky. After two weeks we went back to Las Vegas I. It was a two weeks per
island sort of an arrangement. And everywhere we went, we went with absolutely
fresh memories. So much so that we would enter places for what we thought was
the first time. But it would have our photos on the wall. It was like a never
ending but pleasant déjà vu. The ‘circle of life’ effect the monks called it.
We laughed at that every single time.
It has been six months, six days and
six hours since the New Year’s Eve. It hasn’t stopped raining.
Pravin Vemuri
is a technology marketer from Bangalore. He dabbles in fiction, sports writing
and app design. He doesn’t believe in heaven or angels or God. But he is
mortally scared of ghosts in all their forms and is convinced that there will
be a second coming of Jim Morrison.
No comments:
Post a Comment