There was blood on my hands. I felt pain and a severe pressure pressing down my chest. My body convulsed and through a series of violent coughs, another volley of blood came pouring out through my nose. My breathing became labored as my lungs tried to push out whatever blood still remained inside them. I coughed some more as more blood dribbled on to my palms. After a while, the pressure on my chest reduced and I could breathe once again.
I walked over to my desk where my aunt had kept a small bowl of cleaning water, a clean hand towel and a pouch of drinking water. I don’t know how many hours of extra shifts she had to work to pay off those extra pouches of drinking water. Ever since the rations of drinking water were reduced, it has become harder to find water pouches in the market. The company, Qua, that manufactured it had said that it was finding it difficult to manufacture drinkable water these days due to some technical reasons. Water is being manufactured these past many years. All the available sources of water are too toxic to drink. So, the company has been dipping into the only remaining source of water that can be turned drinkable in its laboratories and selling it in the market. The rest of the water is too toxic to be treated.
As I used the hand towel to wipe off whatever blood I could from my face and my hands, I peeked outside my room to see if my coughing had woken up my aunt. She seemed to be fast asleep. I felt relieved. I didn’t want to wake her up. She worked too long and too hard so she could take care of me. My parents died a long time ago from lung disease. It wasn’t strange. Most people these days died of lung disease. It’s the same thing I am suffering from as well. I got sick a couple of years ago and don’t expect to survive long enough to witness the year that comes next. It started as a mild cough and then accelerated into a more chronic form of lung disease. A year ago, I got so sick that I could no longer work or care for myself. That’s when I moved in with my aunt.
I cleaned myself and drank almost half of the pouch of water at a single go. I wanted to drink some more but water rations were at an all time low and I had to be careful and preserve as much as I could. I stood staring out of my window for a while. It didn’t open of course – the window. None of the windows anywhere opened. It was designed as a safety feature. The air outside is so toxic that breathing it will assuredly result in death. The neighbourhood where we reside now has air detoxifiers that were installed when my grandparent’s generations were children. But it hasnt been updated since a long time now. As a result, the air inside our apartments is a little better than the air outside. This means that the air that we breathe is not bad enough for us to die instantly but still quite bad. The richer neighbourhoods have better and more advanced air purifiers of course. But entering their zones require special permits and passes. Some of the women who live in my building work as household maids there and therefore are permitted inside. It is mostly through them that we hear about what life is like inside those areas.
Our buildings have purifying systems but the streets do not. We have to rely on our outdated gas masks every time we have to traverse through our end of the city. And even then we can only go out during the nights. In the day time, the temperatures are so high that it is impossible to go out. Our homes have in built air conditioning systems. But they dont work very well. There are times when the systems break down and we have to make do without air conditioning. We are lucky to live in these apartment units where we still have functioning systems. Most families that lived on the outskirts didn’t survive once the power to their air systems was cut off.
The story is different in the richer neighbourhoods. They have enclosed tube like protective tunnels through which they navigate within their neighbourhoods. They had turned their streets into enclosed glass tunnels some time during the last century. I have seen them from outside. I have never had the chance to actually go inside. But I have been told that the air inside those tunnels is more breathable than air anywhere else.
There were many rumours I’d heard about the people who lived inside those glass tunnels. It was said that they didn’t have to ration their food and water. It was even said that when they fell sick of the lung disease, they would eat a few pills and feel better immediately. They were very wealthy and therefore they didn’t have the need to ration their supplies.
It was said that the way that they had made that wealth was the reason why the world was dead. It seemed outlandish to me. How was that possible..? If they were rich, they had gotten that way because they were more intelligent and more hard working than the rest of us. But the rumour did persist. It was said that in the pre world, the rich owned the rivers and the forests and they destroyed the forests to dig for ores buried inside which they used to sell in the markets and that’s how they got rich. That they paid off the governments so that they wouldn’t be stopped. And this is how they secured areas where the environment had still not become toxic for themselves. It was also said that once the world started dying and the people who lived there tried to save themselves by trying to enter these havens of the rich, they were shot dead.
But it didn’t make sense to me. How could anyone be so stupid? What would they do once the world that they supposedly exploited had nothing left to exploit? And would they be stupid enough to think that the dying world wouldn’t advance on them as well..? No, there had to be some other explanation as to why this world was dead.
I laid back down on my bed and tried to fall asleep again. But sleep remained elusive and after an hour I decided to give up. I got up and retrieved my laptop and the storage device from my desk and turned it on. The screen flickered a few times before it began to work properly. It was an old devise that I had found at the antiquities store. I worked there when I used to be in better health. No one wanted to do the job but there was a great demand for functional electronic devices and other pre world trinkets. The antiquities store was located outside the city limits so it didn’t fall under the protected zone. People, like me, who worked outside of the protection zone were given gas masks as a measure of protection against the toxic environment. We were supposed to be issued HazMat suites but the company that employed us had forgone them citing cost issues.
A couple of months before I moved in with my aunt, when I was still working at the antiquities store, I noticed an electronic device that seemed to have worked as a storage device. We didn’t have such devices any more. I also found an old computer which after a little nudging agreed to work. I found various folders named movies, documentaries, pictures, music, ebooks and some other data on the device. I scrolled through them and uncertainly hovered my cursor over the folder named documentaries. I didn’t know what it meant – the word documentary. I clicked on the folder and found a couple hundred audio video files. These were not movies – I could tell. Intrigued, I decided to bring it home with me. I had a pre world laptop at home and I was sure that the device could be paired with it to read the data on it. I used to smuggle a lot of stuff from the store. There was so much of it that no one cared to check our bags. Besides, there were so few of us left who agreed to go out of the city that the company didn’t want to discourage the few who did go out.
I’d had the device since a long time but I never had enough time to explore its contents. After I fell sick and had to give up my job, I was confined to the bed and had little energy for anything. That’s when I began going over the contents of the storage device. At first, what I saw on the screen shocked me. There were pictures of the woman who it must have belonged to. She had a kind and an intelligent face. She too had a wheatish complexion like me.
But that was not what had shocked me. What shocked me was evidence of what the world had looked like before it was all destroyed. It was…there is no other word for it.. beautiful! In one of the pictures, I found her standing amidst hundreds of trees. They were so big and tall that it took my breath away. I couldn’t believe it. Of course when I saw it for the first time, I couldn’t tell what they were. I did not even know that they were called, ‘Trees’. I just kept referring to them as ‘giant green things’. There were so many of such things that I could not recognize at first sight. I saw pictures of a water body that I couldn’t recognize. My world was surrounded by water but the water in the picture was different than the water that was around me. It was blue in colour and it seemed to be meeting a land mass which was covered with white powdery stuff. The water in my world is pitch black and I have never seen the white powdery stuff in my entire life. The air too seemed so different. It looked cleaner and clearer. It looked breathable.
I now understood what the old lady was referring to. There was an old woman, when I was younger, she was more than a 100 years old. No one knew how she had managed to live so long. No one did. Kids used to gather around her a lot to hear her stories. She used to speak about the pre world and the pre humans, she said she had lived amongst them in the old world before it changed. No one believed her of course. We used to think she was making stuff up. She was blind but it didn’t seem to bother her that much. ‘There’s nothing left to see anyway’, she would say. ‘There are no butterflies or flowers or birds in this world anymore’, she would add sadly. We didn’t know what it meant and we wrote it off as the rambling of an old woman.
But I saw now, what she was referring to – the birds and the butterflies and the flowers. They were beautiful, no.. beyond beautiful. What was the word she had used? Yes, exquisite.. that’s the word she had used to describe them. I didn’t understand what it meant – the word exquisite. I did now. So many colours! More than I had seen in my entire life..! I didn’t even know what they were called. And there was more – there were aquatic mammals in the water and mountains – the terrain wasn’t always flat like it was now. And there was snow – white flaky cold stuff that covered the mountain tops. There were lions and cheetahs and tigers and dolphins and elephants and polar bears- such exquisite creatures! So much wonder this world had held.
I could see that she had a lot of pictures with dogs in them. I could tell that the creatures were dogs because I had seen one a long time ago. There was one family that had a dog, Goofy, when I was very young. The family named their dog after a cartoon character they saw in the pre world videos. They used to live next door. I remember going over to their home to play with him. It had long golden coloured fur and was so cuddly that just watching him would put a big smile on my face. I remember crying all night when it died. I haven’t seen a dog since. I suppose they died out like everything else. I remember when Goofy fell sick, his family tried to find someone who could help him. They told me that in the pre world, there used to be special doctors called vets who specialized in treating animals alone. With animals gone from the world, there was no need for the profession and it died out. I remember seeing the family when goofy died. They seemed inconsolable. I was too. It felt like he had taken part of my soul with him. It felt like someone had grabbed a hold of my heart and was squeezing it tight. It is strange, this capacity we have to bond with a specie that is not our own.
I slowly learnt the words for the things that I saw. Trees, beaches, oceans, forests, seas, mountains, snow, sand, wildlife – all these were words I was learning for the first time. They had all disappeared from our vocabulary a long time ago. It was as if I was peeking into a world that was as different as it could be from mine. It was as if someone had opened a portal to a universe that was thousands of light years away. It was hard to imagine that my own world used to look like the world from the pictures. What happened to it? Why and how did it change so drastically?
As I scrolled through the videos on the device, I glanced up and looked at the poster I had stuck on my wall. I had learnt recently that it wasn’t a poster, it was a map. It was a map of what the pre world had looked like. I had found it, like everything else, at the antiquities store. I didn’t know what it was but I had hoped that someone would buy it. When no one did, I brought it home with me and stuck it up on my wall. I kept looking at the map. I wondered what it must have been like to live in a world with so much land. Most of the world had drowned almost 100 years ago. What little land remained was too toxic to be inhabitable. People started moving in wards and on high altitude lands when the water started advancing. Most of what used to be the coast drowned. Entire cities have been engulfed by the rising water levels. The world today does not resemble the world I can see on the map. There is no way to tell which part of which country I reside in. There are no countries anymore. I think that the land that I live in today used to be a part of a country called India. But I can’t be sure of it.
I stared at the map for a while and groaned as I felt a hunger pang growing in my stomach. I got up and drifted onto the desk where my aunt kept all of her supplies. There wasn’t much there – just a few cans of onion soup. I opened one and glided back to my bed as I sipped. It was mostly a goop of laboratory made preservatives and water. There were hardly any onions in it. But it did have dehydrated carrots in it. As I sipped, I stared at the picture on the can. The company’s name – Verdure – was printed in a concave semicircle that formed an umbrella over a basket full to the brim with different fruits and vegetables. I had never seen in reality the image that was printed on the can.
I continued to sip – trying to slow my pace. But I was much too hungry and the can of soup disappeared in a matter of moments. I was still hungry but we are on strict rations and I will have to save the remaining cans for later. When I was little, we used to get a larger variety of produce. It was all grown in the labs of course. My parents used to be critical though – they would say that when they were young, the produce was even more varied. They would take names of different fruits and vegetables I hadn’t heard of before. They used to feel sad when most of what they could find when they were younger was no longer produced. A decade later, I could say the same. So much of what was grown when I was younger was no longer available. I remember digging into a can of sweet pineapple when I was a kid. It was one of my absolute favorites. We no longer find them in the market. Kids today have never tasted sweetened pineapple. How sad.
My mouth started watering at the memories of the sweetened pineapple. My stomach churned from hunger but there was nothing to eat.
I turned back to the laptop screen and tried to distract myself. I started browsing through the girl’s pictures. And as I scrolled and looked through those images, I started imagining myself in them. I imagined I lived in that lovely house that was surrounded with an incredible amount of green. When I would look out the window, I would see the long branches of the tree I had grown up with. When I ran out of the house, I wouldn’t need a gas mask for the air that I breathed was not toxic at all; it was alive and healthy and pure. I would have had dogs bounding about with their tails wagging looking for new places to bury their little treasures in. I would have had family and friends and we would surround ourselves around the table that had ample amounts of clean water – as much as we would want to drink. And food! All kinds of food! How amazing it would be to live in this world – where I wouldn’t starve, where I wouldn’t thirst, where I wouldn’t breathe air that had become so toxic, that breathing it would mean certain death!
And as I continued to imagine a life I would never have, I felt a desperate longing filling me. It burdened my chest until it became heavy. Too heavy! Heavier still! Until I couldn’t breathe. Until every breath became restricted and I felt tortured with agony. I found myself rolled into a fetal position, a small ball of misery, trying desperately to contain the torment that threatened to spill out. I wanted to shout – on the top of my lungs – I wanted to wail and curse – I wanted desperately to allow the misery to roll out. But I thought about my aunt sleeping in the other room and made an enormous effort to get a grip over myself. Slowly, the melancholy started to ebb away and I laid there staring into the ceiling, silent tears of protest coating my cheeks. I tired myself out and slowly the unconsciousness of sleep provided a happy escape into nothingness.
I began feeling the slight sensations of consciousness before I realized I had awoken. I sensed the slight flutter of air on my nose, the warm light of the candle that was flickering in the corner, the sound of the whirring air detoxifier. As consciousness battled unconsciousness, I rebelled against the rising wakefulness. I didn’t want to wake up. I didn’t want to face yet another day of nothingness. I wanted to lie in bed forever until I died a peaceful death. Such a gift it would be – dying in my sleep. I remembered my parents’ deaths. They died a long drawn out death of the lung disease. I didn’t want to suffer the way they did. And yet, I knew I wouldn’t get that wish. I knew that my death wouldn’t be peaceful. My passing from this world wouldn’t be easy – it would be as hard as life had been for me. I tried not to think about it – the circumstances of my death and how much pain I will have to bear even as I died. I knew that dwelling upon it would only make it that much harder. And I didn’t want fear gripping me, taking ahold of me. I wanted to preserve my dignity during my last moments. That much, I hoped, I could ask for if nothing else.
I continued to lay in my bed, my body and my mind, refusing to move, refusing to react or interact with the world around me. I just wanted to lay still – do nothing, feel nothing…. Endure nothing. I continued to drift in and out of this semi conscious state until the demands of thirst and hunger could no longer be ignored. I finally woke up, used a damp cloth to wipe myself down and changed my clothes. I walked over to the food cabinet and fished out a can of mashed potato and peas. I gulped down the remaining water from the water pouch I had saved during the night, opened the can and started to eat.
After a while, I heard the keys turning and my aunt walked in. She had bought fresh supply of food cans and water pouches. My aunt was a nice woman. Overworked and skinny ofcourse, but she had a secret store of infinite energy tucked away somewhere inside her – or so I liked to believe. She didn’t like to talk much. As a result, we spent a majority of our time accompanying each other in silence.
She got a can for herself and seeing as I had sat down to eat, came over to join me. As she ate, she studied my appearance. I could see her brows furrowing as she noticed the deepened dark circles under my eyes. I tried to smile but my jaws seemed to have become stiff. I wanted to save my can of mashed potatoes for later but my aunt stopped me and said, “No, you must eat. You look starved. You need the energy to get better. Go ahead, eat it.” I wanted to protest and any other day I would have, but I didn’t have it in me today. I was in fact starved and I wanted to give in and indulge myself, if only just this once. She watched me as I ate and after a while as I rolled back into bed, she left for work again.
I turned on my laptop again and this time I opened a new folder – the one that was marked ‘documentaries.’ The first file that I opened had a video of a starving polar bear that was being filmed just as it was about to die. It was a horrifying, gut wrenching sight. It felt enormously wrong – this sight of a magnificent creature struggling, fighting for survival – stripped off its dignity reduced to picking garbage to survive. It didn’t sit right with me at all. I was stunned. I couldn’t move. I kept staring at the screen, tears pouring down my cheeks.
As days went by, I found myself dwelling on just one thought – Why did the people who lived during the time of the girl in the video didn’t do anything to save this world? Why did they not save that bear? The thought kept me awake at night, it drilled a hole in my brain, it allowed no respite, no repose, no recess. I kept feeling that if I figured this out, I could reverse the situation. I could revive this dead planet. I just needed to understand why.
I had a few books lying around my house that I had never read. I had no idea what was written in them. But I was looking for clues as to what had transpired and I hoped that one of the books might just reveal something. I had a curious mix of them and didn’t know where to begin. Each author, each subject was as alien to me as the next one. I sat down on the floor with all of them, curious names they had – PG Wodehouse, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Nivedita Menon, Sunil Khilnani, Ramchandra Guha, JK Rowling, Romila Thapar, Robert Reich, Raghuram Rajan, Richard Peet, Ashish Kothari, Vandana Shiva, Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, William Dalrymple, Jawaharlal Nehru, Noam Chomsky, Benedict Anderson and so on. As I read their names, I felt a thrill go through me. To me, these books represented windows into the souls of men and women who’d written them. The more one read the more windows opened. As I sat there, surrounded by all these books, it occurred to me what an odd sight this would seem to an observer.
People didn’t read books anymore. They’d become redundant a long time ago. In the pre world, there used to be places that would host only books – for people to go and read. They were called libraries I think. How amazing it must have been – the experience of entering a room and being surrounded by hundreds of books. I wonder why they stopped reading..? The pre humans.. ?
There is very little knowledge about our world and the world as it existed before it died in the people that live now. Knowledge isn’t forbidden. People are just not interested in it. All this data is there, accessible, available but no one seems to be bothered about it. There are no authors anymore, no poetesses. No one writes about anything. So much time goes by in just trying to survive that no one has the time to read or write or listen to music or watch movies. In fact, I am one of the very few survivors who knows how to read.
Months went by as I read. It felt like I was discovering missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle I had been trying to solve but couldn’t. The books that I had with me were written in different eras. Many things I understood, many I didn’t. It was all a jumble at first. I had no idea which timeline I was reading about. Most of the words I didn’t understand. Thankfully, my aunt found a copy of an extremely old, tattered book whose pages had become yellowed and brittle. It was called a dictionary. You could look up meaning of words in this book.
But even then it took a lot of time to get a timeline together in my head. To understand the series of events as they transpired. To understand who were the prime movers. What was even harder to understand were concepts, the –isms – the pre world seemed to be drowning in them. Socialism, capitalism, communism, anti Semitism, feminism, racism, Sexism, religious fundamentalism, extremism, casteism…….. consumerism. The books, combined with the documentaries on the girl’s devise, did help me understand what had happened. How we had ended up where we were today.
The turn of the century brought rising incomes and with rising incomes came rising demands. People wanted bigger homes, more cars, electronic gadgets, appliances, a diet so rich that it alone devoured vast tracks of forest lands. It was a world of mega structures – everything had to be bigger and larger than ever before. It turned people into empty headed pleasure seekers. Simple lifestyles were considered to be a sign of poverty and soon went out of fashion. They didn’t want to be told that their chosen lifestyle of excessive consumerism will bring this world to an end. They wanted speed and greater efficiency. And so anyone who told them to slow down, to take less, consume less became the enemy – they became people who were against the ‘national good,’ they became ‘anti-development’ and by extension ‘anti-good’.
The basic problem lay in their economic models. It assumed that the ‘economy’ was something that existed independent and outside of the environment. Forests, rivers, lakes, wetlands became collateral in this mad quest for accumulation of private wealth. While the big corporations and governments were busy maximizing their profits using a flawed economic model, the vast majority of the populous viewed the enormity of ecological devastation as ‘necessary’ in order for ‘development’ to arrive. They didnt realize that this model while making a certain percentage of classes rich beyond belief, was in fact impoverishing a vast majority of the population.
No one realized that the human being himself is a product of the environment and thus any system he creates – including his economic system – will be dependent and a result of the environment as well. No one realized that we did not exist independent and outside of the environment. We are embedded in it which means that ‘its’ destruction would mean ‘our’ destruction as well.
As I lay in bed, I started thinking about the picture on the can of food. In the Pre world, food didn’t used to be made in laboratories and sold in cans. It used to be grown from the earth by specialists called ‘farmers.’ There were different kind of farmers who’d specialize in different varieties of produce. That meant that there was a greater variety available in the markets where the produce would be sold – fresh. But that all changed.
The farmers were cheated out of their lands so that large corporations could take them over. Most lands were ‘diverted’ towards creation of large townships, highways, flyovers, Metro rails and their servicing sheds, golf parks etc. Land was also stolen from the tribal populations – their forests were destroyed in order to mine ores out of the earth.
It was made immensely difficult for the farmers to sustain themselves solely on farm incomes. No aids, no supports were provided to them so that they would be forced to sell off their lands. Once the farmers started leaving their farms, the companies started advancing into the farm sector. Initially, a lot of companies ‘owned’ such commercial farms. But slowly they started losing out to the bigger, much larger corporations. They couldnt compete with ‘Multinationals’ who’d lower their rates so much and for so long that it would drive out all the competitors. Once they’d monopolized the farming ‘industry’ they started driving up the prices. Food became expensive. They even enforced patents on seeds which meant that growing your own food if you couldnt afford the market rates became illegal. Filling bellies with food became a crime. Hunger became a crime.
And then slowly the varieties started to die out. The corporations only goal was profit. Although they ‘owned’ the farms, they knew nothing about the crops that they were growing. They did not understand the inter-connectedness of the different species, they didn’t understand why planting mono cultures was bad for ecological systems. With the farmers out of the picture, traditional wisdom died out. And so the many varieties of fruits, flowers and vegetables started to disappear. Soon the bees vanished. And the crops that were dependent on the bees for pollination too disappeared.
With shortages of food becoming endemic on account of large amount of crops failure rates, the few ‘Multinationals’ that remained in business too shut down. Only one remained. Verdure. With the only one left standing, it became the only provider of food to the entire surviving population.
It was a similar story with Qua as well. The world has been ruled by a conglomerate of corporations since a very long time now. Its almost as if the corporations survived at the expense of the survival of the earth and its inhabitants. It destroyed everything that came in the way of its making profits – forests, rivers, marshes, wildlife, grasslands, traditional cultures, indigenous populations – it decimated everything!
It was in a book called Ecofeminism by Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies that I read about the two -isms that were most responsible for the destruction of this world:
‘Colonialism and capitalism transformed land and soil from being a source of life and a commons from which people drew sustenance, into private property to be bought and sold and conquered, development continued colonialism’s unfinished task. It transformed man from the role of guest to predator. Chief seattle’s letter has become an ecological testament, telling us that:
The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to earth. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.’
But people didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want governments that would curb the accumulation of their wealth. They wanted unrestricted access and thus ‘regulation’ became a bad word – a bad policy.
Slowly, the pre people lost faith in their institutions.. they felt that a better world would be afforded to them by the corporations.. their institutions would run more efficiently if they were taken over by corporations and if public institutions were run the way private institutions ran. So they gave up their institutions to big corporations. In doing so, they gave up their power to elect governments in power. Soon, elections were called off. There seemed to be no need for them. Democracy came to an end. Courts of law too came to an end and Security forces became privatised. With the power to remove a corrupt government out of power gone, the few protests that did take place amounted to nothing. Protests against this new form of rule were surprisingly feeble. The rich didn’t participate and the poor were too powerless to actually matter. The middle class, as they were called, did not rebel either because for the first time they found themselves completely unburdened by taxes. Since everything was privatized, social programs were abandoned. So there was no longer free schooling, healthcare, security, infrastructure. The rich made provisions for such things amongst themselves and the vast majority slowly started dying out. The middle class that initially rejoiced now found itself overwhelmed by the amount of money they needed to access everyday services. Transportation became expensive, so did healthcare, schooling and infrastructure. Security too became expensive. In an era of privatised security, only the rich could afford Gaurds. Everyone else had to fend for themselves. They figured out too late that paying taxes used to be cheaper.
In such a world, where corporations reigned supreme, consumerism rose to unchecked levels. It reached its peak. And at its peak, it ended up destroying the world.
Even as the world was dying, people wouldn’t wake up. Instead of re-evaluating what they were doing wrong and bringing about systemic changes in their lifestyles and economic models, they found ways of adapting to the changing weather and increasing amounts of toxicity in their environment. Instead of stopping their deforesting and polluting activities, they adapted gas masks and oxygen cylinders. The idiots normalized the apocalype.
One image that struck me was that of a woman dressed in fabrics I had never seen in my life with a gas mask on her face lighting what appeared to be chemical filled fire work. It seemed to me that momentary pleasures were so important that they wouldn’t let them go even if it meant losing their planet. They loved their pleasures more than they loved their planet. They loved their marble, air conditioned homes and bejeweled bodies more than they loved that Polar Bear. Who cared if it died when they could have uninterrupted luxuries in their life?
Somewhere in their consumerist lifestyles, I think that the pre world had stopped worshipping the things that gave life – air, water, trees, forests, rivers, birds, bees. They had forgotten what was truly needed to survive and therefore took these life giving forces for granted. Instead, they started looking for God – as they called it – in inanimate objects. In stones and statues. And infinite amount of time and energy was spent in worshipping these inanimate objects. What seemed even more incredulous was that there were correct and incorrect ways of worshipping. I read that even wars were fought because they disagreed about whose way of worship and whose deity was superior. It seems unreal to me. How does something so obvious escape the notice of so many millions..? But I did begin to understand why my world was dead and why no one from the pre world did anything to save it. How can anyone who finds their God in statues and worships sticks and stones be expected to rebel against the destruction of that which actually gives life – air, water, trees, forests, rivers, birds, bees? They were so busy fussing about which religion is more superior and which imaginary deity is more powerful that they did not notice when the real Gods started disappearing.
The unrestrained hedonistic desires of human kind destroyed a planet that took billions of years to come alive in a matter of a few hundred years. I finally realized that the rumours weren’t wrong – the ones about how the rich got rich and how they sacrificed the world in order to become richer still. They really were that stupid. Stupidity and greed had killed this planet.
I suppose I should feel angry. But I don’t. I feel an odd sense of relief at finally having understood what had happened. I don’t feel any outrage. I lay awake in bed pondering about what life was going to be like for the people inside living inside those glass tunnels once even their laboratories were unable to manufacture water and food. Sooner or later that was going to happen. How do they plan to survive then? It must not have occurred to them that this is the only planet that we have. There is no Planet B. I’d read that an incredible amount of money was spent on space missions trying to find alternative habitable planets once this one started dying. But every mission resulted in failure. I marveled at this arrogance – only ‘man’ was capable of being this conceited – to think that ‘he’ could simply replace an entire planet. Suddenly I burst out laughing. The universe seemed to have judged mankind and it had taught us an incredible lesson. And as I laughed, my body began to convulse with violent coughs. Blood poured out, thicker than usual, in more volume than usual. I felt a pang of fear. I wasn’t afraid of the death that was coming but the spirit trapped inside my body feared for itself. It was an instinctual reaction – to fear death. But buried deep underneath the fear was relief. I would finally be free of this. I wouldn’t feel longing anymore, I wouldn’t feel broken and devastated, I wouldn’t feel despair and anger and hatred. I would be free.
An year and half had gone by since the day I had first begun to read. I had begun to read because I wanted to understand what had happened. I wanted to know who had destroyed my beautiful world. And why. I wanted to know who had stolen my right to a clean environment. When I began reading, I thought I would uncover some great catastrophe that had caused so much destruction to this world that it couldn’t be repaired. Never for a moment had I thought that the cause of such massive scale of destruction would be something as elementary as human stupidity and human greed.
I felt myself drifting off – not to sleep – I could tell. This pull seemed to be stronger than the pull of sleep. It seemed more permanent too. I felt fear – terrifying fear. My time had come. It was time to finally let go. And as I started to let go, I knew that it wasn’t going to be hard. Dying. It would be no different than drifting away. And as I did, drift, I wished for one last wish. To see a world that was unharmed, un-spoilt, un-ravaged – pristine.