The Democracy of Dust

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear

The earth grind on its axis, or history

Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

Robert Penn Warren, ‘Evening Hawk’

I submit my final designs for a gambling app and take a deep breath. Nothing to do now but wait. Showering after what seems like days, I hear music float up from the apartment below me. Pan flutes and harps and tablas. Folk songs, probably on vinyl cause I can make out the scratching. And an older woman’s clear voice harmonising over and above. It’s relaxing.

I have a couple weeks to myself now. I make a list of things to do, starting with ‘Leave the house’.

The lady downstairs continues to sing. Sometimes I hold my phone up to record it, to listen before bed. One time, drunk off cheap white wine, I consider saying hi but chicken out at the door. One morning I hear the woman weeping and the next, the music stops for good.

I’m temporarily free from zoom call purgatory and the scrambled headspace of staring at pages of code. A yawning pit of time to kill. I should document this, I think. Someone will look back on all this someday. I dust off my camera to find that the battery inside has swollen beyond its form, so I buy a sketchbook.

It’s hot. I keep dreaming of a Great Flood that washes away the dust, cools the twisted metal, swallows everything. Only I remain, gazing into the maw of a Whale God. On the weekend my boss pushes me to go to a tech conference. I slip into a new dress and wait for a cab by a dead tree under a dead office building. On a bench beside me sits the sidewalk monk. He’s always there. He sits very still and his weathered robes fall like curtains from the stone seat. I could ask him his story but I’m afraid of the heartbreak, so I draw him instead. Unlike the students I’ve seen at monasteries up north, his face is hard and grey. But vastly more beautiful, a Man of Signs.

At the tech event, there are booths helmed by suits and the occasional dude in pyjamas who watches too many podcasts. They say AI a lot. At one of the stalls, you enter your name and it pulls up a list of people you’ve lost. When you tap one, a 3D hologram of the person appears. For some reason it manifests my grandpa rattling off corporate motivation quotes. The young lady running the booth says, ‘Imagine. If your favourite dead celebrity, your ancestors, or late loved ones could speak to you in this encouraging manner. Everyone’s lost someone, right? Or is about to … especially now. So it’s a gap in the market that will only get bigger. Great opportunity for a young investor who can really see the bigger picture.’

At another booth, I meet a cute guy who sells an EMP device that attaches to your phone and sparks off all devices around you so you can focus on peace and self-care. It’s the latest promise of technology, that it’ll hide you from other technology. It does not seem legal. ‘It’s for the executive class,’ he says. Guess it’s legal then.

He asks me out. We spend an hour in traffic talking about work and reach a rooftop bar where the sun beats down on us. He’s wearing a gas mask-style helmet. He’s only visiting, so he’s not gonna risk respiratory disease. It’s doing nothing for me.

‘This is a fun place to live, I’m sure? Always something going on. Just on my way here I saw a pack of dogs killing a parrot, a screaming hobo on a kids’ skateboard, a grocery store that looked like a wrestling match. Bet you never get bored.’

‘So, would you move here?’ I ask.

‘Nah, I’d go crazy.’

‘Yeah…’

‘Have you gone crazy yet?’

‘I don’t know.’

He slicks his hair down under the mask. ‘You would if you were on the streets, for sure. No one suffers like the poor. And I know you fuckers don’t even see them.’

‘Do you see them?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then what?’

‘I don’t know, what do you want me to do?’

He says I don’t smile enough. He asks if I live alone, and I say I’m caring for my mother with macular degeneration. Just some crap out of a tv movie. I’m tired. When did life get so small? I bring some cheesecake home and two streets away a bridge collapses like it’s nothing cause it’s nothing. And in the evening, a thunderstorm so bone-shaking. The rain fills up the streets and can’t find its way back to the sea. I stay inside. Look through the peephole to watch my neighbour kiss and squeeze a girl through his door, all bounce and giggles.

There are weird signals on the tv. Fuzzy images of abandoned places. Rain falling inside underground parking lots. Defunct wings of government hospitals. Impossible squeeze spaces between slum walls. Wells crawling with plastic bags fucking and ripping each other.

I make a lot of drawings, feverishly searching for meaning. On the work chat somebody messages, then deletes, that they switched channels at midnight and saw the oldest house in the city. ‘It was the First House,’ they say.

The next day it’s bright hot sunshine. The flood seeps slowly out of the maze and the apocalypse never comes. I send some of my drawings to an art and culture magazine, hoping for a quick buck. They set up a video call.

The boy at the other end says, ‘I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I personally enjoyed them. It’s just that the big man makes the decisions, and at a time like this … we don’t wanna publish anything too dour, you know? It’s all around us anyway. We’re looking for something else.’

‘Something to take the pain away?’

‘Oh yes, something … hopeful, or fun?’

‘I understand.’

‘Got anything like that?’

‘Um, I don’t think so. I could try.’

He has a coughing fit. Then with a hint of pity, he taps the printouts. ‘But look, this has value too. When we’re all ready to confront things, you know?’

Any day now. Any day now we’ll be ready. Soon after, we score a new project. A man from Ahmedabad selling public speaking courses for four-to-six-year-olds. I get to work designing the website. Endless calls at night while the tv brings vague warnings to stay inside to stay safe.

My CEO tells me that the State’s gonna fly the banks and stock exchange out of this city. ‘And I’m not just talking about the people, mind you. I’m talking about the actual, physical structures. They’re sacred, that’s why. But I’m sad to see them go. God, who will we be without our foundations?’

Bored out of her mind, my junior tells me wild stories every day. ‘So my friend grew up in this old building in Mazgaon, and it got torn down for a cluster redevelopment project, but the work was called off, thanks to…’ She gestures at everything.

‘But recently, she went back there, just to sort of mope about her lost home, and saw construction workers who were still at it. Clearing debris, mixing cement, I don’t know, like, construction stuff. And when she moved closer to spy on them, they dropped into the cement and were just … gone.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just, like … melted. She thinks they’re spirits. That they needed the work so bad that they haven’t stopped for a day, even in death. Crazy, right?’

Crazy. Faces in the concrete. Debt beyond death. No one else sees my drawings, but I can’t stop making them. Every surface of the house is covered with paper, with the truth. Someone will pay attention.

They find my musical neighbour decaying in her living room. Cats chewing on her cheeks. You can’t cover up the stink forever, someone will come. Fish are beginning to turn up dead on the rocks, and young people are vaulting over the promenade – walking straight into the ocean. At dawn, like clockwork, you see their dark shapes getting smaller and smaller in the shimmer. Maybe they had the same dream as me, and got sick of waiting around.