4.4 Viveka
I forced myself to breathe normally, to avoid hyper-ventilating as I tend to do when faced with a crisis. I closed my eyes for a moment, covering my face with my hands, trying to re-boot my consciousness, to start again to understand my situation.
This is what came to me:
One moment, I was sitting before my brother Mikey's computer back home in Bombay, India. The next moment, I was in a world that was like no place I'd seen before.
No, that's not quite right. I had seen this place before. It was Pali Hill, the Westward side, with a view of the sea and Carter Road. Or what should have been Pali Hill and Carter Road. It looked totally different, but geographically it was the same place. I realized that now, with my eyes closed.
Slowly, my breathing a little calmer now, I uncovered my face and looked around again.
Yes, I saw it now. This wasn't just Pali Hill. It was the exact same spot where our building stood. It was just that the whole region had changed so drastically, it had seemed like another world at first.
Instead of the mass of buildings and roads and all the other stuff that make up our civilized Bandra suburb, the Beverly Hills of India as some people call it, there was only devastation.
The shells of ruined structures lay scattered all around, for miles in either direction. They were the shells of buildings and houses, but not the kind that we have in the real Bombay. These were strange, squat constructions, none more than a single floor.
Even knocked down, burned down, destroyed, I could tell that they were not modern housing, not even the modern village housing. These were the kind of stone-pile and wooden cottages that existed in medieval times in India. Before even the Moghul era. And even then, they were not like the typical medieval Indian houses I had seen in history books or museum recreations. There was something essentially different about them, but not being an anthropology or architecture grad, I couldn't tell right away what that difference was.
But where was the Bombay I knew? It was as if it had never existed!
The tall skyscrapers, the arcing flyovers, the endless causeways, they were all gone.
Instead, fires billowed everywhere, obscuring the landscape with clouds of dark, evil-smelling smoke. The ground was blasted and pit-holed, like a war zone. Large craters pockmarked the land at intervals of a few dozen metres, as if there had been artillery shelling or aerial bombing.
Even the sea, the beautiful Arabian Sea that I had a view of from my bedroom window at home, was horribly changed. It was discoloured and covered with a scummy layer, like a stagnant pool in a gutter.
A slow wind groaned and whistled through the ruins of the structure I was standing in, stinking of odours I couldn't recognize. It made me gag with revulsion.
Carried on this stinking wind were the sounds of people screaming, gunfire, explosions, and God knows what else.
What was this place? How had I got here? The last thing I remembered was that bizarre screen on Mikey's PC, asking me those strange questions. Something about a portal. No, not portal. Vortal. Surely entering that command hadn't brought me here? How could a computer programme transport me to...to wherever the hell I was.
One thing I knew for certain: I wasn't dreaming or imagining this. It was vividly, terribly real.
I looked around at my immediate surroundings, searching for something, anything that could help me make sense of what had happened.
I seemed to be standing in the debris of a house. A simple structure, just four brick walls and a thatched roof. More a shanty than a proper house. But from the ruins scattered everywhere, it seemed that this was the kind of house everyone lived in. The splintered and heat-fused fragments of various household items lay in the debris around me--remnants of cooking utensils, clothes, wooden furniture. Simple, crude things, at the level of what you might expect to find in a Indian tribal village maybe, not a 21st century Indian metropolis.
A sound from afar distracted me for a moment. I walked to the Eastern side of the plot. I looked out in the direction that should have shown me a view of Khar-Danda on the left, old Khar and Bandra in front and Linking Road-Turner Road-Hill Road on the right.
Instead, what I saw blew my mind.
This is what came to me:
One moment, I was sitting before my brother Mikey's computer back home in Bombay, India. The next moment, I was in a world that was like no place I'd seen before.
No, that's not quite right. I had seen this place before. It was Pali Hill, the Westward side, with a view of the sea and Carter Road. Or what should have been Pali Hill and Carter Road. It looked totally different, but geographically it was the same place. I realized that now, with my eyes closed.
Slowly, my breathing a little calmer now, I uncovered my face and looked around again.
Yes, I saw it now. This wasn't just Pali Hill. It was the exact same spot where our building stood. It was just that the whole region had changed so drastically, it had seemed like another world at first.
Instead of the mass of buildings and roads and all the other stuff that make up our civilized Bandra suburb, the Beverly Hills of India as some people call it, there was only devastation.
The shells of ruined structures lay scattered all around, for miles in either direction. They were the shells of buildings and houses, but not the kind that we have in the real Bombay. These were strange, squat constructions, none more than a single floor.
Even knocked down, burned down, destroyed, I could tell that they were not modern housing, not even the modern village housing. These were the kind of stone-pile and wooden cottages that existed in medieval times in India. Before even the Moghul era. And even then, they were not like the typical medieval Indian houses I had seen in history books or museum recreations. There was something essentially different about them, but not being an anthropology or architecture grad, I couldn't tell right away what that difference was.
But where was the Bombay I knew? It was as if it had never existed!
The tall skyscrapers, the arcing flyovers, the endless causeways, they were all gone.
Instead, fires billowed everywhere, obscuring the landscape with clouds of dark, evil-smelling smoke. The ground was blasted and pit-holed, like a war zone. Large craters pockmarked the land at intervals of a few dozen metres, as if there had been artillery shelling or aerial bombing.
Even the sea, the beautiful Arabian Sea that I had a view of from my bedroom window at home, was horribly changed. It was discoloured and covered with a scummy layer, like a stagnant pool in a gutter.
A slow wind groaned and whistled through the ruins of the structure I was standing in, stinking of odours I couldn't recognize. It made me gag with revulsion.
Carried on this stinking wind were the sounds of people screaming, gunfire, explosions, and God knows what else.
What was this place? How had I got here? The last thing I remembered was that bizarre screen on Mikey's PC, asking me those strange questions. Something about a portal. No, not portal. Vortal. Surely entering that command hadn't brought me here? How could a computer programme transport me to...to wherever the hell I was.
One thing I knew for certain: I wasn't dreaming or imagining this. It was vividly, terribly real.
I looked around at my immediate surroundings, searching for something, anything that could help me make sense of what had happened.
I seemed to be standing in the debris of a house. A simple structure, just four brick walls and a thatched roof. More a shanty than a proper house. But from the ruins scattered everywhere, it seemed that this was the kind of house everyone lived in. The splintered and heat-fused fragments of various household items lay in the debris around me--remnants of cooking utensils, clothes, wooden furniture. Simple, crude things, at the level of what you might expect to find in a Indian tribal village maybe, not a 21st century Indian metropolis.
A sound from afar distracted me for a moment. I walked to the Eastern side of the plot. I looked out in the direction that should have shown me a view of Khar-Danda on the left, old Khar and Bandra in front and Linking Road-Turner Road-Hill Road on the right.
Instead, what I saw blew my mind.
posted by Ashok K. Banker at 12.10.05
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